NORML vs ONDCP

There is an excellent write up in The Hill by NORML's executive director, Allen St. Pierre. NORML bills this as

"...passing for one of the first public debates ever between the government’s ‘anti-drug’ office (Office of National Drug Control Policy, aka ONDCP) and the world’s most famous pro-cannabis reform organization (NORML)"

We'll take it. NORML had originally posted an editorial on The Hill's site on August 6th. The ONDCP posted a response on the 12th, and NORML has now posted this rebuttal. Public debate on this subject is what's been missing, and this is shocking given the impact prohibition has on public budget priorities and private liberty.

The government spends an extraordinary amount of money keeping a plant "illegal"; and a weed at that. Talk about a loosing proposition. Are we too proud to be informed by our collective "wisdom of the ages" when speculating on such a fight (man vs. nature)? (add your own literary citations in the comments)


Ayn Rand once said,

"The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

The numbers don't lie, and what makes this all the more appalling is that our nation's competence in secondary education has been doing nothing but declining during this same time period. In theory, with our dubious honor of having the worlds highest per-capita rate of incarceration (higher than Russia, China, and Singapore), one might think so many removed "bad-seeds" should be affecting the sample set for testing scores positively (directly or indirectly). Obviously, it has not.

I only halfway joke about this correlation. I'm not making any ergo hoc proposition here, but only asking by what measure we can justify such incarceration rates. What are we as a society getting for such a terrible cost? Is there a graph showing some proportional social improvement relative to incarceration? While we are certainly beginning to frame the costs in quantitative terms, the benefits can only be referred to in dubious qualitative terms.

In Allen St. Pierre's posting at The Hill, he makes the excellent point that

"nearly 9 out of 10 cannabis prohibition-related arrests are for minor possession (i.e., any eye-popping 738,935 in 2006)"

While these arrests do not always directly result in incarceration, the costs for even minor possession only add on to the total cost of prohibition. These may include asset seizure, loss of individual rights and privileges, and other restrictions affecting the liberty and productivity of the state's citizens.

Despite this, the ONDCP seems to audaciously use the language of consolation when saying that only 2.7% of inmates in state prisons are there for marijuana-related offenses. They conveniently fail to mention the growth trends for this percentage. For instance, what rate of incoming state prisoners are arrested for drug crimes vs. violent crime, and how has that been changing over the past twenty years? Further, they obscure the costs by ignoring the aforementioned penalties of arrest without incarceration, and by glossing over the fact that 2.7% of a large population is still quite a large number.

With respect to those growth trends, let's illuminate how the incoming state prison populations stack up, year over year. The graph to the left comes from a paper put together by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, entitled "Poor Prescription: The Costs of Imprisoning Drug Offenders in the United States".

With respect to how percentages translate to actual numbers of citizens affected, we had linked to a MPP video narration of an excerpt from Michael Pollen's excellent book, The Botany of Desire, a while back. It's useful to quote the same passage in context and in closing:

"The swiftness of this change in the weather, the demonizing of a plant that less than twenty years ago was on the cusp of general acceptance, will surely puzzle historians of the future. They will wonder why it was that the "drug war" of the '80s, '90s, and '00s fought the vast majority of its battles over marijuana*. They will wonder why, during this period, Americans jailed more of their citizens than any other country in history, and why one of every three of those were in prison because of their involvement with drugs, nearly fifty thousand of them solely for crimes involving marijuana. ... For in the last years of the twentieth century a series of Supreme Court cases and government actions specifically involving marijuana led to a substantial increase in the power of the government at the expense of the Bill of Rights*. As a result of the war against cannabis, Americans are demonstrably less free today."

* [I would be doing a disservice if I didn't mention that Pollen backs these claims fully in the footnotes of the book with arrest statistics, citations of court opinions, quotes from government officials, etc.]