Legalization of Marijuana

I was disappointed but not surprised to read that President Obama – a man who prides himself on his rational decision making -- dismissed an online question in his recent town hall meeting advocating the legalization of marijuana. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama has taken a completely irrational position on this issue in the name of political correctness.

Don’t get me wrong – President Obama has no choice in this matter. Endorsement of marijuana legalization would give his Republican enemies enough red meat to last the next seven years and beyond, although ironically some of our Nation’s most prominent conservative voices have advocated such a change in our drug policies for years.

Let’s look at the facts.

We are a nation of hypocrites when it comes to drugs. We are the largest consumer of drugs (legal and illegal), yet we rage against a few of the least harmful ones as if they were sent to us by the Devil himself. We drink like fish, smoke like chimneys, and get our doctors to prescribe us all sorts of potent, addictive, and deadly goodies – except for pot. That’s evil – even if medically necessary.

In the context of what is legal and illegal in America, marijuana is relatively harmless. It isn’t physically addictive in the way that tobacco and alcohol are and it is virtually impossible to overdose on. The smoke – even unfiltered – doesn’t correlate with lung cancer. In fact, there was a 2007 study that showed the active ingredient in pot (THC) actually inhibits the growth of common lung cancer tumors.

I’m not arguing that pot is good for you (although it does have valid medical uses), but when compared to alcohol, tobacco, many proscription drugs, and even a few over-the-counter drugs -- it is pretty innocuous.

And it is readily available. Your kids can pick some up at the local mall – I don’t care where you live. Let’s not kid ourselves.

We spend billions on the war against drugs while tent cities spring up in California. Very honestly, this is money that is being thrown down a black hole bigger than the one the TARP money went down on Wall Street.

It’s a simple matter of economics. When there is large demand for something, it will be available in the market. When governments try for unreasonable reasons to prohibit what the market has a high demand for, they create an underground market which is uncontrollable – and which inevitably leads to more harm than good.

We had prohibition against alcohol in the United States for the exact same reasons we now have prohibition against marijuana. We considered drinking to be immoral, therefore we banned it.

What happened? Everybody continued to drink – they just did it at underground clubs owned by the mob – a mob which became very powerful as a result of vastly increased revenues. Al Capone and others got rich, the alcohol went untaxed, lots of cops and politicians were paid bribes to look the other way, and lots of people got killed in the turf wars that sprang up.

Sound familiar? Look what’s happening on our boarder with Mexico. The Mexican government is powerless to stop the carnage -- and the violence is beginning to spill over into our country in the form of murders and kidnappings.

And look what's happening in our own inner cities. I taught at at a New York City public high school before I taught college, and I had several of my thirteen year old eighth graders describe how they had seen people gunned down in the streets or had friends or family gunned down in this unwinnable war.

I remember very vividly one of my high school freshman, a friendly young man -- just thirteen years old -- showing me the scars from where he had been shot -- the innocent victim of a drive-by shooting. He described being shot as a burning feeling. He said he was surprised -- that he didn't think being shot would feel like that.

I cannot imagine the harm such experiences do to children, nor can I imagine the harm they do to the communities they live in. What I do know is that leaving things the way they are is no answer.

Legalizing marijuana – and possibly some other drugs such as cocaine – would go a long way toward emasculating the drug cartels that have done so much harm to so many. The health costs of such a policy change are manageable – and arguably may not even exist -- considering these drugs are readily available no matter what we do.

Legalization of marijuana would also go a long way toward getting this nation back on track economically. We would no longer be spending large sums of money – both on the federal and on the state levels – investigating and imprisoning people -- many who have done society little (if any) harm. Legalization would also create jobs and generate significant tax revenue which could be applied to deficit reduction instead of financing the activities of drug lords both here and across the boarder.