Should the U.S. Legalize Marijuana?

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Let us imagine that even knowing what we do about marijuana’s harmfulness, and the experience of other countries that have legalized the drug, we still opted for marijuana legalization. A spike in marijuana-related violence on the street, for example, could prompt some well-meaning officials to reluctantly choose repealing punitive laws.

What would that scenario look like?

Describing the results of legalizing drugs is almost impossible for a few reasons. First, with the exception of the Netherlands and some marijuana clubs in the United States, drugs have not been available on the legal market for almost a century. Though cocaine, heroin, and other drugs were once available in the United States, they offer little by means of comparison when we fast forward one-hundred years to today. Also, proponents of legalization have never really presented what their regime would look like. But let’s briefly look at what it might look like under a few imaginable circumstances.

Treat it like alcohol and tobacco

Alcohol and tobacco are a favorite reference point for those who wish to legalize drugs. Since those two killers are legal -- indeed alcohol contributes to more violent crime than crack-cocaine -- why not just legalize other dangerous substances (or at least one more) and regulate their sale? Why the difference between alcohol and tobacco on one hand, and, marijuana on the other, especially when we know that alcohol use has a much greater association to violence than marijuana use?

Even a cursory glance at the status of our two legal drugs shows us that to add a third drug to this list would exacerbate an already difficult public-health problem. Tobacco kills half a million people every year. Alcohol is worse – not only is it responsible for negative health effects of the drinker, but of people around them. If we are to look at these two legal drugs as indicators of behavior associated with legal drug use, we see a pattern: legal drugs are by definition easy to obtain; commercialization glamorizes their use and furthers their social acceptance, their price is low, and high profits make promotion worthwhile for sellers. Subsequently – inevitably – more users occur, more addicts, and the increased use results in more social and health damage, increased deaths, and greater economic burden. When sellers rely on addiction for profit, there is not a strong case that drugs -- even just marijuana -- should be sold alongside alcohol and tobacco.

The alcohol/tobacco versus marijuana argument also falls apart since alcohol and tobacco have very different cultures surrounding them than marijuana does. For one, most people who use alcohol do so responsibly -- it is a minority of drinkers that cost society greatly. Secondly, unlike marijuana, tobacco can claim no such role in potentially hurting the lives of non-smokers (with the exception of second-hand smoke, especially to children) -- in fact, marijuana is the second most implicated drug in driving accidents, next to alcohol. Tobacco can claim no such infamous role in destroying the life of non-smokers. Furthermore, unlike tobacco, marijuana is implicated widely in the loss of productivity at work, long-term reproductive system damage; and, like tobacco, long term respiratory and cancer risk. As Kleiman has stated, “Until success is achieved in imposing reasonable controls on the currently licit killers, alcohol and nicotine, the case for adding a third or fourth recreational drug . . . will remain hopelessly speculative” (Kleiman 1993).

Tax the hell out of it

An alternative to commercially selling marijuana through private industry is having the government regulate and distribute the drug. Many legalization advocates (including Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell) urge the government to “tax the hell out of” drugs like marijuana in order to pay for the assumed increase use and addiction costs. That way, new users will be deterred from starting because the price would be out of reach. The most vulnerable (i.e. the poor) would benefit from high costs, too.

Ironically, however, this scenario actually exacerbates some of the worst qualities of prohibition. High cost drugs would ensure that an already well-established black market would remain largely in tact. If I can buy cocaine for $10 an ounce from my dealer or go to my government-sponsored “drug store” for ten times that much, I would opt for the former scenario. Especially if drugs were still illegal for kids (no one has seriously proposed legalizing marijuana for children), a black market would still have reasons to linger. This is precisely what occurred in Canada when they imposed steep taxes on cigarettes (Gunby 1994).

In the U.S., illegal drugs actually cost $160 billion a year in lost social costs. That number would no doubt increase under legalization, and then have to be distributed to the new number of total drug users. Experience with taxing alcohol and tobacco show us that any attempt to pay for lost costs through taxes would be futile. Indeed the social costs of legalization outweigh any possible tax that could be levied against the drug. In 1999, state and federal governments gained about $11 billion from alcohol taxes -- but direct health care costs amounted to four times that much, notwithstanding the costs to the criminal justice system, federal entitlement programs, and loss of productivity (U.S. Census Bureau 1999 and 2000; CASA 1996). Tobacco was worse -- the $13 billion in federal and state tobacco tax revenue in 1999 was one sixth of the $75 billion in direct health care costs attributable to tobacco (U.S. Census Bureau 1999 and 2000; CASA 1996).

Taxing drugs could feasibly increase street crime as well. As addicts frenzied for their next fix need to find more money to buy expensive drugs easily, they can be expected to engage in criminality. Taxing drugs would do no one good.

Make it cheap -- cut out the black market

One way to doom the black market for drugs is to beat the market down: Make drugs so cheap that the black market will eventually whither away in the face of legal competition. That way, turf wars between drug gangs and crime surrounding people’s desire to get money for drugs would be eliminated.

This is a good economic model -- if we weren’t concerned about the effects of drugs themselves. Certainly, drugs are dangerous because they rob people of making rational decisions. Cheap drugs would put a joint of marijuana well within the reach of a child’s daily allowance. Additionally, it would dissuade users from stopping (thus giving them a greater chance to become addicted) because of the cheap price. The American tobacco experience shows us that the price of drugs greatly influences a person’s decision to use.