mondaymonkey

by legalization

I read this webpage,Should Governments Legalize and Tax Marijuana?. I think the page is pretty shoddy as far as a look into marijuana costs. But I decided to estimate how much the gov't wastes on Policing, "counciling", Court Fees, etc.

So ontop of the obvious tax benefits (gov't could theoretically snap up the difference between production costs and actual sale) the gov't could also save on arrests.

According to Marijuana | Drug War Facts there where on the order of nearly 875 000 marijuana arrests. 775 thousand of them being possession, and the other 100000 being trafficking, production charges.

Assume each possession takes 1 hour of 2 officers time to ticket, fine, follow up, and convict a person of simple possession. That means that we're looking at 1 550 000 man-hours of police alone to convict these people. If we think that each officer gets about 20-30 bucks an hour, then we're looking at 31-46.5 million dollars saved on police time. And this is discounting laying off many officers completely due to less demand on police time. What about also the time cops are sitting around waiting to spot a possessor?

The cost of busting people, with helicopters, swat teams, wiretaps, FBI investiagtors, search warrents, 24/7 survelance, the cost of busts become mind boggling.

For the costs of keeping a marijuana user prisoner see this page Marijuana Sentencing Guidelines

Kind of scary eh? If you count up the dollars, its absolutly ridiculous to jail marijuana users. Even IF it was a bad drug, the loss of GDP, and increases in tax STILL are a better situation. If the drug caused cancer like cigarettes and caused problems like alcohol, you`d still see a positive increase in the economy if you legalized. But we all know marijuana is not even close to as harmful as the two above drugs.

Buzzby

A couple of years ago, 500 economists signed a letter estimating that legalizing marijuana would save the government 14 billion dollars a year.

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mondaymonkey

14 billion..... thats a lot of dough. (or doh!). 14 billion a year will really help the government with repaying the debt, or stimulating the economy.

14 billions dollars could also buy a lot of marijuana

claygooding

Do the math. If each of those possession charges carried a $200 fine,they made money,and how much do you figure the bail bondsman made and the attorney's?
There is a lot of money involved in this that they don't want to lose.

Vesey

I wonder if illegality pays them more than legality, though?

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ReeferSadness

All I know is that the most harmful side effect of cannabis consumption is jail time.

People have been smoking pot for over 3,000 years and they feel like just making it illegal is gonna make people stop?

Hell, lets make white T-shirts and Snickers bars illegal too. Arrest everyone with a white T-shirt or a Snickers bar and throw them in jail.

WTF? The word ignorance comes to mind when I hear "Marijuana Prohibition".... wake up motherfuckers!!!!

TheMeatball

Did they? How much does the police officer who has to haul in a pot smoker make per hour? How about the court costs? How about the processing costs for giving someone a criminal record? Nevermind the costs of incarcerating someone.

That $200 won't go far. And honestly, $14 billion won't make or break any budgets on the scale of the US Government, but it's mindblowing that they have this instant $14,000,000,000 per year they could be taking advantage of, but aren't based on nothing but outdated wives tales and greed.