by Greg Francisco
Friday August 22, 2008, 10:53 AM

Recently, while driving through Saginaw, I happened to tune into a
radio program featuring an interview with Saginaw County Sheriff
Charles Brown, who was railing against the dangers of marijuana.

Speaking as a former federal law enforcement officer, I would like to
respond.
We can argue from now until doomsday whether marijuana is a deadly
gateway drug, a simple plant neither inherently good nor evil or a
great boon to mankind given by a loving creator. And we can continue
to completely miss the point.

The real question should be, is prohibition the best way to deal with
the dangers, real or imagined, of marijuana?

Marijuana is here to stay, deeply ingrained in our society. Thinking
we ever will achieve the utopian vision of a marijuana-free society is
just so much wishful thinking. The best we ever can hope for is to
control marijuana and mitigate any damage it may cause. Seventy-three
years after marijuana prohibition was first enacted and 35 years after
President Nixon declared a "War on Drugs," marijuana is cheaper, more
potent, more prevalent and more available than ever before.

Brown calls marijuana prohibition a "drug control strategy." The
reality is prohibition takes all control over who manufactures and
distributes marijuana away from legitimate government oversight and
hands it over instead to criminal gangs.

Marijuana prohibition means no control whatsoever. Marijuana dealers
don't ask underage children to show an ID, they just want to see the
cash.

Regardless of one's opinion on the relative dangers of marijuana
abuse, one thing we all ought to agree on is that prohibition is the
worst scheme possible to control it.

When our grandparents wisely abandoned alcohol prohibition, it wasn't
because they decided booze isn't so dangerous after all. Rather, they
had the integrity to face the truth -- prohibition was making the
problem worse -- along with the courage to do what had to be done. Do
we?

Marijuana prohibition is horribly expensive, annually costing Michigan
taxpayers close to $200 million in police, court and jail costs alone.
At the same time it deprives the state treasury of hundreds of
millions of dollars in potential tax revenues, makes criminals out of
tens of thousands of otherwise law-abiding citizens and opens the door
to steady erosions in our privacy and civil liberties. The only
successes of marijuana prohibition have been to guarantee lifetime
employment to those doing the prohibiting and to make a very few very
bad people very rich.

Marijuana prohibition has been a dismal failure, a failure made even
more glaring when compared to the sensible way we deal with alcohol
and tobacco, the two most deadly drugs in our society today. The
solution is obvious. The only question is, do we have the courage to
do it? Or are we doomed to another 35 years of failure?

Brown would be well advised to check out the Web site of Law
Enforcement Against Prohibition, www.leap.cc, where he can learn why
more and more of his fellow professional lawmen are calling for an end
to prohibition.

Legalize, regulate and tax marijuana so that we finally can control
marijuana.

Greg Francisco is a graduate of the U.S. Coast Guard Maritime Law
Enforcement Academy and a former Coast Guard narcotics interdiction
officer. He lives in Paw Paw.

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