WHY LEGALIZING MARIJUANA MAKES SENSE

For the past several years, I've been harboring a fantasy, a last
political crusade for the baby-boom generation. We, who started on
the path of righteousness, marching for civil rights and against the
war in Vietnam, need to find an appropriately high-minded approach to
life's exit ramp. In this case, I mean the high-minded part
literally. And so, a deal: give us drugs, after a certain age -- say,
80 -- all drugs, any drugs we want. In return, we will give you our
driver's licenses. (I mean, can you imagine how terrifying a nation
of decrepit, solipsistic 90-year-old boomers behind the wheel would
be?) We'll let you proceed with your lives -- much of which will be
spent paying for our retirement, in any case -- without having to
hear us complain about our every ache and reflux.

We'll be too busy exploring altered states of consciousness. I even
have a slogan for the campaign: "Tune in, turn on, drop dead."

A fantasy, I suppose.

But, beneath the furious roil of the economic crisis, a national
conversation has quietly begun about the irrationality of our drug
laws. It is going on in state legislatures, like New York's, where
the draconian Rockefeller drug laws are up for review; in other
states, from California to Massachusetts, various forms of marijuana
decriminalization are being enacted.

And it has reached the floor of Congress, where Senators Jim Webb and
Arlen Specter have proposed a major prison-reform package, which
would directly address drug-sentencing policy.

There are also more puckish signs of a zeitgeist shift.

A few weeks ago, the White House decided to stage a forum in which
the President would answer questions submitted by the public; 92,000
people responded -- and most of them seemed obsessed with the
legalization of marijuana.

The two most popular questions about "green jobs and energy," for
example, were about pot. The President dismissed the outpouring --
appropriately, I guess -- as online ballot-stuffing and dismissed the
legalization question with a simple: "No."

This was a rare instance of Barack Obama reacting reflexively,
without attempting to think creatively, about a serious policy
question. He was, in fact, taking the traditional path of least
resistance: an unexpected answer on marijuana would have launched a
tabloid firestorm, diverting attention from the budget fight and all
those bailouts.

In fact, the default fate of any politician who publicly considers
the legalization of marijuana is to be cast into the outer darkness.

Such a person is assumed to be stoned all the time, unworthy of being
taken seriously.

Such a person would be lacerated by the assorted boozehounds and pill
poppers of talk radio. The hypocrisy inherent in the American
conversation about stimulants is staggering.

But there are big issues here, issues of economy and simple justice,
especially on the sentencing side. As Webb pointed out in a cover
story in Parade magazine, the U.S. is, by far, the most "criminal"
country in the world, with 5% of the world's population and 25% of
its prisoners.

We spend $68 billion per year on corrections, and one-third of those
being corrected are serving time for nonviolent drug crimes.

We spend about $150 billion on policing and courts, and 47.5% of all
arrests are marijuana-related. That is an awful lot of money, most of
it nonfederal, that could be spent on better schools or
infrastructure -- or simply returned to the public.

At the same time, there is an enormous potential windfall in the
taxation of marijuana.

It is estimated that pot is the largest cash crop in California, with
annual revenues approaching $14 billion.

A 10% pot tax would yield $1.4 billion in California alone.

And that's probably a fraction of the revenues that would be
available -- and of the economic impact, with thousands of new jobs
in agriculture, packaging, marketing and advertising. A veritable
marijuana economic-stimulus package! (Read: "Is Pot Good For You?")

So why not do it? There are serious moral arguments, both secular and
religious. There are those who believe -- with some good reason --
that the accretion of legalized vices is debilitating, that we are a
less virtuous society since gambling spilled out from Las Vegas to
"riverboats" and state lotteries across the country.

There is a medical argument, though not a very convincing one:
alcohol is more dangerous in a variety of ways, including the
tendency of some drunks to get violent.

One could argue that the abuse of McDonald's has a greater potential
health-care cost than the abuse of marijuana. (Although it's true
that with legalization, those two might not be unrelated.) Obviously,
marijuana can be abused.

But the costs of criminalization have proved to be enormous, perhaps
unsustainable. Would legalization be any worse?

In any case, the drug-reform discussion comes just at the right
moment. We boomers are getting older every day. You're not going to
want us on the highways.

Make us your best offer.