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$9 Billion a year to fight a flower PDF Print E-mail
Written by Paul Armentano   

American taxpayers now spend more than a billion dollars per year to incarcerate its citizens for pot, according to an October 2006 report by the US Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.

420clock According to the report, Drug Use and Dependence, State and Federal Prisoners, 2004, 12.7 percent of state inmates and 12.4 percent of federal inmates incarcerated for drug violations are in for cannabis.

Police arrested 786,545 Americans on marijuana charges in 2005.
Combining these percentages with separate US Department of Justice statistics on the total number of state and federal drug prisoners (October 2005 BJS Bulletin “Prisoners in 2004,” NCJ 210677) suggests that there are now about 33,655 state inmates and 10,785 federal inmates behind bars for marijuana offenses. (The report failed to include estimates on the percentage of inmates incarcerated in county jails for pot-related offenses.)

Multiplying these totals by US DOJ prison expenditure data (June 2004 BJS Bulletin “State Prison Expenditures, 2001,” NCJ 202949) reveals that taxpayers spend more than $1 billion annually to imprison pot offenders.

The new report is noteworthy because it undermines the common claim from law enforcement officers and bureaucrats, specifically White House drug czar John Walters, that few, if any, Americans are incarcerated for cannabis offenses. In reality, nearly one in eight US drug prisoners are locked up for pot.

Of course, several hundred thousand more Americans are arrested each year for violating cannabis laws, costing taxpayers another $8 billion dollars annually in criminal justice costs.

According to the most recent figures from the FBI, police arrested an estimated 786,545 Americans on marijuana charges in 2005 – more than twice the number arrested just 12 years ago. Among those arrested, about 88 percent – some 696,074 Americans – were charged with mere possession.

Another 90,471 were charged with “sale/manufacture,” which is a category that includes all cultivation offenses, even where the cannabis was being grown for personal or medical use. It also includes people who were not selling, but merely charged with sales.

These totals are the highest ever, and make up 42.6 percent of all drug arrests in the US. Nevertheless, self-reported pot use by adults, as well as the ready availability of cannabis, remains virtually unchanged.

Cannabis isn’t a harmless substance, and those who argue for a change in the drug’s legal status do not claim it to be. However, it’s relative risks to the user and society are much fewer than those of alcohol and tobacco, and do not warrant the expenses associated with targeting, arresting and prosecuting hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.

Federal statistics show that about 94 million Americans – 40 percent of the population age 12 or older – self-identify as having used cannabis at some point in their lives, and very few claim any significant deleterious health effects due to their use.

America’s public policies should reflect this reality, not deny it. It makes no sense to continue to treat nearly half of all Americans as criminals.

* Armentano is senior policy analyst for the NORML Foundation, norml.org, in Washington, DC. This article originally appeared in the Washington Examiner.
 
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