IS THE END OF THE 'DRUG WAR' IN SIGHT?

The debate about whether to legalize marijuana is just about over. We
give it no more than a year, and perhaps less if the economy
continues to resist the financial ministrations of the Obama
administration, before the evil weed becomes just another legal
source of tax revenue.

Last week, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn proposed a
measure to tax medical marijuana dispensaries, and today, Oakland
will count mail-in ballots on a proposal to levy a business tax on
dispensaries in that city. Odds are pretty good the proposal will be
approved if California polls are accurate. Last April, the Field Poll
found that 56 percent of the state's voters want to legalize and tax
marijuana. And the same poll showed Los Angeles County voters are 60
percent pro-pot.

And how much tax revenue would that yield for California? The state's
Board of Equalization (the people responsible for administering the
state's tax system) calculated that a $50 per ounce levy and sales
tax on all marijuana purchases would yield $1.4 billion a year.

Of all humans, politicians have the keenest sense of smell for tax
revenue sources, and the odor emanating from marijuana is powerful
indeed. Almost an aphrodisiac, in fact.

If marijuana is thus legalized via the tax argument, it would thus
join cigarettes, alcohol, gambling and various and sundry other sops
to human frailty once viewed with alarm and disdain by society at
large as just another way to fatten government's take. And, of
course, to bring the marijuana market under government control.

Such control would be very bad news for participants in the illegal
drug trade, here and abroad (think Mexico). That trade yields in
excess of a trillion dollars a year, just in the United States, and
supports a criminal empire responsible for the violent deaths of
thousands of people every year. Just in the United States.

Legalization, in other words, would result not only in a shot in the
arm (no pun intended) for tax collections, it would spell the
beginning of the end of the "drug war," a war that has cost so much
money and so many lives and has gone on so long it makes such
military operations as Korea, Vietnam and Iraq pale by comparison. If
that war's goal was to eradicate marijuana use, it has proved
unwinnable. And social liberals have long argued that government
control via legalization and taxation are the only effective weapons available.

Looks like we're soon going to find out if they're right.