Thursday, February 9, 2012
Arkansas Politics / Law Judge touts savings of drug courts
Posted by Max Brantley on Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 11:13 AM
Circuit Judge Robert Herzfeld of Benton has provided data comparing the cost of handling drug offenders in drug courts with the cost of imprisonment. It's much cheaper he contends — about $6,000 per year for someone in drug court versus $21,900 for some imprisoned for a year. He figures this adds up to $30 million in savings a year for the sate.
He ascribes no costs to the $136,000-a-year judge presiding over the various drug courts or their own staffs, figuring that those costs exist with or without drug court. He appears to be figuring about $1,250 a year in treatment costs for people in drug court.
It's part of his prep for a meeting Friday at the Capitol with legislators about reductions in treatment money for drug courts.
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I read the other day if it weren't for Stalin's record on incarceration, we the USA, in this day and age would be the record-holder of highest rate of incarceration of our own brethren in history.
So when you thank Dawg for Mississippi, thank Stalin too. And by all means vote for the bluest neoliberal so you can pretend you are better than red.
Gee, I wonder just how much we could save by legalizing and taxing marijuana?
Legalizing, yes. But how are you ever going to tax a weed anybody can grow in their yard or window planter, or score (if desired) from anybody over fifteen?
Marijuana will NEVER be a tax revenue source, unless they restrict it like tobacco.
But they can't. Tobacco is hard to grow and highly addictive. Marijuana is neither.
Facts are what you face when you've run out of excuses.
But Norma, no one can tax me for tomatoes I grow in my yard, but I pay taxes when I buy them in the grocery store. And since all our efforts at growing tomatoes in the heat last year produced one little tomato the size of a 50 cent piece, I've bought a lot of tomatoes at the store.
Most pot smokers would probably get their weed at a pot store if it was legal, because who has time to be a pot farmer these days? And if pot was taxed like my Marlboro Lights, Arkansas & the US would be swimming in new tax revenue.
Then add the money we'd save by bringing all our troops home from the War on Drugs added to the money we'd save turning loose half the prisoners we've got socked away in the 50 states....hell, we could probably be hunky-dory if Mormon Mitt only paid 10% on his money he keeps in the US of A.
My pot days are long over, but the circus of the War On Drugs has about run its course and the cost to our society is staggering.
DBI -
Tomatoes aren't easy to grow either.
Believe me: powers-that-be have tried for years, decades now, to figure out a model for selling and taxing marijuana. If they ever figure that out, they'll "legalize" it.
The culture of marijuana has evolved quite naturally based on two facts: 1) It's a weed that's easy to grow and 2) It's illegal.
Granted, more powerful exotic strains may require tender loving care. But smokers really don't give a shit about that when it comes right down to it, since anybody anywhere can easily grow the weed and it doesn't require a "farm" or expensive and time-consuming processing like tobacco.
The growing, distribution and sale of marijuana is -- as with all illegal recreational substances including alcohol during prohibition -- highly social. The rituals of establishing friends and connections and suppliers require and provide supply social interactions that buying the stuff at 7-11 like Marlboros does not.
No one would buy cigarettes if tobacco were as easily grown and processed as marijuana. But it isn't. The amount of tobacco required to process in quantities for just one pack of cigarettes, much less a carton or three a month, is enormous. Tobacco's addictive properties, unlike marijuana, easily lead to habits of 20-60 cigarettes daily.
Marijuana requires no processing. It can simply be plucked from the plant, dried, and immediately smoked or ingested.
Marijuana smokers (on average) may consume one or two joints a day, if that. Many smoke one or two joints a week. It is nothing to home-grow the quantities to supply a typical marijuana habit.
Marijuana use is not REMOTELY related to addictions like alcohol, tobacco, heroin, cocaine, meth, etc., either socially or medically. Nor is marijuana the mythical "gateway" drug to harder stuff that it's claimed. MOST marijuana users do not go on to heroin or anything else. Neither do most tobacco smokers.
Those who DO go on to harder drugs OF COURSE started with marijuana (and often with cigarettes too) simply because it's as readily available as Altoids. But that doesn't mean it LEADS, like a gateway, to smack. Fun with fallacies. Tobacco, then, is a gateway drug. And sugar.
Even if it were legalized, as it should and will be (possession is now but a misdemeanor, for the most part; one practically has to blow the smoke in an officer's face to be issued a citation), marijuana will continue to be preferred to be bought through friends and / or personally grown, by most, over purchasing highly-taxed price-inflated seductively packaged and marketed store-bought brands.
Presumably, THC content would be regulated like alcohol content in beers and liquors.
Alcohol and tobacco are both increasingly viewed negatively as money-robbing corporate-sponsored addictions for suckers, plagued with huge social and personal health and economic costs. Marijuana isn't. It is still and always will be countercultural and associated with Free Love.
These facts and nothing more continue to keep marijuana illegal.
It's called grass and weed because it's ubiquitous and free. It's only "expensive" because illegal, thus providing gargantuan revenues to drug cartels and nice profits to more localized dealers and grandmothers in the economic downturn.
If and when marijuana is legalized, however, not to worry: the cartels won't be reduced to selling black velvet paintings of Jesus and Elvis to touristas. They've still got the hard-core shit to traffic and play deadly cops-and-robbers with.
Hopes of huge tax revenues from legalized marijuana are, um, a pipe dream.
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