Osama Been Forgotten

Is running around relatively free (dead or alive was the mantra a few years ago) and approximately 693,000 people were busted for pot last year, preventing our law enforcement people from looking for criminals, finding missing blonde women or unlearning racial profiling.

The case for legal pot use: "A Harvard University professor of economics, Jeffrey Miron, has crunched the numbers, and he's determined that legalizing marijuana would save $7.7 billion annually in money spent on enforcing dope laws.

That breaks down to $5.3 billion in savings for state and local governments, and $2.4 billion in cost reductions at the federal level.

This is noteworthy because the FBI reported the other day that more Americans were arrested for pot last year than at any time in U.S. history. And of the more than 770,000 people cited for dope-related offenses, nearly 90 percent were charged only with possession.

Those are hundreds of thousands of criminal cases that didn't have to be taking up the time and resources of our cops and courts."

To say nothing of jail space which consists of room and board plus supervision by highly paid guards.

"In his study, "The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition," Miron places the illicit U.S. market for marijuana at about $10.5 billion in annual sales. (Figures close to $11 billion seem to be the consensus among people who guess at such things.)

Decriminalization would result in lower production costs as dope farming and processing go mainstream. It would also lead to what Miron believes would be only a modest increase in demand because "the people who care about it are already consuming it."

Umm, yeah and they would be willing to pay taxes if they could walk into a store and pick what they wanted and leave. My dad always used to say that as soon as they figured out how to tax it, the government would make it legal.

What is taking so long? Our space program sucks too, no mind expanding possibilities there either.