The Enlightened Despot

Unbelievable:

Matt Yglesias: thoughtful, intelligent, open minded, and yet - time after time - dead wrong. Here he goes again:

Here’s one idea:

Of course there are many illegal markets that would generate stimulus were they to be legalized. Here are some of the big ones.

1. Drugs
2. Guns
3. Prostitution (except in Nevada)
4. Gay prostitution (even in Nevada)
5. Gambling
6. Trade with Cuba
7. Liberalized immigration

I’ve heard a lot of that kid of thing lately, but though I’d be a supporter of several of the items suggested on the list, I’m a bit skeptical of the theory. These all sounds to me like things that would do more to raise the potential output of the economy than to raise the actual output of an economy that’s producing far less than capacity right now.

…

With regard to things like drugs and prostitution, bringing some transactions that are already happening into the above-ground economy would certainly boost our GDP measurements. But these are transactions that are already happening. Shifting them from the illicit to the licit economy doesn’t actually change the fact that there are already people in America earning a living as prostitutes or pimps or drug dealers.

With so much incorrectness, it’s hard to know where to begin. Yes, it’s true that increasing measured GDP isn’t the same thing as getting richer, but making formerly black market activity legal isn’t just an accounting trick - you would actually be altering what happens in that economy substantively. For one thing, these activities would now be taxed. Of course, raising taxes isn’t generally stimulative, but presumably the tax burden would be more than offset by the lower cost of doing business without interference from law enforcement. More importantly, pimps and drug dealers would be able to deposit all of their income in banks. When drug dealers have, say, $26 million in cash lying around their houses, we are cheating ourselves out of vast sums of potential investment capital. And the rumor on the street is that the banks could use a little extra capital these days.

Pete Guither of Drug WarRant, a drug policy blog hosted by Salon, has this to say about my last post on legalization:

There are many kinds of legalization. And different ones would be appropriate for different drugs. Legalization does not preclude regulation - even severe regulation (I sometimes think we need a better universal understanding of the word “legalization”). The advantage of legalization of some kind for each drug is to remove (to the extent possible) the black market control.

Sure, legalization of heroin in the tobacco model might have more adverse effects than positive effects, while legalization in an adaption of the Swiss model (free or low-cost heroin maintenance in clinical setting, removing both the sexiness of it and the profit for criminal dealers) could actually reduce the negative affects through legalization.

The point about different forms of legalization is well taken. Hard drugs in Switzerland are not as freely distributed as marijuana in the Netherlands, which in turn is more regulated than alcohol and tobacco here, and even those are regulated and kept artificially expensive through taxation. Personally, I’d like to see restrictions on even the most dangerous drugs reduced to levels substantially lower than those in Switzerland, but this doesn’t mean that you’d be able to buy heroin at the corner store.

On the other hand, I think Guither’s hypothetical is wrong: regulating heroin like tobacco almost certainly wouldn’t be a net negative change from our current system. I don’t think it’s the way to go by any means, but I don’t see how it could do enough damage to outweigh the potential for a sane Afghanistan policy (though it seems we’re about to take a few baby steps in the right direction), a huge boost in tax revenues, and the elimination of the illicit drug trade. There are plenty of paths toward legalization that might make us all worse off in the short-term, but I don’t see how any end-state that can honestly be called ‘legalization’ could actually be worse than the system we have in place now.

And to think I debated whether that title was too childish to publish once. But Frederick brought it back with this response to the original:

I would focus on marijuana, for what I think is the very convincing reason of humility. It’s a certainty that legalizing drugs would have both good and bad effects; what’s uncertain is the exact nature, ratio, and pattern of those effects. It’s also certain that the effects, both good and bad, of legalizing cocaine would be more dramatic than those of legalizing marijuana. Why not then legalize marijuana first and observe the results? Then, after a time of say ten years, we can decide whether we want to legalize cocaine; assuming we do, we’ll know better what to expect and be able to legalize the other drugs in a more elegant way, maximizing the good and minimizing the bad.

As it happens, I disagree with this, but I don’t think it’s obviously wrong, and it wasn’t what I was objecting to. I wasn’t really talking about policy at all, but rather about what people say about it. If people want to push for marijuana legalization, that’s terrific - I won’t campaign for it, but I’ll vote for it. But I do object to people using arguments that obviously apply to drugs en masse as if they apply only to marijuana. Legalizing cocaine and heroin is so massively unpopular that admitting that what you are saying implies that we should do so seems to serve as a reductio of your reasoning. But people also prefer to avoid the ‘marijuana isn’t so bad’ argument if they can. So you get rants about personal freedoms, the evils of the marijuana war, the lost tax revenue, the crisis in our prisons, etc., as if these things decided the issue. Which I think they do, in fact. But what these folks really mean is that all these things are true and marijuana isn’t so bad; if it were worse for you than it is, all those ills would be outweighed. Otherwise, they’d be arguing for legalizing it all.

This, for instance, makes me want to stop arguing altogether, and start stabbing people with a fork:

The fact is, the marijuana law in the U.S. is a big lie. It’s racist and classist. White rich people can smoke marijuana with impunity and poor black people get a record, can’t get education, can’t get a loan, and all of sudden go into a life of desperation and become hardened criminals. Why? Because we’ve got a racist law based on lies about marijuana.

Rich white people snort cocaine with impunity too! The marijuana trade is turning poor black people into hardened criminals? I hate to be crude, but, seriously, fuck you. The truth is, as a society, we don’t care about drug use per se. We’ve elected two presidents in a row knowing full well they’d used cocaine. We invest our money with people who use cocaine. We send our kids to college, where they, too, use cocaine, and we don’t lose too much sleep over it. But if we get our hands on the rat bastards who sold it to them…

Okay, that’s enough. I’m taking some deep breaths. If you aren’t bored of this already, there are some thoughts on why I think Frederick is wrong on the policy angle after the jump.

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The Patron Saint of Hyperbole strikes again on his new favorite subject, marijuana legalization. In reference to Obama’s response to a question on the topic at his press conference, Sullivan says:

The chuckle suggests a man of his generation. The dismissiveness toward the question of ending Prohibition as both a good in itself and a form of tax revenue is, however, depressing. His answer was a non-answer. I’m tired of having the Prohibition issue treated as if it’s trivial or a joke. It is neither. It is about freedom and it’s deadly serious. As for your online audience, Mr president, have you forgotten who got you elected?

There are a lot of hysteria warning signs here. First, note the capitalized ‘Prohibition’. When Sullivan starts introducing terminology, you know you’re in for it. Then there is the weird claim that this was a “non-answer”. What he actually said was ‘no’. That might not be the answer Sullivan wants to hear, and it might have been nice to hear the rationale behind the answer, but this is as clear-cut an answer as you could hope for. And, finally, Sullivan provides a fairly insane Easy Question of the Day: has Obama forgotten who got him elected? No, he no doubt remembers that he was elected by a coalition of people who knew he was publicly opposed to legalization, people who didn’t know and didn’t care, and people who hoped he was in favor but were too lazy to look it up and can presumably be counted on not to notice now, either.

The bigger issue, though, is that this marijuana-centric outrage is complete bullshit. If you want pot legalized because you think it’s harmless and you enjoy smoking it, then knock yourself out. But once you bring up tax revenues, personal freedom, or the evils of the drug war, you really owe an explanation for why you’re focusing on marijuana. And while I’d love to hear it, I doubt that explanation would be very convincing.

On the one hand, I hate to say I told you so. On the other hand, that’s a complete lie, I actually love nothing more. So here goes:

Back when Eric Holder’s name first popped up in the appointment rumor mill, a number of lefties went berserk, noting some reactionary and stupid things he had said about marijuana, worried that this signaled that Obama was adopting a hard line drug warrior stance. But, as I pointed out, this is an incredibly stupid inference to make, as are most inferences about policy gleaned from appointment watching:

Holder’s views are very wrong, but he isn’t going to be crafting any drug legislation. For the most part, he won’t even be deciding how to approach existing drug legislation; he’ll be figuring out the best way to carry out Obama’s vision of how drug legislation should be approached. That’s what the unitary executive is all about.

So I’m doubly pleased to see this today:

Attorney General Eric Holder said at a press conference Wednesday that the Justice Department will no longer raid medical marijuana clubs that are established legally under state law. His declaration is a fulfillment of a campaign promise by President Barack Obama, and marks a major shift from the previous administration.

After the inauguration, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) continued to carry outsuch raids, despite Obama’s promise. Holder was asked if those raids represented American policy going forward.

“No,” he said. “What the president said during the campaign, you’ll be surprised to know, will be consistent with what we’ll be doing in law enforcement. He was my boss during the campaign. He is formally and technically and by law my boss now. What he said during the campaign is now American policy.”

On the other hand, the fact that Holder once publicly worried about ‘marijuana violence’ is still very, very funny.

I know I’ve had a lot to say about drug policy recently, and I don’t want to turn this blog into a one-trick pony, but there has been a whole lot of buzz about how great Mark Kleinman’s not-at-all-great idea for quazi-legalizing marijuana is, so I feel compelled to weigh in. Here’s the scheme:

Substantively, I’m not a big fan of legalization on the alcohol model; a legal pot industry, like the legal booze and gambling industries, would depend for the bulk of its sales on excessive use, which would provide a strong incentive for the marketing effort to aim at creating and maintaining addiction. (Cannabis abuse is somewhat less common, and tends to be somewhat less long-lasting, than alcohol abuse, and the physiological and behavioral effects tend to be less dramatic, but about 11% of those who smoke a fifth lifetime joint go on to a period of heavy daily use measured in months.) So I’d expect outright legalization to lead to a substantial increase in the prevalence of cannabis-related drug abuse disorder: I’d regard an increase of only 50% as a pleasant surprise, and if I had to guess I’d guess at something like a doubling.

So I continue to favor a “grow your own” policy, under which it would be legal to grow, possess, and use cannabis and to give it away, but illegal to sell it. Of course there would be sales, and law enforcement agencies would properly mostly ignore those sales. But there wouldn’t be billboards.

That beautifully-crafted policy has only two major defects that I’m aware of: it wouldn’t create tax revenue, and no one but me* supports it. On the drug-warrior side of the argument, even those who can read the handwriting on the wall won’t dare to deviate from the orthodoxy. As we did with alcohol, the country will lurch from one bad policy (prohibition) to another (commercial legalization). I just hope the sellers are required to measure the cannabinoid profiles of their products and put those measurements on the label.

I am extremely skeptical of the motivation here. That first paragraph rests on a whole host of presuppositions that, in my estimation, range from the questionable to the deranged. I wonder where Kleinman gets his standard for marijauna addiction and the distinction between excessive use and plain old use. More substantively, I wonder how much dosage patterns for recreational drugs are ever dictated by marketing strategies. Especially in the case of tobacco, which can’t advertise on television, I don’t see much evidence at all that the sellers are doing an effective job of advocating heavy use; rather, they’re advocating plain old use, and relying on the fact that they are selling one of the most addictive substances known to man to do the rest.

I don’t think that begins to exhaust what’s wrong with the motivation for this compromise, but its the proposed solution that I really want to focus on. Legalizing private growing only would be an improvement over the status quo, but not much of one. To start with the drawback that Kleinman aknowledges, the tax revenues forfitted are non-trivial: by his own estimation, domestic marijuana purchases are in the neighborhood of $10 billion a year. The revenue from a direct tobacco-style tax on that, plus the income taxes of marijuana industry workers brought into the mainstream economy, plus the transfer of earnings from mattresses to banks (I gather they could use a little more capital) is nothing to sniff at.

Furthermore, I think we should always be hesitant to pursue policies that increase the number of laws we ignore by common consent. There will always be rules on the books that society winks at, but it’s a situation that encourages abuse and corruption, as Kevin Drum points out. Most marijuana consumers are not realistically ready, willing, or able to grow their own. This policy wouldn’t do all that much to decrease the size of the illegal industry.

Meanwhile, if there is any reason to think this would actually address the problems Kleinman is worried about, he doesn’t mention them. Wouldn’t small-time growers be exactly as dependant on heavy users as would massive pot corporations? Illicit vendors can’t advertise conventionally, but they obviously have marketing strategies. What reason is there to assume that the legal approach to weed pushing would lead to heavier users than the illegal approach? Did prohibition lead to an era of people responsibly having one glass of blackmarket red wine a night to help fight heart disease?

Speaking of prohibition, this sentence is worth re-quoting:

As we did with alcohol, the country will lurch from one bad policy (prohibition) to another (commercial legalization).

Kleinman doesn’t say what a better alcohol policy would be, but if we take his marijuana suggestion as a model, he presumably thinks we should be drinking legally-produced bathtub gin in illegal but tolerated speakeasies. I suspect that policy wouldn’t be so popular.

Note: A lot of what follows is covered in earlier posts, in a few instances word-for-word. But some of it is new, and I had to write this up for something else (thus the lack of links, but take my word for it, it’s all true), so I figured I’d post it here as well.

President Obama has taken his first concrete steps toward fulfilling one of the key foreign policy promises of his campaign: improving America’s military efforts in Afghanistan. Over the next few months, 17,000 additional troops will be deployed to the region. This is welcome news, coming on the heels of news that over 2000 civilians were killed there in 2008. 39% of these casualties were inflicted by pro-government forces (that is, NATO and the Karzai government itself), and of those, two-thirds were killed in air strikes. Simply put, we do not have enough boots on the ground, and as a result, we have been forced to over-rely on air power, which is necessarily less precise.
As badly as these troops are needed, however, their chances of enabling us to defeat the Taliban and stabilize the region are vanishingly slim unless we radically reshape our strategy in Afghanistan, particularly with respect to its primary industry, opium. It is widely understood how central the opium issue is to the war effort. As National Security Advisor Jim Jones put it, “It is not the resurgence of the Taliban but the linkage of the economy to drug production, crime, corruption and black market activities which poses the greatest danger for Afghanistan.” Despite this, there is hardly any mainstream discussion of what our approach to the opium trade should be. Rather, debate is focused on the narrow tactical question of how best to dismantle the drug trade; the desirability of dismantling it simply goes without saying.
But like so many things that go without saying, this strategy is in fact too stupid for words. While the data is - naturally enough - spotty, opium production most likely accounts for around a third of Afghanistan’s GDP. This figure fluctuates a good deal from year to year, but the trade has been a major part of the country’s economy for over a quarter of a century. More than 10% of the population is directly employed in the production effort.
It can therefore be instructive - though of course somewhat hyperbolic - to substitute ‘the economy’ for ‘the drug trade’ in statements about our strategy for the region. So when Joe Klein, for instance, says that for success to be even conceivable “[t]he Karzai government will have to end its corruption and close down the drug trade”, he is saying something disturbingly close to “the Karzai government will have to shut down the economy.” Destroying the source of a population’s livelihood goes against the core of any sane counterinsurgency strategy. If we are working to win the hearts and minds (remember those?) of people who are growing a profitable crop, and if our enemy offers to purchase that crop for export while we offer to destroy it and shoot anyone who makes too much of a fuss, we are always going to come up short.
There is at least some indication that General Jones recognizes this, having assured a reporter that we “will not see NATO soldiers burning poppy fields.” And this is technically true: the bulk of the eradication effort involves Afghan soldiers destroying plants by hand, though there is enthusiasm amongst many in the U.S. military for greater reliance on a program of poisoning fields via aircraft. All of which has had a fairly typical degree of success for a supply-side drug reduction effort: opium output over the past few years has been higher than at any point in history.
Drug trafficking has proven time again to be something we simply can’t beat, and we all know what you’re supposed to do when you can’t beat ‘em. Which is not to say that we need to start supplying street corners worldwide. There are severe codeine and morphine shortages in many parts of the world. Due to extensive international regulation, the supply of legal opium is kept artificially low, and reforms would be needed before countries would be allowed to import the medication they need even once they were able to afford it. But creating a program for licit poppy growing on a significant portion of Afghanistan’s farmland would dramatically change the dynamic between pro-government forces and the Afghan people. We would have to overpay for the scheme to work; the price of opium on the legal market is far below its price in the heroin trade. But Afghanistan’s entire GDP is $10 billion. Pricing the Taliban out of the market for Afghan crops simply isn’t that expensive a proposition. As an added benefit, raising the country’s major industry out of the black market and into the daylight would remove the major cause of the government’s widespread corruption.
We have a war on drugs. We desperately need to get it off them and into recovery. There is simply no chance of succeeding in Afghanistan until our war kicks its opium habit.

For something so profoundly obvious, the effect of drug policy on our efforts in Afghanistan gets extremely sporadic and shallow coverage. Over the past few days we’ve seen one of the periodic spikes in discussion of the issue, but it will no doubt fade back into the shadows soon. This is a very bad thing, because our crusader attitude toward drugs is not just a side show here; presumably there is some number of troops we could theoretically have in the country that would allow us to defeat the insurgents and stop the flow of opium, but as a practical matter, a hard line on this issue is a sufficient condition for failure.

Recent discussion of the issue began with this inanity from Joe Klein:

The drug trade — Afghanistan provides more than 90% of the world’s opium — permeates everything. A former governor, Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, was caught with nine tons of opium, enough to force him out of office, but not enough to put him in jail, since he enjoys — according to U.S. military sources — a close relationship with the Karzai government. Indeed, Akhundzada and Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali — who operates in Kandahar, the next province over — are considered the shadow rulers of the region (along with Mullah Omar). “You should understand,” a British commander said, “the fight here isn’t really about religion. It’s about money.”

…

The Karzai government will have to end its corruption and close down the drug trade. There are plenty of other reforms necessary — the international humanitarian effort is a shabby, self-righteous mess; some of our NATO allies aren’t carrying their share of the military burden — but the war will remain a bloody stalemate at best as long as jihadis come across the border from Pakistan and the drug trade flourishes.

So the opium trade is a huge part of Afghanistan’s political and economic life. Klein’s first rule of counterinsurgency, then, is to crush the major industry of the people you’re trying to win over. Color me skeptical. Cato’s Ted Carpenter gives a comprehensive account of why such a strategy is doomed, then offers this as an alternative:

U.S. officials need to keep their priorities straight. Our mortal enemy is al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime that made Afghanistan into a sanctuary for that terrorist organization. The drug war is a dangerous distraction in the campaign to destroy those forces. Recognizing that security considerations sometimes trump other objectives would hardly be an unprecedented move by Washington. U.S. agencies quietly ignored drug-trafficking activities of anticommunist factions in Central America during the 1980s when the primary goal was to keep those countries out of the Soviet orbit. In the early 1990s, the United States also eased its pressure on Peru’s government regarding the drug-eradication issue when President Alberto Fujimori concluded that a higher priority had to be given to winning coca farmers away from the Maoist Shining Path guerrilla movement.

The Obama administration should adopt a similar pragmatic policy in Afghanistan and look the other way regarding the drug-trafficking activities of friendly warlords. And above all, the U.S. military must not become the enemy of Afghan farmers whose livelihood depends on opium-poppy cultivation. True, some of the funds from the drug trade will find their way into the coffers of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. That is an inevitable side effect of a global prohibitionist policy that creates such an enormous profit from illegal drugs. But alienating pro-Western Afghan factions in an effort to disrupt the flow of revenue to the Islamic radicals is too high a price to pay. General Jones should reconsider his views.

I feel odd saying this, but the gentleman from Cato isn’t going far enough. Here’s a letter from one of Patrick Appel’s readers:
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As the past few days of posting should make clear, Frederick and I are more or less on the same page as far as the drug war is concerned. This last post would be dead on, except that it is slightly too generous to the Brookings Institute. The claim that “the war on drugs has failed and will continue to do so unless its strategy is dramatically changed” isn’t merely so understated as to be obvious, it’s so understated as to be false, because there is no dramatic change in strategy that could make the drug war successful. Well, perhaps that’s unfair - we could nuke Afghanistan and all of South America. That would probably end U.S. drug consumption as we know it for at least a few months. Failing that, though, the government will always run into the fundamental problem that they don’t - and can’t - care as much about stopping drug use as junkies care about using drugs.

We spend vast sums of money messing with the drug trade so as to drive prices up, in the hopes of driving demand down. Your Intro Econ teacher will tell you that demand for drugs is completely immune to changes in price; this is, of course, a stupid, oversimplified thing for your Intro Econ teacher to tell you, but the fact remains that these are single-issue spenders. As more and more money is spent fighting drug use, voters start to complain, but addicts are still looking to score. So it remains in someone’s interest to find a way through the enforcement, or to come up with a new drug the addicts will like.

Again, that’s all a bit more simplistic than I like to be on this issue, but the basic problem I’m trying to highlight - that the people breaking these laws will always care a lot more about the issue than the people enforcing them - is, I think, a big part of why anti-drug efforts have been so ineffectual.

Finally, here’s some more from Richard Nixon (and Bob Haldeman) on the subject of drugs. You can almost see our deranged national attitude towards drug use developing in front of your eyes:

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The Brookings Institute has released a study that concludes the war on drugs has failed and will continue to do so unless its strategy is dramatically changed. This reminds me of another groundbreaking study on drugs and alcohol.

Actually, the entire report is worth reading, if you like reading that sort of thing.  It’s not just about drugs - the title is Re-Thinking U.S.-Latin American Relations:  A Hemispheric Partnership for a Turbulent World.  The good news is that the text is not as long as the title would suggest.  And it’s full of fun charts like this one.  So Bob, I see you’ve got yourself a drug war there.  How’s that going for you, Bob?

In the interest of fairness, here are some excerpts from our former president’s conversations about legalizing marijuana:

You see, homosexuality, dope, immorality in general: These are the enemies of strong societies. That’s why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff, they’re trying to destroy us.
…
Now, this is one thing I want. I want a Goddamn strong statement on marijuana. Can I get that out of this sonofabitching, uh, Domestic Council? I mean one on marijuana that just tears the ass out of them. I see another thing in the news summary this morning about it. You know it’s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob, what is the matter with them? I suppose it’s because most of them are psychiatrists, you know, there’s so many, all the greatest psychiatrists are Jewish. By God we are going to hit the marijuana thing, and I want to hit it right square in the puss

In the spirit of actual, non-snarky fairness, I should point out that Nixon didn’t think marijuana users should go to jail. So a guy who thought the legalization movement was a jewish/communist conspiracy to destroy our country was in favor of much saner legislation than we have on the books today.

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t consider all the speculation about cabinet appointments to be worthy of the attention it gets, but I realize it’s always going to be the major topic of discussion in the closing days of a presidency. What I don’t understand is why people agonize over the policy views of the alleged nominees. Not only is it unclear whether any given phantom cabinet-member will actually end up with the job in question, it is very clear that (in most cases) his primary role will not be to shape policy.

The worries - mentioned by Frederick - about Eric Holder’s views on drug enforcement from many reform-minded folks are especially stupid:

Barack Obama’s selection of Eric Holder as his attorney general is a very discouraging sign for anyone who hoped the new administration would de-escalate the war on drugs. As Dave Weigel noted earlier today, Holder pushed for stiffer marijuana penalties when he was the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and the details are strikingly at odds not only with Obama’s signals regarding marijuana but with his opposition to long sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. According to a December 1996 report in The Washington Times excerpted at TalkLeft, Holder wanted “minimum sentences of 18 months for first-time convicted drug dealers, 36 months for the second time and 72 months for every conviction thereafter.” He also wanted to “make the penalty for distribution and possession with intent to distribute marijuana a felony, punishable with up to a five-year sentence.” The D.C. Council made the latter Holder-endorsed change in 2000. Holder thought New York City’s irrational, unjust crackdown on pot smokers was a fine idea and worth emulating, saying “we have too long taken the view that what we would term to be minor crimes are not important.” His rhetoric on the seriousness of marijuana offenses was indistinguishable from that of the most zealous Republican drug warrior:

The truth of the matter is that marijuana is a significant problem for the city….Crack cocaine still drives most of the violence in this city, but marijuana violence is increasing. We need to nip it in the bud.

As funny as the phrase ‘marijuana violence’ is, there isn’t really much worth writing home about here. Holder’s views are very wrong, but he isn’t going to be crafting any drug legislation. For the most part, he won’t even be deciding how to approach existing drug legislation; he’ll be figuring out the best way to carry out Obama’s vision of how drug legislation should be approached. That’s what the unitary executive is all about.

As a side note: the difference between Holder’s position and what reformers are hoping for out of an Obama administration is not worth all that much in the context of our nation’s drug war problem. The obsession with decriminalizing marijuana amongst those with sane views about drugs is really very counterproductive. Focusing all this attention on the fact that marijuana isn’t all that bad helps steer the conversation away from the question of whether drugs should be legal even when they are that bad. Pushing for slightly saner marijuana laws is fun, because it doesn’t seem like that hard a fight to win; but you get what you pay for. Ending the drug war altogether would save federal and state governments close to $50 billion a year*, allow us to levy taxes on a massive industry, reduce our terrifying incarceration rate, drastically reduce violence and improve the quality of life in inner-cities, allow us to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda without actively driving the local population into their arms, and create room for a little sanity in our foreign policy in Columbia and elsewhere. Decriminalizing marijuana, on the other hand, would make it easier to score weed.

* Actually, much more than that. This figure just takes into account direct anti-drug measures and the trial and incarceration of offenders. These are fairly easy to calculate, so you can get an exact number, but ideally you’d want to take into account, eg, the percentage of our foreign aid to South America that is spent on helping them bomb farmers.