By undermining the black market, marijuana legalization could also be expected to reduce systemic or economically motivated marijuana-related crime , and the costs of law enforcement efforts targeted at marijuana. Miron also estimates that legalization would save the federal and state governments a combined $7.7 billion in prohibition enforcement expenditures. While the assumptions required for such estimates make them imprecise, it is not implausible that for marijuana alone, the combination of tax revenues and diminished enforcement expenditures could boost government coffers by over $10 billion. However, given the extremely large number of arrests for marijuana possession—far more than for sale—depenalization could achieve many of the same gains in reduced enforcement costs. Moreover, marijuana often has a much shorter distribution chain than cocaine; cultivation by individuals is common and many users receive marijuana from friends for free.These social factors may help explain why violence appears to be significantly less common and severe in black markets for marijuana than in such markets for cocaine.Hence, one of legalization’s advantages over depenalization—its ability to undermine black markets— may be less important for marijuana than for cocaine. Legalization could also be expected to increase use more substantially than depenalization,microgreen rack for sale although social costs of additional marijuana use could be mitigated if marijuana proved a partial substitute—rather than complement—for such drugs as cigarettes and alcohol. We next consider additional considerations relevant to legalization: advertising, international legal obligations, and informational benefits.
Advertising. Legalization of marijuana in the United States might unleash the power of American advertising to entice consumers to use newly legalized substances while obscuring their dangers. There is some chance that an outright interdiction on advertisements of legalized drugs would be found to violate First Amendment speech protections. Twenty-five years ago, the Supreme Court held in Posadas de Puerto Rico Associates v. Tourism Companythat if the government can ban a product or an activity like gambling, it can also proscribe advertising of that product or activity. This might suggest that because marijuana and other drugs are currently prohibited, advertising of such products could be banned. More recent decisions, however, have suggested that the government is not necessarily empowered to ban truthful advertising, even of products it could otherwise proscribe.Steven Duke and Albert Gross have called the Posadas decision an “aberration” and suggested that a complete ban on drug advertising could chill debate about the true dangers of drug use. Instead, these authors argue that a better way to limit advertising would be to withhold trademark protection from companies selling legalized drugs so that they would have no brand names to advertise, unlike today’s alcohol and cigarette companies. In addition, Duke and Gross recommend placing warnings on print ads at least as large as the largest type in the ads and prohibiting radio and television advertising, which the Court has held to be immune from First Amendment protections because the airwaves are owned by the public.Evidence on the value of warning labels comes from Canada where colorful pictures of the damage to the body associated with smoking are placed on cigarette packages and required to cover at least 30 percent of the package material. The Canadian warnings have been found to be far more effective at inhibiting smoking than the bland American “Surgeon General’s Warning” .
One of the most touted anti-drug advertising campaigns in the United States has been Montana’s attempt to counter its methamphetamine problem through television ads and billboards depicting the physical deformities and violent behavior caused by meth use. According to one analysis, two years after the introduction of the “Not Even Once” advertising campaign, meth use in Montana had dropped by one-half . Following legalization, rigorous requirements on packaging of newly legalized drugs and explicit counter advertisements could help reduce a sudden surge in demand. Placing such explicit warnings on newly legalized drug products would raise questions about how to deal with alcohol and tobacco advertising following the legalization of currently illicit substances. If one were to enact strict regulations requiring graphic depictions of the harms of newly legalized drugs like marijuana, it would seem inconsistent to allow cigarette manufacturers to continue packaging cigarettes with the current Surgeon General’s Warning, given that in terms of both lethality and addictiveness, marijuana may well be a less dangerous substance than nicotine . A comprehensive marketing policy on all dangerous substances might be difficult to accomplish, however, for political reasons. An ongoing case filed in federal district court in Kentucky by several tobacco manufacturers and retailers could determine the extent to which the government may require large or graphic warning labels in print advertisements or product packaging.In this case, the plaintiffs are seeking an injunction against sections of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act requiring graphic warning labels on cigarette packaging similar to those found in Canada, curtailing the use of color advertising in magazines with over 15 percent readership or two million readers under age 18, and prohibiting the advertisement of tobacco products within 1,000 feet of school playgrounds. In January 2010, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky granted the plaintiff tobacco companies’ motion for summary judgment regarding the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act’s provision requiring that all tobacco advertising appear in black text on a white background in magazines with over 15 percent readership or two million readers under the age of 18.
The court found that the ban violated the First Amendment because it was not narrowly tailored to serve the asserted state interest of protecting minors from tobacco advertising. The court seemed to place heavy emphasis on the fact that barring all color advertising would ban some of the logos and product symbols used by tobacco companies; product symbols whose meanings could not easily be translated into black and white text.However, the court was more tolerant of the new warning requirements that mandate that cigarette packaging contain graphic warnings similar to those used in Canada, finding that these restrictions were narrowly tailored, and thus not in violation of the First Amendment.This case will likely be appealed, and if it reaches the U.S. Supreme Court,cannabis grow facility layout which many experts believe it will, its holding could shape the government’s ability to restrict the advertisement of legalized drugs for decades to come. International Law. Another complication for legalization is international law. While many researchers attempt to make international comparisons in studying drugs, one area of drug control policy that receives scant attention is the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 which binds all UN member nations to maintain prohibition of drugs, including cannabis specifically . While the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs requires that countries maintain prohibition of manufacture, sales, and import, it does not require a punitive regime of the type currently found in the United States. Article 36 of the Single Convention, “Penal Provision,” specifically allows for treatment programs to either enhance or serve as a substitute for punishment.The Economist reports that countries like the Netherlands are able to allow for some innovation in controlling marijuana use through the convention’s commentary, which states that its goal is “improvement of the efficacy of national criminal justice systems in the field of drug trafficking” . Thus reforms working within the framework of the existing treaty are possible, though full-scale legalization would require either a country’s withdrawal from the treaty or revision thereof. Perhaps partly due to the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, even countries with more liberal narcotics policies than the United States lack full-fledged drug legalization and at most allow for depenalization of marijuana and/or widespread needle exchange programs.
As discussed above, in the Netherlands, a country long known for its tolerance of marijuana smoking, the importation and commercial production of cannabis remains illegal . When considering its own drug reform, Portugal declined to adopt outright legalization likely in part because of its treaty obligations under the 1961 Single Convention . Information Under Legalization.America’s war on drugs is deeply entrenched, and powerful institutional forces make change difficult. In important ways the case for marijuana reform rests not only on the potential for the institution of an evidence-based, cost-minimizing approach to marijuana policy in its own right, but also on the possibility that marijuana reform might catalyze the use of such an approach in shaping drug policy in general. The National Research Council’s Informing America’s Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Don’t Know Keeps Hurting Us argued that our current form of criminalization severely limits the tools social science needs to study the effects of drugs and drug policies, and it therefore poses a serious obstacle for the possibility of making policy based on sound evidence. Criminalization obscures our knowledge of consumption patterns, prices, and potencies, and hence of the responsiveness of prices to policy changes.82 Perhaps most significantly, because America has no recent experience with the legalization of major currently illegal drugs, there has been too little variation in the data to tease out the causal effects of prohibition or the likely consequences of itsrepeal.Policy changes resulting in interstate variation in the treatment of marijuana would generate clearer information for analysts and policymakers. U.S. drug policy has also reflected exaggeration of differences between the psychopharmacological effects of cocaine and crack. The primary difference between cocaine and crack use stems from the differing routes of administration, with powder cocaine being snorted through the nose, while crack cocaine is generally smoked. Smoking crack leads to a quicker high than snorting powder cocaine because the large surface area of the lungs and the proximity of pulmonary to cerebral circulation allow for rapid absorption of the drug and a direct route to the brain . This rapid absorption results in a high within 5-10 seconds and a subsequent crash once the high wears off . Physically, crack smoking, like smoking of other drugs, can lead to a variety of lung problems.84 Behaviorally, crack smoking is associated with many of the same problems observed in users of powder cocaine, including depression, loss of interest, nervousness, fatigue, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, and thoughts of suicide, though with higher prevalence than for powder cocaine users . However, these behavioral problems are gathered from surveys of crack users, and thus come from a self selected population that may be predisposed to such disorders even without drug use . While differences do exist between cocaine and crack, many of the policy changes, such as the much harsher federal sentencing guidelines for crack as opposed to powder cocaine, now appear to have been enacted partly because of an exaggeration of the differences between the effects of cocaine and crack. Consider, for example, the “crack baby” scare of the 1980s, during which the media highlighted the problem of numerous babies supposedly born addicted to crack. This scare appears to have been sensationalized. Recent research calls into question the supposed link between mothers using crack and children suffering from physical ailments different from those experienced by children whose mothers are not crack users . Apparently, many of the problems associated with “crack babies” can be traced to the strong correlation between using crack and the failure of mothers to take other steps associated with prenatal health rather than physiological effects of crack use on the infants. Psychopharmacological effects have been mischaracterized in other ways as well, beginning with the nature of the relationship between crack use and crime.However, while crack was associated with a large increase in violence in American cities during the late 1980s, the psychopharmacological impact of the drug was largely not to blame. In a study of New York City murders committed during a six month period of 1988—the height of the crack epidemic— researchers attempted to attribute the cause of homicides to three different drug-related factors: psychopharmacological effects of drug use, economic compulsion in which drug addicts kill while committing thefts to fund drug purchases, and systemic effects of participating in the drug market, such as when a dealer kills one of his own agents . These researchers determined that only 7.5 and 1.9 percent of the murders could be attributed solely to either the psychopharmacological effects of drug use or economic compulsion, respectively, whereas 39.1 percent were part of the systemic involvement in the illegal drug markets.This study found that 52.6 percent of homicides in New York City during this peak period of the crack problem were in some way drug related.