Marijuana Policy Project

Media outlets in southeastern Wisconsin were all over last week's bust that yielded a multi-million dollar haul of hundreds of marijuana plants, being grown inside homes that had been rigged up for that purpose. The story was intriguing: the pot growers had bypassed electric meters in order to disguise the massive amount of electricity needed to power all those grow lights, and the insides the houses had been transformed into a giant version of what happens when you leave something in the refrigerator for too long.

But as Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Jim Stingl points out, a lot of us have been covering similar stories for a lot of years now, and the cumulative effect on the marijuana trade from all those arrests (and imprisonments) is approximately zilch. And all the while, Wisconsin has had a major problem with people abusing a legal drug. "Show me some news video of a roomful of drunk drivers connected together in leg irons," Stingl writes, before going onto argue for legalizing marijuana. "That's a lot scarier than these weeds that make people giggle and crave junk food."    

I looked around on the web for a counter argument to Stingl's. You know, something along the lines of "marijuana is as illegal as any other drug and people involved in it's production and sale belong in prison." That may be the official line but it's pretty tough to find anybody outside of law enforcement and government prosecutors who's willing to make the argument anymore.

"We are waging a war on pot, a substance less addictive and harmful than tobacco and alcohol," writes National Review's Rich Lowry. "Marijuana is not harmless, and its use should be discouraged, but in the same way, say, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day should be discouraged. The criminal-justice system should stay out of it."         

Then there's the Cato Institute's Doug Bandow, a former Special Assistant to President Reagan. "Why government tosses pot smokers in jail while tolerating use of alcohol and cigarettes, far more dangerous substances by most measures, has never been obvious," Bandow writes, also in National Review. "There is good reason for people to abstain from all of them; there is no good reason to imprison them if people do not."     

I thought George F. Will would be a reliable supporter of the war on drugs, but in a column from 2005, Will doesn't do much more than reiterate the assertions of John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. "Because marijuana is, unlike heroin and cocaine, not toxic — because marijuana users do not die of overdoses — its reputation is too benign," seems to be Will's strongest argument for the status quo, and I'm not even sure that's his opinion, or Walters'. I'll keep searching.