stop the madness

Reefer madness edition

There's $10 billion you could save right away and wouldn't harm anything in the last three columns. Maybe two or three billion of that could go to the first two columns. But you'd probably make at least that much at least from taxes, regulation/fee compliance of distributors and producers, and a number of legal incomes now subject to taxation rather than evasion and laundering to conceal them.

I admit that ending the drug war is probably going to take a more moderate approach than the swift sharp break I think justice demands. But softening the federal crackdown on marijuana production and "medical" marijuana isn't exactly progress and change you can believe in either when you look at the budget that remains roughly fixed in place for the foreseeable future on interdiction and police/military tactics, search and seizure, forfeiture and the Constitutional and judicial abuses that they spawn, and the amount of money being pissed away to present an appearance of being "tough" on a problem that only gets tougher and worse when you crack down on it.