Marijuana Legalization

The legalization of marijuana has been a controversial issue in the United States for several decades and has yet to find its resolution. When considering the minor risks and unrevealed health effects marijuana entails it becomes questionable why marijuana is still deemed as unlawful. Rather then trying to band its existence measures should be taken towards education and regulation instead of prohibition. Although the usage of marijuana has prevailed in many countries around the world, its social acceptance doesn't seem to reduce the penalties for its consumption. Whether the argument is health, politics, family, or cultural related the reality is that the justification of marijuana can be conceived by many except the law (Kubby, pg.1).

At the outset, antilegalization policies have come to defy many of our Constitutional rights that grant us liberty and the pursuit of happiness. While these laws set out to protect us in reality they are harming more individuals as well as weakening our frail democracy. Marijuana laws and their enforcement violate the First, Fourth, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments. The First Amendment disregards the federal government's right to intervene with certain rights:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the fee exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Laws are not allowed to be made by the government in view of religion, speech, press, or assembly yet it appears to be the only religions accepted by the government are those that meet their standards (Kubby, pg.1). For instance, for thousands of years marijuana has been used for religious purposes in religions such as Hindu, Buddhist, and various tribal celebrations. Moralists against prohibition argue that members of these churches should continue their practices as part of the religious freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment (Earleywine, pg.228).

The financial consequences brought forth by prohibiting the use of marijuana have a drastic effect on the economy affecting many individual tax payers. Estimates of the annual economic cost of drug abuse vary widely. In 1998, The American Medical Association released a report stating that more than $171 billion is expended yearly on alcohol, tobacco, and drug related problems (Loue, pg.56). Treatment for those placed in rehabilitation centers cost tax payers an extensive amount of money every year.

Furthermore, in addition to the medical economic expenses you have enforcement costs that range in the billions every year. In the year 2000, there were 734,000 people arrested for marijuana related offenses. In that same year, one of every six inmates in a federal prison system lived behind government bars mainly because of marijuana charges (Gerber, pg.68). Federal taxpayers spend far more per year to house one inmate ($23,000) than to educate on child (approximately $8,000). At the end of 2001 there were an estimated 1.2 million non-violent offenders locked up in America at an annual cost of more than $24 billion. The total cost of marijuana-related incarceration reached more than $1.2 billion per year not including the cost of investigating, arresting, and prosecuting the hundreds of thousands of marijuana users (Kubby, pg.30-31).

The first economic affect that would take place if marijuana were to be legalized would probably be the lowering of price. Once you eliminate the risk factor incidental to contraband substances then naturally prices will begin to decrease. A good illustration of this would be the ending of alcohol prohibition that led to the cost of liquor tumble to about a third of its black-market cost. When other formerly smuggled goods or procedures were introduced into the legal marketplace, their cost felt a dramatic decline as well. For example, costs of abortions were reduced about 80 percent, and prices of formerly banned books were reduced about 30 percent (Kubby, pg.25-26).

Stephen T. Easton, a government official, argues that if marijuana was legalized, we could transfer these excess profits caused by the risk-premium from these grow operations to the government:

If we substitute a tax on marijuana cigarettes equal to the difference between the local production cost and the street price people currently pay--that is, transfer the revenue from the current producers and marketers (many of whom work with organized crime) to the government, leaving all other marketing and transportation issues aside we would have revenue of (say) $7 per [unit]. If you could collect on every cigarette and ignore the transportation, marketing, and advertising costs, this comes to over $2 billion on Canadian sales and substantially more from an export tax and you forego the costs of enforcement and deploy your policing assets elsewhere.

If it's a substance that people are going to consume regardless of the laws that have been enforced then why not utilize it to our economic advantage towards bettering our

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