Matt Collins
08-09-2007, 12:09 PM
Federal Marijuana Ban Turns 70
August 2 marked the 70th anniversary of federal marijuana prohibition. On that day in 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the deceptively-titled Marijuana Tax Act (actually a prohibition measure) into law.
The bill was passed after a Congressional "debate" that reads like a Marx Brothers (Groucho or Karl, your choice) screenplay. That half-baked "debate" was preceded by a federal campaign of outrageous lies, racism, and utter claptrap.
So how's that working for us, seventy years later?
"It's hard to think of a more spectacularly bad, long-term policy failure than our government's 70-year war on marijuana users," said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) in Washington, D.C. "Since the federal government banned marijuana in 1937, it's gone from being an obscure plant that few Americans had even heard of to the number-one cash crop in the United States."
MPP points out:
* Federal government estimates indicate that marijuana use has increased approximately 4,000 percent since the Marijuana Tax Act took effect.
* A study by researcher Jon Gettman, Ph.D., published in December 2006 and based on government data, found marijuana to be the country's number-one cash crop, exceeding the value of corn and wheat combined.
* The federally funded Monitoring the Future survey reports that approximately 85 percent of high school seniors describe marijuana as "easy to get" -- a figure that has remained virtually unchanged since the survey began in 1975.
* In 2005 (the most recent figures available), U.S. law enforcement made an all-time record 786,545 marijuana arrests -- 89 percent for possession, not sale or trafficking.
We could add more. Marijuana prohibition is a giant federal subsidy to criminal gangs. It keeps a proven therapeutic substance out of the hands of untold thousands of desperately sick people who, doctors and researchers agree, could benefit from it. It wastes precious law enforcement and criminal justice resources. All this for an impossible ban of a substance that is safer than alcohol or tobacco.
And finally, in a country allegedly based on individual liberty, the idea that people can't grow, smoke, and sell a common plant, is outrageous.
"Marijuana prohibition is easily the government's biggest long-term failure since its disastrous experiment with alcohol Prohibition from 1919 to 1933, but the marijuana prohibition disaster just lives on," Kampia said. "It's time to steer a new course and regulate marijuana like we do alcohol."
Well said. (Except that alcohol should be deregulated, too!)
Source: Marijuana Policy Project: http://www.mpp.org/site/c.glKZLeMQIsG/b.1493403/apps/nl/content2.asp?content_id={4E2B134D-699F-4AAD-B5BE-284DAB9E31F3}¬oc=1
August 2 marked the 70th anniversary of federal marijuana prohibition. On that day in 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the deceptively-titled Marijuana Tax Act (actually a prohibition measure) into law.
The bill was passed after a Congressional "debate" that reads like a Marx Brothers (Groucho or Karl, your choice) screenplay. That half-baked "debate" was preceded by a federal campaign of outrageous lies, racism, and utter claptrap.
So how's that working for us, seventy years later?
"It's hard to think of a more spectacularly bad, long-term policy failure than our government's 70-year war on marijuana users," said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) in Washington, D.C. "Since the federal government banned marijuana in 1937, it's gone from being an obscure plant that few Americans had even heard of to the number-one cash crop in the United States."
MPP points out:
* Federal government estimates indicate that marijuana use has increased approximately 4,000 percent since the Marijuana Tax Act took effect.
* A study by researcher Jon Gettman, Ph.D., published in December 2006 and based on government data, found marijuana to be the country's number-one cash crop, exceeding the value of corn and wheat combined.
* The federally funded Monitoring the Future survey reports that approximately 85 percent of high school seniors describe marijuana as "easy to get" -- a figure that has remained virtually unchanged since the survey began in 1975.
* In 2005 (the most recent figures available), U.S. law enforcement made an all-time record 786,545 marijuana arrests -- 89 percent for possession, not sale or trafficking.
We could add more. Marijuana prohibition is a giant federal subsidy to criminal gangs. It keeps a proven therapeutic substance out of the hands of untold thousands of desperately sick people who, doctors and researchers agree, could benefit from it. It wastes precious law enforcement and criminal justice resources. All this for an impossible ban of a substance that is safer than alcohol or tobacco.
And finally, in a country allegedly based on individual liberty, the idea that people can't grow, smoke, and sell a common plant, is outrageous.
"Marijuana prohibition is easily the government's biggest long-term failure since its disastrous experiment with alcohol Prohibition from 1919 to 1933, but the marijuana prohibition disaster just lives on," Kampia said. "It's time to steer a new course and regulate marijuana like we do alcohol."
Well said. (Except that alcohol should be deregulated, too!)
Source: Marijuana Policy Project: http://www.mpp.org/site/c.glKZLeMQIsG/b.1493403/apps/nl/content2.asp?content_id={4E2B134D-699F-4AAD-B5BE-284DAB9E31F3}¬oc=1