In My Own Write

High Cost of Cutting the Grass

In a Seattle bar one rainy afternoon several years ago, I met one of the largest growers of marijuana in the Northwest. He impressed me with his marketing skills, his expertise in running a half dozen indoor growing operations scattered across the city, and his free-market approach to what was and still is a very lucrative business thanks to government prohibition. Charlie Flowers, an apropos alias for this enterprising horticulturist, claimed he was making about a hundred thousand tax-free dollars yearly from his three-year-old business. For the next year, we met occasionally over beers, and then I lost track of him after I moved to Idaho. I heard he’d liquidated and retired to Hawaii.

To a greater or lesser degree, there are thousands of Charlie Flowers out there. Marijuana grown indoors, a Northwest cottage industry, is more potent, grows more quickly than its outdoor cousins, and commands a higher price. Would-be growers can learn all they need to know from readily available instruction manuals, Internet sites, and a popular magazine. Retail shops located in most cities sell all the equipment needed to grow a crop in any basement: high-powered lights, hydroponic feeding systems, even room deodorizers to mask the plant's telltale aroma. Grow operations are more prevalent than you’d imagine with an estimated one to two thousand in the Seattle area alone.

Despite over fifty years of strict prohibition, millions of people still grow, sell, and use pot. Over that time, the arrest rate has rarely risen above one in ten. Paradoxically, high drug profits are generated by strict enforcement. It makes the business more dangerous, thus raising the price of the product, and therefore becomes more profitable for dealers willing to take higher risks.

Drug war myths about pot fail to discourage use and include the one about marijuana being a "gateway" to hard drugs. Since the Dutch decriminalized marijuana in the 1970s, hard drug and even marijuana use has declined substantially. If marijuana really were a gateway drug, the use of hard drugs should have gone up. Actual studies of hard drug addicts reveal they started with alcohol or tobacco more frequently than marijuana.

Warnings of health problems are also questionable. Separate research studies of heavy cannabis users in Jamaica, Costa Rica, and Greece failed to find evidence of impaired mental or physical functioning due to even heavy, chronic cannabis use. Smoking marijuana seems to be healthier than alcohol or tobacco.

However, the enforcement of drug laws does pose a threat to the well-being of our civil liberties. The Fifth Amendment promises “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.”

But forfeiture laws allow police to seize your business, home, car, bank account, and personal property if they suspect it was used in the commission of a crime or purchased with proceeds from a crime — without indictment, hearing or trial. Because forfeiture is a civil rather than criminal procedure, the accused need never be convicted of a crime. According to one estimate, in 80% of asset-forfeiture cases the property owner is not even charged with a crime, and the seized property is used to pad the budgets of the law agencies involved.

Quirks in marijuana laws compound forfeiture injustices because sentencing judges consider the number of plants instead of their actual weight. For 49 plants or fewer, Drug Enforcement Administration guidelines calculate each plant will produce 3 ½ ounces of marijuana, whether the plant is a 15-footer or a 3-inch seedling. For 50 plants or more, the estimated yield jumps to an inflated 2.2 pounds per plant. Under these guidelines, there’s no difference between a home grower caught with 100 plants and a big-time dealer busted importing 220 pounds of dried marijuana from Mexico.

Current federal drug enforcement programs cost over $13 billion per year; state and local programs billions more. A third of the cases involve cannabis. Imprisonment adds billions to the tab. Most of the people in California prisons for drug use are there simply for using marijuana costing $100 million a year. Nationwide, prison costs soar into the billions. Rapists, murderers, and burglars are often set free to make space in jails for marijuana smokers.

There are plenty of good reasons why marijuana should be legalized: medical uses, crime reduction, trade deficits, new product markets for hemp, tax revenues. For example, according to a recent national drug abuse survey, some 19.5 million Americans use marijuana at least once a year, 5.3 million at least once a week, and 3.1 million daily. Assuming a tax of a buck a joint, you can make a rough estimate of the revenues to be raised from legalized cannabis.

But the truth is, most marijuana users just want to kick back, smoke a joint, and get high without the cops breaking down the door. The ‘war on drugs’ is a failure simply because prohibition doesn’t work. Alcohol prohibition didn't end it’s use, but it did enrich organized crime and taught ordinary people disrespect for the law. The same is happening today. Can we really respect authorities who willingly ruin a person's life for possession of a drug with the abuse potential of a six-pack of Bud?

Judges, mayors, prosecutors, congressmen, civic leaders — liberal and conservative alike — acknowledge that the war against marijuana is unwinnable. The drug continues to be easily available to millions who want it, and the losing fight against a simple plant that grows almost everywhere is costing us too much money better spent on just about anything else.

Considering everyone who has puffed pot — from Bill Clinton to Newt Gingrich — the war on marijuana seems a strangely foolish, hypocritical exercise. Moreover, it’s a dangerous weakening of basic civil liberties and an imposition on the reasonable expenditure of taxpayer money. At least with this relatively innocuous drug, it’s time to admit we’ve lost the war and make the best peace we can.

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