The Cost of Legislating Personal Behavior
From a Constitutional perspective, you believe in personal freedom. You don’t like the government telling you what you can or cannot do.
From a fiscal perspective, you believe in eliminating waste, cutting government spending, and reducing the deficit.
If this is true, then you should advocate for the legalization of cannabis.
As I stated in the book, cannabis is hardly a boon to society. It is an addictive intoxicant with negative health consequences.
On the other hand, we as a society should compare its social costs to the cost of prohibition. It is arguably less addictive than tobacco, and demonstrably less dangerous to the user than alcohol. Despite the fact that nicotine is an addictive carcinogenic poison, tobacco is legal because we believe that the individual has a right to make his or her own choices about whether of not to use it. Tobacco kills thousands of people a year, but we will probably never outlaw tobacco because we believe in freedom. (Or, some might say, we believe in the profits that tobacco generates.)
We tried to outlaw alcohol in this country. We soon repealed the Amendment because we recognized that Prohibition was a disaster. It did not change people’s behavior as the amendment’s sponsors had hoped. Instead in created a historic wave of violence due to organized crime. The takeaway is that people don’t stop using intoxicants just because the intoxicants are illegal: instead, the money for the intoxicants is funneled to criminal networks, who employ the profits to widen their influence, which generally exerts a destructive influence on society.
We pride ourselves on learning from our mistakes.
In this country we spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on the War on Drugs, and what does all that money buy us?
The War on Drugs sends millions of nonviolent offenders to jail every year, often for no greater crime than simple possession. The additional cost of the War on Drugs to local communities is tremendous financially, because they have to pay for the incarceration and related costs. Simultaneously, the War on Drugs costs communities even more from a social perspective, because it breaks up families, deprives children of their fathers, deprives wives of their husbands, and deprives households of the financial support of the primary breadwinner.
The War on Drugs buys invasive government policies that violate individuals’ privacy and reduce freedom for everyone.
The extraordinary cost of prosecuting and incarcerating all these nonviolent offenders is rarely considered in discussions concerning the War on Drugs and the debate over legalization.
We could reduce the government deficit by eliminating this pointless War on Drugs and all its attendant invasions of privacy.
Furthermore, just as significantly from a fiscal perspective, we could tax the sale of decriminalized cannabis and use the tax revenue to pay off the national debt and to shore up the storied 20-years-from-now shortfall in Social Security.