Putting Toothpaste Back in the Tube

There are two major aspects of legalizing marijuana: morality and economics. The economic arguments are easy to make - we all recognize the value of saving money and increasing revenues, especially now.

The United Nations says the worldwide drug trade is worth $320 billion a year. Regulating and taxing the sales of marijuana will raise much-needed income for local and federal governments around the country and fund programs designed to discourage addiction and use, similar to how tobacco and alcohol taxes are spent.

Licensing fees from retailers selling drugs would pay for enforcement measures, just like tobacco and alcohol. In fact, much of the existing framework already in place could be used to regulate legalized drugs.

Over 500 economists, including Free to Choose author Milton Friedman and Nobel Laureate George Akerlof, recently signed a letter saying tax revenues from marijuana could earn 2.4 to 6.2 billion dollars a year for state and local governments.

Combined with the savings of not locking up non-violent offenders, from a purely economic perspective, legalizing at least marijuana is a near necessity to keep local governments solvent in the face of declining property values and job losses.

Non-Violent Offenders

Morally, we can look at the example of alcohol prohibition in the United States during the Great Depression. Our country finds itself in a similar situation today. We arrest about 1.5 million people every year for possession of illegal drugs. Marijuana possession and distribution arrests account for about half of all drug arrests, according to the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Trying to win the “War on Drugs” through prohibition, harsh penalties, and laughably ineffective anti-drug television advertising is like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

The vast majority of marijuana arrestees are non-violent offenders, whose only crime was possession of or growing of marijuana. Local governments spend approximately $7.6 billion every year arresting these people, according to the NORML Foundation.

But none of this spending solves the problem. Pot use did not decrease; pot distribution did not decrease; pot potency did not decrease. All those billions did was lock people up for a while without treating either the underlying causes of their use or the underlying causes of the marijuana trade.

Treating drug users, especially for addictive drugs (which marijuana is not), is better than jailing them. Sending drug users to jail doesn’t cure the addiction; they’ll be back to using after they leave jail—and cost local governments even more money to try them in court and lock them up again. So when it comes to a drug like marijuana, one far less addictive than nicotine or alcohol, how much sense can this policy make?

One study from the National Institute on Drug Abuse found a dramatic decline in the rates of drinking and drug use in teenagers after spending longer times in rehab programs (Nida Notes, Vol. 17, No. 1).

Attention: Parents

Of course, it’s easy to extol the economic virtues of drug legalization—not many people will argue we shouldn’t do what we can to save money during a recession. The difficulties many people face come from the moral implications.

Just like tobacco and alcohol, we have a responsibility to keep children from putting themselves in dangerous situations. Drug use, were it legalized, would obviously not be legal for people under 18 or, more likely, 21.

And parents, consider this: if alcohol were not legal and sold in stores, where would people, including teenagers, purchase it? Back alleys, behind the school, out of cars…

Sound familiar? Eliminating the black market means access to marijuana and other drugs can be controlled at least as well as it is for alcohol or tobacco. Some pot will inevitably find its way into the hands of juveniles, but it’s something we’ll have to learn to deal with responsibly, just as we do for cigarettes and alcohol.

Another moral argument against legalization of drugs involves the issue of personal responsibility. Addiction is a problem, obviously, but we can treat drug addiction the same as we treat alcohol or tobacco addiction. Fortunately for marijuana, it’s much, much less physically addictive than cigarettes or alcohol (although, like most things not done in moderation, our bodies can create psychological dependencies).

But personal responsibility doesn’t stop tobacco from being outlawed, or alcohol, or really fast cars, or guns and knives. We understand, as a society, the risks involved and do our best to minimize them.

While marijuana and other drugs are illegal, our options to minimize the harm they cause are limited. We’ve seen the “no tolerance” strategies fail over the past three decades and people may be afraid to get treatment in case they are arrested.

It’s also hard to explain why marijuana in particular is such a bad drug when prominent actors, singers, Olympic gold medalists, and even the three most recent presidents have used drugs like marijuana. The disconnect between popular and successful people and the junkies we’re told we become if we smoke dope is jarring.

Rational, Legal, Safe

The bottom line when it comes to legalizing drugs is that only by legalizing them can we control them. The War on Drugs has failed. We spend more billions every year, only to see more arrests, more broken families, more criminals, more drugs, more users.

We’re being overwhelmed by drugs. Legalizing and regulating marijuana is a good step towards a rational drug policy, one that benefits us financially and morally.

Like we realized as a nation in the early 1930s, making a drug like alcohol illegal won’t end its use or eliminate criminal incentives. Legal, taxable, and responsible regulation is the least bad solution to an otherwise unsolvable problem.