THE WAR ON POT: AMERICA'S $42 BILLION ANNUAL BOONDOGGLE

What else could we spend $42 billion each year on? Health insurance
for kids? Better paid teachers? It's our choice.

What would you buy if you had an extra $42 billion to spend every
year? What might our government buy if it suddenly had that much
money dropped onto its lap every year?

For one thing, it might pay for the entire $7 billion annual increase
in the State Children's Health Insurance Program that President Bush
is threatening to veto because of its cost -- and there'd still be
$35 billion left over.

Or perhaps you'd hire 880,000 schoolteachers at the average U.S.
teacher salary of $47,602 per year.

Or give every one of our current teachers a 30 percent raise (at a
cost of $15 billion, according to the American Federation of
Teachers) and use what's left to take a $27 billion whack out of the
federal deficit.

Or use all $42 billion for a massive tax cut that would put an extra
$140 in the pockets of every person in the country -- $560 for a
family of four.

The mind reels at the ways such a massive sum of money could be put to use.

Why $42 billion? Because that's what our current marijuana laws cost
American taxpayers each year, according to a new study by researcher
Jon Gettman, Ph.D. -- $10.7 billion in direct law enforcement costs,
and $31.1 billion in lost tax revenues. And that may be an
underestimate, at least on the law enforcement side, since Gettman
made his calculations before the FBI released its latest arrest
statistics in late September. The new FBI stats show an all-time
record 829,627 marijuana arrests in 2006, 43,000 more than in 2005.

That's like arresting every man, woman and child in the state of
North Dakota plus every man, woman, and child in Des Moines, Iowa on
marijuana charges ... every year. Arrests for marijuana possession --
not sales or trafficking, just possession -- totaled 738,916. By
comparison, there were 611,523 arrests last year for all violent
crimes combined.

Basing his calculations mainly on U.S. government statistics, Gettman
concludes that marijuana in the U.S. is a $113 billion dollar
business. That's a huge chunk of economic activity that is
unregulated and untaxed because it's almost entirely off the books.

Of course, the cost of our marijuana laws goes far beyond lost tax
revenues and money spent on law enforcement. By consigning a very
popular product -- one that's been used by about 100 million
Americans, according to government surveys -- to the criminal
underground, we've effectively cut legitimate businesspeople out of
the market and handed a monopoly to criminals and gangs.

Strangely, government officials love to warn us that some unsavory
characters profit off of marijuana sales, while ignoring the obvious:
Our prohibitionist laws handed them the marijuana business in the
first place, effectively giving marijuana dealers a $113 billion free ride.

All this might make some sense if marijuana were so terribly
dangerous that it needed to be banned at all costs, but science long
ago came to precisely the opposite conclusion. Compared to alcohol,
for example, marijuana is astonishingly safe. For one thing,
marijuana is much less addictive than alcohol, with just nine percent
of users becoming dependent, as opposed to 15 percent for booze. And
marijuana is much less toxic. Heavy drinking is well-documented to
damage the brain and liver, and to increase the risk of many types of
cancer. Marijuana, on the other hand, has never caused a medically
documented overdose death, and scientists are still debating whether
even heavy marijuana use causes any permanent harm at all. And then
there's violence. Again, the scientific findings are overwhelming:
Booze incites violence and aggression; marijuana doesn't.

Despite all that, we now arrest one American every 38 seconds on
marijuana charges. And we do so at a staggering cost in law
enforcement expenses, lost tax revenues, and staggering profits for
criminal gangs.

The alternative is clear: Regulate marijuana just as we do beer,
wine, and liquor. The only thing lacking is the political will.