The Mountaineer

Issue date: 11/18/08 Section: Opinion

The current penalties for marijuana-related crimes are not only unjust, but are impractical, inefficient, and cost the government too much money. Currently under federal law possession of marijuana is a felony. This seems completely pointless to me.
Marijuana was made completely illegal on the federal level in 1937. The laws that made marijuana illegal were driven by racial hate for Mexican-Americans because they were the primary users of the plant. At the time, Harry J. Anslinger, the director of the Board of Narcotics said, "...the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races." This reasoning is outdated and downright racist. So why do the prohibition laws still exist today?
That is a reasonable question because no one has ever died from overdosing on marijuana. As a matter of fact, Judge Francis L. Young, the Former Chief Administrative Law Judge at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said that marijuana is actually safer than many foods we commonly consume.
According to www.norml.org, more than 80 million Americans admit that they have smoked marijuana at least once, and 20 million who admit that they have smoked in the past year. That's nearly 10 percent of the current population!
The saddest part of cannabis prohibition is the federal government's attempt to keep cannabis out of the hands of patients who have been prescribed marijuana as medicine. Currently marijuana is a Schedule I drug, meaning that it is supposed to be harmful to the user and have no legitimate medical use. I personally know people who benefit from medical marijuana. Medicinal marijuana has been proven to be one effective treatment for glaucoma, as well as for general pain relief, and even as a medicine for ADHD.
In addition, approximately 700,000 people were incarcerated on marijuana-related charges in 2007, and of those, 90 percent were just for possession, not trafficking or sale. According to www.uscourts.gov, it costs $24,922 to keep someone incarcerated for a year. If all of the people incarcerated in 2007 were imprisoned for only one year it would cost about $17.5 billion just for those inmates and just for that one year. That doesn't even count how much money is wasted on enforcing marijuana laws and drug busts. Why are we wasting so much money on something that isn't hurting anyone, and in many cases is actually helping people?
President Jimmy Carter once said, "Penalties against drug use should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against the possession of marijuana in private for personal use."
Not only are the penalties more damaging than the drug, but those same penalties are even more damaging to our government and our economy than they are to any individual. I propose that we abolish these old-fashioned laws and decriminalize making possession of the controlled substance a misdemeanor with a fine instead of a felony resulting in incarceration.

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