Drugs: The Legalization Debate

[reed11b]

I don't know. How much money do we spend on that as compared to hunting down those who traffic harder drugs?

SFC W

One way of factoring the cost would be to look at the cost of keep an individual incarcerated for a year, and then count the number of convicts incarcerated on mandatory drug laws for marijuana. According to most sites, like this one, the cost is between $20,000 to $40,000 a year. The estimation of # of marijuana users confined primarly for marijuana offenses is 1 in 7 or 1 in 8 of all prisoners or 40,000 individuals. This equals approx $800,000,000 to 1.6B.
Saying that we are spending a Billion dollars a year on marijuana enforcement is probably being very conservative.
Reed
P.S. That 40,000 is State and Federal prisoners only. There are no compiled records on how many of the 600,000 local prisoners are there for marijuana offenses.