Having just celebrated the third anniversary of cannabis legalization in Oregon, it’s safe to say it has been a success. While its had a negative impact on the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program (OMMP), and 28,975 licensed growers have depressed prices—and the lack of social consumption spaces and events is mind boggling—the numerous benefits still outweigh the negatives.
Connecticut, Michigan and Ohio are expected to vote on cannabis legalization programs in November. National legalization is being discussed with greater frequency and consideration, and predictions for future industry value continues to skyrocket. A recent report by BDS Analytics predicts a U.S. cannabis market value by 2022 of $23.4 billion, and a 22 percent plus annual compound growth rate.
In fact, it’s going so well, there has been more interest in the question: “Should we legalize, regulate and tax all drugs?” (“Hell yes, let’s do it! Let’s totally do it now, bro!” hoarsely shout the readers who just did a line of coke.) Mexico’s newly elected president said he will give “carte blanche” to his future Interior Minister to explore the possiblility of legalization of all drugs. Since Mexico deployed its army in 2006 to fight drug trafficking, there have been over 200,000 murders.
A recent paper by a Harvard-based researcher and published by The Cato Institute gives insight to the financial picture: Legalizing all drugs could generate over $100 billion in savings and taxes annually, benefitting federal, state and local governments.
The author published a prior paper in 2010, forecasting cannabis revenue if legalized and recently said his predictions were “blown out of the water” in Colorado, Oregon and Washington. He told the Marijuana Moment newsletter that “This report estimates that $47.9 billion is spent annually on drug prohibition enforcement, whereas $58.8 billion could potentially be raised in tax revenue.”
He breaks down, state by state, both the federal and state and local expenditures attributable to drug prohibition in 2016 by category: “Marijuana,” “Cocaine/Heroin,” “Synthetic,” and “Other,” which I assume to mean mushrooms, peyote and other plant-based hallucinogens.
Oregon spent $375 million in 2016 on the prohibition of all drugs combined:
$57 million for cannabis, $177 million for cocaine/heroin, and $140 million on other drugs. He estimates that legalization and state taxation would result in nearly $246 million for Oregon, with $50 million for cannabis, $108 million for cocaine, $63 million for heroin, and $23 million for other drugs. Removing the money spent on prohabition and adding the money that would come from legalization and taxes could add up to nearly $625 million in savings and revenue for Oregon.
The current system for drug prohibition and enforcement is a massive, decades-long failure, with blatantly racist punishment of people and communities of color, even with comparable drug use compared to whites. Services for treatment are grossly underfunded, and drug-based criminal convictions severely limit those seeking to reintegrate after incarceration. The system is broken. Criminalizing drug use isn’t working, and there are public health benefits to having legal access to drugs that have undergone a rigorous screening for purity and safety. Yet selling drugs with no discernable benefits, and high risks such as death, is a flawed solution.
Cocaine and heroin aren’t difficult to find in most U.S. cities. But to purchase personal amounts of those drugs at a cannabis dispensary isn’t acceptable for most people I know. They view cannabis as having tremendous and still untapped healing properties, while having far fewer detrimental effects as a relaxant than prescription pills or alcohol.
Many of these same people enjoy psychedelic mushrooms, and would be down to micro (or macro) dose if they had access to peyote, with the belief that these plants have beneficial uses for physiological conditions such as depression, post traumatic stress disorder, and others.
But no one sings the praises of the healing properties of a bump of coke, or a syringe of heroin. When used in controlled medical settings, both have remarkable pain-killing properties. When consumed recreationally, often the intent is to kill a different type of pain. (Barring Nazi pilots, meth has never done anyone who used it any favors.)
Instead of profiting, perhaps we should start asking users of those drugs what pains they are working to numb, and begin putting sufficient resources into offering comprehensive treatments and alternatives.
This article appears in Aug 1-8, 2018.
MAKE LOCAL JOURNALISM HAPPEN
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
I find it a bit cynical to discuss legalization of drugs (and therefore ending the Drug War) in purely financial terms. They need to be discussed, but at most as an afterthought.
There is a massive incalculable human toll that the Drug War has taken. Kidnappings, gang violence, assassinations, murdering of journalists, crossfire, forced grows, paramilitary counter-violence, gun smuggling, and war have all come from the militarized policing of production of narcotics.
On the supply side, we have turf wars, more gang violence, and what is criminal and corrupt on a state level: mass incarceration. An analysis by Bryan Stevenson bluntly and pointedly puts out: Slavery never ended, it just evolved. It is no longer controversial history that Nixon and his cronies used the pretense of the drug war to criminalize black America. The results are 3 million behind bars, most are people of color.
And then there is the addiction, homelessness, and mental health crisis.
And then there is the military crackdown on poor farmers in South and Central America, forced from poverty and coercion to grow.
And then there is the problem of government sponsored drug smuggling.
And then there is the issue of so called border and airport security.
And then there is the dark web and cryptocurrency fraud.
All manor of embezzlement, money laundering, and financial crimes of the rich proliferate as bankers in $5000 suits move capital, knowingly, profiting off the suffering of the small producers and dealers trickling down from large suppliers.
Not to mention the geopolitical effects; political corruption abounds in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico as cartels bully politicians and the media, with a large death toll behind them.
This is bigger than your stupid drug habit. This is bigger than your stupid state taxes. This is about ending one of the largest failures of ostensible morality in human history.
This is about ending a penal approach to a medical crisis, and ending the slavery of millions.
This is about shifting away from forced production of narcotics and back to cash crops and susbistence farming.
This is about restoring the dignity of millions across the globe, caught in the crossfires of a pointlessly black market that causes profit marginst to be so high that they create multiple massive competing industrial level crime syndicates.
It’s time to legalize all drugs, now.
“selling drugs with no benefit and a high risk of death seems a poor solution”. This is a flawed argument. First of all, all drugs have at least one benefit, they get you high.
Also, who told you it was a high risk of death. Actually, cocaine isn’t physically addictive and opium is less dangerous than alcohol and has more medical properties, it’s a pain killer. Heroin can kill you with overdose, but only if you use it irresponsibly, which you’re more likely to do if you aren’t told how to use it properly. In fact, morphine is still used in hospitals, I had a friend who had brain cancer who actually bragged to me that they let her have morphine.
All drugs should be made legal because the drug laws are immoral and unjust. This was never about whether or not drugs are dangerous, drugs are usually pretty safe when used correctly. Some are worse for your body than others, like donuts are worse for you than kale, but donuts taste better.
The drug laws should be repealed. I mean, not only are punishments racist, but they were racially motivated to begin with. “the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races”, said Harry Anslinger. This worked to convince people to outlaw it in 1937. The laws capitalize on the supporting ideologies that blacks have a different physiology so they react to the drugs differently than whites, by raping white women and murdering people.
So keeping the laws around keeps this idea that blacks have a different physiology around. It’s where they come from, it’s what they do. It doesn’t keep them around in the way that not everyone knows that, just people smart enough to look up some history on google and every person still in favor of these laws. The idea that there are medical reasons is unfounded not just when it comes to marijuana, although marijuana does have numerous health benefits, but unfounded for other drugs as well.
Just look at alcohol. Alcohol is a dangerous drug. Drink too much of it at one time and you can die. It has no health benefits, actually it’s hard for the body to digest and makes you puke if you drink too much as well. It makes you pee a lot.
Despite all this people enjoy drinking it, and can do it relatively safely and live a long healthy life. Or they won’t stop, we loved them, and they drank themselves to death that selfish bastard.
Despite this medical reasons to outlaw it and simply not allow it, don’t necessarily work. This is because arresting people for hurting themselves when they’re doing no harm to others, is fundamentally wrong. Also, the person could be using the drug in moderation. You could have arrested a person who is an occasional alcohol user. Arresting and killing people isn’t a solution to the people who drink themselves to death.
I mean, we have enough medical reasons to outlaw guns too, and certainly arsenic, but both those things are legal. I mean, a gun was designed to kill things it doesn’t do anything else using it safely is a ridiculous idea you’ll just destroy something not alive how’s that better. Meanwhile you may kill yourself with alcohol, or you may not, you may be a responsible adult and understand the danger involved.
All drugs, are safer than letting people walk around with guns, yet guns are perfectly legal. That’s because drugs are made to get people high, to give them pleasure, not to kill them. Marijuana simply can’t kill you. Yet still, people are arrested, killed, and ostracized from society for it. This is about the rights of the drug user to be a person again, who sought pleasure for pleasures sake, in an innocent enough way, by taking a strange plant cooked up by a mad scientist friend, and giving them respect, and not dehumanizing them. So quit dehumanizing me the drug user, and never arrest a drug user again.
Legalizing all drugs has no scary downside because drugs were made illegal with racist and religious hate campaigns to begin with and are innately a result of cultural warfare.
This isn’t about dealing with a health risk through the criminal system because the fact that the Catholic church hated magic mushrooms because they thought Aztecs were using them to conspire with devils is not a health risk, it is only mindless superstition.
The idea that marijuana and other illegal drugs cause blacks to have sex with white women and become violent is not a health risk of the drug, it is just venomous slander against fellow Americans.
Marijuana is sacred in India, that’s why the British wanted to suppress it, and in Jamaican Rastafarianism.
Saying that the illegal drugs pose scary health risks– I say, people who say that are liars. History makes it clear that people hated drugs because they wanted a way to oppress indigenous communities and ethnic communities.
Even if drugs did pose a scary health risk, it would still be immoral to jail anyone for getting sick. But you see, the reason why people use drugs recreationally of their own volition, is because it doesn’t pose a scary health risk.
Besides, worrying about some nonexistent health risk is less important than worrying about the human rights that drug laws violate. We have a right to not have racist laws enforced against us. These drugs have no health risk and are only illegal because of racism, so the laws are innately racist laws.
Also there is the death toll of civilians and the people in prison who shouldn’t be there. This is a crime against our fellow citizens because of racism and religious oppression. The death toll is not caused by drugs, but by guns, by violence and fighting and chaos due to being ostracized from society.
What health risks there are because of drugs people try to avoid. These are drugs that have been around for thousands of years. People use them to have fun. Not to kill themselves.
Perhaps some outlier will try to kill themselves with a drug, but what does that matter, their problem is not the drug,
Drugs should be legalized to live in a less racist more tolerant society. It would be more tolerant of indigenous cultures to have drugs legal as well. It would also get rid of death and prisons.
Bottom line, the reason why people want drugs legal isn’t so they can use drugs, it’s so that they can stop being over policed and live in a society that accepts the fact that human beings like to have fun every once in a while.
Of course all drugs need to be legalized. Making drugs illegal is immoral and inhumane. Calling it radical to think that drugs need to be legalized is the radical idea. Drugs were made illegal out of racism, the idea that getting high caused interracial sex. Claiming that drugs are illegal because of health reasons is just another excuse. Since all illegal drugs can be used safely, any health risks of drugs are irrelevant. What I mean is, you can use a rope to hang a man. But you can also use it for other things. But just because you can use the rope to hang a man, doesn’t mean you can arrest all people with rope. Just the same with drugs. Some can kill if overdosed, or cause physical dependency if over used. But these health risks can be avoided. I don’t understand how “health reasons” even applies, and yet they’ve got so many people convinced drugs are somehow poison.
Drugs are used for pleasure, medicine, and religious reasons. None of those things are bad. It is immoral, I think, to just keep people from a possible pleasure in their lives for no reason at all. And it is monstrous to hunt people down and arrest people for seeking nothing more than temporary pleasure.
The issue isn’t that drugs are bad, but prohibition is worse. It’s that drugs were never bad, so prohibition is monstrous and evil.
This is not about using drugs, it’s about the people in jail and the drug testing and the paranoia. It’s about the casualties of enforcing a law that is immoral to begin with.
So often I read that the drug laws have good intentions. That simply isn’t true. People enjoy using drugs. It is monstrous to behave as if we don’t and try to force people with violence to not enjoy using drugs, because people do enjoy using drugs.
It’s a law of discrimination. And even if we arrest equally white and black people for drugs, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a law of discrimination. Against people who enjoy drugs. And that’s 100 percent of people, and that’s why the drug laws are the most monstrous inhumane laws ever put into practice. Sobriety just isn’t realistic. It’s never going to happen.
Drug laws keep people from enjoying freedom that people were promised when we came to America. How is it that a country promising the land of the free managed to create the largest prison system in the world and police their citizens more than any other country. How is it that the land of the free is actually the land of the enslaved. With mass incarceration resulting from immoral laws.
Drug usage in moderation gives us a release of pent up energy and helps us cope with the stressful world we live in. A small glimpse into a world of true happiness for those who are the producers of the world living pay check to pay check. Criminalization comes with far more cons than pros. Legal records leading to a life of poverty and loss of freedom and liberty. It also leads to varying impurities, potency and fake drugs passed off as another putting users in dire risk. It leads to cartels and deaths across the world. Mules die when bags of drugs burst inside them as they transport it across the border.
Legalization would allow us to treat addiction as a purely medical condition. Crime levels would plummet as these powders would no longer cost more than gold per ounce and addicts would no longer need to commit felonies to support their habits. Recreational use of any substance without addiction is possible for those that have the mental willpower to resist and do not have an underlying chemical imbalance that makes them prone to addiction of certain substances.
Even for those who struggle with addiction because of legalization they would be spared the expense of being criminalized and overdoses for the most part as the quality would be consistent. We could easily use the funds currently used for prosecution in order to provide meaningful evidence based treatment (none of this believing in the fairytale god to overcome your addiction this isnt the middle ages no longer!)
Drugs could be distributed via controlled government sponsored retail locations. No marketing allowed. On site locations for consuming the more dangerous substances with trained staff to recover any overdoses. Pricing could be reflective of the cost to manufacture the substance and the costs of these facilities and staff.
True crimes such as theft to pay for a habbit, driving under the influence etc could be punished and severely as these crimes truly have victims and are actually crimes. Unauthorized distribution and providing drugs to a minor could carry extremely stiff penalties.
All the allure and glamour of selling and using drugs would diminish. People would be provided with the escape they desire occasionally without worrying about breaking the law.
Crime in general would go down. Its easier to cross the line of breaking the law when you are already doing so for something that is relatively harmless frequently. Committing a real crime after you have already been breaking laws with tougher consequences for drugs is easier to justify and blurs the line of what is truly right and wrong. It plants the seeds of distrust between citzens and law enforcement creating an us vs them mentality.
There will be overdoses, freak accidents and other negative health consequences. After the initial allure of dabbling with these substances fades it’s likely to be at levels similar to what we already experience just as marijuana has proven.
It’s simply a no brainer. We must rid the books of laws that only exist to define what others feel we shouldn’t morally do to our own bodies. Society will benefit from the ability to relax and have less incarceration rates, less people held back by a criminal record, save a massive amount of money in enforcement, and have the ability to divert the funds from enforcement into treatment helping those with addictions recover. With a consistent potency overdoses will go down. With access to clean equipment blood borne disease will be greatly decreased saving more lives. The relationship between citzens and police will improve. Add these together with more time to focus on other crime and crimes will decrease as it wont be required to support a habbit, violent crime will be solved quicker and society will be safer across the world.
As the generations that lived thru Reefer madness gives up the reigns to their children and grand children we can only hope they open their eyes to the failed policies that have caused so much death, misery and despair and stand up against them. We have made so much progress, the scare program Dare no longer exists, a majority of the US has medical marijuana and recreational marijuana continues to spread. We must not stop here, the injustice of taking away someone’s freedom for a personal action that only harms ones self cannot continue. The war on drugs is a war on the people. We must have peace, the racial injustice, the killing, the incarceration, and life long branding making us second class citizens must stop! Our great grandchildren will hear of the barbaric sentences handed down during our times and realize these policies were similar to those of the middle ages.
I O’D and died of herion dose and Drugs are serious and dangerous. No one wants to become addicted to drugs or alcohol they are of the devil and fun for a season then they grip you like cancer and the only true help is Jesus He delivered me from a that awful sin and I live my life glorify my Lord and savior now. So the only thing I can say is a life with drugs is a life of hell. Our souls are do big and the only thing that can replace that void is Jesus that’s why He came to die on calvarys cross to save us from this sinful world. Ask Jesus to forgive your sins and be your Lord and savior and believe that he died and has risen and the son of Almighty God and you will transfer from eternal hell to eternal life in a second. God bless and be saved by God’s son Jesus 🙏