Legalizing Marijuana: The Economic Benefits

Don’t get the wrong idea. We are not all potheads here at brobrobrodude, but prohibition on marijuana is just absurd. Let me start by explaining why it was made illegal in the first place.

The Marijuana Tax Act was created in 1937. It didn’t criminalize marijuana but rather forced everyone using it or growing it to have a stamp for it. However, the government wasn’t giving any out. This essentially made it illegal to possess or grow marijuana. The main reason this law was passed can be tied directly to racism. It was done because Mexicans and African Americans were mostly the ones who used marijuana recreationally and people like Henry Anslinger, the Commissioner of the FBI at the time, wanted to ruin all their fun. Anslinger ran smear campaigns through outrageous films such as “Reefer Madness,” to ruin the image of marijuana.

Time and time again, scientific studies have shown that marijuana has no long term health effects and there is no record of anyone EVER dying from marijuana use. Yet things like cigarettes and alcohol which kill millions of people worldwide every year remain completely legal. But enough about the basics… and on to the real reason for this post: why legalizing marijuana could be a great boost to this economy that is in the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Hemp is a material made from marijuana plants that can be used to make over 25,000 different products from clothes to paper. Before it was made illegal, it was the largest agricultural crop in the world! These days, the underground marijuana industry is a multi-billion dollar industry despite the fact that it is illegal. Making more products from hemp could have countless positive outcomes. It could help our pollution in this country because the products would be organic and it could also create many jobs. The marijuana industry itself could create many jobs, from growers to distributors. Our unemployment rate is in the double digits and more jobs could do nothing but help the situation. There is currently an estimated 50 million people in America who use marijuana. If the government made it legal and taxed it, there could be billions of dollars in revenue to help the $12.3 trillion debt that we are in, or maybe even put us in a surplus which has been done only once in the past 40 years, by the Clinton Administration. There are 45,000 people in jail in the U.S. because of weed related issues. There is even more money we could save by not having to provide for all of those people every day. According to Jeffrey Miron, an economics professor at Harvard University, “the government could save $7.7 billion every year if it didn’t have to spend money policing and prosecuting marijuana activity.” This year alone, there has already been $5 billion spent on the war on drugs in the United States. That’s just over a month! And yet marijuana is still illegal and our debt is growing at an astounding rate. Something has to be done to fix the economy and these asinine stimulus bills are not working. Marijuana legalization may not be the only solution to that problem or the best one, but it sure as hell would help.