Editor’s note: This editorial is a part of our drug issue.

Iowa, though it may not look like it, is predominantly an industrial wasteland. The state, according to the Natural History Museum at the University of Iowa, is nearly 99 percent terraformed; few pockets of untouched earth remain. According to Iowa State University, approximately 85 percent of this land alteration has been implemented throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries for industrial agriculture, specifically row crops such as soybeans and corn.

Of course, this is an endeavor that yields beneficial results: People get to eat, and the Iowan economy prospers. On top of this, like a cherry on apple pie, we get Americana landscapes: fields of Iowan corn, gently swaying in the wind, the cob in the foreground and a red barn in the backdrop. These types of images will forever be rooted in our national culture.

But the bulk of this corn is hardly suitable for human consumption. For this reason, the bulk of Iowan grain (yes, field corn is a grain) is instead funneled into three areas: high fructose corn-syrup production, animal feed, and ethanol.

Ethanol, though a noble endeavor to protect the corn economies we depend on while confronting the need for alternative fuel sources, at this moment is not entirely sustainable. And until more non-food sources for ethanol production are used, it will remain unsustainable.

Corn syrup, not surprisingly given the sweet and cheap nature of the product, has made its way into an astonishing number of packaged foods since the 1970s. Perhaps surprising to some, the syrup has also been linked to the rise of American obesity and held liable for the mass production of cheap junk food and super-sized caloric drinks.

Though maybe the end product of our corn could be controversial or perhaps unhealthy, what matters is that Iowans grow it, so Iowans get to sell it. Johnson County alone has 1,293 farms (a bit below the state average) with a median income of roughly $150,000 per farm in 2007.

The value of corn to the American economy sits at $23.3 billion. Marijuana, potentially the U.S.’s top cash crop, sits at $35.8 billion, according to a study conducted by activist and marijuana-policy researcher Jon Gettman.

At present, because of the prohibition against the crop, too much of this money is funneled into the hands of violent drug-trafficking organizations. On top of this, too many Americans find themselves incarcerated for something as trivial as smoking a plant. According to the ACLU, in 2010, the rate of marijuana-possession arrests for blacks in Iowa was more than eight times that of whites, a statistic that is telling of using the drug as a tool of biased policing. Incarceration for something as harmless as marijuana is an embarrassing waste of state resources.

The Daily Iowan Editorial Board believes it’s high time Iowa follows the path of Colorado, California, Oregon, and many others and finally decriminalizes and gets a slice of the agriculture pot pie. Marijuana is not the perfect cash crop, but neither is corn. Yet one is significantly more profitable than the other.

If Iowa’s farmers were to work within the agricultural framework set before them to capitalize on marijuana in conjunction with crops such as corn and soybeans, the benefits would far outweigh the negatives.