Drug_Trafficing_in_America__Legaliing_Marijuana_to_Control_Crowded_Prision_Systems

Drug Trafficking in America: Legalizing Marijuana to Control Crowded Prison Systems Bonnie Forward ENG 122 Prof. Candy Henry July 2, 2012 Drug Trafficking in America: Legalizing Marijuana to Control Crowded Prison Systems Drug trafficking has become a huge problem in the United States (U.S.) and Mexico, in particular, and affects many people in different aspects. The U.S. has the most profitable illegal drug market in the world, attracting the most merciless, sophisticated, and violent drug traffickers (U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, 2004, May). Our drug law enforcement agencies face a huge task everyday guarding the country’s boundaries against cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, MDMA which is commonly referred to as ecstasy, marijuana, LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), PCP (phencyclidine), rohypnol, GHB/GBL (gamma hydroxybutyrate/gamma butyrolactone), and steroids trafficking (U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, 2004, May). Out of all the illegal drugs in the U.S., marijuana is the most readily obtainable and commonly abused illegal drug. According to an article in The Daily Caller by Kristin Davis, former New York Gubernatorial Candidate, it is estimated that currently over 25 million people use marijuana (2010, Oct 4, para. 2). Davis states, “There is one fact that Americans, and New Yorkers, must face (as it slaps us in the face): Prohibition hasn’t stopped the use and domestic production of marijuana,” (para. 2). Assuming millions of people use marijuana every day putting an excise tax on it would generate billions of dollars every year, just in New York alone. According to the article, which calls New York City the “marijuana arrest capital of the world” (para. 7), 10% of the city’s budget for law enforcement is spent enforcing marijuana laws, although there is very little data on how much is spent on housing inmates who have been incarcerated for possession (dailycaller.com). An article in the Daily Sundial states, “Additionally, our country as a whole spends $68 billion a year on its prisoners, one-third of which are imprisoned for nonviolent drug crimes….which means one-sixth of our country’s prisoners are in jail for marijuana-related charges,” (Wolff, 2009, Nov. 9). Aside from the monetary gains, there are medical benefits of the drug and it is not physically addictive either. Because marijuana is and has been socially unacceptable for so long in the U.S., the legalization of it is not easily acceptable to so many Americans, but it is readily available either through trafficking or illegally growing the weed. It is very unlikely that someone who is not already smoking marijuana will smoke it just because they will not be arrested for it if it is legalized. Unless a serious crime is committed along with selling, buying, possessing, or growing marijuana, many claim that it is a victimless crime which should be downsized, increasing our state’s incomes from excise and state taxation, and decreasing our country’s overcrowded prisons (Wolff, 2009, Nov. 9). So the question is whether or not the decriminalization, or legalization, of marijuana would greatly reduce the drug trafficking and the prison populations' There have been studies done that are for and against this dilemma. Richard Lee, an entrepreneur from Oakland in medical marijuana, funded a measure called Proposition 19, which would have legalized recreational marijuana, but when voted on in November 2010, it was snuffed out by California voters. Backers of Proposition 19 said they would be mounting another campaign in 2012. In an article for ABC News (2010, Nov. 3), Lee stated, “The fact that millions of Californians voted to legalize marijuana is a tremendous victory,” he said in a statement. “We have broken the glass ceiling. Prop. 19 has changed the terms of the debate,” (p. 1, para. 3). The article goes on to state that the debate is increasingly more about how to legalize marijuana and less about whether to legalize it. For the first time, a marijuana legalization measure has been endorsed by major elected officials, civil rights organizations, and labor unions (p. 1, para. 6). Lee has made the campaign to legalize marijuana his main cause since an accident in 1990 while touring with Aerosmith as a lighting technician left him a paraplegic. Although it was illegal at the time, medicinal pot eased the back spasms he got from sitting in his wheelchair. He founded Oakland’s Oaksterdam University, which is a small marijuana business empire which at the time of this article was bringing in $7 million a year. The university has extended to three campuses in California and one campus in Michigan, and claims that it gives “quality training for the cannabis industry and teaches more than 4,000 people a year,” (Sanchez, 2010, p. 2, para. 5). Supporters for the legalization of marijuana feel that it is a drug less harmful than alcohol and legalization would end a duplicitous ban on the drug. Supporters feel that law enforcement costs would be cut, tax revenues would be raised, and children would have a harder time getting marijuana. Some of the supporters include many large labor unions, the California branch of the NAACP, the California Young Democrats, the Republican Liberty Caucus, state chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union, and the California Council of Churches (Sanchez, 2010). Proposition 19 signifies a threat to public safety, infringes upon federal law and drug-free work environment rules, and it would not create much tax revenue at all, according to the opponents. Some of the critics against legalizing marijuana include many law enforcement groups, all the state’s chief party contenders for governor and U.S. Senate, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (M.A.D.D.), and the California League of Cities (Sanchez, 2010). In an article by Randal Archibold in The New York Times (2012, March 5), he states that Vice President Biden bluntly told officials in Latin America that the U.S. will not change in its opposition for the legalization of illicit drugs, even though the United States is Mexico’s biggest market for consumption habits. Because of the violence over the drug trade, Biden said he sympathized with the leaders, but said the few potential benefits such as smaller prison populations, would counterbalance problems such as an expensive system of government to control the drugs and the many new addicts (Archibold, 2012, March 5). Reading about the turmoil of so many lives disrupted by drugs and burdened with poverty, one cannot help but ask: are we winning the war on drugs' Forty years ago Nixon declared drug abuse “a serious national threat” and created the phrase “War on Drugs”. It would seem that we are not winning this war, so in this recession strapped time do we seek out a more actual solution' The Mexican army is being overwhelmed by the cartels and Juarez has unfortunately become the murder capital of the world. And yet according to an article in the Virginia Quarterly Review (2009), the statistics show that American teenagers are using less hard drugs than twenty-five years ago and that is because the cartels are not prospering because of hard drugs, but because their lifeblood - their “cash cow” – is marijuana. The article states, “Yes, thousands of deaths in Mexico are chiefly the result of traffic in high-potency pot smuggled across the border with ruthless resolve,” (p. 1, para. 4). A report from the Cato Institute by Miron & Waldock (2010), consequently ponders a policy change of “…simultaneous legalization by all states and the federal government,” (p. 2, para. 1). This policy change is not likely to occur on the table anytime soon, but this hypothetical case is systematically tractable since it dodges the need for assumptions about cross-border properties or about state versus federal effects of legalization. More importantly, this conjectural offers an upper bound on the expenditure savings and revenue increases that may transpire from legalization (Miron, et al, 2010). In the 2008 summary of expenditures and revenues from drug legalization, the total state, local, and federal expenditures for marijuana was $8.7 billion and the state and federal revenues from marijuana was also $8.7 billion. The total impact of drug legalization on government budgets would be about $88 billion per year (Miron, et al, 2010). The policy change considered in the Cato Institute report—legalization—is “extra extensive than decriminalization”, which means abolishing criminal penalties against simple possession but recalling them against smuggling and selling of drugs. The report states (2010), ”The budgetary implications of legalization exceed those of decriminalization for three reasons. First, legalization eliminates arrests for drug trafficking in addition to arrests for simple possession. Second, legalization saves prosecutorial, judicial, and incarceration expenses; these savings are minimal in the case of decriminalization. Third, legalization allows taxation of drug production and sale,” (p. 2, para. 2). The following table, from the Cato Institute (2010), shows the percentage of arrests due to drug prohibition. The percentage of drug arrests for possession of marijuana is a staggering 42.10%, compared to heroin/cocaine at 21.50%, synthetic drugs at 3.30%, and all other drugs at 15.60%. Table 1 | Percentage of Arrests Due to Drug Prohibition, 2007 | Heroin/ | All Drugs Cocaine Marijuana Synthetic Other | 1. Total Arrests 14,209,365 | 2. Arrests for Drug Violations 1,841,182 | 3. % of Arrests, Drug Violations 12.96 | 4. % of Drug Arrests, Sale/Man 17.50 7.90 5.30 1.50 2.80 | 5. % of Total Arrests, Sale/Man 2.27 1.02 0.69 0.19 0.36 | 6. % of Drug Arrests , Possession 82.50 21.50 42.10 3.30 15.60 | 7. % of Total Arrests, Possession 10.69 2.79 5.46 0.43 2.02 | 8. 0.5 * % of Arrests, Possession 5.34 1.39 2.73 0.21 1.01 | Sources: Total arrests and arrests for drug violations: U.S. Department of Justice, Crime in the United States: Estimated Number of Arrests (Washington: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reporting Program, 2007), http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2007/data/table_29.html. Drug violation and sale/ manufacturing percentages: U.S. Department of Justice, Crime in the United States: Persons Arrested (Washington: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reporting Program, 2007), http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2007/arrests/index.html. (Cato Institute, 2010). According to an article by Paul Armentano in The Washington Examiner (2006, Oct. 18), more than a billion dollars every year is being spent by American taxpayers to incarcerate individuals for pot (from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics). Another $8 billion annually is being spent by taxpayers for criminal justice costs for several hundred thousand additional Americans that are arrested every year because of the violation of marijuana laws. The article goes on to say that about 88% of Americans that were arrested were charged with possession only and the remaining were charged with the sale or manufacture of marijuana. “These totals are the highest ever recorded by the FBI, and make up 42.6 percent of all drug arrests in the United States. Nevertheless, self-reported post use by adults, as well as the ready availability of marijuana on the black market, remains virtually unchanged,” (para. 7). Legalizing and taxing marijuana would undercut the “cash cow” supporting the cartels in Mexico, creating a tax base with which the U.S. could fight trafficking and use of harder drugs, instead of putting offenders in this country’s overcrowded prisons because they were busted for possession of marijuana. The U.S. would benefit from the legalization of marijuana, although some sources are debating otherwise. Legalizing marijuana will prove to be a financial gain for our country, reducing government expenditure, and will stomp out a huge chunk of drug trafficking. Legalizing marijuana in isolation would produce approximately $17.4 billion in the budget’s improvement, but the legalization of other drugs is not foreseeable in the next few years to come according to the current political climate. Therefore, the budgetary impression from the politically probable element of the legalization of marijuana appears equitably modest. What the estimates provided in the Cato report (2010) are two supplementary reasons to end drug prohibition: a reduction of expenditures on law enforcement and a rise in tax revenue from lawful transactions. According to Armentano (2006), 40 percent of Americans age 12 and older self-identified as having used marijuana at one time or another, with relatively few having any significant health issues due to their use. “America’s public policies should reflect this reality, not deny it. It makes no sense to continue to treat nearly half of all Americans as criminals,” (para. 9). Legalizing marijuana could help get rid of overcrowded prison systems, which have become much more dangerous for the prison workers. The overcrowding is endemic to our prison systems, and it brings the heights of anxiety up for everyone, making the prison atmosphere very tense. Legalizing marijuana and using the taxation to come up with more suitable punishments for this seemingly victimless crime would seem like the better way to go, not only to ease the overcrowding of prisons, but to help ease the violence of drug trafficking in the United States. References Archibold, R.C. (2012, March 5). U.S. remains opposed to drug legalization, Biden tells region. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/world/americas/us-remains-against-drug-legalization-in-mexico-biden-says.html'_r=2. Are We Losing the War on Drugs'. (2009). Virginia Quarterly Review, 85(4), 1-2. Armentano, P. (2006, October 18). Paul Armentano: a billion dollars a year for pot' Retrieved from: http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/35895. Author Unknown (2004 May) U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. Drug trafficking in the United States. Retrieved from: http://www.policyalmanac.org/crime/archive/drug_trafficking.shtml. Davis, K. (2010, Oct. 4). Marijuana: the victimless crime that costs New York State $15 billion a year. Retrieved from: http://dailycaller.com/2010/10/04/marijuana-the-victimless-crime-that-costs-new-york-state-15-billion-a-year/2/. Miron, J.A. & Waldock, K. (2010). The Budgetary Impact of Ending Drug Prohibition. Retrieved from: http://www.cato.org/pubs/wtpapers/DrugProhibitionWP.pdf Sanchez, R. (2010, Nov. 3). California’s Proposition 19 Rejected by Voters. Retrieved from: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/proposition-19-results-california-votes-reject-marijuana-measure/story'id=12037727. Wolff, M. (2009, Nov. 9). Legalizing marijuana can reduce crime, increase revenue for state. Retrieved from: http://sundial.csun.edu/2009/11/legalizing-marijuana-can-reduce-crime-increase-revenue-for-state/