E-Mail This Article to a Friend Smart news about pot BY MIKE MILIARD

500-plus economists can't wrong. Right? Seems a slew of them have finally decided what most of us have known for a long time: that pot prohibition "has minimal benefits and may itself cause substantial harm."

A report just released by visiting BU economics professor Dr. Jeffrey Miron and endorsed by more than 500 of his peers offers yet another commonsense critique of current marijuana policy. This time, the issue is framed in terms — dollars and cents — that even conservatives can understand. Some of them, including Nobel Prize-winner Dr. Milton Friedman, have seen the light. Will the Bush administration? Don't count on it.

In The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition, Miron finds that by instituting a system of regulation and taxation for pot similar to those in place for alcohol and tobacco, the money that would be saved in expenditures and gained in tax revenue is considerable: between $10 billion and $14 billion annually. That's real money that could be used to address real problems like gaps in homeland security, failing schools, and growing budget deficits. If it might help change GOP minds about our nonsensical drug laws, we suppose it could even fund tax cuts.

Miron explains his methodology: "We can easily determine the expenditure by state on police, on judges and prosecutors, and on prisons. We have a reasonable sense of what fraction of arrests are for marijuana charges, what fraction of prosecutions are for marijuana violations, etc." After crunching the numbers, he found that replacing marijuana prohibition with a system of regulations would save approximately $7.7 billion in government expenditures: $2.4 billion at the federal level and $5.3 billion at the state and local levels.

"On the tax revenue side, there are estimates available from some standard sources on the size of the marijuana market," Miron says. "Then I used other information about how much demand would likely change, based on how much the price would likely change, to estimate revenues." He found that taxing legalized pot could reap $2.4 billion each year if the drug were taxed like standard consumer goods — and perhaps $6.2 billion annually if it were taxed like alcohol or tobacco.

"This is not a trivial amount of money," Miron says. "This is $10 billion, not $10 million. Clearly, we should care about what the ramifications are of having a policy that's spending that kind of money."

In fact, says Bruce Mirken, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project, Miron's estimates may be on the conservative side. The study doesn't take into account the money that might be saved when pot smokers won't have to be referred to drug treatment programs, or when parolees aren't reincarcerated for testing positive for marijuana use. Also, Miron worked on the assumption that just one percent of state prisoners are in jail for marijuana violations. The White House's own Office of National Drug Control Policy puts that figure at 1.6 percent. At any rate, Mirken says, "it's a considerable amount of money — on enforcing a policy that clearly does not work."

While Mirken recognizes that the study is simply "one more step" in the advancement towards more sensible drug laws, he thinks it's significant that it frames an old issue in new terms. "Conservatives are starting to really have the conversation about whether we're getting our money's worth," he says. "Is this an expenditure that makes any sense? Eighty-five percent of high school seniors have been telling government survey takers that marijuana is easy to get for 30 years, virtually without change. That's a sign that what we're doing is not working. And when you put that together with what adds up, over a period of years, to hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe there's other things we can do with that money."

He cites specifics. "Here's a hunk of money that, in two and a half years or so, could secure all those loose nukes rattling around the old Soviet Union. All the port security measures that have been put in place would be taken care of with a year's worth of savings alone — let alone the tax revenue. This is a serious amount of money and it's time to have a conversation about whether we're pouring it down a rat hole."

Still, he says, "I think the people running drug policy in the present administration are ideologues who aren't going to be changed by anything. If Jesus came down from heaven and told them to rethink our marijuana laws, they'd say he was bought off by the drug legalizers."

Miron agrees. "I think [conservatives'] concerns are more in terms of the message or symbolism attached to saying certain things are legal or not legal." On the other hand, he says, "I think a lot of conflicted conservatives say, 'Gee, if alcohol and tobacco are legal, maybe we should think about whether certain illegal drugs should be legal."

So even though we're finally speaking their language, one shouldn't expect to soon be able to walk down to the corner packie and buy a six-pack and a spliff.

Miron just laughs. "No, I don't think that's gonna happen any time soon."

See the full report at http://www.prohibitioncosts.org/. Also visit http://www.marijuanapolicy.org