GETTING REAL ABOUT MARIJUANA

Weed Is Less Harmful Than Wine; It's Crazy To Criminalize Its Use

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

I'm no pothead 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. But 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
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 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).
Arresting good citizens 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.

Here's a Bingo 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,
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.

More income tax too 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 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, freewheeling debate free of politics and
bureaucratic self-interest is overdue.

Maybe Al Gore could moderate.