"Your Tax Dollars on Drugs" (redo)


Wasting billions
Rob Kampia sums it up, just in time for tax day.

No. 1 on the failure list is our government's war on marijuana users. This war has not only failed to curb marijuana use and availability, but it has done real harm to our nation while chewing up billions of dollars every year.

How many billions? Last year, Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron estimated that the federal government spends about $2.4 billion annually on enforcing anti-marijuana laws, which is on top of about $5.3 billion that local and state governments spend annually. Under prohibition, we also forgo the roughly $6.2 billion in tax revenues that Prof. Miron says would be generated if marijuana were regulated and taxed like alcohol and tobacco.

But that's only part of the cost of marijuana prohibition. The federal government has spent over $1 billion since 1998 on TV, radio and print anti-drug ads that have focused overwhelmingly on marijuana, often neglecting far more dangerous drugs like methamphetamine. And the government spends millions of additional dollars conducting and publicizing research that's designed to justify marijuana prohibition -- and an unknown amount campaigning against state and local efforts to reform marijuana laws.

The goal of all this is to choke off the marijuana supply and put a stop to marijuana use. Are we getting our money's worth?

In a word, no.

According to the U.S. Justice Department's 2006 National Drug Threat Assessment report, "Marijuana availability is high and stable or increasing slightly." In another recent federal government survey, 86 percent of high school seniors said that marijuana was "easy to get" -- a figure that has remained virtually constant since 1975.

You know, if it weren't the Federal government, someone would be held criminally negligent for spending billions and losing billions more in revenue.

But no, we overlook it because it's "for our own good."

Hat tip to Drug War Rant.

Additional Technorati Tags
drug war, government waste

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - April 17, 2006 at 04:42 AM  Tag


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