Good attempt at a dodge, but no cigar. You called people in federal prison "scumbags" because they provided others with cannabis. God provided cannabis for all mankind.
So, I ask again, are you calling God a "scumbag"?
"Nearly 40,000 Americans are presently incarcerated in state and federal correctional facilities for marijuana violations. Of these, 28,650 marijuana offenders are state inmates, and 10,538 are federal prisoners. In all, marijuana prisoners compose 14 percent of all state and federal drug inmates."
Get your facts straight.
Why yes, very good. But there are 50 states, and 1 federal. That cite is 14%, combined. If you look at 5 different places on the web you find 5 different sets of numbers.
My logic is that, there being about 60% of prisoners in federal prisons for drugs, the mode and method of cannabis trafficking being in packaging larger and more easily discoverable than the small packaging of other Scheduled substances (not to mention that cannabis emits odors of burning rope and other substances don't have a obvious smell), the fact that, while a future federal inmate may be charged with possession of these other substances, a large, if not the largest, part were caught using cannabis is the initial cause. While they may be in the prison on a conviction for other offenses, they are really there for the use of cannabis.
This goes to my original position that you unSchedule cannabis, the DEA is a goner.
Also, Bureau of Justice Statistics, which I assume NORML is citing, did not count a number of populations for their estimates, like those fed prisoners in state and local jails and holding facilities and convicted but unsentenced prisoners, which, at the current level of the drug war will be large at any one time.
Statistical analyzes always use the most surface data, the cost being high for even the thinest surface skim and the cost of any kind of deeper relationship prohibitive.
I maintain that my "facts" are much closer to reality than their "facts".
They'd lose, at most, one-third. But, if marijuana were legal, how much would their role increase to prevent marijuana exports from the U.S.?
Well, on the negative side of my position, there will always be factions that have the greatest contempt for the innate wisdom of the "common man" and will express it by trying to save him from himself, by force. So, indeed, there may always be some form of DEA.
But there will always be some form of the flu, too.
My analysis of the situation is that while the DEA is concerned with cocaine, many opium derivatives, and other exotic drugs, it's public perception of power is based on cannabis.
It's bricks may be hard drugs and chemical cocktails, but cannabis is the mortar that holds the entire unwieldy mass together both legally, publicly and politically, but the bricks are tiny and the mortar courses thick.
You have to remember that whether a person deals in smoking opium or heroin, methamphedemines or PCP, he will smoke cannabis just like he will most probably drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes.