IT'S TIME WE SERIOUSLY DISCUSS LEGALIZING MARIJUANA

Billions Are Being Wasted on Crime and Punishment

News that Al Gore's 24-year-old son, Al Gore III, was busted for pot
and assorted prescription pills has unleashed a torrent of mirth in
certain quarters.

Gore-phobes on the Internet apparently view the son's arrest and
incarceration as comeuppance for the father's shortcomings.

Especially rich was the fact young Al was driving a Toyota Prius when
he was pulled over for going 100 mph - just as Papa Gore was set to
preside over concerts during a 24-hour, seven-continent Live Earth
celebration to raise awareness about global warming July 7.

Whatever one might feel about the former vice president's
environmental obsessions, his son's problems are no one's cause for
celebration.

The younger Gore's high-profile arrest does, however, offer Americans
an opportunity to get real about drug prohibition and especially
about marijuana laws.

For the record, I have no interest in marijuana except as a
public-policy matter. My personal drug of choice is a heavenly elixir
made from crushed grapes.

It is, alas, a drug.

Tasty, attractive and highly ritualized in our culture, wine and
other alcoholic beverages are approved for responsible use despite
the fact alcoholism and attendant problems are a plague, while
responsible use of a weed that, at worst, makes people boring and
hungry, is criminal.

Pot smokers might revolt if they weren't so mellow.

Efforts over the past few decades to relax marijuana laws have been
moderately successful.

Twelve states have decriminalized marijuana, which usually means no
prison or criminal record for first-time possession of small amounts
for personal consumption. Those states are Alabama, California,
Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New York,
North Carolina, Ohio and Oregon.

Yet even now, federal law enforcement agents raid the homes of
terminally ill patients who use marijuana for relief from suffering
in states where medical marijuana use is permitted. These federal
raids have become an issue in the 2008 presidential race as
candidates have been asked to take a position.

A summary is available on the Marijuana Policy Project Web site (mpp.org).

Beyond the medical issue is the practical question of criminalizing
otherwise good citizens for consuming a nontoxic substance -
described by the British medical journal Lancet as less harmful to
health than alcohol or tobacco - at great economic and social cost.

Each year, 700,000 people are arrested for marijuana-related offenses
at a cost of more than $7 billion, according to the Marijuana Policy Project.

Here's a thought for people concerned about the federal deficit,
America's 4.5 million uninsured children or our soon-to-be-bankrupt
Social Security system:

If marijuana were legalized, regulated and taxed at the rates applied
to alcohol and tobacco, revenues would reach about $6.2 billion
annually, according to an open letter signed by 500 economists who
urged President Bush and other public officials to debate marijuana
prohibition.

Among those economists were three Nobel Prize winners, including the
late Milton Friedman of Stanford's Hoover Institution.

Friedman and others were acting in response to a 2005 report on the
budgetary implications of marijuana prohibition by Jeffrey Miron, a
visiting professor of economics at Harvard.

By Miron's estimate, regulating marijuana would save about $7.7
billion annually in government prohibition enforcement - $2.4 billion
at the federal level and $5.3 billion at the state and local levels.

That's a lot of money for English tutors and health care for indigents.

Add to that amount income taxes that would have to be paid by
marijuana producers.

Drug dealers don't pay taxes, after all.

Nor do they concern themselves much with rules of the workplace and
worker welfare. Miron argues that legalizing marijuana wouldn't
increase use, because decriminalization hasn't increased use.

But, he says, legalization would reduce crime by neutralizing dealers
and eliminating the violent black market.

Legalizing marijuana isn't an endorsement of underage or irresponsible use.

Best would be that everyone deal with life unmedicated, but adults
arguably have a right to amuse themselves in ways that don't harm others.

While some might balk at the idea of legalized pot, it seems clear
some remedy is in order.

At the very least, a fresh, freewheeling debate free of politics and
bureaucratic self-interest is overdue.

Maybe Al Gore could moderate.