Marijuana legalization

It is estimated that one in fourteen high school seniors uses the drug on a daily basis. When Dr. Andrea Barthwell of the White House drug czar’s office addressed the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco last summer, she threw out an intriguing statistic:16 million Americans use illegal drugs, 6 million of them need treatment. There are more than 291 million people in this country. These numbers must make you wonder if the drug war is really worth the cost. There’s the dollar cost, and then there’s the social cost of placing 16 million Americans outside the law.
Eric Sterling of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation in Washington, D.C., pegged the annual tab of America’s drug war at $50 billion. Sterling based his estimate on a 1996 Chicago Tribune opinion piece in which former drug czar Barry McCaffrey wrote that the federal government spent $14 billion annually on the drug war, while state and local governments s...