From Economist.com - The costliest place in the world to get high is Japan, according to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime's annual World Drug Report. The street price of a gram of cannabis weed was $58.30 in 2005, over twice as much as in the next most expensive nation, Australia. Americans pay nearly twice as much as Canadians. Similar disparities occur in Europe. Although the Netherlands is the only Western country where cannabis can be bought legally, punters pay more there than in Germany or France. Prices are cheapest in developing countries, where enforcement is less strict.
Marijuana prohibition costs US taxpayers nearly $42 billion dollars per year in criminal justice costs and in lost tax revenues, according to an economic analysis recently released.
According to the study, "Lost Taxes and Other Costs of Marijuana Laws," law enforcement spends $10.7 billion annually to arrest and prosecute marijuana offenders. This amount comprises nearly six percent of America’s total criminal justice expenditures.
Pot’s criminalization also artificially raises the plant’s retail price and diverts billions of dollars into the black market economy, the study finds. According to the report, Americans spend some $113 billion dollars annually to consume an estimated 31.1 million pounds of pot. By criminalizing this market, the study estimates that the government loses more than $30 billion per year in tax revenue.
"The market in marijuana in the United States is illicit, illegal, and as such it diverts capital away from the channels of the licit or legal economy, especially the channels from which local, state, and the federal government collect tax revenue," the study concludes. "If [the billions of dollars America’s currently spend on marijuana] were spent on legal commodities … those economic transactions would produce billions in tax revenues for local, state, and the federal government."
According to data released last week by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), police arrested a record 829,625 persons for marijuana violations in 2006. Of those arrested, 738,915 Americans (89 percent) were charged with marijuana possession.
Yesterday, following a press briefing on the subject of teen drug abuse, President Bush reminisced about his love/hate relationship with alcohol back in the 70's and 80's. Moved by the plight of a young, drug-addicted girl, the president offered words born of his personal battle with booze:
"Your president made the same kind of choice," he told her. "I had to quit drinking. ... Addiction competes for your affection ... You fall in love with alcohol."
Following the event, Bush granted ABC News an interview, and continued to muse about the nature of his entanglement as well as his decision to go cold turkey.
"I wasn't a knee walking drunk," Bush said. "It's a difficult thing to do, which is to kick an addiction."
... Bush said in his case, he made the decision to quit when he realized drinking was interfering with his family. "Alcohol can compete with your affections. It sure did in my case," Bush said, "affections with your family, or affections for exercise. It was the competition that I decided just wasn't worth it."
Framing his drinking in terms of addiction is something new for the president. In the run-up to the 2000 election, faced with unearthed stories of a 1976 DUI arrest, Bush described his past behavior this way:
"Well, I don't think I had an addiction. You know it's hard for me to say. I've had friends who were, you know, very addicted... and they required hitting bottom [to start] going to A.A. I don't think that was my case."
Perhaps he's just older and wiser now, and can distinguish one too many hangovers from a larger, more worrisome pattern. What rings true, however--for anyone who has ever personally gone through addiction, or watched a loved one suffer its throes--is the couching of alcohol dependency in terms usually reserved for a romantic affair. Type the words "alcohol" and "love affair" into any search engine and see what pops up: a few hundred thousand testimonials written by recovering alcoholics.
Not all substance abuse metaphors are the same, of course. Whereas Mr. Bush's troubles might be likened to ongoing infidelity that threatened his personal relationships (or jogging routine), Barack Obama has known the headlong rush of escapism. His admissions of drug and alcohol use describe not an addiction, per se, as much as a high school brush with a potentially destructive femme fatale. In his book, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Obama reflects on where his behavior could have led him:
"Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man. ...I got high [to] push questions of who I was out of my mind."
His admissions of trying pot (and he did inhale) and cocaine (Mr. Bush never would say one way or the other if he had) have caused some to wonder if there's such a thing as being too honest about the past. But therein lies a media double-standard. Tell the nation everything and the press will criticize you for it. Don't and they'll dig it up anyway and call you evasive. Personally, I find both Bush and Obama's disclosures to be refreshing. We all make mistakes, and can be made better for them. In many ways, coming clean about drug and alcohol abuse mirror the admission of a secret love affair. In both matters, honesty is the way to go.
(Hammer Music USA)
