The War on Pot: America's $42
Billion Annual Boondoggle
by Rob Kampia, AlterNet
www.alternet.org/, October 9,
2007
What would you buy if you had an extra
$42 billion to spend every year? What might our government buy
if it suddenly had that much money dropped onto its lap every
year?
For one thing, it might pay for the entire
$7 billion annual increase in the State Children's Health Insurance
Program that President Bush is threatening to veto because of
its cost -- and there'd still be $35 billion left over.
Or perhaps you'd hire 880,000 schoolteachers
at the average U.S. teacher salary of $47,602 per year.
Or give every one of our current teachers
a 30 percent raise (at a cost of $15 billion, according to the
American Federation of Teachers) and use what's left to take a
$27 billion whack out of the federal deficit.
Or use all $42 billion for a massive tax
cut that would put an extra $140 in the pockets of every person
in the country -- $560 for a family of four.
The mind reels at the ways such a massive
sum of money could be put to use.
Why $42 billion? Because that's what our
current marijuana laws cost American taxpayers each year, according
to a new study by researcher Jon Gettman, Ph.D. -- $10.7 billion
in direct law enforcement costs, and $31.1 billion in lost tax
revenues. And that may be an underestimate, at least on the law
enforcement side, since Gettman made his calculations before the
FBI released its latest arrest statistics in late September. The
new FBI stats show an all-time record 829,627 marijuana arrests
in 2006, 43,000 more than in 2005.
That's like arresting every man, woman
and child in the state of North Dakota plus every man, woman,
and child in Des Moines, Iowa on marijuana charges ... every year.
Arrests for marijuana possession -- not sales or trafficking,
just possession -- totaled 738,916. By comparison, there were
611,523 arrests last year for all violent crimes combined.
Basing his calculations mainly on U.S.
government statistics, Gettman concludes that marijuana in the
U.S. is a $113 billion dollar business. That's a huge chunk of
economic activity that is unregulated and untaxed because it's
almost entirely off the books.
Of course, the cost of our marijuana laws
goes far beyond lost tax revenues and money spent on law enforcement.
By consigning a very popular product -- one that's been used by
about 100 million Americans, according to government surveys --
to the criminal underground, we've effectively cut legitimate
businesspeople out of the market and handed a monopoly to criminals
and gangs.
Strangely, government officials love to
warn us that some unsavory characters profit off of marijuana
sales, while ignoring the obvious: Our prohibitionist laws handed
them the marijuana business in the first place, effectively giving
marijuana dealers a $113 billion free ride.
All this might make some sense if marijuana
were so terribly dangerous that it needed to be banned at all
costs, but science long ago came to precisely the opposite conclusion.
Compared to alcohol, for example, marijuana is astonishingly safe.
For one thing, marijuana is much less addictive than alcohol,
with just nine percent of users becoming dependent, as opposed
to 15 percent for booze. And marijuana is much less toxic. Heavy
drinking is well-documented to damage the brain and liver, and
to increase the risk of many types of cancer. Marijuana, on the
other hand, has never caused a medically documented overdose death,
and scientists are still debating whether even heavy marijuana
use causes any permanent harm at all. And then there's violence.
Again, the scientific findings are overwhelming: Booze incites
violence and aggression; marijuana doesn't.
Despite all that, we now arrest one American
every 38 seconds on marijuana charges. And we do so at a staggering
cost in law enforcement expenses, lost tax revenues, and staggering
profits for criminal gangs.
The alternative is clear: Regulate marijuana
just as we do beer, wine, and liquor. The only thing lacking is
the political will.
Rob Kampia is executive director of the
Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, DC.
War on Drugs
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