Why are we continuing to arrest people for marijuana use?
FBI stats, just released in September 2007, show an all-time record 829,627 marijuana arrests in 2006. Up by 43,000 from 2005.
The number of arrests for simple possession totaled 738,916. This is about 90% of all marijuana arrests and does not include trafficking, just possession.
By comparison, there were 611,523 arrests last year for all violent crimes combined.
This amounts to a lot of manpower and expense thrown at taking a natural herb off the streets that has never been shown to cause violent behavior in anyone. In fact, scientific studies have shown, long ago, that, compared to alcohol, marijuana is much safer. For one thing, marijuana is much less addictive with only 9% becoming addicted as opposed to 15% for alcohol users. Marijuana use has never been shown to cause any permanent harm to the body whereas, it is well documented, alcohol damages the brain and liver to the point that it leads to death. Alcohol, also well documented, incites violence and aggression, marijuana does not.
Cops love to keep marijuana illegal because it keeps their arrest numbers up which ‘proves’ to our community that their services are needed. Also, marijuana users are more docile than alcoholics and therefore are easier to arrest, with less chance of fighting back. Whereas, violent criminals tend to endanger them and the citizenry by using weapons to prevent being arrested.
Where cops are really needed is on our roadways where their heightened presence is more likely to catch drunk drivers that tend to kill us. Their presence would help decrease the number of speeders who are more likely to lose control of their vehicles and kill us. Their presence is needed to prevent careless and reckless drivers from killing us. Their presence is needed to help prevent road rage that can kill us.
There has never been one documented case in which a marijuana user has caused the death of anyone.
Does this show that the priorities of law enforcement officers are misplaced? You bet it does.
With these arrest figures carried out to daily arrests, this means that every 38 seconds of every day a marijuana user is arrested.
Since most people don’t really take anything seriously until it affects their finances, let’s look at some numbers. It is estimated, by people who spend a lot of their time examining such mundane things, that if marijuana was a taxable commodity, the U.S. government could conceivably collect $31 billion from the estimated $113 billion annual marijuana business. Wow! How much healthcare could that figure cover?
The extra time that cops would have on their hands for not arresting these non-violent people could now be focused on catching the actual violent offenders who are still on their most wanted lists.
Taxes collected on marijuana sales could help fund cancer research since they are damaging their lungs through inhaling smoke. Because let’s face it, tobacco smoke has already been proven to cause death from lung cancer, why would you think marijuana smoke is any different. Personally, I think it is foolish for anyone to put such carcinogenic substances into your body. Everyone would condemn anyone who purposefully did this to another human being and call it torture and cruel and unusual punishment (true, it would take a long time to work and you would be happy along the way, but it still will kill you). But hey, it’s your body.
In case you are too high to pick up on it, I don’t think marijuana is a ‘crime’ that warrants this much time, effort and money pursuing. I think cops should spend their time on more worthwhile endeavors. I certainly do not think that marijuana users should be labeled as ‘hardened criminals’. And I don’t fall in step with our drug czar in the all too common belief, shared with other non-drug users, that smoking marijuana leads to harder drug use. This is just urban legend. True there are some smokers that will occasionally experiment with harder drugs but it is by no means the next ‘logical’ inevitable step. The number of those that do is no higher than for those who never smoked pot and went straight for the harder stuff.
I think marijuana users, and alcohol users, are wasting a lot of money that could be better spent on things like a savings plan for the future, either theirs or for their kids. That money could be better spent to improve your living conditions.
It has been proven through studies, and I am sure you have seen this yourselves, that smoking marijuana causes stupidity. If you smoke pot and are one of the lucky few to still have a job, don’t jeopardize it. Too many of you are smoking at work or getting stoned on your way to work. This is just stupid. One, because just having marijuana is still illegal, two, you could get fired if caught with it (let’s face it, if you are stoned at work, you cannot hide it for very long) and most importantly, your job performance suffers and you could cause injury to your self or someone else, depending on what you do for a living. Come on people, keep it strictly recreational if you are going to insist on continuing to use it.
If marijuana was legalized, following in the steps of alcohol legalization in the 1930’s, then there would not be any profit for gangs and other criminals to fund their other criminal, and more violent, enterprises. This is just a no-brainer. By leaving any involvement with marijuana illegal, the legal system has created, and is maintaining, a criminal underground that is more dangerous to this society only because it’s use is illegal. If you want to argue that marijuana impairs your driving and therefore that makes it a danger to society then I have to agree with you. But so is alcohol. And since they are both detrimental to safe drivers everywhere why is one illegal and the other not?
Also, our jails would not be so crowded, because, believe it or not, a large population of inmates, 44% in 2006 according to the FBI, are incarcerated for marijuana offenses. Arguably the least criminal characters in jail today. Is it really necessary to build more prisons to house these non-violent offenders?
America’s prison population totaled 2.1 million inmates as of mid-year 2006, according to Department of Justice Statistics.
The overwhelming majority of drug arrests are for possession of marijuana, and most persons in prison for a drug offense have no history of violence or high-level drug selling activity.
Virtually all of these prisons are horrifically overcrowded. State prisons were operating at 99 to 113 percent of capacity, and the federal prison system was operating at 134 percent of capacity. This compounds the dangers and brutality of prison life. Inmates are exposed to physical and sexual assault, and put at risk for diseases such as HIV/AIDS or developing mental illness.
It does not take a excessive amount of brain power to figure out that by removing these non-violent ‘offenders’ from the equation, we could solve the over-crowding issue and not be faced with raising taxes to pay for more, even larger prisons.
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