The Christian Science Monitor’s editorial board is weighing in on the increasingly popular issue of marijuana legalization with an editorial they call “Legalize marijuana? Not so fast.” and a veritable who’s-who parade of reefer mad prohibitionists:

A harmless drug? Supporters of legalization often claim that no one has died of a pot overdose, and that it has beneficial effects in alleviating suffering from certain diseases.

True, marijuana cannot directly kill its user in the way that alcohol or a drug like heroin can. And activists claim that it may ease symptoms for certain patients – though it has not been endorsed by the major medical associations representing those patients, and the Food and Drug Administration disputes its value.

The AMA is in the back pocket of Big Pharma; they’re not going to endorse a product that cuts by at least half the need for opioids, benzodiazepenes, and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.  There are plenty of major medical associations that endorse medical marijuana, including the American College of Physicians, the American Medical Student Association, and the American Nurses Association.  Also, the FDA doesn’t dispute marijuana’s value; it merely has never approved marijuana, and the government, through FDA, DEA, and NIDA, have opposed all efforts to actually put marijuana through the approval process, which we all know it would sail through.

Rosalie Pacula, codirector of the Rand Drug Policy Research Center, poses this question: “If pot is relatively harmless, why are we seeing more than 100,000 hospitalizations a year” for marijuana use?

Emergency-room admissions where marijuana is the primary substance involved increased by 164 percent from 1995 to 2002 – faster than for other drugs, according to the Drug Abuse Warning Network.

The way Rosalie puts it, you’d think 100,000 people were running into the ER and screaming, “Quick, doctor! I need help! I’ve taken marijuana and I think I’m going to die!” (in four years of doing this, I’ve only heard one such case…)

But the fact is that these DAWN statistics just survey the drugs people admit to using or what is detected in their body when they are admitted to the emergency room.  DAWN doesn’t measure the cause of why someone’s in the hospital. If you smoked a joint, went to a restaurant, sat down for dinner and had the server accidentally drop scalding hot coffee in your lap, and you went to the hospital for the burns, and when asked, admitted you had smoked a joint that day, cha-ching, that’s a “marijuana [as] the primary substance involved” in that admission.  You might as well say iPods are harmful, because the number of people admitted to hospitals that own an iPod has skyrocketed since 1995.

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Should we tax pot? – Los Angeles Times
Now, as we’re desperately trying to reinvent the economy, should we consider marijuana?

We’ve dipped a toe in those waters already in California. Sales of medical marijuana are taxable — $11.4-million worth for 2005-2006, the most recent (though admittedly murky) figures available.

Marijuana is a huge component of the nation’s underground economy. A couple of years ago, the legalize-it forces estimated that the U.S. marijuana crop was worth $35 billion a year. California’s share of that was $13.8 billion.

If the number is even half that, any tax windfall, on top of money saved by not prosecuting marijuana crimes, would mean a bonanza, wouldn’t it?

Sacramento would be doing the backstroke in black ink. With all the new parks and health clinics, we’d have more ribbon-cuttings than a baby shower. Is this just a pipe dream?

Rosalie Pacula says that in all likelihood, yes. She’s a senior economist at the Rand Corp. and co-director of its drug policy research center. Here’s how she burst my bubble:

First, you have to consider that legalizing it would have its own costs. Recent research, Pacula says, shows marijuana to be more addictive than was thought. Because marijuana is illegal, and because its users often smoke tobacco or use other drugs, teasing out marijuana’s health effects and associated costs is almost impossible. And more people would smoke it regularly if it were legal — Pacula estimates 60% to 70% of the population as opposed to 20% to 30% now — and the social costs would rise.

She takes issue with figures from Harvard’s Jeffrey Miron, among others, who says that billions spent on enforcing marijuana laws could all be saved by legalization. Rand’s research, Pacula says, finds that many marijuana arrests are collateral — say, part of DUI checks or curfew arrests — and many arrestees already have criminal records, meaning they might wind up behind bars for something else even if marijuana were legal.

Legalization also wouldn’t do away with pot-related crime entirely. There would likely be a black market, just as there is in other regulated substances, such as cigarettes and liquor. That means police and prosecution, which cost money.

As to the tax benefit, that’s partly a function of the price point for legalized pot. If everyone could legally grow and consume dope, then the crop probably wouldn’t be worth $35 billion and the taxes wouldn’t be anything to write home about.

How many ways do you think we can debunk Pacula’s premise, which seems to be that arresting 872,721 Americans for marijuana-related offenses and eradicating hundreds of millions of marijuana plants every year is cheaper than not legalizing marijuana?  Did you find all seven?  Read on…

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