"Casualties From the War on Drugs"

It must be kind of tough to look out through those cold, gray bars in your cell at the local hoosegow and see people buying pot legally across the street at a legal dispensary...

I don't know why that came up, but it did.  I do get a little empathetic from time to time.  Not sympathetic, just empathetic.

Anyway, as an economist, and a businessman, and a reasonably frugal American, and a patriotic veteran, I look at waste with disdain.  I don't like it, no matter what the form.  And one form is to lock up a whole sub-section of our society for choosing to do things to themselves that others find less than desirable. 

Remember my old admonition?  

"They just want to be left

     alone to live your life..." 

So, undesirable, in fact, that they - the Powers That Be, have conjured up zillions of laws against it.  And the enforcement of those laws have packed our jails and prisons full to overflowing.  And at an almost incalculable cost in terms of money and time and grief and peoples' lives.

Although I can only choose to vote for one of the two major parties (guess which?), my politics tends more toward Libertarian.  I want a Government that stays out of my wallet, out of my business, out of my residence and out of my bedroom.  Assuming nobody gets hurt, that is.  After that, pretty much anything goes.  So being offended by wasting $Trillions and decades trying to get people to stop smoking and snorting and shooting up, and watching an underbelly of our society become wealthy pandering to them, I come down on the side of legalizing and taxing the piss out of it.  

I was always told you tax stuff you don't want as much of, because folks will do less of it if it if they get taxed.  If our "betters" in D.C. and all the state capitols would embrace that concept I think we'd be a lot better off.  

Let's take a quick tour of what we as a society have done to ourselves during this "War on Drugs:"

  -  Amount annually spent in the U.S. on the "War on Drugs:"  $47 Billion.

  -  Number of arrests in 2017 (the latest stats) in the U.S. for drug law violations:   1,632,921.

  -  Number of drug arrests that were for possession only:  1,394,614 (85.4%).

  -  Number of people arrested for a marijuana law violations in 2017:   659,700.

  -  Number of people arrested for drug law violations who are Black or Latino:  46.9% (despite making up only 31.5% of the population).

  -  Number of people in the U.S. incarcerated in 2016:  2,205,300 (highest incarceration rate per capita in the world).

  -  Number of people in the U.S. incarcerated for a drug law violation in 2017:  456,000.

  -  Number of states allowing the medical use of marijuana:  33, plus the District of Columbia.

  -  Number of states that have legalized marijuana:  11.

  -  Number of states that have decriminalized or removed the threat of jail time for simple possession of small amounts of marijuana:  22.

This year's anticipated tax revenue from the sale of maryjowanna in the State of Colorado:  $1,000,000,000+.  That's with a "B."

And finally, just for kickers, the number of students who have lost Federal financial aid eligibility because of a drug conviction:  200,000+.

And, as an example of legislative excess in the extreme, there's a guy in Wisconsin who was caught selling 3 pounds of pot to a cop back in 1993.  He was sentenced to 40 years to life in 1994.  He's still in prison...

Perhaps we ought to rethink this whole process...........