In 2009, the National Survey on Drug Use and health conducted a survey to determine how many people who were at least twelve years old smoked marijuana at least once in the month before. 16.7 million Americans reported that they had. Now, let's pretend that just 12 million of the people who participated in the survey smoked just one ounce of weed in a year, and keep in mind that this is a very conservative amount of marijuana for an entire year. Some heavy smokers will go through an ounce in two weeks. So, we are being conservative when it comes to the number of people who will one ounce of weed in a year while we are also being conservative by using an ounce of marijuana a year.
Now the price of an ounce will vary depending on where you live and the quality of the marijuana. An ounce of swag can go for $60-$80 while an ounce of Dro can go for anywhere between $300-$400. Just for calculating purposes we will say that the average cost of an ounce of marijuana is $200. So we take $200 and multiply it by the conservative figure of the 12 million people who will smoke just one ounce of marijuana in a year.
That amounts to 2.4 BILLION dollars in one year which is probably a very conservative number.
If we are more realistic and say that 13.5 million people smoke on average just two ounces of marijuana in a year the figure comes out to be 5.4 BILLION dollars in sales.That would a huge new industry that would create jobs during a time when our country so desperately needs them. It would be an enormous new source of tax revenue when at a time when our country so desperately needs tax revenue as well.
When we take into account that in 2008 the tax revenue generated by tobacco was 16.5 billion dollars just from the tax on sales alone, you can get an idea of how much of an effect legalizing marijuana can have on the U.S. debt which is already beyond outrageous.
Let's just say that legalizing marijuana would generate 10 billion dollars of tax revenue a year. That sure doesn't sound like much when you take into account the fact that the U.S. is in debt now for a sum of 14 trillion dollars but you have to start somewhere.
Once legalized there are other externalities that would benefit society and lessen our defecit.
Take into account these things:
1) The defense and border control spending we could save as the drug cartels in Mexico would be greatly weakened after we began to strengthen our own economy instead of strengthening their cartels by selling our citizens what they are going to get one way or the other. Is it really worth the lives of those brutally murdered by the drug cartels to criminalize individuals for using a substance that "could be a gateway drug"?
2) The outrageous amount of money we spend to incarcerate individuals who have done nothing wrong besides smoke pot. I'm not saying that marijuana is the only reason that someone is in prison for drug use, but FIFTY PERCENT of the people in prison are there because of drug use. That means 50% of the money we spend on prisons is because of drugs including marijuana. I also don't want my tax money to pay the police man's salary who is performing a sting operation on the corner of the street by selling marijuana to an unsuspecting customer.
Our war on drugs is a complete and utter failure. It is a total waste of our tax dollars, and today we don't have tax dollars to waste. During times like these it shouldn't even be an option whether or not we spend our tax money to criminalize one who smokes marijuana or create money by legalizing it. It's not going away. Should we keep wasting money or should we start making money? That's the question every American has to ask themselves, and if you believe it's time to start making money then you need to be loud about it. Because Washington can't hear us.
And we aren't even talking about how much of the deficit we could make up if the government discontinued to give a damn about whether or not I play a $20 Texas Hold Em tournament on my computer.