GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS, UNBELIEVABLE NEWS
by James W. Harris
Federal Marijuana Ban Turns 70
August 2 marked the 70th anniversary of federal marijuana prohibition. On that
day in 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the deceptively-titled
Marijuana Tax Act (actually a prohibition measure) into law.
The bill was passed after a Congressional "debate" that reads like a Marx
Brothers (Groucho or Karl, your choice) screenplay. That half-baked "debate"
was preceded by a federal campaign of outrageous lies, racism, and utter
claptrap.
So how's that working for us, seventy years later?
"It's hard to think of a more spectacularly bad, long-term policy failure than
our government's 70-year war on marijuana users," said Rob Kampia, executive
director of the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) in Washington, D.C. "Since the
federal government banned marijuana in 1937, it's gone from being an obscure
plant that few Americans had even heard of to the number-one cash crop in the
United States."
MPP points out:
* Federal government estimates indicate that marijuana use has increased
approximately 4,000 percent since the Marijuana Tax Act took effect.
* A study by researcher Jon Gettman, Ph.D., published in December 2006 and
based on government data, found marijuana to be the country's number-one cash
crop, exceeding the value of corn and wheat combined.
* The federally funded Monitoring the Future survey reports that approximately
85 percent of high school seniors describe marijuana as "easy to get" -- a
figure that has remained virtually unchanged since the survey began in 1975.
* In 2005 (the most recent figures available), U.S. law enforcement made an all-
time record 786,545 marijuana arrests -- 89 percent for possession, not sale or
trafficking.
We could add more. Marijuana prohibition is a giant federal subsidy to criminal
gangs. It keeps a proven therapeutic substance out of the hands of untold
thousands of desperately sick people who, doctors and researchers agree, could
benefit from it. It wastes precious law enforcement and criminal justice
resources. All this for an impossible ban of a substance that is safer than
alcohol or tobacco.
And finally, in a country allegedly based on individual liberty, the idea that
people can't grow, smoke, and sell a common plant, is outrageous.
"Marijuana prohibition is easily the government's biggest long-term failure
since its disastrous experiment with alcohol Prohibition from 1919 to 1933, but
the marijuana prohibition disaster just lives on," Kampia said. "It's time to
steer a new course and regulate marijuana like we do alcohol."
Well said. (Except that we'd like to see alcohol deregulated, too!)
(Source: Marijuana Policy Project:
mpp.org
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