Joe Klein argues for the legalization of marijuana, taking the fiscal approach.
As Webb pointed out in a cover story in Parade magazine, the U.S. is, by far, the most "criminal" country in the world, with 5% of the world's population and 25% of its prisoners. We spend $68 billion per year on corrections, and one-third of those being corrected are serving time for nonviolent drug crimes. We spend about $150 billion on policing and courts, and 47.5% of all arrests are marijuana-related. That is an awful lot of money, most of it nonfederal, that could be spent on better schools or infrastructure — or simply returned to the public.
This is the argument most likely to gain traction -- as Nancy Lavigne from the Urban Institute said to me, "Americans are as punitive as they can afford to be." Corrections costs have ballooned 300 percent in the past 20 years, and taxpayers now devote 68 billion of their tax dollars to corrections. We could spend considerably less and be safer than we are now. But mostly we'd like to spend less.
The argument that is sadly less likely to gain traction is the moral argument: the proportion of suffering caused by outlawing marijuana is vastly disproportionate to the social gain of criminalizing it. This however, is not an adequate subject for political debate. Being sensible and serious in our political context means that human suffering is always sublimated to fiscal concerns. And I'm not saying complete legalization is the only option -- there is a happy medium between having 25 percent of the world's prison population, gunning down people for their dime bags, or offering dub sacs over the counter.
-- A. Serwer
