Maybe one reason we're not making any headway in the war on terror is that we're wasting more time, money and effort than ever doing battle with that other mortal threat to the Republic: American marijuana smokers. We're no closer to catching Osama, but we're doing a historic job of busting potheads.
Last year the number of people arrested for marijuana offenses in the U.S. hit an all-time high of 829,625, according to the FBI. That makes the fourth year in a row that pot busts have set new records. In each of those years, the number of marijuana arrests was far higher than the total for all violent crimes. And, no, it's not primarily dealers who are getting nabbed. Almost nine out of 10 of those arrests were for simple possession.
None of which has had any real impact on the availability, price, potency or use of the demon weed. It does have a serious impact on the lives of those convicted on pot charges, though. A recent study by the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics found that in many states, having a marijuana conviction on your record can make you ineligible for student financial aid, food stamps and public housing (in some cases, even if you're a Hurricane Katrina victim). You can be barred from entering certain professions, adopting a child or even voting.
And for the rest of us, the battle against buds is costing us massively in cash and public safety. How much of the time our police should be spending protecting our communities is being wasted on chasing stoners? Violent crime rates have been rising for the past two years; wouldn't you rather have the cops putting their energy into doing something about that?
How many millions of tax dollars are getting flushed down the pipes, processing these cases through the courts and locking up the defendants? Here's one clue. As of 2004, there were over 40,000 people in state and federal prisons whose most serious offense was a marijuana charge. It costs around $25,000 per year to keep a prisoner behind bars. That makes for a total of at least one billion dollars blown incarcerating potheads every single year. And that number doesn't even include county jails, where the vast majority of marijuana offenders do their time. The Drug Policy Alliance estimates the total cost of enforcing marijuana laws at well over $10 billion.
In short, we're throwing away billions of dollars and countless hours of police and court officials' time, and ruining millions of lives, to achieve—nothing. The University of Michigan's well-respected annual "Monitoring the Future" survey of drug use finds that nearly every twelfth-grader in America—about 85 per cent of them, to be precise—says buds are easy to get. That figure has held basically steady since the 1970s. And almost one in three of those teenagers have smoked up in the past year, a number that's also not much changed over the last 30 years. All told, the federal government reckons more than one in 10 Americans over age 12 has smoked weed in the past year.
In other words, the massive crackdown on pot smokers hasn't done a thing to stop millions of Americans from lighting up. The only thing it has changed is their chances of winding up in jail.
Vince Beiser is a California-based writer who contributes to The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Rolling Stone and LA Weekly.
