Marijuana prohibition has done little other than burden millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens with criminal records. The University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future Study reports that lifetime use of marijuana is higher in the U.S. than any European country, yet America is one of the few Western countries that punishes citizens who prefer marijuana to martinis.
Unlike alcohol, marijuana has never been shown to cause an overdose death, nor does it share the addictive properties of tobacco. The short-term health effects of marijuana are inconsequential compared to the long-term effects of criminal records.
Unfortunately, marijuana represents the counterculture to many Americans. In subsidizing the prejudices of culture warriors, government is subsidizing organized crime. The drug war's distortion of immutable laws of supply and demand make an easily grown weed literally worth its weight in gold. The only clear winners in the war on marijuana are drug cartels and shameless tough-on-drugs politicians who've built careers confusing drug prohibition's collateral damage with a relatively harmless plant. The big losers are the taxpayers who have been deluded into believing big government is the appropriate response to non- traditional consensual vices.
The results of a comparative study of European and U.S. rates of drug use can be found at: http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/espad_pr.pdf.
United Nations stats: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/global_illicit_drug_trends.html.
Robert Sharpe
Common Sense for Drug Policy, Washington, D.C.
