So I was making dinner recently, and on NPR
I heard, to my amazement, a report by Robert Siegel and
Michele Norris about April 20th being “Marijuana Observance Day.”
“We’re hearing more
talk about legalizing marijuana,” Norris noted, “and not just from
those who are lighting up.”
I lit up — metaphorically — over this. Aside from the
fact that this is a policy change that’s at least 30 years overdue, the
story aired at the same time we were cringing over the long-suspected
yet nonetheless horrific accounts of torture under the Bush regime.
Once again, the right wing of the Republican Party comes off as
addicted to all forms of cruelty, just as it did when it sanctioned
“extreme rendition.” But maybe if right-wing Republicans all smoked a
little pot — the gateway drug to mellowness — the world
would be a better place. Just a thought.
As many critics and commentators — and not just on the left
— have noted repeatedly, the so-called war on drugs is one of the
single most ineffectual, expensive, dangerous, dumb-ass activities our
government engages in, especially the part focused on marijuana. Here’s
what that radical socialist William F. Buckley wrote on the subject in
2004, in what he calls an “exercise in scrupulosity”: “There are
approximately 700,000 marijuana-related arrests made very year. Most of
these — 87 percent — involve nothing more than mere
possession of small amounts of marijuana. … Professor Ethan Nadelmann
of the Drug Policy Alliance estimates at 100,000 the number of
Americans currently behind bars for one or another marijuana
offense.”
Buckley’s conclusion? Legalize it. Glenn Beck has also jumped on the
bandwagon. So has Ron Paul, who called the war on drugs “a total
disaster.”
President Obama recently received multiple questions at a town hall
meeting asking if marijuana shouldn’t be legalized to help the economy,
and Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the federal government,
unlike under Bush, would no longer raid medical marijuana
dispensaries.
In the wake of this, John Burnett and Carl Kasell on NPR imagined a
country in which pot had been legalized for two years. They cited
Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist and expert on the economics of the
marijuana market. What might the economic benefits of legalizing pot
be? While not earth-shattering when compared to, say, never having
invaded Iraq, from a benefit-cost analysis alone, legalization makes
sense.
“Miron figures state and federal taxes on cannabis sales would add
up to $6.7 billion annually,” Burnett reported. “And he calculates the
savings from not having to enforce state and federal marijuana laws, in
arrests, prosecution and incarceration, at $12.9 billion a year.
Excluding additional expenses, such as the public health cost of
marijuana or the cost of administering the new law, Miron figures that
legal pot creates almost a $20 billion bonus.”
This idea seems everywhere in the air this spring. Bruce Mirken, a
spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, notes that government
surveys indicate about 15 million Americans admit to having smoked pot
in the previous month. California assemblyman Tom Ammiano projected
that marijuana is a $14 billion dollar industry in his state alone,
which, if taxed, could bring in $1.3 billion in revenues. So he
introduced a bill to legalize it. D.L. Hughley did a piece on
legalization on his CNN show. The Wall Street Journal (!) ran an
editorial titled “The War on Drugs is a Failure” by three former Latin
American presidents who proposed decriminalization of pot for personal
use.
Some of the new focus on this issue stems, of course, from the
soaring drug-and-gun violence on the Mexican border. It is estimated
that in the last year alone, more than 5,000 people in Mexico have died
in drug-related violence. Some of the impetus is economic. Some is
humanitarian: Since 1970, the government has arrested a staggering 38
million people for nonviolent drug offenses, and the percentage of such
offenders in our prison-industrial complex has soared 2,557 percent
during this time. Currently, nearly half a million people are in jail
on drug charges. There were more arrests for drug violations than for
any other offense in 2007. It is the war on drugs that makes the United
States the world’s largest jailer.
Of course, it is politically impossible for the first
African-American president to legalize pot, isn’t it? And he obviously
has other crucial issues to tackle. But if Republicans, many of whom
might benefit from passing the bong, followed the lead of Buckley,
Beck, and Paul, this extravagant waste of human and financial resources
could end.
Susan J. Douglas writes for In These Times, where this
column first appeared.
