New Reports All Agree: Marijuana Prohibition is an Expensive Failure

[IndianaToker]

New Reports All Agree: Marijuana Prohibition
is an Expensive Failure

Three Nobel Laureates, American Enterprise Institute,
others call for a new approach

Six recent reports -- from the American Enterprise Institute, Citizens Against Government Waste, Taxpayers for Common Sense, The Sentencing Project, a Harvard University economics professor, and the U.S. Department of Justice -- point out the failures and steep costs of marijuana prohibition and call for a new approach.

Ending Marijuana Prohibition Would Save $10-14 Billion Annually ... Report Endorsed by Milton Friedman and More Than 500 Economists

In "The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition" (released June 2, 2005), Dr. Jeffrey Miron, visiting professor of economics at Harvard University, estimates that replacing marijuana prohibition with a system of taxation and regulation similar to that used for alcoholic beverages would produce combined savings and tax revenues of between $10 billion and $14 billion per year.


More than 500 distinguished economists -- led by Nobel Prize-winner Dr. Milton Friedman and two additional Nobel Laureates -- endorsed the report and signed an open letter to President Bush and other public officials calling for "an open and honest debate about marijuana prohibition," adding, "We believe such a debate will favor a regime in which marijuana is legal but taxed and regulated like other goods."


Using data from a variety of federal and state government sources, Miron concludes:

• Replacing marijuana prohibition with a system of legal regulation would save approximately $7.7 billion in government expenditures on prohibition enforcement -- $2.4 billion at the federal level and $5.3 billion at the state and local levels.
• Revenue from taxation of marijuana sales would range from $2.4 billion per year if marijuana were taxed like ordinary consumer goods to $6.2 billion if it were taxed like alcohol or tobacco.

The full report and its full list of endorsers are available here.

Citizens Against Government Waste: Government Anti-Drug Programs Don't Work

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy’s (ONDCP's) expensive drug control programs have failed to produce any meaningful results after 17 years, finds a May 12, 2005, report from Citizens Against Government Waste, a national organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government.


"Up in Smoke: ONDCP's Wasted Efforts in the War on Drugs" shows how ONDCP wastes millions of dollars annually on media advertising and combating state-level legislation. The report's findings include:

• ONDCP "has morphed into a federal wasteland, throwing taxpayer money toward numerous high-priced drug control programs that have failed to show results ... Instead of curbing America’s drug problem, ONDCP has wasted $4.2 billion since fiscal 1997 on media advertising, fighting state legislation, and deficient anti-drug trafficking programs."
• Since Arizona and California passed medical marijuana laws in November 1996, ONDCP began campaigning against state medical marijuana ballot initiatives, which is "an infringement upon states' rights, a blatant misuse of tax dollars, and in contravention of ONDCP’s original mission. The White House’s drug office should use its resources to root out major drug operations in the U.S. instead of creating propaganda-filled news videos and flying across the country on the taxpayers' dime."
• "ONDCP burns through tax dollars by funding wasteful and unnecessary projects. Partly to thwart state efforts to regulate marijuana, the drug czar created a $2 billion national anti-drug campaign, produced expensive propaganda ads that failed to reduce drug use among America’s youth, and in the process, violated federal law. Furthermore, the office wastes federal resources by opposing any legalization of marijuana, including medicinal use, which has nothing to do with the war on drugs."

The full report is available here.

War on Drugs has Become War on Low-Level Marijuana Users

During the 1990s, the “war on drugs” was transformed to a “war on marijuana,” with law enforcement officials shifting their focus to arresting increasing numbers of low-level marijuana offenders, finds a Sentencing Project report released on May 3, 2005.


"The War on Marijuana: The Transformation of the War on Drugs in the 1990s" finds that between 1990 and 2002, 82% of the national increase in drug arrests were for marijuana offenses, and nearly all of this increase was arrests for possession. Marijuana arrests now constitute 45% of the 1.5 million drug arrests annually.


As a result, significant policing resources have been dedicated to low-level offenses, with only 6% of marijuana arrests resulting in a felony conviction. One-quarter of people in prison for a marijuana offense are low-level offenders.


Despite the billions of dollars being spent annually on marijuana law enforcement, use and availability have not declined, while cost has dropped.
The full report is available here.

American Enterprise Institute: Prison is not an effective drug policy

American drug policy should focus on expanding treatment options and not on prison, says a new book from the American Enterprise Institute, one of the country's most respected conservative think tanks.

In <cite>An Analytic Assessment of U.S. Drug Policy</cite> (published in February 2005), Peter Reuter, a professor at the University of Maryland and a
senior economist in the Drug Policy Research Center at RAND, and independent consultant David Boyum use a market framework to assess
the effectiveness of anti-drug efforts ... and conclude that they have failed.


The authors note that while there is little evidence that tougher law enforcement reduces drug use, drug policy has become increasingly punitive -- the number of drug offenders in jail and prison grew tenfold between 1980 and 2003. They recommend the following changes:

• Law enforcement should focus on reducing drug-related problems, such as violence associated with drug markets, rather than on locking up large numbers of low-level dealers.
• Treatment services for heavy users need more money and fewer regulations, and programs that coerce convicted drug addicts to enter treatment and maintain abstinence as a condition of continued freedom should be expanded.

The full report is available here.

Taxpayers for Common Sense: Effectiveness of billions spent to stop marijuana use remains unknown

Despite the federal government spending tens of billions to combat marijuana use over the last three decades, use and perception of the drug has barely changed, according to an economic study released by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a national budget watchdog organization that targets wasteful and ineffective federal spending.

"Federal Marijuana Policy: A Preliminary Assessment," released June 28, 2005, finds that efforts to reduce marijuana use and supply cost federal taxpayers billions, despite no evidence that the programs actual work. "Despite sky-high deficits, taxpayers continue to watch their money go up in smoke funding expensive but ineffective government programs intended to reduce marijuana use," said a Taxpayers for Common Sense spokesman.

The report assesses the cost of the nation's anti-marijuana efforts and the effect those efforts have had on marijuana use and finds the program to have been a failure, noting that increased federal spending on marijuana has accompanied increased use.

The report singles out as particularly wasteful and ineffective marijuana arrests (which have not stemmed marijuana usage rates), the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy's youth anti-drug media campaign, and student drug testing programs.

"The ultimate measure of the drug war's worth is its impact on drug usage," concludes the report. "By this standard, the federal marijuana program has fared poorly. Rather than continue to spend billions of dollars on the problem, it would be better for the U.S. government to get out of the marijuana business entirely."
The full report, which the MPP grants program helped to fund, is available here.

U.S. Department of Justice: Top cops say drug war is on the wrong track

The Justice Department's 2005 "National Drug Threat Assessment" concludes that not only is the war on marijuana a failure, but police officers overwhelmingly see methamphetamine as a much greater threat than marijuana. Asked to identify the greatest drug threat in their communities, only 12 percent of local law enforcement agencies named marijuana -- a figure that has been declining for years. In contrast, 36 percent named cocaine and 40 percent cited methamphetamine as the greatest threat -- despite the fact that marijuana use is massively more common and despite what the report describes as "marijuana's widespread and ready availability in the United States."


The report explains, "Such data indicate that, despite the volume of marijuana trafficked and used in this country, for many in law enforcement marijuana is much less an immediate problem than methamphetamine, for example, which is associated with more tangible risks such as violent users and toxic production sites." (Despite this, the White

House Office of National Drug Control Policy has focused heavily on marijuana. In November 2002, ONDCP sent a letter to the nation's prosecutors declaring flatly, "Nationwide, no drug matches the threat posed by marijuana.")

The report also finds "no reports of a trend toward decreased availability" anywhere in the country ... Indeed, reporting from some areas has suggested that marijuana is easier for youths to obtain than alcohol or cigarettes."


Link to article: http://mpp.org/reports/index.html

[xXMelkorXx]

Beautiful. Mind if I print this off and put it on my wall?

[IndianaToker]

Originally Posted by xXMelkorXx

Beautiful. Mind if I print this off and put it on my wall?

By all means, feel free.

[fAKdded]

That was a good read, very informative.

[just_a_girl]

of course it is .. people are just blinded by the propaganda against hemp .. i just red an article how is smoking weed bad and that u can go crazy when u try it just once written by a DOCTOR. i'm so mad right now. ...gone smoke

[TheColonel]

In November 2002, ONDCP sent a letter to the nation's prosecutors declaring flatly, "Nationwide, no drug matches the threat posed by marijuana."

Thats just ridiculous. Straight out of reefer madness. I dont understand how any human being, much less a government agency can't draw the line between a violent crack head/meth head, and the docile stoner that pays their taxes and works 40 hour weeks to support their country and their family.

They take us all for granted. One day they'll wake up.

[a_-g-_m]

Legalization suits THE PUBLIC AND GOVERNMENT interests but NOT corporate interests. And unfortunately, America is a corporate economy. If you think that the US government has an active role in day to day affairs, you're sadly mistaken. You got to think twice on who runs the country when even the damn Federal Reserve isin't run by the govt. It's very easy to read the situation over there. The corporates use the govt. to enforce status quo (and thus profit margins).

I'm not only talking about the pharma guys but also many seemingly unrelated corporate industries such as construction. In today's America the one of the only profitable construction industries is prison building. How does a prison builder keep up w/ demand and thus, maintain profits? I wonder. Hmmmmm...

The situation is different in each country but I believe I understood America pretty well...

Unless you people in America can do something about rampant corporatism and consumerism, the legalization battle will be uphill and hard. Identify the shape of the problem first and deal with it accordingly. If every one of you in the US bought your shit from small scale industries or commune shops (Vs. Walmart) it's the step in the right direction. Your long run goals must be to ensure that total domestic demand and supply is satisfied by non corporate entities. That's the only way you guys over der cn hope for legalization.

Good luck to all the stoners in America We're with 'ya.

[uncleslappy]

Originally Posted by just_a_girl

of course it is .. people are just blinded by the propaganda against hemp .. i just red an article how is smoking weed bad and that u can go crazy when u try it just once written by a DOCTOR. i'm so mad right now. ...gone smoke

im so SICK of all the bullshit thats out there about marijuana. Every time i turn on the tv i see countless commercials talking about how smoking weed causes you to lose friends, act crazy, and forces you to give up the things you care about (referring to a commercial depicting a handful of teens burning their belongings apparently because they smoke weed, although I don't quite understand the connection).

how many commercials do you see of kids lives being ruined by meth, coke, heroin, or any other drugs that can ACTUALLY ruin your life. the truth is, weed CAN ruin your life.. when the cops bust into your house and find your piece and bud and bring your ass to jail. marijuana is also the only drug that can stay in your system for over 20 days. that fact is causing people to do more serious, damaging drugs because they are flushed out in a day or so.

the american government is BLATANTLY lying to all of us and the fact is that anyone whos ever smoked weed knows that. ugh im so pissed off at all of it . ive seen too many of my friends get arrested and for bs marijuana charges. fuck the government.

and fuck the "war on drugs"