I like this graphic except for the taxation benefits it lists. They are incorrect, as I point out in the comment I left for them at their web site:
"The $36 billion figure quoted as potential revenue is false because marijuana cultivated in a post-prohibition market, however, would cost a fraction of the figure you gave.
"To get a sense of the disparity in price between legal and illegal drugs, compare the production value of marijuana—about $1,600 per pound by your $36B estimate—to the production value of tobacco, a legal smoke crop that US farmers sell for less than $2 per pound.
"Go back to 2005, make marijuana legal, and give it an astronomically high production value of $800 per pound, or half of the per pound value based on your $36B estimate: It would have tied with soy beans in 2006 as America’s third largest cash crop, with an average production value of roughly $17 billion. If it had the same production value per pound as tobacco, or $2, its APV in 2005 would have been $44 million; or less than 10 percent of beans, 2005’s 20th most valuable cash crop.
"So while pointing to marijuana as America’s largest cash crop is a good indicator of its popularity (and arguably, the safety of its use), it doesn’t follow that taxation and regulation of the drug in a post-prohibition market would be a boon to a floundering economy, especially when factoring in the costs of an aggressive regulatory framework. And the estimate you used skews all the other estimates you gave based on it." --jef
By Tony Newman, AlterNet
Posted on December 22, 2011
Should juries vote “not guilty” on low-level marijuana charges to send a message about our country’s insane marijuana arrest policy? Paul Butler, former federal prosecutor and law professor of George Washington University made a powerful argument for jury nullification in an op-ed in Tuesday’s New York Times.
Jury nullification is a constitutional doctrine that allows juries to acquit defendants who are technically guilty, but who don’t deserve punishment. Butler explained that juries have the right and power to use jury nullification to protest unjust laws.
Mr. Butler points out that nullification was credited with ending our country’s disastrous alcohol prohibition as more and more jurors refused to send their neighbors to jail for a law they didn’t believe in. Butler says we need to do the same with today’s marijuana arrests.
There is growing recognition that today's drug laws are ineffective and unfair. For the first time ever, a recent Gallup poll found that 50 percent of Americans want legalize use of marijuana. Despite half of our country wanting to end marijuana prohibition, the war on marijuana users is as vicious as ever. There were more than 750,000 arrests last year for marijuana possession alone. In New York City, marijuana possession was the #1 reason people were arrested last year; making up 15 percent of all arrests.
People hoping for change should not expect it to come from our “leaders” in Washington. While most of our elected officials know in their hearts that our drug war is an utter failure that fills our prisons while doing nothing to help people struggling with addiction, there is deafening silence when it comes to offering alternatives to the war on drugs. Democrats and Republicans are both cowardly and opportunistic and don’t want to give up their “tough on crime” credentials.
Here is where jury nullification comes in. If our leaders are going to stop the madness, maybe it is up to our peers to say enough is enough.
In Montana last year, a group of five prospective-jurors said they had a problem with someone receiving a felony for a small amount of marijuana. The prosecutors were freaked out about the “Mutiny in Montana” and were afraid they were not going to be able convince12 jurors in Montana to convict. The judge said, in a major New York Times article, “I’ve never seen this large a number of people express this large a number of reservations” and “it does raise a question about the next case.”
The highest profile group to call for jury nullification for drug offenses is from the creators of the HBO hit series The Wire. David Simon and the other creators of The Wire wrote a passionate piece in Time magazine where they called on Americans to join them in the use of jury nullification as a strategy to slow the drug war machine.
From the article:
"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right," wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy — the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn't resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do — and what we will do.
If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that usesnonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.”
Forty years after President Richard Nixon launched the “war on drugs” the casualties continue to mount with no end in sight. We need to step up our efforts to end this war at home and stop sending our loved ones to cages because they have a drug problem. We have more power than we realize. If the people lead, the leaders will follow.
