Time to Legalize…
A national conversation has begun regarding our archaic drug laws. It is going on in state legislatures, like New York’s, where the draconian Rockefeller drug laws may finally be overturned; in other states, from coast to coast, a variety of marijuana decriminalization laws are being enacted. It’s even reached Congress, where Senators Jim Webb and Arlen Specter have proposed a major prison-reform package, which would directly address drug-sentencing policy.
But there are big issues here, issues of economy and simple justice, especially on the sentencing side. As Webb pointed out in a cover story in Parade magazine, the U.S. is, by far, the most “criminal” country in the world, with 5% of the world’s population and 25% of its prisoners. We spend $68 billion per year on corrections, and one-third of those being corrected are serving time for nonviolent drug crimes. We spend about $150 billion on policing and courts, and 47.5% of all drug arrests are marijuana-related. That is an awful lot of money, most of it non-federal, that could be spent on better schools or infrastructure — or simply returned to the public.
The government is wasting our time and money by prohibiting marijuana:
- Cost of active law enforcement
- Cost of prosecution (and defense!) of accused offenders
- Cost of incarceration of convicted offenders
- Hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue, generated if drugs were legal and taxed
- Cost of foster care and social services for children of incarcerated offenders
Taxpayers are forced to pay billions of dollars to prosecute and incarcerate people for using marijuana. If marijuana were legal and regulated (like alcohol and tobacco) this money, plus tax revenues from marijuana sales, could be used for other purposes such as education and health care.
Marijuana, like tobacco and alcohol, can be abused. But prohibition is expensive and ineffective; education and regulation are better solutions. Regulating sales of marijuana and teaching people the truth about its health effects will allow us to minimize the harms and costs to society. We should have learned a lesson from history. Alcohol prohibition did not work, and there is no logical reason to believe that marijuana prohibition is a better idea. People have a basic right to make choices for themselves as long as their actions do not harm others. Responsible individuals in a free society should be allowed to choose whether or not they use marijuana.
Leave a Reply