IT'S TIME TO END COSTLY, UNFAIR MARIJUANA PROHIBITION

WASHINGTON -- News that Al Gore's 24-year-old son, Al Gore III, was
busted for pot and assorted prescription pills last week 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 that 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 seven-continent Live Earth celebration to raise
awareness about global warming.

Whatever one may feel about the former vice president's environmental
obsessions, his son's problems are no one's cause for celebration. The
younger Mr. 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. Tasty, attractive and highly ritualized in our
culture, wine and other alcoholic beverages are approved for
responsible use despite the fact that 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 use.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Mr. Miron argues that legalizing marijuana would not 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 may balk at the idea of legalized pot, it seems clear that
some remedy is in order. At the very least, a fresh debate free of
politics and bureaucratic self-interest is overdue. Maybe Al Gore
could moderate.