THE LOW DOWN

Legalize It!

It shouldn't be hard to tell what this column is about from the title
of it. It's about marijuana, a drug that's much less harmful than
cigarettes and alcohol and yet is demonized for reasons that befuddle
this writer's mind.

I'm not going to lay out the same old tired argument that potheads
have used for the past half a century. But you won't see homeless
potheads sitting on street corners begging for five bucks to get a
bag of weed, or you won't hear about a couple stoners robbing the
local gas station to get money to buy some pot. You won't hear about
the hundreds of thousands of dead because of its use. My argument for
why marijuana should be legal comes from a strict monetary outlet.
The United States can be making so much money off taxing legalized
marijuana that a sizable chunk of the federal deficit could be erased
within years.

Let's Look At The Numbers.

In the Netherlands you can buy an eighth of an ounce of marijuana for
the equivalent of 15 dollars American, or so I've read somewhere.
Here, people are paying up to 60 dollars and beyond for the stuff, or
so I've heard. If the government grew marijuana, it would make almost
pure profit, especially if it didn't allow corporations to get their
greedy hands on the product.

So, let's say the cost of an eighth of an ounce would be 60 dollars.
Subtract fifteen dollars for land upkeep, packaging and
transportation (if that). Ninety-four million Americans have admitted
to smoking marijuana, but we'll go for a safer estimate and say 10
percent of the population would buy one of these eighths. That's over
one billion dollars of pure profit, just from each pothead buying once.

And it doesn't even include the savings earned from such things as a
reduction in law enforcement expenditures. It would effectively
neuter some Latin American and Mexican drug kingpins who make their
wealth getting the drug into our country. While arrests for driving
under the influence would almost surely go up, taxpayer money
wouldn't be needed to support the amount of the prison population
that is serving time for marijuana possession. College and high
school students wouldn't have to worry about losing all chances at
federal aid if caught with the slightest bit of weed. Cancer patients
and people suffering from other diseases won't have to worry about
the cops breaking down their doors for trying to ease their pain in
the cheapest way.

I'm not saying that marijuana is a good thing. I've seen what it does
to some people, robbing them of ambition and intelligence. But I've
also seen what cigarettes and alcohol do to people, and those legal
drugs are more harmful than marijuana could ever be.