Marijuana Decriminalization and Legalization: The Honest Facts

Marijuana is medically legalized in 15 states, as well as the District of Columbia. It is also legalized in several countries, notably The Netherlands. However, the rest of the world is not on board. And why should they be? Let's take a look at some pertinent statistics:

(1) The U.S. Institute of Medicine claims that less than 10% of marijuana users become dependent on the drug, whereas 15% and 32% of alcohol and tobacco users exhibit dependency.

(2) 800,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana charges last year, with more than 5 million Americans arrested in the past decade. Nearly 90% of these arrests occur for possession.

(3) If the US government legalised marijuana it would possibly save $7.7 billion per year in expenditure on enforcement of prohibition. Also, marijuana legalization would yield tax revenue of roughly $2.4 billion annually if it were taxed like all other goods, and about $6.2 billion annually if it were taxed at rates comparable to those on alcohol and tobacco. (http://www.prohibitioncosts.org/mironreport.html)

(4) 50,000 people die each year from alcohol poisoning. Similarly, more than 400,000 deaths each year are attributed to tobacco smoking.

(5) The American 2010 Monitoring the Future Study showed that 13.7% of 8th graders, 27.5% of 10th graders, and 34.8% of 12th graders had abused marijuana at least once in the year prior to being surveyed.

(6) Statements in the popular media that the potency of cannabis has increased by ten times or more in recent decades are not supported by the data from either the USA or Europe

(7) Throughout most of the first two decades of the 1976 de facto legalization policy, Dutch use levels have remained at or below those in the United States.

(8) "Commissioned by President Nixon in 1972, the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse concluded that 'Marihuana's relative potential for harm to the vast majority of individual users and its actual impact on society does not justify a social policy designed to seek out and firmly punish those who use it. This judgment is based on prevalent use patterns, on behavior exhibited by the vast majority of users and on our interpretations of existing medical and scientific data. This position also is consistent with the estimate by law enforcement personnel that the elimination of use is unattainable.' "

(9) A meta-analysis of studies that have attempted to address the question of longer term neurocognitive disturbance in moderate and heavy cannabis users has failed to demonstrate a substantial, systematic, and detrimental effect of cannabis use on neuropsychological performance. It was surprising to find such few and small effects given that most of the potential biases inherent in analyses actually increased the likelihood of finding a cannabis effect.

So what's the deal with weed?
YOU BE THE JUDGE.
The majority of these statistics taken from:
http://drugwarfacts.org/cms/?q=node/53 and www.norml.com