New Research on Drug Legalization

Spencer,

CUT IT FOR THIS WEEKEND!!

THIS ARTICLE IS PHENOMENAL!!!! Has solvency ev for legalization, drug war is racist, Portugal decrim
effort did not cause increased drug use, drug war increases crime and empowers gangs…

Enjoy,

Dobs

p.s. upload the drug war is racist jazz after you cut it cause I know lots of debaters can use it…

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Nicholas Kristoff, columnist for The New York Times, 10-28-10

I dropped in on a marijuana shop here that proudly boasted that it sells “31 flavors.” It also offered a loyalty
program. For every 10 purchases of pot — supposedly for medical uses — you get one free packet.

“There are five of these shops within a three-block radius,” explained the proprietor, Edward J. Kim. He brimmed
with pride at his inventory and sounded like any small businessman as he complained about onerous government
regulation. Like, well, state and federal laws.

But those burdensome regulations are already evaporating in California, where anyone who can fake a headache
already can buy pot. Now there’s a significant chance that on Tuesday, California voters will choose to go further
and broadly legalize marijuana.

I hope so. Our nearly century-long experiment in banning marijuana has failed as abysmally as Prohibition did, and
California may now be pioneering a saner approach. Sure, there are risks if California legalizes pot. But our present
drug policy has three catastrophic consequences.

First, it squanders billions of dollars that might be better used for education. California now spends more money on
prisons than on higher education. It spends about $216,000 per year on each juvenile detainee, and just $8,000 on
each child in the troubled Oakland public school system.

Each year, some 750,000 Americans are arrested for possession of small amounts of marijuana. Is that really the
optimal use of our police force?

In contrast, legalizing and taxing marijuana would bring in substantial sums that could be used to pay for schools,
libraries or early childhood education. A Harvard economist, Jeffrey A. Miron, calculates that marijuana could
generate $8.7 billion in tax revenue each year if legalized nationally, while legalization would also save the same
sum annually in enforcement costs.

That’s a $17 billion swing in the nation’s finances — enough to send every 3- and 4-year-old in a poor family to a
high-quality preschool. And that’s an investment that would improve education outcomes and reduce crime and drug
use in the future — with enough left over to pay for an extensive nationwide campaign to discourage drug use.

The second big problem with the drug war is that it has exacerbated poverty and devastated the family structure of
African-Americans. Partly that’s because drug laws are enforced inequitably. Black and Latino men are much more
likely than whites to be stopped and searched and, when drugs are found, prosecuted.

Here in Los Angeles, blacks are arrested for marijuana possession at seven times the rate whites are, according to a
study by the Drug Policy Alliance, which favors legalization. Yet surveys consistently find that young whites use
marijuana at higher rates than young blacks.

Partly because of drug laws, a black man now has a one-in-three chance of serving time in prison at some point in
his life, according to the Sentencing Project, a group that seeks reform in the criminal justice system. This makes it
more difficult for black men to find jobs, more difficult for black women to find suitable husbands, and less
common for black children to grow up in stable families with black male role models. So, sure, drugs have
devastated black communities — but the remedy of criminal sentencing has made the situation worse.

The third problem with our drug policy is that it creates crime and empowers gangs. “The only groups that benefit
from continuing to keep marijuana illegal are the violent gangs and cartels that control its distribution and reap
immense profits from it through the black market,” a group of current and former police officers, judges and
prosecutors wrote last month in an open letter to voters in California.

I have no illusions about drugs. One of my childhood friends in Yamhill, Ore., pretty much squandered his life by
dabbling with marijuana in ninth grade and then moving on to stronger stuff. And yes, there’s some risk that
legalization would make such dabbling more common. But that hasn’t been a significant problem in Portugal, which
decriminalized drug use in 2001.

Likewise, medical marijuana laws approved in 1996 have in effect made pot accessible to any adult in California,
without any large increase in usage. Special medical clinics abound where for about $45 you can see a doctor who is
certain to give you the medical recommendation that you need to buy marijuana. Then you can visit Mr. Kim and
choose one of his 31 varieties, topping out at a private “OG” brand that costs $75 for one-eighth of an ounce. “It’s
like a fine wine, cured, aged, dried,” he boasted.

Or browse the online offerings. One store advertises: “refer a friend, get free joint.” And the world hasn’t ended.
One advantage of our federal system is that when we have a failed policy, we can grope for improvements by
experimenting at the state level. I hope California will lead the way on Tuesday by legalizing marijuana.

The Wall Street Journal October 26 2010

By GEORGE SOROS , Mr. Soros is chairman of Soros Fund Management and founder of the Open Society Foundations

Our marijuana laws are clearly doing more harm than good. The criminalization of marijuana did not prevent marijuana from becoming the
most widely used illegal substance in the United States and many other countries. But it did result in extensive costs and negative
consequences.

Law enforcement agencies today spend many billions of taxpayer dollars annually trying to enforce this unenforceable prohibition. The
roughly 750,000 arrests they make each year for possession of small amounts of marijuana represent more than 40% of all drug arrests.

Regulating and taxing marijuana would simultaneously save taxpayers billions of dollars in enforcement and incarceration costs, while
providing many billions of dollars in revenue annually. It also would reduce the crime, violence and corruption associated with drug markets,
and the violations of civil liberties and human rights that occur when large numbers of otherwise law-abiding citizens are subject to arrest.
Police could focus on serious crime instead.

The racial inequities that are part and parcel of marijuana enforcement policies cannot be ignored. African-Americans are no more likely than
other Americans to use marijuana but they are three, five or even 10 times more likely—depending on the city—to be arrested for possessing
marijuana. I agree with Alice Huffman, president of the California NAACP, when she says that being caught up in the criminal justice system
does more harm to young people than marijuana itself. Giving millions of young Americans a permanent drug arrest record that may follow
them for life serves no one's interests.

Racial prejudice also helps explain the origins of marijuana prohibition. When California and other U.S. states first decided (between 1915
and 1933) to criminalize marijuana, the principal motivations were not grounded in science or public health but rather in prejudice and
discrimination against immigrants from Mexico who reputedly smoked the "killer weed."

Who most benefits from keeping marijuana illegal? The greatest beneficiaries are the major criminal organizations in Mexico and elsewhere
that earn billions of dollars annually from this illicit trade—and who would rapidly lose their competitive advantage if marijuana were a legal
commodity. Some claim that they would only move into other illicit enterprises, but they are more likely to be weakened by being deprived of
the easy profits they can earn with marijuana.

This was just one reason the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy—chaired by three distinguished former presidents,
Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, César Gaviria of Colombia and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico—included marijuana decriminalization
among their recommendations for reforming drug policies in the Americas.

Like many parents and grandparents, I am worried about young people getting into trouble with marijuana and other drugs. The best
solution, however, is honest and effective drug education. One survey after another indicates that teenagers have better access than most
adults to marijuana—and often other drugs as well—and find it easier to buy marijuana than alcohol. Legalizing marijuana may make it
easier for adults to buy marijuana, but it can hardly make it any more accessible to young people. I'd much rather invest in effective
education than ineffective arrest and incarceration.

California's Proposition 19, which would legalize the recreational use and small-scale cultivation of marijuana, wouldn't solve all the problems
connected with the drug. But it would represent a major step forward, and its deficiencies can be corrected on the basis of experience. Just
as the process of repealing national alcohol prohibition began with individual states repealing their own prohibition laws, so individual states
must now take the initiative with respect to repealing marijuana prohibition laws. And just as California provided national leadership in 1996
by becoming the first state to legalize the medical use of marijuana, so it has an opportunity once again to lead the nation.

In many respects, of course, Proposition 19 already is a winner no matter what happens on Election Day. The mere fact of its being on the
ballot has elevated and legitimized public discourse about marijuana and marijuana policy in ways I could not have imagined a year ago.

These are the reasons I have decided to support Proposition 19 and invite others to do so.
Mr. Soros is chairman of Soros Fund Management and founder of the Open Society Foundations.

New York Times

Soros Pushes for Legalization of Marijuana

October 26, 2010, 7:36 am

The billionaire George Soros is speaking out in favor of legalizing the marijuana industry.

The financier laid out his arguments for backing California’s Proposition 19, which would
legalize the recreational use and small-scale cultivation of marijuana, in an opinion piece in The
Wall Street Journal.

Aside from the usual arguments for backing legalization — tax revenue for the federal
government, regulation of a corrupt industry, reduction in violent crime — Mr. Soros also argued
that the motivation for criminalizing marijuana was rooted in racism:

Racial prejudice also helps explain the origins of marijuana prohibition. When California and
other U.S. states first decided (between 1915 and 1933) to criminalize marijuana, the principal
motivations were not grounded in science or public health but rather in prejudice and
discrimination against immigrants from Mexico who reputedly smoked the “killer weed.”

And it seems Mr. Soros has put his money where his mouth is on this issue: the financier has
invested $3 million in the medical marijuana initiative and two other measures, according to The
Los Angeles Times. While he has not yet donated to support Proposition 19, Michael Vachon, an
adviser to Mr Soros, told the newspaper that “he plans to make a significant contribution.”

Legalization of Marijuana will curb violence and reduce power of Drug gangs
Timothy Egan, NYT, 9-29-10

The other major opponents appear, at first glance, to be somewhat of a surprise. The California
Cannabis Association, representing medical marijuana dispensaries, has come out against
legalization, claiming it would be “a direct assault on medical marijuana patients.”
Prop 19, in fact, would be a direct assault on the profits made by those dispensaries. A Rand
Drug Policy Research Center study this summer found that the price for an ounce of pot could
drop 90 percent — before a hefty tax — if it’s legalized in California. This is in part because the
law would allow people to grow a small plot of their own weed, further cutting into the cartels —
legal and illegal.

And that’s really the crux of the issue. Most of the bad things associated with marijuana come
from its criminalization. If legalization curbs the violence — of the Mexican drug lords, of the
gangsters who still wage turf wars in parts of California, of the powerful and paranoid growers in
the north — it will have done society a big favor.