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August 7, 2008
Our Failed and Never Ending War on Marijuana
Rueters posted a great article on our governments never ending and failed war on marijuana. “America’s marijuana prohibition drew into its 72nd year this month. It has created a huge underground industry catering to users, helped the U.S. prison population balloon into the world’s largest, and diverted the resources of American law enforcement. What it has not done is keep Americans from using marijuana.”
The article sites several eye opening statistic including the fact that, ”since 1937, the year marijuana was outlawed, its use in the United States has gone up by 4,000 percent.” For the first time since Senator Edward Kennedy introduced legislation to decriminalize marijuana back in 1978 another representative, Congressman Barney Frank, has stepped up to the plate to introduce, “a bill before Congress that would eliminate federal penalties for the personal use of marijuana by responsible adults.”
“The case for legalizing marijuana, the most widely used drug after alcohol and tobacco, rests on several planks - the most obvious being that prohibition simply hasn’t worked despite extraordinarily labor-intensive and costly government efforts. In 2006, the last year for which figures from the Federal Bureau of Investigation are available, 830,000 Americans were arrested on marijuana charges, most of them for possession rather than trafficking. That works out at a marijuana arrest every 38 seconds. A study last year estimated the cost of these arrests at $10.7 billion.”
I don’t expect Congress to pass this bill or ever really exercise common sense but it’s nice to know a few of them do.
8 comments
Ony a few of them do!
Just because people are still using it despite the prohibition doesn’t make it right, and doesn’t make it sensible to legalize.
Great post! How about this argument: Marijuana, if legalized and taxed, could be mean a huge cash cow for the public coffers. Weed’s price is already artificially high (no pun intended) because of the inherent difficulty in growing and trafficking something that’s illegal. If it became a “legitimate” industry, supply would go up, the business would become more efficient, and prices would go down. Pot smokers could then afford to take on a relatively high tax burden, as cigarette smokers already do.
you’re damned right - by criminalising marijuana, the government allows a huge industry to remain unregulated, untaxed, and in the hands of criminals.
and i want to be able to buy a joint in KFC…
but, what’s the big deal? It’s just weed? Less of a problem than alcohol users and if they harvested hemp, they could use that instead of cutting down billions of trees for a variety of products.
I’m totally for legalizing it.
especially with the news coming out of Maryland taking center stage- it is about time!
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-mayor0807,0,4563211.story
What the prohibition has done is given a monopoly to criminals. It is as if we learned nothing from the prohibition of alcohol.
If it were legalized, which I support, I would not use it. It goes against my moral convictions to surrender control of myself to a chemical. I don’t expect laws to enforce my convictions, I only expect the law to protect me. The prohibition of marijuana protects me from nothing.
Good for people to know.