David Lazarus of The San Francisco Chronicle makes a succinct case for the taxation and regulation of non-medical marijuana.
The column relies heavily on a report issued earlier this year (pdf) by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron. Among that report’s core findings:
Legalizing marijuana would save $7.7 billion per year in government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition. $5.3 billion of this savings would accrue to state and local governments, while $2.4 billion would accrue to the federal government.Marijuana legalization would yield tax revenue of $2.4 billion annually if marijuana were taxed like all other goods and $6.2 billion annually if marijuana were taxed at rates comparable to those on alcohol and tobacco.
Using the national figures, marijuana decriminalization would yield a net economic benefit of almost $14 billion per year.
To be sure, $14 billion isn’t very much when one considers the two and half trillion dollars the federal government expends annually.
What persistently goes unmentioned in the larger decriminalization debate is impact on individuals caught in prohibition’s dragnet. Marijuana arrests reached an all-time high last year — 770,000 and counting. So that’s over three quarters of a million persons who are brought into the criminal justice system each year who might not otherwise have been there.
Ordinarily, it would be wise to point out the sordid waste of law enforcement resources and court resources, but for many elected officials, even those who consider themselves “conservative,” it is almost axiomatic for them that “fiscal largesse in pursuit of ‘law and order’is no vice!”
This especially rings true when the law itself is so fundamentally flawed: the commitment of public resources to enforcement becomes the raison d’etre for prohibition. Individual liberty, science, and reason be damned…
Posted by Nikos Leverenz.
