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Home / Health & Fitness / The War on Pot Costs America $42 Billion Annually

The War on Pot Costs America $42 Billion Annually

John P.

April 29, 2008 By John P.

marijuanaHmmm. I’ve got a question. Why not let Marlboro sell packaged marijuana just like they do normal cigarettes or clove cigarettes? If one can believe the stats in the article below, the cost to fight the Pot war is simply amazing!

Arrests for marijuana possession — not sales or trafficking, just possession — totaled 738,916. By comparison, there were 611,523 arrests last year for all violent crimes combined.

Wow! I don’t understand that on so many levels:

  1. How do so many people actually gain access to an illegal drug like that? I wouldn’t have a clue where to go buy some pot, and I’d be scared to ask anyone!
  2. If 3/4 of a million people got CAUGHT, there must be 50 people for each one that got away! I mean, America must love it’s pot!
  3. I never heard of anyone high on pot committing violent crimes. I thought it had the opposite effect? Making you tired and lazy, right?

What would you buy if you had an extra $42 billion to spend every year? What might our government buy if it suddenly had that much money dropped onto its lap every year?

For one thing, it might pay for the entire $7 billion annual increase in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program that President Bush is threatening to veto because of its cost — and there’d still be $35 billion left over.

Or perhaps you’d hire 880,000 schoolteachers at the average U.S. teacher salary of $47,602 per year.

Or give every one of our current teachers a 30 percent raise (at a cost of $15 billion, according to the American Federation of Teachers) and use what’s left to take a $27 billion whack out of the federal deficit.

Or use all $42 billion for a massive tax cut that would put an extra $140 in the pockets of every person in the country — $560 for a family of four.

The mind reels at the ways such a massive sum of money could be put to use.

Why $42 billion? Because that’s what our current marijuana laws cost American taxpayers each year, according to a new study by researcher Jon Gettman, Ph.D. — $10.7 billion in direct law enforcement costs, and $31.1 billion in lost tax revenues. And that may be an underestimate, at least on the law enforcement side, since Gettman made his calculations before the FBI released its latest arrest statistics in late September. The new FBI stats show an all-time record 829,627 marijuana arrests in 2006, 43,000 more than in 2005.

That’s like arresting every man, woman and child in the state of North Dakota plus every man, woman, and child in Des Moines, Iowa on marijuana charges … every year. Arrests for marijuana possession — not sales or trafficking, just possession — totaled 738,916. By comparison, there were 611,523 arrests last year for all violent crimes combined.

Basing his calculations mainly on U.S. government statistics, Gettman concludes that marijuana in the U.S. is a $113 billion dollar business. That’s a huge chunk of economic activity that is unregulated and untaxed because it’s almost entirely off the books.

Of course, the cost of our marijuana laws goes far beyond lost tax revenues and money spent on law enforcement. By consigning a very popular product — one that’s been used by about 100 million Americans, according to government surveys — to the criminal underground, we’ve effectively cut legitimate businesspeople out of the market and handed a monopoly to criminals and gangs.

Strangely, government officials love to warn us that some unsavory characters profit off of marijuana sales, while ignoring the obvious: Our prohibitionist laws handed them the marijuana business in the first place, effectively giving marijuana dealers a $113 billion free ride.

All this might make some sense if marijuana were so terribly dangerous that it needed to be banned at all costs, but science long ago came to precisely the opposite conclusion. Compared to alcohol, for example, marijuana is astonishingly safe. For one thing, marijuana is much less addictive than alcohol, with just nine percent of users becoming dependent, as opposed to 15 percent for booze. And marijuana is much less toxic. Heavy drinking is well-documented to damage the brain and liver, and to increase the risk of many types of cancer. Marijuana, on the other hand, has never caused a medically documented overdose death, and scientists are still debating whether even heavy marijuana use causes any permanent harm at all. And then there’s violence. Again, the scientific findings are overwhelming: Booze incites violence and aggression; marijuana doesn’t.

Despite all that, we now arrest one American every 38 seconds on marijuana charges. And we do so at a staggering cost in law enforcement expenses, lost tax revenues, and staggering profits for criminal gangs.

The alternative is clear: Regulate marijuana just as we do beer, wine, and liquor. The only thing lacking is the political will.

Rob Kampia is executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, DC

Related

Filed Under: Health & Fitness, News, Philosophy, Politics Tagged With: Drugs, Health-&-Fitness, Legalization, Marijuana, News, Philosophy, Politics

About John P.

John P. is a former CEO, former TV Show Host, and the Founder and Wizard behind Texas Metal Works. You can find him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Feel free to send shoutouts, insults, and praise. Or Money. Money is good.

Comments

  1. Amy Marie says

    May 8, 2010 at 1:27 pm

    Can you imagine how much alcohol and smoking costs the UK NHS? A bit of weed is nothing in comparison.

  2. Zach says

    January 12, 2009 at 12:26 pm

    Man, if thats one small mistake someone should list the big ones.
    If we freed up our tax dollars via ligalization the skys the limit. . .Dude!

  3. Franklin says

    June 18, 2008 at 7:56 pm

    I’ve been a pot smoker for about 15 years and somebody has to explain this war on marijana to me. When did economic efficiancy became more important than a human life? The US spends millions on strategic wargames in Israel and around, but they can’t handle it if a guy gets fed up with it all and smokes 1 joint every night, just to get some some sleep. I wonder, what would happen if everything was for free?

  4. Jenny says

    May 3, 2008 at 8:39 pm

    I’d actuallty like to see the smoking of pot made mandatory for American politiceans.

    We’d see a lot less wars …..

    I’m assumng current policy is made while they are drunk … so could pot be any worse?

  5. Steve Elliott says

    May 3, 2008 at 3:15 am

    Lol, Rhoody, nice idea…..but wouldn’t your joint go out as you go down the waterslides !

  6. Rhoody says

    May 2, 2008 at 11:40 pm

    … and on water-parks in the dessert…

  7. John Walters says

    May 2, 2008 at 7:00 pm

    This makes an interesting read.

    Personally I think money should be spent on more important things like on the military and creating huge armies and better weapons and more weapons…

    So comparatively is it such a bad thing to spend money on?

  8. Rhoody says

    May 2, 2008 at 6:10 am

    just legalize it.. than you don’t need to fight it. look at the netherlands how it is handled there…

  9. 3gp says

    May 1, 2008 at 11:26 am

    very interesting article.

  10. Ilia Boyko says

    May 1, 2008 at 7:16 am

    I bet it is still a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of money being spent on alcohol related incidents as well as medical care. When it comes to weed… Do you think they are just labeling people? Eg this guy stole a watch after smoking weed all day. But what about all those none weed smokers who steal for a living?

  11. Clickfire says

    April 30, 2008 at 8:36 pm

    Yes, that’s right. I think some people hold the principle that certain drugs are more destructive than others and are therefore “bad.” How they come to the conclusion varies, I suppose, from having a gut feeling to research data.

  12. RHB says

    April 30, 2008 at 5:28 am

    what principle? examine as stated above, the legal drugs we sell to ourselves and the deaths and damage done to ourselves using alcohol ans tobbacco. What you are saying is that some drugs are in some peoples minds given a preconcieved value, good or bad. Drugs are not good or bad, they do have varying degrees of danger associated with abuse, and have been subject to varying levels of acceptence in societies for centuries.

    Now the question of whether to regulate all drugs, or to not regulate any is a real dilemna.

  13. Rocketman says

    April 30, 2008 at 12:13 am

    I’m just wondering if we’d really save $10 billion, because there’s probably not many cops dedicated solely to pot busts. Even if it’s legalized, all those cops making the busts are still going to keep their jobs doing community law enforcement, of which enforcing laws on pot is one facet.

  14. Clickfire says

    April 29, 2008 at 8:36 pm

    Because sometimes we place a higher value a principle than monetary savings.

  15. Adam says

    April 29, 2008 at 8:52 am

    I agree and think that everyone should look at this article to make it so:

    H.R. 5843 would eliminate most Federal penalties for possession of marijuana for personal use.

  16. RHB says

    April 29, 2008 at 7:47 am

    Well I am in my 60s, this is a an old argument, there are so many inconsistentcies in government policy on drugs in general, this is only one small idiocy.

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