Mr. Sabet describes the FBI's annual arrest data "unhelpful," but conveniently, he offers no contrary statistics to better clarify the matter. Despite the Uniform Crime Report's limitations, the agency reports that some 11 million Americans have been arrested for marijuana since 1990 -- a total that is more than the populations of Alaska, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wyoming combined. Of those arrested, nearly 90 percent are charged with minor possession only, not marijuana trafficking, cultivation, or sale.
Mr. Sabet tries to downplay this staggering arrest total because only a minority of those busted are sentenced to time in prison. While this claim may be true, that doesn't mean that millions of minor pot offenders don't suffer significant sanctions as a result of their run in with law
enforcement. These penalties include (but are not limited to): probation and mandatory drug testing, loss of employment, loss of child custody, removal from subsidized housing, asset forfeiture, loss of student aid, loss of voting privileges, loss of adoption rights, and the loss of certain federal welfare benefits such as food stamps.
And yes Mr. Sabet, some arrestees do serve prison time. In fact, according to a 2006 Bureau of Justice Statistics report, 12.7 percent of state inmates and 12.4 percent of federal inmates serving time for drug violations are incarcerated for marijuana offenses. In human terms, this means that there are now about 33,655 state inmates and 10,785 federal inmates behind bars for violating marijuana laws. (The report failed to include estimates on the percentage of inmates incarcerated in county jails for pot-related offenses.)
In fiscal terms, this means that taxpayers are spending more than $1 billion annually to imprison pot offenders.
Yet this billion-dollar price tag only estimates the financial costs on the 'back end' of a marijuana arrest. The criminal justice costs to taxpayers -- such as the man-hours it takes a police officer to arrest and process the average pot offender -- on the 'front end' is far greater, with some economists estimating the financial burden to be in upwards of $7 billion a year. Naturally, as the annual number of pot arrests continues to increase (according to the latest FBI data, marijuana arrests now constitute 44 percent of all illicit drug arrests), these costs are only going to grow larger and more socially and fiscally unacceptable.
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