TOUGHER MARIJUANA LAWS ARE BAD ECONOMICS

The house on Northeast 18th Street was well landscaped with lush
tropical plants beyond the arched brick entranceway.

Very nice. Of course, accomplished landscaping would be the least
you'd expect of a grow house: palms, birds of paradise and purple
orchids out front; 79 hydroponic marijuana plants inside.

"No. No. That couldn't be true. Not here," a neighbor protested.
"He's lived here for years. There's his pick-up truck."

It just didn't compute. Not for her. Not in her neighborhood on the
eastern edge of Victoria Park in Fort Lauderdale. Not that nice
middle-aged fellow across the street whose house was worth about $670,000.

Not the Only One

Indeed, his pickup truck was parked by the ornamental iron gate. A
John Lennon bumper sticker had taken on new meaning after Wednesday's
raid: "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."

John Storelli, 47, was not the only one. He was among 135 swept up in
Wednesday's statewide operation. About 3,400 plants were confiscated.
Forty-nine houses in Miami-Dade led to 2,220 plants and 50 arrests.
Nine houses in Broward yielded 302 plants and 10 arrests.

Sending a Message

The DEA called this the culmination of a three-month investigation
and it certainly looked as if the feds had squirreled away three
months worth of grow house leads for one big shebang. For maximum impact.

It worked. On Thursday, the Florida state Senate took up a bill,
already approved by the House, to toughen penalties for -- you
guessed it -- marijuana cultivation. News of Operation D-Day was
still reverberating around the state. Growers had been nabbed in 40
of Florida's 67 counties. The senators voted 36-0 to lower the
threshold for a second-degree felony from 100 plants to 25.

Someone caught with 79 plants, like the house on Northeast 18th
Avenue, will be slapped with a 15-year stretch. Getting tough on pot
growers after a spectacular statewide media splash makes for dandy
politics. And insane economics.

Price of Punishment

It was if no one in the Legislature noticed that the budget they just
crafted, with brutal cuts in funding for foster kids, nursing homes,
education, also included $305 million in new money to build three more prisons.

Florida spent 9.3 percent of last year's budget (about $2.5 billion)
to keep 96,000 prisoners in state lock-ups.

A study conducted last year by the Pew Charitable Trust found that
national spending on prisons was rising six times faster than
spending for public education. Florida's get-tough policies, of
course, were singled out as an extreme example of wasteful,
ineffective, economic craziness.

It costs about $20,000 a year to house a single prisoner in a state
system that skimps on rehabilitation, education and the other
amenities meant to discourage recidivism. Twenty percent of Florida's
prisoners are nonviolent drug offenders, who in most western
societies would have been diverted into cheaper alternatives.
Instead, we pop thousands of non-violent druggies with long prison
sentences that devour even larger chunks of our tax dollars. Last
year, Florida spent 66 cents on inmates for every dollar appropriated
for higher education.

Barely two months after the Pew report, legislators forgot all about
it, voting to hang 15-year sentences on yet another category of
non-violent drug offenders.

Stupid economics for sure. But on the day after Operation D-Day, it
made for brilliant politics.