END THE WAR ON POT

LOS ANGELES - I dropped in on a marijuana shop here that proudly
boasted that it sells "31 flavors." It also offered a loyalty program.
For every 10 purchases of pot -- supposedly for medical uses -- you
get one free packet.

"There are five of these shops within a three-block radius," explained
the proprietor, Edward J. Kim. He brimmed with pride at his inventory
and sounded like any small businessman as he complained about onerous
government regulation. Like, well, state and federal laws.

But those burdensome regulations are already evaporating in
California, where anyone who can fake a headache already can buy pot.
Now there's a significant chance that on Tuesday, California voters
will choose to go further and broadly legalize marijuana.

I hope so. Our nearly century-long experiment in banning marijuana has
failed as abysmally as Prohibition did, and California may now be
pioneering a saner approach. Sure, there are risks if California
legalizes pot. But our present drug policy has three catastrophic
consequences.

First, it squanders billions of dollars that might be better used for
education. California now spends more money on prisons than on higher
education. It spends about $216,000 per year on each juvenile
detainee, and just $8,000 on each child in the troubled Oakland public
school system.

Each year, some 750,000 Americans are arrested for possession of small
amounts of marijuana. Is that really the optimal use of our police
force?

In contrast, legalizing and taxing marijuana would bring in
substantial sums that could be used to pay for schools, libraries or
early childhood education. A Harvard economist, Jeffrey A. Miron,
calculates that marijuana could generate $8.7 billion in tax revenue
each year if legalized nationally, while legalization would also save
the same sum annually in enforcement costs.

That's a $17 billion swing in the nation's finances -- enough to send
every 3- and 4-year-old in a poor family to a high-quality preschool.
And that's an investment that would improve education outcomes and
reduce crime and drug use in the future -- with enough left over to
pay for an extensive nationwide campaign to discourage drug use.

The second big problem with the drug war is that it has exacerbated
poverty and devastated the family structure of African-Americans.
Partly that's because drug laws are enforced inequitably. Black and
Latino men are much more likely than whites to be stopped and searched
and, when drugs are found, prosecuted.

Here in Los Angeles, blacks are arrested for marijuana possession at
seven times the rate whites are, according to a study by the Drug
Policy Alliance, which favors legalization. Yet surveys consistently
find that young whites use marijuana at higher rates than young blacks.

Partly because of drug laws, a black man now has a one-in-three chance
of serving time in prison at some point in his life, according to the
Sentencing Project, a group that seeks reform in the criminal justice
system. This makes it more difficult for black men to find jobs, more
difficult for black women to find suitable husbands, and less common
for black children to grow up in stable families with black male role
models. So, sure, drugs have devastated black communities -- but the
remedy of criminal sentencing has made the situation worse.

The third problem with our drug policy is that it creates crime and
empowers gangs. "The only groups that benefit from continuing to keep
marijuana illegal are the violent gangs and cartels that control its
distribution and reap immense profits from it through the black
market," a group of current and former police officers, judges and
prosecutors wrote last month in an open letter to voters in California.

I have no illusions about drugs. One of my childhood friends in
Yamhill, Ore., pretty much squandered his life by dabbling with
marijuana in ninth grade and then moving on to stronger stuff. And
yes, there's some risk that legalization would make such dabbling more
common. But that hasn't been a significant problem in Portugal, which
decriminalized drug use in 2001.

Likewise, medical marijuana laws approved in 1996 have in effect made
pot accessible to any adult in California, without any large increase
in usage. Special medical clinics abound where for about $45 you can
see a doctor who is certain to give you the medical recommendation
that you need to buy marijuana. Then you can visit Mr. Kim and choose
one of his 31 varieties, topping out at a private "OG" brand that
costs $75 for one-eighth of an ounce. "It's like a fine wine, cured,
aged, dried," he boasted.

Or browse the online offerings. One store advertises: "refer a friend,
get free joint." And the world hasn't ended.

One advantage of our federal system is that when we have a failed
policy, we can grope for improvements by experimenting at the state
level. I hope California will lead the way on Tuesday by legalizing
marijuana.