Why conservatives should favor legalizing marijuana By Evan Wood, Special to CNN(CNN) - If there is one clear emotion emerging before November's U.S. congressional elections, it is that citizens across the political spectrum are worried about government spending and a perceived lack of government accountability regarding where tax dollars are spent.
Oddly, the government's approach to the illegal drug problem -- which has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $2.5 trillion since former President Richard Nixon first declared America's "war on drugs" -- has been largely immune from this concern.
One dramatic exception is California, where Proposition 19, which proposes to "regulate, control and tax cannabis," will be on the statewide ballot on November 2. In California alone, the illegal market for cannabis, or marijuana, has been estimated to be worth about $14 billion per year, and the legalization initiative aims to redirect the flow of these massive profits from violent drug cartels toward government coffers.
Although the full financial impact of legalization cannot be known, cannabis law enforcement in California is estimated to cost taxpayers anywhere between $200 million and $1.9 billion each year, whereas the State Board of Equalization has estimated that taxation could generate $1.4 billion a year in new tax revenue.
As the vote approaches, a clear division in political support for Proposition 19 has emerged, with a recent Reuters-Ipsos poll showing that 54 percent of Democrats support legalization as Republican support sits at 33 percent. This division is curious, given that cannabis prohibition takes its biggest toll on the traditional conservative wish list of fiscal discipline, low crime rates and strong families.
In fact, as detailed in a report published this month by my organization, the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy, research funded by none other than the U.S. government clearly demonstrates the failure of marijuna prohibition. For instance, government reports demonstrate that even as federal funding for anti-drug efforts has increased from $1.5 billion in 1981 to more than $20 billion today, surveillance systems show that marijuana's estimated potency has increased by 145 percent and its price has declined by 58 percent since 1990.
At a 1991 lecture titled "The Drug War as a Socialist Enterprise," conservative economist Milton Friedman noted: "There are some general features of a socialist enterprise, whether it's the post office, schools or the war on drugs. The enterprise is inefficient, expensive, very advantageous to a small group of people and harmful to a lot of people."
Friedman, who won the Nobel Prize in 1976 for his achievements in the fields of "consumption analysis," had strong views about the certain failure of the war on drugs, which are shared by most economists who stress that costly efforts to remove the drug supply by building prisons and locking up drug dealers have the perverse effect of making it much more profitable for new drug dealers to get into the market.
This explains why surveillance systems funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health concluded that over the last 30 years, cannabis has remained "almost universally available to American 12th-graders," with between 80 percent and 90 percent saying the drug is "very easy" or "fairly easy" to obtain.
Friedman was also vocal about the unintended consequences of the war on drugs, including the enrichment of organized crime and drug market violence. As he wrote in The New York Times: "The young are not dissuaded by the bullets that fly so freely in disputes between competing drug dealers -- bullets that fly only because dealing drugs is illegal. Al Capone epitomizes our earlier attempt at Prohibition; the Crips and Bloods epitomize this one."
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