No Time to Play Girly-man: Legalize It!

The State of California is having a fiscal emergency that could be solved in the quasi-near-term with the stroke of a pen. Legalize cannabis and tax it liberally. Let the growers and leaf pickers work legally, tax their income. Allow mail orders and tax the shipments. People should be willing to roll with it, even if it means giving up the thrill of being underground. The economic benefits to the state would be significant. Governor Schwarzenegger stated, "In an emergency like this, we have to take quick action to avoid even worse problems, even if they include decisions we don't like." Legalizing cannabis is an environmentally friendly, economically sound and socially beneficial means of easing the economic crunch. The Governator cannot be blind to this fact nor to it being an option he can and should take seriously.

The arguments against legalization center around 3 principle issues: health, crime and social rectitude (for lack of a better term). NORML’s site offers a pretty thorough FAQ page, so you should go there if you crave a more thorough pro legalization argument to go along with whatever else you might be craving if you’re reading this stoned :-) The issue of negative health impacts in a world full of alcohol, PCBs and fossil fuels seems, relatively speaking, like a non-issue. If you have asthma, you probably wouldn’t opt to smoke pot anymore than you would decide to spend your holiday in Beijing or Mexico City. The idea that government should protect people from all things bad is farcical: this requires either totalitarianism to eliminate all free will (itself an ultimate badness) or consistency, which cannot come from states that make things like nuclear weapons and torture people. We live in an imperfect world, and we should respect individual choices to engage in whatever form of self-medication or recreational substance use one prefers, so long as they don’t involve violence against someone else. If you are afraid being around a bunch of pot smokers presents a clear and present danger to your health, then instead of buying tickets to the next Chemical Brothers concert, go into your local pub to hang out in an inebriation safe zone.

The issue of crime is self-construed. That is to say, growing, selling and using cannabis is criminal not in any moral universe sense, but only in that criminalizing the drug per force turns your peaceful Pink Floyd loving or migraine prone neighbor into an outlaw. Take away the illegal nature of a substance which history has proven millions to be committed to using in spite of the law, and we remove the whole stigma of criminal from our list of cannabis-related problems. According to NORML,

More than 700,000 Americans were arrested on marijuana charges last year, and more than 5 million Americans have been arrested for marijuana offenses in the past decade. Almost 90 percent of these arrests are for simple possession, not trafficking or sale. This is a misapplication of the criminal sanction that invites government into areas of our private lives that are inappropriate and wastes valuable law enforcement resources that should be focused on serious and violent crime.

I’ve left the last sentence in because it points to the main thing people should consider about the criminal status of cannabis: the costs of law enforcement. An editorial in the Australian Drug and Alcohol Review about the potential impacts of legalization noted the following: Reclassification of possession of up to 1 ounce (28 g) of cannabis to a misdemeanour rather than a felony in California in 1976 achieved law enforcement savings of $US 100 million annually. In 2005, a study conducted for the Marijuana Policy Project by Harvard University economist, Jeff Miron, reached the following conclusion:

“… 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.

These figures are, in fact, lower than those in a 2003 study by the US Office on National Drug Control Policy, which estimated “the United States was spending $12.1 billion on law enforcement and court costs, and $16.9 billion in corrections costs, totaling $29 billion.” Of course, the W Dick administration was in 2003 on the verge of throwing away $3 TRILLION dollars prosecuting their bogus war in Iraq, so it’s no surprise they never considered a mere $29 billion as something worthy of reform.

Although i’d suspect that anyone reading this blog already appreciates the point being made here, for the record, allow me to state the obvious: in a time of fiscal emergency, wasting billions of dollars on an area of law enforcement that (1) does not curb real violence, (2) puts productive, nonviolent people in prison, and (3) has absolutely no deterrent effect whatsoever MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE.

Doug Benson’s hilarious film Super High Me, shows the further idiocy inflicted by law enforcement in their raids on medical marijuana dispensaries, and brings us to the third major issue which is undoubtedly the one Schwarzenegger should consider most seriously as he tries to arrive at budgetary solutions in California. What impact would legalizing cannabis have on the economy? In particular, on the economy of a state which grows about a third of all cannabis produced in the US? Taking the US as a whole, Miron estimated that “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.” Zeroing in on California, on top of the $981 million savings in law enforcement expenditures, the state could earn up to $105.4 million a year in tax revenue. Put these two figures together and we top $1 billion, approximately 10% of California’s current budget gap of $11.2 billion. If the Governator chose the path of emergency legalization, he could turn San Francisco into a west coast Amsterdam, inevitably reaping further economic benefits for the state.

Political courage is not political suicide. That comes straight from the horse’s mouth, the Governator himself. Legalizing marijuana would be a sanely courageous and highly non suicidal act. Aside from diehard Reefer Madness believers and politicized elements within the Jehovah Witnesses, Californians are unlikely to storm Sacramento protesting such an executive order. In fact, i’d harbor a guess that the only reason thousands might go to the state capitol would be to invite the Governator to a celebratory smoke-in. The Australians who looked at this issue also understood the sanity of such a move: “Allowing demand to instead be met from taxed and regulated sources is likely to reduce the harms from cannabis as well as the financial and other costs of cannabis control policies.” Arnie, your state is having a fiscal meltdown, its medical marijuana dispensaries are here to stay, one of the state’s major agricultural industries is operating completely underground. If you’ve still got those body-builder balls, now is the time to show them off. Don’t be a girly-man, be an innovator. This is the moment and it should be seized.