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Politics : THE WHITE HOUSE -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gersh Avery who wrote (17866)	3/1/2008 10:06:58 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 25737

The High Cost of the War on Marijuana According to a 2006 Bureau of Justice Statistics report, 12.7 percent of state inmates and 12.4 percent of federal inmates incarcerated for drug violations are there for marijuana offenses. Thus there are about 33,655 state inmates and 10,785 federal inmates behind bars for violating marijuana laws. (And still more are imprisoned elsewhere. The report failed to include estimates on the percentage of inmates in county jails for pot-related offenses.) The cost of imprisoning these pot offenders: more than $1 billion each year. Yes, over one billion dollars. Every year. To lock up marijuana offenders. And that's just the beginning, notes Paul Armentano of NORML: "This billion dollar price tag only estimates the financial costs on the 'back end' of a marijuana arrest. The criminal justice costs to taxpayers -- such as the man-hours it takes a police officer to arrest and process the average pot offender -- on the 'front end' is far greater, with some economists estimating the financial burden to be upwards of $7 billion a year. Naturally, as the annual number of pot arrests continues to increase (according to the latest FBI data, marijuana arrests now constitute 44 percent of all illicit drug arrests), these costs are only going to grow larger." Some put the total cost, weighing in all factors, even higher -- above $10 billion each and every year. All this, to search out and destroy users of a drug that is, by all standards, far less harmful than alcohol and tobacco. All this, in a country where an adult can legally buy enough liquor to drink himself to death in one night, or enough cigarettes to turn his lungs into blackened shriveled husks. Ah, justice! (Source: NORML: alternet.org )