PROHIBITION IS NOT WORKING

The consensus thinking among libertarians is that the standard by which
people should judge any law or government program is whether the benefits
of that law or government program outweigh the costs associated with its
enactment or enforcement.

With that in mind, can anybody name for me any example from history when
any government of any kind has ever been able to prevent its citizens from
partaking of any vice by prohibiting that behavior? No? Then explain how
the United States Federal Government intends to stop the use of a substance
that can be routinely cultivated in an average person's closet.

The prohibition of marijuana can never be successful.

Knowing that there is zero possibility of success in its prohibition, the
question each of us must ask is whether the benefits of limiting the use of
marijuana as a drug outweigh the costs associated with combating it.

How effective has prohibition been in reducing marijuana usage? Not very
effective.

The 2009 National Survey on Drug Use and Health reports that the number of
people over the age of 12 who admitted to using cannabis within the past
month rose from 6.2 percent in 2002 to 6.6 percent in 2009.

However, keep in mind that these numbers are survey-based and, since
illegal drug use is unquantifiable in any exact sense, there is every
reason to believe the real numbers are far higher. Reason.com columnist
Jacob Sullum uses data from the FBI and the National Survey on Drug Use and
Health in a Sept. 16 blog post to highlight the fact that while arrests for
marijuana crimes have roughly tripled since the early 1990's, use has not
only remained constant, but has actually risen slightly. Since the
government can only ever hope to reduce usage and it hasn't even done that,
then the only question left to answer is whether the costs of prohibition
outweigh its nonexistent success.

Even a cursory glance at those costs indicates that they far exceed the
benefits. For example, The Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP)
claims that in 1997 "only 1.6 percent of the state inmate population had
been convicted of a marijuana only crime, including trafficking." This was
before many states began legalizing medical marijuana, which resulted in a
federal crackdown on trafficking and use, but let's assume that the same
percentage holds true today at both the state and federal level.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported that in 2006, there were
1,569,945 federal and state prison inmates. At a rate of 1.6 percent, that
means over 25,000 of them were incarcerated for marijuana crimes. BJS
statistics on corrections expenditures indicate that these 25,000 inmates
represent a cost of just over $1 billion that year. This is just the cost
for the incarceration of these inmates, which number does not even include
all those who violated other laws as a result of being involved in the
criminalized economy of marijuana. To me, this represents a minimum of
25,000 people and $1 billion too many.

Then there is the cost imposed by prohibition on hemp cultivation. Hemp is
one of the most useful crops mankind has ever cultivated. It was so crucial
to the colonial economy that many areas, including Mass., required farmers
to dedicate some portion of their acreage to its cultivation. Despite the
fact that it had been criminalized in 1937, the U.S. government initiated
the "Hemp for Victory" program during World War II to encourage farmers to
grow the crop for use in making rope and other products for the war effort.
Today, rather than cutting down trees, which remove carbon from the
atmosphere and are at best a semi-renewable resource, we could be making
paper (and cloth and plastic and myriad and other useful items) from a crop
that generates less pollution in the manufacturing process, grows in almost
any climate region and is completely renewable.

So, is there some other proven method for reducing the use of a harmful
substance? Remarkably, according to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC), the government's own data shows that we have had far more
success reducing the prevalence of smoking than we have in reducing the use
of cannabis. Through aggressive education and prevention programs, not to
mention increasingly heavy doses of taxation, the percentage of adults who
smoke in the U.S. has declined from 24.7 percent in 1997 to 20.6 percent in
2009.

In fact, the number of adult smokers had dropped to only 19.7 percent in
2007 before the recent recession began at the end of that year, once again
proving the correlation of rising vice to periods of economic distress.

Besides, I don't know about you, but I would really look forward to seeing
what MTV would do with their "Shards 'O Glass" anti-smoking commercials to
refocus them on reducing youth pot smoking.

I'm not going to tell you that legalization is the only solution to our
marijuana issues, but as these facts prove beyond any doubt, the current
situation causes more harm than good. Prohibition is not working, so let's
find something that will.

Ben Rudnick is a Collegian columnist.