Frances Woolley at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative blog:
Milton Friedman — Nobel Laureate in Economics and adviser to Ronald Reagan — supported legalizing and taxing marijuana. Stephen Easton’s classic paper advocating marijuana legalization was published by the Fraser Institute. Why do so many right-leaning economists favour marijuana legalization?
Conservative economists typically believe that a person is a best judge of what is in his or her own interests. From this premise it follows that the government should not try to constrain or influence people’s behaviour. Yes, marijuana use has well-documented negative side effects, from memory loss to male breast growth. Yet if fully informed individuals decide that these personal costs are worth accepting for the benefits that marijuana use brings, the government should respect that choice. As Willie Nelson says “I smoke pot and it is none of the government’s business.”
[. . .]
Another reason for conservatives to favour legalization and taxation of marijuana is that they do not like paying taxes. Criminalization costs. According to a 2005 US study, legalization would save state and local governments $5.3 billion annually in reduced enforcement costs, while the federal government would gain another $2.4 billion federally. Locking up people for possession of a small amount of marijuana is a waste of resources, and good fiscal conservatives deplore waste.Taxing marijuana would be a money-maker: $6.2 billion annually, if marijuana were taxed at rates similar to those on alcohol and tobacco, according to this same 2005 report.Those revenues could be used to reduce deficits, or fund reductions in the taxes paid by conservative economists.
Conservatives have lots of good reasons to favour legalization. The people who should be fighting legalization are the small scale growers: little family-run organic pot farms wouldn’t stand a chance against industrial scale agri-business.
When placed in proper context the argument has merit. I am against pot only because it is illegal, not because of its many effects. Booze has many bad side effects, but it is legal. Smokes the same thing. If the government made pot legal, in my mind, it would be just like booze and smokes. It would still be illegal to grow your own to sell, the way it is illegal to make your own booze to sell, without a license.
The biggest problem is the stigma of pot as an illegal drug, having it accepted would take some time, but I think it could work in the long run. But, how would they reconcile public consumption since smoking is on the way out in almost all public spaces, including the great out doors?
Comment by Dwayne — May 18, 2012 @ 09:11
Actually, the biggest problem with pot isn’t the stigma, as much as it is the fact that we share the world’s longest (once undefended) border with one of the world’s biggest hypocrite on drug policy. Americans individually provide a disproportional share of the world’s demand for all drugs — but especially marijuana — and at the same time operate a criminal enforcement regime that shames their claim to being the leaders of the ‘free world’.
If we didn’t share a land border with the US, we could easily have legalized pot a decade ago, and be enjoying the benefits (even anti-legalizers would admit that it would ease pressure on the police and the prison system and provide profits to be taxed). The problem is that any move we make to legalize could — and likely would — be met with further slowdowns at the border, and more legal and bureaucratic interruptions in our bilateral trade with the US.
They’d hurt themselves by doing so, but they’d hurt us much more.
Comment by Nicholas — May 18, 2012 @ 09:31
and at the same time operate a criminal enforcement regime that shames their claim to being the leaders of the ‘free world’.
Forty years after the War on Drugs was declared and … any US high school kid who wants to get baked, can. Time to declare the war over and bring the troops home.
I don’t know if we _can_ do that.
The problem is that the government likes the power they’ve gotten to run the War on Drugs a whole bunch, and they won’t want to give it up.
If we had an actual democracy it’d be done away with real quick. We don’t, so don’t look for it to get better anytime soon.
Comment by Brian Dunbar — May 22, 2012 @ 06:21