The legalization of marijuana took one step closer to being a reality last week, when both houses of Congress passed spending bills. The House passed the 1,088-page, $1.1 trillion spending bill by a 221-to-202 vote. The Senate followed suit on Sunday passing the House-Senate compromise bill by a vote of 57-35. At 1,088 pages the bill obviously included many earmarks and provisions namely, increased budgets for vast areas of the federal government, including health, education, law enforcement and veterans' programs.
One of the more surprising inclusions in both versions of the bill (which is now on its way to be signed by President Obama) was that they both included provisions that strip away Republican-favored bans on medicinal marijuana in the District of Columbia. The Senate bill regarding marijuana in D.C. allows for “all seriously ill individuals…to obtain and use marijuana for medical purposes when a licensed physician has found the use of marijuana to be medically necessary.”
This is a win for D.C. voters who in 1998 had voted by a 70 percent margin to legalize medical marijuana use. Republicans in Congress then by stripped the city of authority to set its own policies on drug use, because the District of Columbia is viewed as more of a colony than a state, with no actual representation in Congress.
While D.C. may still face some hurdles before the law finally goes into effect, there is little that can be done to prevent it now that Congress has in essence had the final say allowing the citizens of D.C. to carry out the law they voted for. And of course D.C. isn’t the first to take this step. Residents of the city will be joining the ranks of the 13 other states that already allow medical marijuana use. This is the first time that use has been given the green light by either the House or the Senate, let alone both.
As the economy still struggles to recover and jobs continue to be scarce, many people are looking to bring the possibility of legalizing marijuana to the forefront of discussion, and this approval from Congress could just be the beginning of opening a dialogue about a drug that could, if legalized, be a huge boost to the American economy.
This is certainly not news to many economists who in recent years have all agreed that the economic implications on the legalization of marijuana would have a profound impact on the economy. In fact in 2005, a research project funded by the Marijuana Policy Project, published the report “The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana” by Jeffrey A. Miron, a professor of economics at Harvard University. In this report, which has been endorsed by over five hundred economists from universities across the country, Miron estimates that the government could collect between ten and fourteen billion dollars in savings and tax revenues each year if marijuana were to be legalized.
Records of cannabis-related deaths alone are all but nonexistent, and the role marijuana could play in small business, law enforcement (freeing up law enforcement from dealing with petty crimes such as marijuana use) and the general economic well-being of the entire country is undeniable. This small, but monumental, step by Congress shows that we may finally be looking at a whole new realm of possibilities when it comes to dealing with marijuana in the United States.
Coincidently it was also reported this week that for California those possibilities could become a reality. With a majority of California voters saying they are in favor of legalizing marijuana for recreational use it looks like an Assembly Bill introduced earlier in the ear may come to the voters in 2010. If it passes it could face more support than originally though thanks to this week's momentous statement by Congress that maybe the time has come to decriminalize marijuana and take advantage of the economic opportunities it could provide.
