A FINE ARGUMENT FOR DRUG LAW REFORM

Timothy Lutts, Cabot Market Letter - The plain truth is that the War on Drugs (a term first used by President Richard Nixon in 1969) has been a failure. In fact, the term is no longer used by the Obama administration, which prefers treatment to incarceration.

Yet the U.S. (federal and states) will spend about $47 billion this year on drug enforcement, clogging our court systems and overcrowding our prisons, in many cases dooming young men to a life in the underclass.

In fact, the United States has a higher proportion of its population incarcerated than any other country in the world . . . and roughly 25% of our inmates are in there for drug offenses, usually possession.

So who benefits from this War on Drugs?

Organized crime, certainly. According to the United Nations, drug trafficking is a $400 billion per year industry, equaling 8% of the world's trade.

Also benefiting are arms manufacturers, the law enforcement industry, the prison industry and the legal industry.

And I don’t think we’re getting a good value for our $47 billion. In fact, I think our efforts may be counterproductive, and that we should explore a more sensible route, the same one we use for alcohol and tobacco.

In short, legalize it, regulate it and tax it.

Legalization would quickly shrink that $47 billion annual cost of law enforcement to a small fraction of its present level. In its place, we’d have federal quality control inspectors to keep tabs on the legal producers (thus reducing poisonings and overdoses). Entrepreneurs would spring up out of the woodwork to become producers, and with the increased supply prices would fall to more reasonable levels. Profits would drop. And organized crime would soon be out of the business.

We’d have a more efficient legal system, and a more efficient prison system. And we’d have a ready supply of legal marijuana for medicinal purposes (two-thirds of Americans are in favor of medical marijuana now).

And then we’d be able to tax it. Every state in the country now taxes alcohol and cigarettes, and I think marijuana should be no different.

A 2008 study by Harvard economist Jeffrey A. Miron estimated that legalizing drugs would inject $76.8 billion a year into the U.S. economy--$44.1 billion from law enforcement savings, and at least $32.7 billion in tax revenue ($6.7 billion from marijuana, $22.5 billion from cocaine and heroin, the remainder from other drugs). I’m not ready to argue for legalizing those harder drugs, but I do think a country as deep in debt as ours should stop giving money away on unproductive projects and start looking for positive cash flows.

Leading the way already is our country’s lifestyle pioneer, California. This past July, 80% of Oakland, California voters chose to impose a tax of 1.8% on medical marijuana sales, which could bring the cash-strapped city nearly $300,000 next year.

And California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a Democrat from San Francisco, introduced legislation that if approved by the California Legislature, would put pot on the same legal footing as alcohol--legalizing its sale and having the state tax it. Ammiano called it "simply nonsensical" to keep marijuana, the state's top cash crop, unregulated and untaxed in light of the state's massive financial problems.

The value of California's marijuana crop is estimated at $14 billion annually. That’s almost twice the combined value of vegetables and grapes, the state's second and third most-valuable crops. Ammiano estimated passage of his pot legalization proposal could generate more than $1.3 billion for state coffers.

Finally, turning to our neighbor Canada, I found this:

“In a recent study for the Fraser Institute, Economist Stephen T. Easton attempted to calculate how much tax revenue the Canadian government could gain by legalizing marijuana.

"The study estimates that the average price of 0.5 grams (a unit) of marijuana was $8.60 on the street, while its cost of production was only $1.70. In a free market, a $6.90 profit for a unit of marijuana would not last for long. Entrepreneurs noticing the great profits to be made in the marijuana market would start their own growing operations, increasing the supply of marijuana on the street, which would cause the street price of the drug to fall to a level much closer to the cost of production. Of course, this doesn't happen because the product is illegal; the prospect of jail time deters many entrepreneurs and the occasional drug bust ensures that the supply stays relatively low. We can consider much of this $6.90 per unit of marijuana profit a risk premium for participating in the underground economy. Unfortunately, this risk premium is making a lot of criminals, many of them with ties to organized crime, very wealthy.

"Stephen T. Easton argues that if marijuana were legalized, we could transfer these excess profits caused by the risk premium from these growing 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.”