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Bogarting Sanity in the Marijuana Wars
By Kathleen Parker
Friday, July 6, 2007
WASHINGTON News that AI Gore's 24-year-old son, Ai
Gore III, was busted for pot and assorted prescription
pills has unleashed a torrent of mirth in certain quarters.
~ • •
Gore-phobes on the Internet apparently view the son's . • • ,
arrest and incarceration as rnmeuppance for the father's
shortcomings. Especially rich was the fact that young AI
was driving a Toyota Prius when he was pulled over for
going 100 mph just as Papa Gore was set to preside
over concerts during a 24-hour, seven-rnntinent Live
Earth celebration to raise awareness about global
warming.
Whatever one may feel about the former vice president's
environmental obsessions, his son's problems are no one's cause for celebration. The younger Gore's high-
proflle arrest does, however, offer Americans an opportunity to get real about drug prohibition, and especially
about marijuana laws.
For the record, I have no interest in marijuana except as a public policy matter. My personal drug of choice is
a heavenly elixir made from crushed grapes. But it is, alas, a drug.
Tasty, attractive and highly ritualized in our culture, wine and other alcoholic beverages are approved for
responsible use despite the fact that alcoholism and attendant problems are a plague, while responsible use of
a weed that, at worst, makes people boring and hungry, is criminal.
Pot smokers might revolt if they weren't so mellow.
Efforts over the past few decades to relax marijuana laws have been moderately successful. Twelve states
have decriminalized marijuana, which usually means no prison or criminal record for first-time possession of
small amounts for personal consumption. (Those states are: Alabama, California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota,
Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Oregon.)
Yet even now, federal law enforcement agents raid the homes of terminally ill patients who use marijuana for
relief from suffering in states where medical marijuana use is permitted. These federal raids have become an
issue in the 2008 presidential race as candidates have been asked to take a position. A summary is available
on the Marijuana Policy Project Web site (mpp.org).
Beyond the medical issue is the practical question of criminalizing otherwise good citizens for consuming a
nontoxic substance described by the British medical journal Lancet as less harmful to health than alrnhol or
tobacco at great economic and social cost. Each year, more than 700,000 people are arrested for
marijuana-related offenses at a cost of more than $7 billion, according to the Marijuana Policy Project.
Here's a Bingo thought for people concerned about the federal deficit, America's 4.5 million uninsured children
or our soon-to-be-bankrupt Social Security system:
If marijuana were legalized, regulated and taxed at the rates applied to alcohol and tobacco, revenues would
reach about $6.2 billion annually, according to an open letter signed by 500 ernnomists who urged President
Bush and other public officials to debate marijuana prohibition. Among those economists were three Nobel
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Prize winners, including the late Milton Friedman of Stanford's Hoover Institution.
Friedman and others were acting in response to a 2005 report on the budgetary implications of marijuana
prohibition by Jeffrey Miron, visiting professor of economics at Harvard. By Miron's estimate, regulating
marijuana would save about $7.7 billion annually in government prohibition enforcement $2.4 billion at the
federal level and $5.3 billion at the state and local levels.
That's a lot of money for English tutors and health care for indigents. Add to that amount income taxes that
would have to be paid by marijuana producers. Drug dealers don't pay taxes, after all. Nor do they concern
themselves much with rules of the workplace and worker welfare. Miron argues that legalizing marijuana
would not increase use because decriminalization hasn't increased use. But, he says, legalization would reduce
crime by neutralizing dealers and eliminating the violent black market.
Legalizing marijuana isn't an endorsement of underage or irresponsible use.
Best would be that everyone deal with life unmedicated, but adults arguably have a right to amuse
themselves in ways that don't harm others.
While some may balk at the idea of legalized pot, it seems clear that some remedy is in order. At the very
least, a fresh, freewheeling debate free of politics and bureaucratic self-interest is overdue.
Maybe AI Gore could moderate.
Kathleen Parker is a syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group.
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