You may wonder, why am I bothering to write another marijuana legalization diary. Don't we have more important things to talk about? The country is in real trouble. We're facing the worst economic contraction since Hoover lost to Roosevelt. The financial markets are in a quiet panic. The Senate Republicans are blocking the Detroit bailout, risking a manufacturing collapse. Unemployment is rising rapidly. Millions of people can't afford basic health care. So why am I wasting time talking about marijuana legalization?
For me, the answer is simple: We have a lot of serious problems in this country. The federal government should not be wasting time and money on marijuana prohibition. More generally, we will not overcome the problems we face unless our government is rational and respected. Marijuana prohibition is an embarrassment. It's egg yolk on Uncle Sam's face.
Let's talk about costs first. Specifically, budgetary costs. I want to talk about what we, the citizens of this country, are spending right now to keep marijuana illegal. It's tricky to get exact sums here, because the federal government doesn't always distinguish too clearly between marijuana and harder drugs like cocaine. But, if you crawl through a few budgets, and scratch out things like military eaid to Columbia (and cut down by a factor of 4 the drug money we send to Mexico), you're going to come to roughly the following conclusion, probably give or take half an order of magnitude: The federal government spends annually about $3-4 billion dollars on marijuana prohibition. That's the cost of law enforcement, the cost of putting anti-drug propaganda on TV, and the cost of imprisoning people who've run afoul of drug laws. That's not counting lost productivity, or child services. That's not revenues that might have come from legalization. That's money directly out of the federal budget. That's your federal tax dollars. (The states collectively spend more than twice that.)
We've gotten a bit jaded lately, what with a trillion here and a trillion there, but I think this is worth pointing out: $3 billion isn't pocket change. It's about half of the money Chrysler needs.
And, although I don't want to try to make exact predictions about the economic benefits of legalization, I should point out that the direct costs of enforcing prohibition are a small fraction of the opportunity costs that we pay as a society. In British Columbia, the legal marijuana trade is worth about $7 billion. That's a lot of jobs, folks, and a lot of potential tax revenue. Harvard's Jeffrey Miron, an economist, has estimated that federal tax revenues on marijuana -- strike that, on pot, on the stuff people smoke, not on hemp or whatever -- would probably amount to about $1 billion annually. Again, that's federal. The state revenues could amount to five times that, assuming we tax pot the way we tax booze. You have to take these figures with a grain of salt, because we don't necessarily know how useage patterns would change, or whether everyone would just keep a plant growing by the kitchen door.
In any case, there's a fair amount of money we could be saving. And here's the thing: The federal government don't have to do anything to save this money. All it has to do is to stop doing something.
Which brings me to my second, more philosophical point. Marijuana prohibition in this country is a farce. What Einstein said in the 1920s about alcohol prohibition applies to pot prohibition today.
"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced."
I want a government which is respected by its citizens. We aren't going to get there by criminalizing a weed which is smoked by half the population. People know better. They've smoked pot, and they know that -- for most of us -- it's no more harmful than alcohol. We aren't going to get there by randomly imprisoning and bankrupting the few people who're unlucky enough to get caught growing or smoking the plant. This kind of Russian roulette -- brutally enforcing the laws on an unlucky (or targeted) minority -- is not justice. It's a violation of the spirit of our legal system.
Finally, I want a rational government. I want a government which can tell real problems from chimeras, and which deals with these problems in a reasonable and effective manner. Making marijuana legal for recreational use isn't all that important in the grand scheme of things -- I doubt historians will write about it a century from now. But it would be a symbol of a larger change in the way we run our government, no different in that sense from choosing a Nobel laureate to head the Energy department.