The Hill Blog – Marijuana Decriminalization Bill Ignores the Facts

Another response to Allen St. Pierre’s piece in The Hill Blog.  This time the ONDCP weighs in.  It’s a lot of the same reefer madness I debunked in the piece below, so I won’t go through all of that again.  I’ll just give you the couple of paragraphs that really jumped out at me:

The Hill Blog» Blog Archive » Marijuana Decriminalization Bill Ignores the Facts
A few weeks ago, Congressman Barney Frank and Ron Paul introduced H.R. 5843, an ill-considered piece of legislation aimed at legalizing marijuana, a topic more often heard in college dorms at 2 o’clock in the morning than in the hallowed halls of our Congress. Indeed, at a press conference announcing the effort to legalize pot, Congressman Frank cracked jokes about how this law could create a “marijuana futures market” and acknowledged that the chance of the bill passing were not “high.”

See, even talking about marijuana policy is such a frivolous, unmitigated waste of time that only stoner college kids talk about it.  Nobody would seriously reconsider a policy that costs us $7.5 billion annually, increases the availablilty and potency of marijuana while lowering the price and leading to the highest rates of marijuana use in the world.  Nothing to see here, move along, let’s not talk about it.

The money that so-called “recreational” users spend on pot has negative consequences that can touch the lives of people around the world. When Americans spend money on illegal drugs, they are providing financial support to groups that use violence and terror as a way of doing business. Drug-fueled violence in Mexico over the last two years has cost at least four thousand lives by most estimates, financed by recreational users with disposable income in this country.

Gee, if only Americans could grow, buy, and sell their own marijuana domestically, no Mexicans would have to die.  How many Mexicans died last year as a result of illegal alcohol trafficking again?  Oh, right, zero, because we can brew it, buy it, and sell it here.  In fact, we even employ some Mexicans if drinkers of Dos Equis and Corona are counted, right?

Some pro-drug interest groups have argued that keeping marijuana illegal itself does damage, since people run the risk of arrest if they break the law. But in fact, marijuana offenders represent only a very tiny fraction of state prison inmates in the United States.

Huh?  We tell you people being arrested is a problem, you tell us few people are in prison? That’s like saying “Some pro-plastic surgery groups argue that liposuction is relatively safe, but, in fact, many people have died from undergoing bariatric surgery” — the first part has nothing to do with the second part!

How do state prison statistics (misleading as they are, since most marijuana offenders are incarcerated in federal prison, county jail,or local jail) change the fact that over 730,000 people were arrested for mere possession in 2006?  How does that change the damage from those arrests – loss of licenses, employment difficulties, loss of student aid, loss of federal housing and benefits, inability to gain security clearances, time on probation, time in a local jail, and a criminal record?

When you read the papers from the Drug Czar, sometimes it’s hard to tell which side is on the mind-altering substance.