MSN Money: A budget cure – marijuana taxes?

(MSN Money) While legalization, decriminalization and the medical use of marijuana continue to be debated in terms of public health, lawmakers and policy analysts are increasingly touting the economic benefits of regulating and taxing weed, which the Office of National Drug Control Policy says is the most popular illegal drug in the U.S.

Critics of legalizing marijuana say the potential economic benefits of regulating and taxing the drug would obscure the less-tangible, long-term downsides of making it more prevalent in society.

“The argument wholly ignores the issue of the connection between marijuana and criminal activity and also the larger picture of substance abuse,” said David Capeless, the district attorney of Berkshire County in Massachusetts and the president of the state’s district attorneys association. “It simply sends a bad message to kids about substance abuse in general, which is a wrong message, that it’s not a big deal.”

Wow, a “marijuana causes crime”, a “gateway theory”, and a “what about the children” all in one statement!  That’s a 6.5 Anslinger Rating for DA Capeless.  Just for the record, prohibition causes crime, the Institute of Medicine disproved the gateway theory, and children in medical marijuana states are using less marijuana than before the law went into effect.

In a 2007 study, Jon Gettman, a senior fellow at George Mason University’s School of Public Policy, valued the American marijuana trade at $113 billion annually. Between drug enforcement and potential taxes, the federal government and the states were losing almost $42 billion a year by keeping marijuana illegal, the study indicated. Gettman is a former staff member of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, a nonprofit that lobbies on Capitol Hill for marijuana legalization.

Of course, critics of decriminalization are also vocal. Calvina Fay, the executive director of the Drug Free America Foundation, says Gettman, Miron and others fail to account for marijuana’s adverse side effects, from lethargy to impaired driving to tendencies among weed smokers to try more-serious drugs. “Those who are using drugs are less productive than those who aren’t,” Fay said.

Hmm, that explains how I’ve managed to make a living running two businesses in 2008, why I’m working twelve-hour days now, and why I’ve never cashed an unemployment check in my life.  If only I weren’t so lethargic, maybe I could do better than to conduct ten interviews a week, write 12 blog posts a day, answer 100+ emails a day, record and edit 45 minutes of audio a day, maintain two websites, blog on the side for an LGBT site, produce ten minutes of video for my appearance on a weekly TV show, manage the oversight of 150+ NORML chapters, and do data analysis and graphic design for Keith Stroup’s new book.  If only my driving weren’t so impaired, I could’ve managed less than four traffic tickets and one minor fender-bender in 25 years of driving.

Now, did I try more serious drugs?  Sure!  All my life I had been told that smoking marijuana would cause all sorts of terrible ills.  Then I smoked pot and none of those dire predictions ever materialized.  In fact, my life improved after marijuana, since it helped end my binge drinking and allowed me to manage my clinical depression without harsh pharmaceuticals.  So when the first line of meth was offered up, I didn’t believe any of the dire predictions about that, either.  I had to learn those lessons the hard way after losing forty pounds in two months, alienating my friends and family, and ending up in an hospital ER at 3am for emergency life-saving hernia surgery, because people in positions of prestige and authority in government and “drug free foundations” lied to me about marijuana.