[davesdude]

I have only posted the executive summary, but please take a look at this report, which is quite complete and interesting on the economical side...

Now if you tell me this article is not credible because it was posted on a site from the MPP, please throw yourself off a bridge...Because :

"Chief among the endorsing economists are three Nobel Laureates in economics: Dr. Milton Friedman of the Hoover Institute, Dr. George Akerlof of the University of California at Berkeley, and Dr. Vernon Smith of George Mason University."

Any thoughts on it? and i apologize if it was already posted somewhere...

[theDentist]

It would be economical. Moreso if we include all manner of drugs... cocaine and heroin, amphetamines, barbituates,and derivatives thereof, and synthetics as well. And we can even LOWER the ages for consumption, dugs, alcohol, tobacco..... /slight sarc

[weegee]

The report also estimates that marijuana legalization would yield tax revenue of $2.4 billion annually if marijuana were taxed like all other goods

Why would it be taxed like other goods (say candy or batteries) and not like alcohol and tobacco?

Don't want to see the DEA move under the ATF?

How much would enforcement of "over 18/21" sales restrictions cost? How much do they cost for tobacco and alcohol today? Or should marijuana be exempt from age restrictions?

[SampleMan]

In other news,
- Surrendering to the Islamofacists would save $400 billion a year, which is now being wasted on the military.

[rhombus]

Get ready for a lot of very un-serious replies as well as a lot of dope smoking jokes.

[butternut_squash_bisque]

"...$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."

Chump change.

Hells bells, they can get 30x that from Big Tobacco, and did a few years ago.

Pass the bong, dd.

[mlc9852]

Finally a tax I can support! :)

[roaddog727]

Wow.

Perhaps sanity is starting to take hold.

[verity]

" i apologize if it was already posted somewhere..."

Do not apologize. It is a sign of weakness. [JW]

[wolfcreek]

Smoke Dope For Our National Security!

[ez]

Fortunately or unfortunately as you view it, discussions of drugs at FR and among Republicans are among the most ignorant discussions. Rockefeller type drug laws have proven their ineffectuveness over the years, and simple primary school education has proved the most effective.

[donh]

The authors of this report do not understand the economic issues involved in keeping marijuana illegal. Marijuana usage dwarfs the usage of every other controlled substance, and the civil seizure law's off-budget incomes for law enforcement agencies is off-budget revenue for those agencies that they don't have to go crawling hat-in-hand to the legislatures to get authorization to use. That is why the federal law enforcement authorities sponsor phony-balony science trying to make out as if marijuana usage has serious health effects. The blow to law enforcement income from marijuana legalization will never come close to matching the horn of plenty they have now.

[Marxbites]

Aside from the Kiwanis Club kidders (and aren't they so smart) I challenge anyone to show where Fed'l Govt ever had the right to prohibit MJ anymore than they did alcohol under the Volstead Act.

Now states can do what they want via the people's vote - but the Fed NEVER has had the constitutional right to do so as it was not an enumerated power.

[Beckwith]

The only thing prohibition has ever done is to create black markets operated by criminals and encourage the corruption of public officials.

It has never, never prevented people from doing what they are going to do.

[hispanichoosier]

As a deputy prosecutor, I can vouch that we have an awful lot of marijuana charges. I can see the immediate benefit of decriminalization:

1) No more marijuana cases, therefore more of my time can be devoted to OWIs, batteries, etc.

2) No more probation officers having to spend time and energy on tokers.

3) No more court time spent on regular and probation-related marijuana cases.

These 3 benefits don't even include time savings for officers, since they won't have to go after tokers any more.

[Cementjungle]

Unless there's a way the big drug companies can be assured the lion's share of profits from Marijuana, it'll never be legalized. People growing their own pot would eat into their (legal) drug sales as some folks may no longer need other drugs if they had marijuana.

[cowtowney]

I've heard Milton Friedman speak on this issue and I totally agree with him. This is just another govt. bureaucracy that needs to go.

[UncleJeff]

While it was not part of this study, the economic impact of legalized hemp would dwarf the fiscal impact of legalizing pot.

Regulation should be fairly simple, restrict licensing to pharmacists and licensed alcohol dealers.

I also don't see the point in limiting taxation to either "like all other goods" or "comparable to those on alcohol and tobacco". Consumers are now paying $100-500/ounce for a plant that's easier to grow than tobacco. If I can buy a pack of 20 Marlboros for $4, and everybody involved in producing and selling that pack made a good profit, those numbers can easily be matched for marijuana production. Set a government established price of $50 for a pack of 20 "joints", or a loose ounce, with $40 of it split equally between the Feds and the States, and $3 going to fund drug rehab for anybody who wants help.

[Lekker 1]

Is there anybody on this site that disagrees with the following statement?

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

[Lady Jag]

Forbes Mag, November 2003, said, "CANADA'S LEGAL farm operators have net margins of 5.5%. An economist in Vancouver's Simon Fraser University figures pot growers have a 72% annual rate of return, after discounting for costs, labor, thefts and arrests." I've seen statistics like this for years, all saying that legalization would be profitable.   From this lack of action, one would infer that legalization would profit the wrong people.

[TKDietz]

The biggest problem I see with this report is that they use the ONDCP's estimate on what Americans spend on marijuana. The ONDCP estimated that Americans spent 10.5 billion dollars on marijuana in 2000. They came up with this figure solely from data from SAMHSA's NSDUH, the government's national survey on drug use. They did not look at all users from the report either, only those who admitted use within the past 30 days, so they cut out several million pot smokers up front. On the survey people were asked how much pot they smoke and the average for those who admitted smoking in the last 30 days was about 7 grams. They then came up with an average price for that much marijuana and multiplied it by the number of people who admitted smoking within 30 days prior to the June 2000 survey to come up with a total for how much Americans spend on marijuana. The total "consumption estimate" of the total amount of marijuana consumed by Americans that year came to about 1009 metric tons (may have been 1019 tons, I'm doing this from memory).

The problem is that far more than 1009 metric tons of marijuana are seized every year by local, state, and federal authorities. To believe the ONDCP's numbers, you'd have to believe that we seize a lot more marijuana than makes it to the streets. That's laughable. That doesn't doesn't happen. Even the ONDCP knows better than this. They also calculate what Americans spend on cocaine and they will not rely on SAMHSA's drug survey numbers to calculate what Americans spend on cocaine because they know the numbers are way low. As it turns out, the ONDCP's "consumption estimates" for cocaine just about match the "supply estimates" for cocaine done by another government agency. There are also supply estimates for marijuana. I don't know off the top of my head what they were for the year 2000, although I'm thinking I recall the estimate being between 10,000 and 22,000 metric tons, but I am quite certain that the estimate for 2003 was that there were between 12,000 and 25,000 metric tons of marijuana available on the market in this country in the year 2003 after the government seized all it was going to seize. That's quite a bit more than the 1009 metric ton consumption estimate by the ONDCP.

The ONDCP consumption estimate is no doubt way low. There is no way in the world the government is seizing far more marijuana than is getting through to consumers. Law enforcement don't even believe that. Most will estimate they are getting something like 10% of what's out there. The feds alone seize something like 1,200 or 1,300 metric tons of marijuana every year, and state and local authorities seize a lot as well. They seize thousands of pounds every year off the highway in the small town where I work. I know this because the public defender office where I work gets almost all the drug mule cases and we handle thousands of pounds worth of pot cases every year. A DEA agent once told me that the actual number in my county is in the tens of thousands of pounds per year but we don't see a lot of it because a lot of these guys will do "controlled deliveries" where they go on and deliver the loads to the other states and law enforcement bust the people at the other end.

It may very well be that the supply estimate of 12,000 to 25,000 metric tons is high, but there is no doubt in my mind that the 1009 metric ton consumption estimate is way off. It could very well be that Americans are really consuming 10, 20 or more times as much marijuana as the ONDCP consumption estimate reflects. The true number has to be at least several times the ONDCP estimate. If that is the case, and there is no doubt in my mind that it is, these economists numbers with respect to taxes are way off. We could probably actually collect several times as much in taxes as these economists estimate.