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Question: would you rather pay less taxes, be personally safer from violent crime and terrorism, get more benefits from government programs, and enjoy the rights you are due as a citizen in a democratic nation? Or would you rather keep marijuana illegal?

There are a multitude of reasons that the prohibitionary 'war against drugs' should be ended and replaced with a more reasonable policy of market regulation combined with harm reduction. The most basic reason, from a practical point of view, is that prohibition simply doesn't work. This was quite sufficiently proved by the days of alcohol prohibition in the United States, but apparently this perfect object lesson was wasted on us, since we've been repeating the same mistakes with marijuana and other drugs continually over the following decades. Since the institution of drug prohibition, drug use has risen faster than at any time during history. There is no evidence that drug enforcement prohibition has any effect on drug use whatsoever. Seriously, the police can't even keep people who are *already in jail* from smoking marijuana. Why does anyone imagine they can keep the population at large from doing it? It's about time we recognized that the interminable, unwinnable war that our governments have been fighting against their own citizens is a massive failure.

Then there's the fact that drug prohibition encourages violent crime. That's right, encourages. Since dealing drugs is illegal, the people most likely to handle large-volume sales are people who understand illegal markets and are already engaged in large-scale black marketing: urban gangs and criminal cartels. Drug sales represent a giant funnel diverting money out of the legitimate, regulated and taxed economy and into the coffers of organizations that deal in protection rackets and murder for hire. To the harmless hippies and desperately poor street dealers filling our prisons, selling marijuana may represent a big risk; for the gangsters and drug cartels which supply them, the risk is negligible, and the returns, massive. Capital raised by drug smuggling is a grand opportunity for criminal organizations to purchase guns, hire soldiers, pay out bribes, and generally expand their influence. Worse, since drug producers are so persecuted in democratic nations, the ultimate source of these drugs is often the less democratic places on earth; tyrannies and lawless regions, places essentially run by the criminals themselves. Much of the drug trade between the

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