The "and" is that the illegal conduit remains. As I said, it would be like legalizing wine during Prohibition. Those who drink wine certainly would be in favor. But what does it really solve?
"Why should the government mandate certain potencies?"
To get the votes for legalization. From parents concerned about their kids getting hooked on high potency pot as they're concerned about their kids getting hooked on cigarettes because the tobacco companies are "deliberately increasing nicotine content".
"Indeed... although the underaged would find it harder to get pot"
Harder to get. Sure. But harder to get means nothing. Today, kids admit that alcohol is harder to get than pot -- yet they use alcohol 2:1 over pot. Why? Because society says it's OK (Hey, how bad can it be? It's legal!)
"have to spend so many resources tracking down and arresting responsible adult consumers"
True. Instead they'll have to spend their time running sting operations on 500,000 retail outlets selling marijuana.
"Black markets cannot be price-competitive with free markets, and taxes could be ridiculously high (as they are on alcohol and tobacco) without making illicit drugs a good buy for the consumer."
The taxes on alcohol aren't there yet. But they are on cigarettes.
"Thanks to recent city- and state-level tax hikes, New York City now has the highest cigarette taxes in the country—a combined state and local tax rate of $3.00 per pack. Consumers have responded by turning to the city's bustling black market and other low-tax sources of cigarettes. During the four months following the recent tax hikes, sales of taxed cigarettes in the city fell by more than 50 percent compared to the same period the prior year."
" New York has a long history of cigarette tax evasion. Former governor Malcolm Wilson dubbed the city the "promised land for cigarette bootleggers." Over the decades, a series of studies by federal, state, and city officials has found that high taxes have created a thriving illegal market for cigarettes in the city. That market has diverted billions of dollars from legitimate businesses and governments to criminals."
A better analogy would be: it's like, during Prohibition, arguing that legalizing alcohol would still leave illegal dealers in marijuana... to which the correct answer would again be, "Yes, and?"
True. Instead they'll have to spend their time running sting operations on 500,000 retail outlets selling marijuana.
You wanna bet that enforcement costs for illegal drugs absolutely dwarf enforcement costs for alcohol?
The taxes on alcohol aren't there yet. But they are on cigarettes.
I haven't looked up any numbers on this. But I'm willing to bet you, "in the blind", however much you'd like that at least 99% of cigarettes sold in the United States are sold legally through taxable channels. Is it a wager?
If you could be convinced that, if marijuana was legalized, the number of underage marijuana users would at least double, maybe triple, would you still want it legalized?
Without question. Let me explain the fallacy you're committing here.
You're citing an alleged benefit of marijuana prohibition here: it cuts underage marijuana use by 50%, maybe 66%. You of course pulled those numbers out of your ass, but never mind that for now, let's just stipulate to them. Any analysis of benefits is incomplete without a corresponding analysis of costs. Would you support a law that would, say, reduce murder by 90%? How about if, in order to do so, it required five hundred billion dollars per year and severely curtailed civil liberties? Is any price worthwhile?
If you think so, consider that all resources are scarce, and a resource devoted to one cause is a resource that can't be devoted to another. Suppose as a result of devoting so many resources to fighting murder, there were less available to fight burglary, to fight assault, to fight rape. Suppose with so much of the budget devoted to the War on Murder, we had to reduce national defense and raise taxes. Is it still worth the cost?
Let's say that, absent the War on Drugs, deaths from currently illegal drugs would treble... which would mean they would kill about a tenth as many Americans per year as tobacco does. I believe that this figure is way high (a depressingly large number of deaths from drugs come from the fact that drugs are illegal and hence are not regulated for purity or potency), but again, let's stipulate for now. What are we spending to achieve this benefit? What are we forgoing in order to reduce drug use by this amount?
Well, the $40,000,000,000 per year in direct enforcement costs are just for starters. There's billions more in forsaken tax revenue. There's the economic cost of locking up people who otherwise wouldn't be locked up, and the lost productivity of removing them from the workforce. There's also the lost productivity of innocents gunned down in the crossfire of drug-related turf wars. There's the cost of building more prisons to house drug offenders... and the economic damage cause by crimes committed by recidivists released from prison early due to overcrowding. Not to mention the additional economic damage caused by criminals who can afford to engage in more ambitious schemes (up to and including terrorism) thanks to being the sole recipients of drug profits.
Then there are the costs not easily measured in dollars. The loss of civil liberties. The encouragement of disrespect for the law, and of lying to children. The dangerous growth of government power. The rise of a "nanny state" determined to tell citizens what they can do and what they can't, for their own good, poor dears, because they simply can't be trusted to make their own decisions. The corruption of police and judges. The real, literal wars that break out in supplier countries, and the horrific body counts therefrom.
I could go on. The War on Drugs couldn't even come close to passing even the most generous cost-benefit analysis... to even suggest so is laughable. I've never heard any proponent of the War on Drugs argue otherwise; they usually just start and end with "drugs are bad, mmm'kay."