Pubdate: Sun, 15 Jul 2007
Source: Record, The (Stockton, CA)
Copyright: 2007 The Record
Contact:  http://www.recordnet.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/428
Author: Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post Writers Group
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/author/Kathleen+Parker
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Marijuana)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Marijuana - Medicinal)

IT'S TIME WE SERIOUSLY DISCUSS LEGALIZING MARIJUANA

Billions Are Being Wasted on Crime and Punishment

News that Al Gore's 24-year-old son, Al Gore III, was busted for pot 
and assorted prescription pills has unleashed a torrent of mirth in 
certain quarters.

Gore-phobes on the Internet apparently view the son's arrest and 
incarceration as comeuppance for the father's shortcomings.

Especially rich was the fact young Al was driving a Toyota Prius when 
he was pulled over for going 100 mph - just as Papa Gore was set to 
preside over concerts during a 24-hour, seven-continent Live Earth 
celebration to raise awareness about global warming July 7.

Whatever one might feel about the former vice president's 
environmental obsessions, his son's problems are no one's cause for 
celebration.

The younger Gore's high-profile arrest does, however, offer Americans 
an opportunity to get real about drug prohibition and especially 
about marijuana laws.

For the record, I have no interest in marijuana except as a 
public-policy matter. My personal drug of choice is a heavenly elixir 
made from crushed grapes.

It is, alas, a drug.

Tasty, attractive and highly ritualized in our culture, wine and 
other alcoholic beverages are approved for responsible use despite 
the fact alcoholism and attendant problems are a plague, while 
responsible use of a weed that, at worst, makes people boring and 
hungry, is criminal.

Pot smokers might revolt if they weren't so mellow.

Efforts over the past few decades to relax marijuana laws have been 
moderately successful.

Twelve states have decriminalized marijuana, which usually means no 
prison or criminal record for first-time possession of small amounts 
for personal consumption. Those states are Alabama, California, 
Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, 
North Carolina, Ohio and Oregon.

Yet even now, federal law enforcement agents raid the homes of 
terminally ill patients who use marijuana for relief from suffering 
in states where medical marijuana use is permitted. These federal 
raids have become an issue in the 2008 presidential race as 
candidates have been asked to take a position.

A summary is available on the Marijuana Policy Project Web site (mpp.org).

Beyond the medical issue is the practical question of criminalizing 
otherwise good citizens for consuming a nontoxic substance - 
described by the British medical journal Lancet as less harmful to 
health than alcohol or tobacco - at great economic and social cost.

Each year, 700,000 people are arrested for marijuana-related offenses 
at a cost of more than $7 billion, according to the Marijuana Policy Project.

Here's a thought for people concerned about the federal deficit, 
America's 4.5 million uninsured children or our soon-to-be-bankrupt 
Social Security system:

If marijuana were legalized, regulated and taxed at the rates applied 
to alcohol and tobacco, revenues would reach about $6.2 billion 
annually, according to an open letter signed by 500 economists who 
urged President Bush and other public officials to debate marijuana 
prohibition.

Among those economists were three Nobel Prize winners, including the 
late Milton Friedman of Stanford's Hoover Institution.

Friedman and others were acting in response to a 2005 report on the 
budgetary implications of marijuana prohibition by Jeffrey Miron, a 
visiting professor of economics at Harvard.

By Miron's estimate, regulating marijuana would save about $7.7 
billion annually in government prohibition enforcement - $2.4 billion 
at the federal level and $5.3 billion at the state and local levels.

That's a lot of money for English tutors and health care for indigents.

Add to that amount income taxes that would have to be paid by 
marijuana producers.

Drug dealers don't pay taxes, after all.

Nor do they concern themselves much with rules of the workplace and 
worker welfare. Miron argues that legalizing marijuana wouldn't 
increase use, because decriminalization hasn't increased use.

But, he says, legalization would reduce crime by neutralizing dealers 
and eliminating the violent black market.

Legalizing marijuana isn't an endorsement of underage or irresponsible use.

Best would be that everyone deal with life unmedicated, but adults 
arguably have a right to amuse themselves in ways that don't harm others.

While some might balk at the idea of legalized pot, it seems clear 
some remedy is in order.

At the very least, a fresh, freewheeling debate free of politics and 
bureaucratic self-interest is overdue.

Maybe Al Gore could moderate.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake