My Comments: Marijuana

This is a comment I left on our colleague's blog "Read My Lips"

I believe that we should simply legalize and tax marijuana nation-wide. My personal preference as a non-smoker would be for marijuana and cigarettes and cigars and pipes to just disappear altogether. However, I don't live in an ideal world, I live in a real world. Realistically, marijuana is no worse for you than alcohol. Probably safer in most regards. Yet alcohol is legal and marijuana is not. It truly makes no sense. The reality is that people like their poisons. If you're familiar with how successful Prohibition wasn't, and to what incredible lengths people went to produce and smuggle alcohol into the country illegally, then you know how effective the ban on marijuana is right now. In fact, I would even make the claim that the illegalization of marijuana fosters an environment of crime which compounds the issue rather than mitigates it. Legal marijuana would grow a large crop of economic development and a considerable stream of tax revenue for the federal government while putting many criminal distributors out of business. According to this CNBC article, marijuana is an industry in it's own right. Conservative estimates put the marijuana industry at $10 billion dollars. That's 10,000,000,000 dollars. On the low end. Currently, the US government spends millions of dollars fighting marijuana traffic. According to this article, the popular consensus is that the US government could stand to earn 20 billion dollars in tax revenue in a legal marijuana market. Given that we already have legal alcohol and tobacco, why fight the legalization of marijuana so hard? Let's capitalize on it. We're hurting. We could use the stimulus to our economy.