WHY OREGON SHOULD LEGALIZE MARIJUANA

Authorities seized $3 million worth of illegal Mexican drug cartel
marijuana in Josephine County, $1 million in Marion County, $2 million
in Deschutes County. An astonishing $1 billion was found just across
the border. In the words of Sen. Everett Dirksen, "Pretty soon you're
talking real money."

Accepting the estimate that less than 15 percent of the illegal crop
is found, there really is "real money" out there, and that's just the
wholesale value. The Mexican drug cartels consider that 15 percent as
the cost of doing business, and they quickly turn the remaining crop
into "real money," selling it to the Americans who readily seek it
out, and then just as quickly they ship the money off to Mexico.

So, not only do we lose those billions of dollars to the criminal
world, we also lose the millions of dollars a year wasted just in
Oregon in the fruitless effort to prosecute marijuana use out of
existence. The overall affect of these efforts is to provide the
Mexican gangsters with an extraordinarily effective free price-support
program for which they surely thank the stupid gringos as they laugh
their way to "the bank" with our money.

Given the situation, one might forgive the stupid gringos for thinking
that there must be a better way to deal with the domestic market than
assigning it to the gangsters. Fortunately, many gringos do think so,
and for a good reason. There really is a better way. Legalize marijuana.

The benefits of legalization are manifold.

The first, of course, is that money spent for marijuana would be
removed from foreign criminal enterprises and kept within our economy,
allowing it to circulate and increase commerce in other goods. Without
the billions of dollars derived from unlawful marijuana sales, the
Mexican cartels are deprived of their primary reason to be here. It
would be easier to starve the cartels out than drive them out.

Second, there are clear savings for law enforcement by not wasting
funds on the annual marijuana eradication efforts and the ongoing
arrest, prosecution and incarceration of otherwise law-abiding adults,
increasing funding for more important, currently underfunded activities.

While the monetary rewards of marijuana legalization are obvious,
other less obvious rewards are as important. Primary among these is
the ability to forge a new relationship between our overextended law
enforcement friends and the significant number of citizens who use
marijuana. Domestic criminals would lose the partial protection
accorded them by responsible marijuana users being reticent to report
crimes to the police because of the real fear that they would become
the ones arrested.

Other societal benefits also would come about. Those whose task is to
educate our children would no longer be forced to lie about marijuana
as part of a perhaps otherwise useful drug education curriculum.
Families would no longer be split apart by the state to "protect"
children from the artificially defined "child abuse" supposedly caused
by their parents' marijuana use. The social and monetary costs of
those actions are nearly incalculable. Those who pass our laws could
spend more time on genuinely pressing statutory needs.

OK, how do we go about legalization? Two areas to address are private
production for personal use and commercial production for sales to
those who do not self-supply.

Addressing commercial production, one useful idea proposes regulated,
licensed production of marijuana by private persons and sales through
state liquor outlets. Proceeds would be distributed to various state
programs as part of their annual budgets. Other possibilities not
currently addressed are a free-market approach, with the state's role
limited to quality assurance and tax collection, or the state acting
as both producer and distributor and retaining all proceeds.

Private production for personal use would not necessarily provide any
monetary returns to the state, but laws could be formulated to do so.
Initiatives in 1988 and 1990 called for a small payment to various
state programs in return for the right to produce marijuana for
personal adult use. Such a concept has a strong precedent in Oregon's
10-year-old, highly successful Oregon Medical Marijuana Act. In that
act, individuals with medical marijuana cards pay a $100 annual fee to
the state in return for the right to produce marijuana for their
personal use.

Oregonians have volunteered to me that they would happily pay the same
for the right to produce their own marijuana for recreational use. I
suggest that this process is a useful beginning move. Oregon should
step up and become the leader in marijuana reform again. Oregon should
make that beginning move.