PERSPECTIVES: LEGAL POT INDUSTRY COULD GIVE STATE BOOST

In the wake of a California budget agreement that even those who
supported it loathe for its tax increases and deep cuts to education
and health care, Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) has offered
a proposal that will bolster the state's budget while protecting our
environment and helping keep drugs away from kids.

Ammiano's bill, AB390, would put marijuana under the same regulatory
system that now applies to beer, wine and liquor. It would end the
bizarre and untenable situation in which California's largest cash
crop - valued at $13.8billion annually - is almost completely untaxed.
("Almost" in the sense that Oakland voters recently passed an
initiative taxing its legal medical marijuana dispensaries $18 per
$1,000 in sales.)

Like it or not, California's marijuana industry is huge. Indeed, our
marijuana crop is worth more each year than the combined value of all
the wheat and cotton produced in the entire U.S.

According to U.S. government surveys, 2million Californiana use
marijuana at least monthly, but both the producers and consumers of
this crop escape paying taxes on it. While precise figures are
impossible given the current illicit market, revenues from taxed and
regulated marijuana could well be in the neighborhood of at least
$1billion per year.

Right now, our laws are based on the laughable notion that we can
somehow make marijuana go away if police can just arrest enough users
- - over 74,000 in 2007 in California alone, 80percent of them for
simple possession - and rip up enough plants. It's hard to think of a
policy that's been a more total failure.

Last year, the state's Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP)
"eradicated" 2.9million marijuana plants. CAMP and similar efforts
have never made the slightest dent in the availability of marijuana,
but they do involve many thousands of person-hours of effort and the
use of helicopters and lots of other expensive equipment, all at
taxpayers' expense.

It gets worse. Some 70percent of the plants CAMP seized were on public
lands - often remote corners of national parks, forests, and other
wilderness areas. These clandestine gardens pose a threat to our
environment as well as the safety of hikers and other visitors.
Regulating marijuana would immediately remove any incentive to grow on
public land and save millions in eradication and environmental cleanup
costs. After all, there's a reason we never hear of criminal gangs
planting illicit vineyards in our national forests.

A chorus of the usual entrenched interests has already taken up their
habitual cry: "What about the children?" The real question is: What
makes anyone believe our current policies have done anything to
protect children?

The vested interests promoting prohibition don't like to talk about
this, but according to U.S. government estimates, marijuana use by
people under age 21 has risen some 4,000 percent since the national
ban on marijuana took effect in 1937. No one wants kids smoking
marijuana, but the evidence suggests prohibition has made the problem
worse, not better.

It's not an accident that in the Netherlands, where for over three
decades adults have been allowed to possess and purchase small amounts
of marijuana from regulated businesses, a recent World Health
Organization study found that not only are overall marijuana use rates
lower than ours, the percentage of teens trying marijuana by age 15 is
only one-third of ours.

And it's not an accident that in this country, the tough crackdown on
cigarette sales to minors that began in the mid-1990s has led to a
sharp drop in teen cigarette smoking, while teen marijuana use rose
during the same period. The latest federal survey found that under our
current unregulated system, more 10th-graders now smoke marijuana than
cigarettes.

Rather than cling to disastrously failed policies, it's time to
realize there is a better way. AB390 is the right move for California.

Unlike other budget plans on the table, from laying off police
officers to increasing taxes on middle-class families, regulating
marijuana would be a good move for California even if the state
treasury were rolling in money.

The first question to ask about any public policy is: Is it working?
For marijuana prohibition, the clear answer is "no." It's painfully
clear that our marijuana laws have failed to reduce marijuana use.
Seventy years of marijuana prohibition have turned a little-known
medicinal herb into a product that's been used by nearly half of all
Americans, including President Barack Obama and California Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger.

Police departments everywhere are stretched to the brink. In 2007,
California saw more than 74,000 marijuana arrests - 80percent for mere
personal possession. That same year, more than 166,000 violent crimes
went unsolved in the state.

By maintaining the legal status quo, the state is abnegating control
of this mind-altering substance to the criminal market, where sellers
have no incentive to restrict their sales to adults. A legal,
regulated market with strict penalties for selling to minors and
honest education about marijuana is the most effective way to reduce
teen use. Indeed, it's already worked with tobacco.

Marijuana prohibition shares eerie parallels to the dark days of
alcohol Prohibition. Instead of Al Capone smuggling booze out of
Chicago, today's prohibition criminals are growing large-scale
marijuana farms in our national parks. Creating a legal, regulated
market for marijuana will put these bad guys out of business - just as
the end of alcohol Prohibition closed the door to bootleggers.

Another reason to repeal marijuana prohibition is that we have no
business making responsible, adult marijuana consumers into criminals.
Independent scientific research consistently concludes that marijuana
is far safer than alcohol - both in risk of addiction and toxicity.
What message are we sending by criminalizing millions of otherwise
law-abiding people who choose to relax at the end of the day with a
safer substance?

The policy of making criminals out of so many productive members of
society and spending vast resources chasing down plants causes
widespread disrespect for the law.

Ending marijuana prohibition would bring users into the light and do
away with the wink-wink, nudge-nudge attitude so many people have
developed about marijuana.

By changing the way we deal with marijuana, California could serve as
a beacon to the nation for a new, effective policy rather than the
embodiment of everything wrong with the old, ineffectual one.

The resulting new tax revenue would only be icing on the cake.