E-Mail This Article to a Friend The $4 billion war on pot Enforcing marijuana laws costs more and more every year. And for what? BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN
	How the US spends $4.09 billion $430 million - Law enforcement: trafficking $1.7 billion - Law enforcement: possession $1.36 billion - Court processing $600 million - Incarceration Source: The Sentencing Project How Massachusetts spends 122.4 million $40.3 million - Policing $68.5 million - Judicial and legal $13.6 million - Corrections Source: Change the Climate

Crime in America has declined significantly in the last 15 years — that is to say, serious crime, "Part I Crime" in law-enforcement terms: rape, murder, robbery, automobile theft, and such. Arrests for those crimes are down 24 percent since 1990.

But arrests of those who use, carry, distribute, or transport marijuana have more than doubled, from 327,000 in 1990 to 697,000 in 2002. In fact, according to a report released in May by Washington, DC–based think tank The Sentencing Project, 82 percent of the increase in drug arrests during those years is attributable to marijuana arrests — 79 percent from marijuana possession arrests.

The US spends $4 billion each year on the arrest, prosecution, and incarceration of marijuana-law offenders, according to The Sentencing Project report. That’s about six times the amount spent globally on AIDS-vaccine research and development. Massachusetts alone could save $120 million a year by legalizing the drug, according to a study by Jeffrey Miron, economics professor at Boston University. (And collect another $17 million by taxing it.)

It is unlikely that this is what constituents have had in mind as they’ve watched more and more of their tax dollars go toward drug control.

BARELY A DENT

Much of this spending, particularly at the federal level, goes to busting marijuana-trafficking rings. Last November, for instance, two undercover agents from the Boston office of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Drug Smuggling Group drove a tractor-trailer filled with pot from a warehouse in Laredo, Texas, to the parking lot of the Tage Inn in Somerville. That operation led to 10 arrests, and the seizure of 1500 pounds of smuggled marijuana.

What that didn’t do, of course, is reduce the use of marijuana in Massachusetts, where pot smoking is higher than almost anywhere in the country — largely, surveys suggest, because Bay State residents view the drug as less harmful than do denizens of other states.

Nationally, interdiction has had little effect on use or availability. Federal authorities seized 1225 metric tons of the stuff in 2003, barely a dent in the estimated 12,000 to 25,000 tons used. The National Drug Intelligence Center’s (NDIC) 2005 National Drug Threat Assessment describes "steady supply of and demand for marijuana overall, and the strong, stable market for its distribution."

On the user side, several recent studies have documented the extent of this country’s efforts to imprison people for possession or low-level selling of pot. But perhaps the most persuasive is the US government’s 40-page attempt at a counter-argument, released last year, titled "Who’s Really in Prison for Marijuana?"

The report, by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, endeavors to "set the record straight" against "those who are willing to spread false information for the purpose of legalizing drug trafficking and use." But the document, which argues that the government is not targeting casual pot smokers, actually shows just how little ammunition the government has on this topic. It resorts to citing 10-year-old articles (including a 1994 Marjorie Eagan column in the Boston Herald) as the sources of the misinformation — and then admits that those critics indeed have their facts right.

As the report concedes, at last count roughly 32,400 people were in state prisons for marijuana offenses, a quarter of whom were there for possession only — including 3600 first-time offenders. Not a huge percentage of the prison population, but not an insignificant number of people living at the public’s expense either.

HIDDEN COSTS?

The government argues that legalization, decriminalization (in which possession would be allowed but trafficking would remain illegal), or relaxed enforcement of marijuana laws would increase usage, leading to increases in other costs, including health care, rehabilitation, crime, and lost productivity. "When you look at a cost-benefit analysis, you need to take those things into account," says Anthony Pettigrew, spokesperson for the New England office of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

But it’s uncertain whether usage would actually spike, says Miron. And if it does, it’s unclear what societal costs would result.

Pettigrew and others point to two recent trends that supposedly illustrate the harm of marijuana. The first, an increase in emergency-room patients citing marijuana use as the cause of their visit, is potentially troubling, although the reasons and costs are not yet clear. The second is an increase in the number of marijuana users — particularly younger ones — entering rehab. "There are more teenagers entering rehabilitation for marijuana than for alcohol or any other drug," Pettigrew says.

Miron maintains that such reports are misleading. "Marijuana-abuse treatment is kind of loony," he says. "There is a surge of people entering marijuana-abuse treatment, but they’re being forced into it. They are told, ‘you can get probation [instead of jail time], if you enter marijuana-abuse treatment.’ "

There is, of course, a third argument that Pettigrew and others make, one that is as old as the hills: that more pot use leads inevitably to use of harder drugs, like cocaine, heroin, and crystal methamphetamine.

That concern doesn’t seem to be on the minds of state and local law-enforcement agencies surveyed by the NDIC, however. "Few consider [marijuana] a significant threat to public health and safety," the study says. Although 95 percent of those agencies report that marijuana is easily available in their jurisdiction, only 12 percent call it their greatest drug threat, according to the NDIC assessment.

In fact, if harder drugs are the source of concern, the NDIC report reads like an argument for pot legalization. The stable and very profitable black market in marijuana provides "financial stability [for] drug traffickers, many of whom traffic marijuana to bankroll other criminal activity," the NDIC assessment says. Those other criminal activities include trafficking of harder drugs, guns, and illegal weapons. In other words, by sending pot profits to criminals, instead of legitimate businesses, criminalization effectively enables trafficking in far more dangerous ventures.