Supporting pot prohibition as divining rod pointing toward social conservatives and away from fiscal conservatives

One of my favorite readers forwarded me this recent commentary by Carl Hiaasen of the Miami Herald concerning pot policy which included a sentence that gave me real clarity on why I find the politics of marijuana reform so interesting.  The piece is headlined "War on pot has gone up in smoke," and here are some excerpts with the key sentence emphasized:

The war on marijuana is going up in smoke, and it's about time.  There is no bigger waste of money and resources in all law enforcement.  Failure is too polite a description for the long campaign to eliminate the pot trade in the United States.  A colossal flop is what it is. After four decades and billions spent, marijuana is easier to get, and more potent, than ever.

More than 40 percent of all Americans over 12 have tried it, and at least 30 million people smoke it every year.  The most recent national drug survey found that 18.1 million Americans had used it during the previous month.

Pot is now medically dispensed in 18 states and Washington, D.C.  It's the largest cash crop in the nation's largest agricultural state, California.  A legitimate pain reliever for cancer victims, "medicinal" marijuana is now available for an assortment of other symptoms, some of them conveniently vague and impossible to discount.  It's not terribly hard to get a prescription.

In November, voters in Colorado and Washington dropped the pretense and approved the adult recreational use of weed.  Other states will follow in coming years.

Absurdly, the government still classifies pot as a Schedule I Controlled Substance, the same as heroin and cocaine.  Federal law prohibits medical marijuana use, and the Obama administration has taken action against dispensaries in California.   It's a lost cause, and an expensive one.  Any true fiscal conservative should be outraged by the waste and futility.

States are rewriting their marijuana laws because that's what makes sense.  Regulate it, tax it, and make a ton of money from it.  Another benefit of decriminalization is liberating overworked police and prosecutors, whose talents are being misspent on dumb, dead-end pot cases — 50 plants in a grow house tended by some hapless bozo who doesn't even know where the seeds came from. Most Americans would prefer to see drug agents shutting down meth labs and pill mills, which actually kill people.

Like it or not, marijuana is so deeply imbedded in our culture that it will never go away. You can find it on Wall Street, Main Street or K Street, on any college campus or military base. Some drug experts fear that more lenient laws will increase consumption and abuse. Others believe a lawful marketplace will prove safer.  Regardless, the saturation level of reefer is already high.

In 2011, according to FBI statistics, a marijuana-related arrest occurred every 42 seconds in the United States.  That's how abundant the stuff is.  Some of those who got busted were career criminals who happened to be caught with a joint in their pockets, but many were casual users or small-time sellers.

Those who get prosecuted on minor pot charges disproportionately tend to be Hispanics and African-Americans, not the white college kids who are toking up a storm.  Cannabis laws have always been selectively enforced, and lots of people are sitting in jail who shouldn't be there.

The current useless Congress is unlikely to tackle marijuana reform, but the Justice Department could do all taxpayers a favor by letting each state decide for itself.  Making pot legally available to adults will require caution....  Inevitably, though, more states will ease their marijuana laws. Money is why; potential revenues from taxing pot cultivation and sales are too substantial to forego. Even the boneheads in Tallahassee will one day figure that out.

Watching America's legalization movement with gloom are the Mexican drug cartels, whose vast profits from grass smuggling will wither with the loss of their most lucrative market.  Pot smokers would just as soon buy it from a licensed dispensary, but they will definitely keep buying it, no matter what the government does.

Though I suppose this point should be pretty obvious, the sentence I have highlighted above provides an effective and stark reminder that positions on pot policy now provide an effective means to distinguish social conservatives and fiscal conservatives.   Indeed, for me personally, I suspect it my own deep fiscal conservative instincts — and surely not any 1960s-era, Great-Society-type social liberalism — that leads me to be a sharp critic of the drug war in general and of pot prohibition generally.  More broadly, as this commentary rightly asserts, it is hard to see how any TRUE fiscal conservatives could or would support the status quo of federal pot prohibition.  If one claiming to be a fiscal conservative supports federal pot prohibition, she must at least admit that, as a governing philosophy, she cares more about social issues than economic ones and that she thinks it essential for the federal government to prioritize social issues over economic concerns even while racking up trillions in debt on a yearly basis.

This fiscal vs. social perspective serves, of course, to further link continued support for modern pot prohibition with historic support for alcohol prohibition and similar morals legislation typically advanced by big-government progressive movements.  Historically, it is would-be social reformers who believe government can and should advance a particular social agenda and who will consistently spport bigger and more expensive government if and whenever that government promises to further a (now-government-imposed) social agenda.

In addition to having historical resonance, this perspective makes it easier to understand the seemingly disparate leaders of the new anti-marijuana reform group calling itself Project SAM  (discussed here; website now here).  Project SAM is headed by Patrick Kennedy and its most vocal leader of late has been David Frum, who was a chief speechwriter in the Bush Administration.  (The rest of the leadership team for Project SAM, as reported here, appears to be persons with MDs and PhDs, which supports SAM's claim to be eager to bring a public health focus to the marijuana reform discussion.)   Patrick Kennedy, of course, comes from the political family perhaps most well known in modern Democratic history for supporting big-federal-government, tax-and-spend programs to promote one vision of social welfare without too much concern about whether expensive government-run social programs actually work.  And David Frum comes from a Bush Administration which made its mark by being fiscally irresponsible through big-federal-government, spend-and-spend programming at home and abroad.

It should thus come as no surprise that these kinds of folks will be heading up efforts to continue to support what looks like a failed big-government criminal justice program.  That said, the marijuana part of the drug war can claim, as one very tangible achievement, that it has helped ensured that lots of taxpayer-funded police, prosecutors and prison officials could make healthy public-sector-union salaries and pensions while being able to focus time and energies on what would appear to be among the least dangerous of modern drugs and drug offenders.  And I suppose only time will tell whether and how the long-term financial burdens imposed by the enduring, big-government "war on pot" will hurt our kids more than a regulatory regime which might lead them to make false IDs in the hope of scoring some pot from the local drug store for a high school party.