JAILING PEACEFUL DRUGGIES BIG WASTE

On April 10, two brothers from Moon were charged with smuggling pot.
The operation was not run out of dinky dorm rooms, either.

U.S. Attorney Rodger Heaton of Illinois charged Noah Landfried, 24,
and Ross Landfried, 27, with bringing more than a ton of weed into
the United States from Mexico, and selling it.

The pot, the feds say, reached the streets via their family home in
Moon, where the Landfrieds allegedly broke down their shipments into
convenient, one-pound blocks for distribution.

The government alleges the dealers made a small fortune.

To me, the most disturbing part of this case isn't the alleged use of
couriers to ferry the drugs across the border, or how many man-hours
the feds invested to catch these guys.

No, the real cost of this case will come to taxpayers many years down the line.

According to mandatory sentencing guidelines, the brothers face
penalties of 10 years to life in prison, time that doesn't come
cheaply. The cost of imprisoning a convict runs around $32,000 per
year, so that would mean $640,000 for two 10-year terms, or $3.8
million in taxpayer dollars if they get life and live for another 60
years each.

Argue all you will about whether marijuana is a so-called "gateway
drug" that leads users on a downward spiral to harder narcotics or
whether it remains illegal because of a powerful alcohol lobby. The
truth is, we can't afford to keep spending so much money locking up
nonviolent criminals.

Unfortunately, it could take years for us to wake up. There is,
after all, a booming incarceration industry whose building blocks are
long-term imprisonment of drug sellers.

A recent study by Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia says one of every 31
adult Americans is either in prison, in jail or on supervised
release. We incarcerate our citizens at five times the rate of the
rest of the world, costing us $68 billion per year.

Last year, nearly half of all arrests in the country were for pot
offenses, and 60 percent of those in state prisons for drug offenses
were nonviolent offenders with no prior records, his study said.

The problem has become so dire that Webb has introduced legislation
to create a national incarceration commission, charged with studying
our thirst for filling jail cells.

Some pot advocates say the tide might be turning. Several states are
considering softening of medical marijuana laws.

But I'll bet we'll finally legalize pot when it becomes too expensive
to keep on throwing users and sellers in jail.