JOINT RESOLUTION: TAXING POT JUST MAKES CENTS

It's time to legalize marijuana, tax it to death, then let struggling
Joe Citizen - instead of Joe Dope Dealer - reap the pot profits.

The most popular question at President Obama's town hall meeting
Thursday? Whether legalizing marijuana would help the economy and
create jobs. You know: Pottery Barn goes Pottery Bong.

Now the pot posse may have stacked the e-mail deck. Still Obama, who
once wanted to decriminalize pot, laughed off the inquiries. "I don't
know what this says about the online audience," he quipped, then did
his post-election about-face. "No, I don't think this would be a good
strategy."

Actually, it would be a very good strategy. He's wrong. Enough
already with these ancient mariner moralizers like ex-drug czar Bill
Bennett, who preached reefer madness while gambling millions in Vegas
and smoking two packs a day. A different generation's in charge now.
Millions of Americans understand that you can get stoned in high
school, in college, every post-collegiate Saturday night, yet remain
a responsible, upstanding, taxpayer. They know because they've done it.

Ignoring hysterical politicians and law enforcement types around
here, Massachusetts voted nearly two to one in November to
decriminalize small amounts of marijuana. Has your neighborhood gone
to pot? If we took the next step - legalize and tax it - we might not
need toll hikes or 19-cent gas tax hikes and they'd surely be hiring
at "Roach Brothers," or "Best Buds," or maybe even, I can't resist,
"Restoration Weed-Wear."

If we legalized nationwide, we'd save billions immediately in
enforcement and jailing costs. We'd reap many billions more per year
in taxes. When Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron published his
legalize-pot tax estimates in 2005, more than 500 professional
economists, including Milton Friedman, signed on.

Miron was on CNN this week discussing the horrific drug war on the
Mexico/U.S. border. He's long argued that violence is the inevitable
norm in illegal, not legal, markets, whether in drugs, gambling,
prostitution, or alcohol. We just never learn.

But legalizing pot isn't only about money. It's about our ridiculous
citizen passivity. Why do we let congressional liars and thieves
dictate what we can do, responsibly, in our living rooms? Who are
they to take away our children's student loans over a joint?

NORML (The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws)
typically gets about $900 a day in online donations. Thursday and
Friday, they got $3,500 each day.

By every possible metric I can employ," said NORML's executive
director, Allen St. Pierre, "these last 24 hours have been the
busiest I've seen."

Though St. Pierre was disappointed with Obama's flip-flop Thursday,
he also knows the president could be his best advertisement. You may
not like Obama's politics, but nobody would argue that pot-smoking
and cocaine-snorting scrambled Obama's brain.