[420 Girl]

California dodged a budget bullet, and now Massachusetts, New York and other states are under the same gun. As governors and state legislatures scrape for new sources of revenue, has the time come to talk seriously -- really seriously, without winks, puns and smirks -- about regulating and taxing marijuana?

It's hard to avoid the brutal truths, and even harder to admit them. The marijuana market is immense, barely restrained by prohibition laws, while the harm it causes society is minuscule compared with alcohol and tobacco.

If there is anyone, anywhere, who believes that investing more taxpayer dollars in prohibition enforcement will extirpate marijuana from within our national borders, let him or her step forward and answer a few plain questions:

. How many more millions of people will have to be arrested, prosecuted, convicted and punished to achieve success in the struggle against marijuana?

. When "success" is achieved, how many more people will be in jails and prisons?

. How much will that cost taxpayers and where will the money come from?

This is the time for defenders of prohibition to answer those questions, or otherwise explain specifically how the war against marijuana can be won. If they can't, let them forever hold their peace, letting the debate turn productively to the alternatives.

Some see decriminalization as an alternative, like the reform enacted by Massachusetts voters in a landslide last November, where personal use is only a civil infraction but commerce remains criminal. Thus were the alcohol laws, 1920-33, during the era we call Prohibition. Decriminalization protects consumers from arrest and the permanent stain of a criminal record, but keeps a heavy burden on police and the courts to stamp out "trafficking."

( New York solved that problem in 1923 by repealing its alcohol-prohibition laws, ceding the burden of enforcement to federal authorities. It also avoided the level of prohibition-related crime and violence experienced in other cities, such as Chicago and Detroit. )

Some will suggest the tomato model, where cannabis is treated like any other agricultural commodity, with controls over purity and packaging, and subject to ordinary sales and income taxes. California is said to collect $100 million annually from sales taxes on medical marijuana alone.

The fiscal circumstances of states, however, demands that this commodity be exploited for every dime of revenue that can be squeezed out of it. Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 admonition -- that "we threw on the table as spoils to be gambled for by the enemies of society the revenue that our government had theretofore received, and the underworld acquired unparalleled resources thereby" -- can be said about drug dealers today. As it was then, the solution is a system of regulation and taxation.

When the question turns from whether to regulate and tax cannabis to how, it's not hard to come up with a legal plan. Legislatures are staffed with legions of lawyers adept at concocting regulatory schemes. The real barrier to reform is the taboo against discussing the subject, as for too long drug policy has been the "third rail" of politics: Touch it and you're dead.

When the taboo yields, blustering politicians can turn to policymaking: How deeply should government be involved in the legal cannabis market? ( A monopoly, like state lotteries, or by regulatory oversight, as with casinos? ) How can the level of tax be set to produce the most revenue, without encouraging a black market? What about home cultivation? In what form should legal cannabis be sold? By whom? How does a regulatory system best impose upon cannabis consumers a profound sense of responsibility for the consequences for their conduct?

Although there is no legal impediment to states' passing regulation and taxation laws, they could not go into actual effect until federal law is modified. In the meantime, states might follow New York's 1923 lead, shifting the cost of enforcement to federal authorities. That would surely get the attention of Congress.


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