Marijuana Policy Project

The General Assembly also did the right thing (Wow! Twice in one week! Who woulda thunk it?) last Tuesday when both the House and Senate voted to override Gov. Donald Carcieri’s veto of the bill to create compassion centers to legally distribute medical marijuana to sick people whose doctors say it will help them.

Perhaps it is time for the U.S. Congress to consider legalizing marijuana altogether. Yes, I mean even go past Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank’s bill to decriminalize up to 3.5 ounces of the drug and make it a legal commodity, regulated and taxed like alcohol.

When the first laws making the drug illegal were passed, people smoking marijuana was a rare and foreign phenomenon, limited to immigrants from Mexico, people who live in poor urban neighborhoods and jazz musicians.

But for the past 40 years now, millions of people have smoked marijuana in this and just about every other country on the planet and the adverse medical effects have been nil. If people’s lives are damaged by marijuana – adults or children – that damage has come not from the substance itself, but from the laws against it: jail, losing or not getting jobs, losing college loans or scholarships, criminal records that last a lifetime.

If marijuana is not doing serious physical or mental damage to people, why are we as a society so intent on doing legal damage to them?

A really good argument can be made that if everyone who drinks alcohol put it down today and started smoking marijuana instead, society would be better off by tonight. Fewer people would die or be maimed on the highways, fewer spouses and children would be verbally or physically or sexually abused, fewer people would show up at hospitals with corroded livers, police would have less vandalism, fighting and other rowdiness to deal with. The billions of dollars that are spent every year (if not every month) on tracking down, prosecuting, imprisoning and supervising on probation and parole people who use marijuana could be put to better use. Our prisons would free up space for violent felons who belong there, not some luckless mope caught with a bag of pot.

Cottage industries that would spring up to grow, process, package and sell marijuana would provide jobs and generate taxes at each step in the process — laws would be best designed to promote such small businesses, rather than have the tobacco conglomerates bigfoot the industry.

Also, organized crime and drug cartels would be deprived of the money they now reap from the tens of millions of people who want a product their government makes illegal.

There is virtually no downside.

Spare me any talk about it being more available to kids. What prompted me to write this was the inanity of Governor Carcieri’s veto message on the compassion centers, especially the part where he says: "Allowing the manufacture and sale of federally illegal drugs would send the wrong message to our children and place them at risk." Give me a break.

If your high school kid is not using marijuana now, it is because he or she does not want to, and you reared them to avoid it. It’s not because it is not available to them. If they want it, they can get it, without leaving the corridors of their schools. Just because there is a non-profit center to make it easier for sick, crippled people to get marijuana to treat their cancer, multiple sclerosis, AIDS or other disease is not going to affect the access teenagers have to the drug one whit, more or less. If you think it would you are kidding yourself.

Perhaps one of the few things that could limit a kid’s access to pot is to have it sold by a businessman with a license and a livelihood to protect, who maybe knows the kid’s parents because they live in the same city or town or neighborhood. If a kid breaks open his piggybank and collects enough nickels, dimes and pennies to buy a bag of weed, the street dealer will be there to sell it to him or her. The licensed shopkeeper is less likely to do that.

Don’t worry, legal pot isn’t going to happen anytime soon. But we would be better off if it did.