This Bulge Explains Much

TW: Nate Silver hits on a good point regarding why drug legalization is creeping back towards respectability. The baby boomers and those since were much heavier users (or at least experimenters) with pot than those who came before them. As the user demographic crowds out the older voters, pot becomes less exotic and perhaps less threatening.

Joe Klein put together a recent piece on legalization. We have hit many of the points previously but he reiterates some of the numbers and angles. Pot legalization goes to numerous challenges facing the U.S.- need for tax revenue, desire to reduce imports and grow domestic industry, need to reduce the stress at the Mexican border, need to address our ineffectively bulging prisons, and ultimately the need to address whether pot, alcohol and tobacco should be treated so differently.

From Joe Klein at Time:
"...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.

...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.

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?.."
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1889021,00.html