It would certainly turn the economy around.

Imagine the taxes and sin taxes the government could levy on Marijuana or Hasish sales. Imagine the boon to the American farming communities if they could all supplement their produce with Marijuana. It would remove a huge burden on the govt for ailing farms and fill the coffers with money from new tax revenue.

And it would be like a match program, dollar for dollar, because it would also remove the federal funding to combat its use, plus helping reduce our prison populations.

It would be a gold mine from an national economic standpoint.

So obviously we can’t have that.

I saw a television show once that did a comparison between the U.S. drug laws and those in Amsterdam. In Amsterdam the use of drugs is not ‘encouraged’, but there is no outright ‘war’ on them either. They had, at the time, a handful of heroin addicts, and a needle exchange program that made it perfectly safe for addicts to exchange their used needles for clean ones without fear of prosecution. The comparison between societies was remarkable, the U.S. plagued by ghettos and crack houses and crime and urban plight, and Amsterdam with a clean, safe and productive society with very few addicts. There’s a great book called “Reefer Madness” that looks at the ridiculous drug laws enacted here in the U.S.

The real problem is the criminalization of drugs and the ill named “War on Drugs.” The US spends untold billions on eradicating this problem with no discernable effect. Meanwhile the people running the drug business rake in probably 100 times the amount spent to put them out of business. Like Prohibition, which by it’s conclusion had actually firmly established organized crime in the US, it is folly to try to erase people’s personal weakness and disease by making them illegal.

The answer is decriminalization of drugs, which will take much of the profit out of it and putting the money saved into effective drug treatment and/or maintenance of addicts. It won’t happen though, because I suspect that the politicians who are most adamant against decriminalization are knowingly, or unknowingly the ones reaping the highest political contributions. All I know is that if I were the head of a drug cartel I would want the most draconian laws possible on the books. The more draconian the law, the greater the profit to be gained.