GORE III CASE SPOTLIGHTS POT DEBATE

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.

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, Miss issippi,
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, 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.

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, however, 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.