Posted on 04/20/2007 5:56:08 AM PDT by tang0r
Most people aren’t spending that much money on marijuana even with high black market prices. According to the government surveys, which granted are probably not entirely accurate, “current marijuana smokers” tend to consume around 7 grams of marijuana per month. Other countries have done similar surveys and have come up with similar averages for “current smokers,” those reporting use in the 30 days prior to the survey. That much pot could cost over a hundred bucks if people are smoking the super pricey stuff, but what we can see from the average potency of seized marijuana is that most people aren’t smoking the super potent, super expensive stuff. They’re smoking the much cheaper lower potency “commercial grade” marijuana. According to narcotics officers in my town, they’re able to get that stuff for $400 to $600 a pound where I live now, and they usually pay more than established dealers because they don’t have time to develop much of a business relationship with these guys before they bust them. I’m a public defender, and I’m hearing from my clients that ounces (28 grams) of the cheap commercial grade stuff are going for $50 or $60 or so.
It is a lot cheaper to smoke commercial grade pot than it is to drink. Even the expensive stuff is still pretty cheap to use because it doesn’t take much of that stuff at all for people to get a buzz. A quarter gram of the potent expensive stuff is enough to get most just stoned out of their gourds, past the point where smoking any more will get them any higher, so most are probably using less than that in one sitting. If it’s a super pricey $140 a quarter ounce, a gram is only $20 worth, so a quarter of a gram is only $5.00 worth, which is around the price of a six pack of beer.
Even the expensive stuff is relatively cheap. There’s not much incentive there for people to grow their own. When marijuana is legalized, the cost of it is going to drop through the floor. We’ll see modern agricultural methods employed in producing it on a massive scale. Producers may have to pay taxes and regulatory costs and so on, but then again they won’t be losing huge amounts of their product to drug seizures and crop eradication programs like they do now. Workers in the industry will no longer have to be paid such high wages because there will no longer the risk of arrest and imprisonment.
I’ve handled thousands of pounds worth of drug mule cases. These mules hauling a couple of hundred pounds worth of weed in their trunks get paid a good bit more for that load than a truck driver hauling a legal load gets paid for making a run. When it’s legal they’ll be able to ship it in truck loads in the tens of thousands of pounds and pay only a tiny fraction of current shipping costs, and not have to worry about a good bit of their product seized by law enforcement along the way. The cost of producing and distributing the product will drop through the floor. I can’t think of any reason why finished product will have cost any more than a few dollars a pound to produce. The only way to keep prices up to anywhere near their current levels will be to tax the hell out of it. Provided the taxes don’t go too high, there shouldn’t be much of a black market for homegrown weed.
I think what we will see are licensed shops that carry a wide variety of product. Consumers will like having all the choices. Consumer tastes will change, and they’ll demand higher quality, better smelling, better tasting, less harsh smoke. There will be favorite brands, brand loyalty. People aren’t going to want crappy homegrown Joe Blow grew in his back yard any more than they want homebrewed beer, homegrown tobacco, or rot gut moonshine whiskey. They’ll want their store bought product that they know has been produced and handled according to regulated safety standards. The lion’s share of the product consumed will have gone through legal channels.
I’m amazed by what I read about these marijuana clubs in California. People with medical marijuana cards are allegedly spending $20 and $30 a gram for pot in these clubs. The people running these operations are getting rich. These people with their marijuana cards could legally grow their own in California. I know it’s still against federal law but the feds aren’t busting small closet/backyard grows out there. They’re trying to make a few higher profile busts. Why are these people paying so much money for pot when they could easily get away with growing their own? If it was fully legal and grown on a grand scale it would probably be a good bit cheaper than what these people are paying so they’d have even less incentive to grow their own than they do now.
Sorry to be late addressing your last post.
Maybe it’s just my interest in landscaping, but growing marijuana would seem much easier and convenient than brewing beer. Additionally, it doesn’t have to be very good to tolerate. I think most would tolerate a couple of hits off a bug eaten under dried plant more tolerable than 3 to 4 sour beers every night. I see there’re lots of online guides making both look easy to produce, but brewing just comes off to me as kind of a mess. Maybe apartment dwellers would see it differently…
The typical marijuana smoker you mention of 7 grams per month is consistent with what I read. I think a quarter ounce a month is daily use if put in a pipe, much less if the smoker’s rolling joints, bingeing or sharing with friends. I see estimates counting users from 14 to 25 million in the US. But I’m sure you know that we can’t just assume 20 million people smoking 7 grams a month will be paying those $30 a gram prices at government licensed smoke houses. For instance, if coffee were both illegal and hallucinogenic, I’m sure a few legal Starbucks could get $30 and up for cups of coffee, but that doesn’t mean we could extrapolate that to revenue potential of today’s number of coffee drinkers.
Let’s make some assumptions from what we know. In the 1980s, a quarter ounce of good marijuana was about $50. I have no idea what today’s price is so I need to go with that for now.
- 7.grams per month = $50.00 per month
- $50.00 per month * 12 = $600 per year
- $600 per year * 20 million US users = a $12 billion anual US market.
Assuming sales to minors will be illegal, let’s say they account for 10% and will still be buying off the black market or growing their own.
- $12 billion dollars less 10% = $10.8 billion
Every tax has an optimum level for revenue generation. For instance if taxes were just 10%, there’d probably be next to no black market and no reduction in usage. But if they were 100% of current prices, most of the dope might still be purchased legally. Lets assume that if taxes were 50% of the current price ($25 per quarter ounce), half the pot smoked illegally now would be purchased legally. We could both make arguments that it would be higher or lower, but for now let’s go with that.
- 50% of a $10.8 billion total market = $5.4 billion legal market.
- A 50% price reduction in a $5.4 billion legal market = $2.7 billion in legal sales.
Some portion of those $2.7 sales is going to go to production, administration and profit. Let’s assume 20%.
- $2.7 billion sales less 20% for expenses = $2.16 billion in tax revenue.
We can play around with the assumptions and bring $2.16 billion in tax revenue up or down, but it’s not going to change dramatically. But that’s not the end of the story because as good capitalist, we know that price, legalization and availability have an affect on usage. I’m not aware of anything with flat sales after its price is cut in half (especially if it’s also legalized). Let’s assume usage increases just 25%
- $2.16 billion in tax revenue * 25% = $2.7 billion in tax revenue.
Is $2.7 billion really significant motivation for legalizing pot? What are the other costs? A 25% increase in usage = 5.4 million more smokers (or some lesser amount at greater levels.) Let’s say that just 5% of that are chronic smokers who’d not otherwise have become alcoholics or junkies on something else. That’s 27,000 more people not contributing to society and becoming liabilities. It’s 27,000 lives that are ruined for just $2.7 billion a year. That doesn’t sound like a bargain to me. It just sounds like social decay.
Granted, I read there’s an additional $10 billion spent on marijuana law enforcement and incarceration yearly, but not all of that’s going to be recoverable. It’s not as if police and jails will cost $10 billion less a couple of years following legalization. Bureaucracies and fixed cost have a way of absorbing a large portion once their scope retracts.
Still legalization of dope is not a big issue with me. I could list a half dozen more reasons for legalizing it that chip away at any reason for keeping it illegal, but one of them isn’t revenue enhancement. I think the cost to society from the lives destroyed and productivity lost would more than make up for what little tax revenue is generated.
It’s really difficult though, if not impossible, to estimate with any degree of accuracy how much marijuana is consumed in this country. It would be even more difficult to accurately estimate how much tax revenues we would bring in. I think it would be several billion just on sales taxes and excises, but any numbers I came up with would just be guesses. I don’t think though that there would be that much of a black market provided taxes don’t send prices of the really cheap stuff a lot higher than current prices or keep the really expensive stuff as expensive as it is now.
You talk about marijuana being easy to grow and people being able to tolerate even crappy marijuana. I don’t think it’s so easy to grow, and I think that while people might tolerate crappy pot now, when it’s legal and there is a wide variety of higher quality product at the store consumers will become a lot more picky. They aren’t going to want crappy pot. You said people wouldn’t tolerate 3 or 4 sour beers, but look at the swill they’ll drink in prison. If they can’t get decent alcohol they’ll make their own and won’t care that much if it’s disgusting. They won’t drink that swill after they get out of prison though, even if it is dirt cheap to make. They’ll go to the store and pay good money for heavily taxed product. Or they’ll go to bars and easily spend as much in one or two nights what someone spend on marijuana.
As for marijuana being easy to grow, I’ve never grown it myself but I have a pretty good understanding of the process. It involves a lot of work. If you’ve ever had a vegetable garden, you’d have some idea about the effort involved with a small outdoor plot of marijuana. It takes months of effort before they can get a finished product. They have to worry about having good fertile soil, plant diseases, getting enough sun, watering enough but not too much, fertilizing enough but not too much, making sure they use the right types of nutrients, etc., all the sorts of things you have to worry about with vegetable gardens.
There are also some extra things they have to worry about. If they grow from seeds they’re going to have to learn to spot the male plants early on so they can pull those before they fertilize the female plants. They’ll have to be extra careful too watching for hermaphrodite plants that will look female and then one day pollen sacks will open up on some of the tops and fertilize their entire crop. They have to watch for molds and fungus that can pop up in the final weeks of growing or while drying that will ruin the plants they’ve been babying for so many months. They have to know how to tell when the plants are ready to harvest. Online or in pot growing books you will read about people actually looking at the buds with jewelers loops, getting a magnified view of the pistols so they can see if just the right percentage have changed colors yet. Then they have to dry the stuff right, not drying it too fast and not too slow, not too much, and not too little. Those getting fancy with it even go through a curing process where they’ll put the dried buds in jars and “burp” the jars several times a day for weeks to get rid of any chlorophyll taste that might remain.
Growing indoors is a lot more difficult. The best marijuana is grown indoors. These plants have been bred and crossbred a number of times to have just the right characteristics. Many of these strains are no longer suitable for growing outdoors. They need a much more controlled environment. The growers have to gain a lot of specialized skills and knowledge to do it right. Most will grow from clones that they cut from mother plants that they sometimes keep alive for years. They have to control heat, humidity, light levels, C02 levels, etc. They have to learn all about various types of lights, about color temperatures, penetrating ability of lights, luminosity, etc. They have to vent the grow rooms just right, having the proper sized vent holes and intake holes, and fans that are rated to push the correct number of cubic feet of air per minute. If they are using hydroponics and artificial growing mediums they’ll have to know about all that too. There’s just a lot to learn and a it all involves a lot of work, more than the average pot smoker is going to want to mess with.
I think most people are going to want to take the easy route and just buy their pot at the store. There are some who smoke ridiculous amounts of marijuna who might want to grow their own or find a cheaper source, but most will want to go to a nice clean store and select from a wide variety of quality product.
I think marijuana would get cheaper too, even with taxes, regulatory costs, all the employee taxes businesses have to pay, insurance, etc. It is after all, a plant, and it is possible to produce many hundreds of pounds of finished buds per acre of and, maybe even more than a thousand pounds. An average of one pound every 43.56 square feet would work out to 1000 pounds per acre, with a square slightly larger than six feet by six feet to grow each pound. I can envision huge fields being grown using all the fancy farm equipment modern farmers use. The process will become highly mechanized. It will be grown on a huge scale and prices will drop considerably. The stuff now grown under lights will be grown in greenhouses instead. The outdoor stuff that sells for a few hundred dollars a pound wholesale now will only cost a few dollars a pound to produce at most. The indoor grown stuff that will then be produced in huge fields of greenhouses will cost more to produce, but still nowhere near the thousands of dollars a pound it now commands on the wholesale markets. It’s going to be far cheaper to produce it legally than it is to produce it in the small outdoor plots and tiny indoor gardens found today. I think it is quite likely that even with super high taxes, several times the wholesale price, the legal product will be a good bit cheaper for consumers than what is out there today. The cheap stuff shouldn’t cost too much more than tobacco which wholesales for somewhere around $3:00 a pound and even if the fancy stuff costs ten times as much to produce production costs won’t even be in the hundreds of dollars per pound. This is a product that is relatively cheap as it is even with artificially high prices created by prohibition. If legal prices end up being the same as current prices illicit producers would have to drop their prices a lot if they want any share in the market. If prices for legal product are much cheaper than current prices there won’t be much money in small clandestine illicit growing operations like we have today. It wouldn’t be worth it to be in illicit marijuana production and/or distribution.
You can’t just look at the sales and excise taxes. Even a few billion in sales and excise taxes wouldn’t be bad though. A few hundred million more in revenues would should help my state. But there is more to it than just sales and excise taxes. There will also be hundreds of thousands of people employed in the industry, maybe more. People have to grow it and process it and market it, etc. People have to transport it. There will have to be regulators to regulate the industry. These people are going to pay taxes on their incomes. They’re also going to pay sales taxes, property taxes, etc., and that money is going to come what they earn in the industry. They’re going to spend their money in our communities and those who get there money will end up paying taxes on it. It would be an infusion of many billions of dollars into our economy. We’re already getting some of that even though it’s an illegal industry, but of course a lot of that ends up in Mexico or Canada or some other foreign country, and a lot of that being made by all the perhaps millions of people involved to some degree in the industry now ends up going toward more illegal drugs or for some other illicit purpose.
There will also be a great deal of money saved. You are right I think that not all of the costs will be recoverable. Still though state, federal, and local governments will save billions, and they’ll have one less giant illegal industry to fight.
I was talking with one of our drug interdiction officers the other day. We have a patch of interstate highway going through my county and we always have several officers patrolling that patch whose main function is to interdict drug shipments. They pull vehicles with out of state tags over left and right and run the dogs around them. I always see them out there with vehicles pulled over being searched. Every time I see this I wonder how many big huge loads of pot, cocaine, meth, whatever, are going by while they are tearing the vehicle apart on the side of the road. The officer was telling me he wished that he could just write tickets for marijuana possession offenses because it takes him a good hour or more to arrest someone and do his paperwork and he hates to waste all that time over a few joints. What’s worse than that is that a lot of the time when the dogs alert they don’t find anything. They’ll spend all that time searching and come up with nothing. Usually that’s probably because someone had rolled a joint in the car or something recently and there is still some residual odor. If marijuana was legal, the dogs wouldn’t even alert to it because they wouldn’t be trained to alert to marijuana. It would save our interdiction officers a lot of time, keeping them out on the highway more where they’ll be able to pop a higher percentage of the loads of meth and cocaine that come through, which in turn I would hope would bring the price of these drugs up even higher. The same principles would apply at airports and international borders. Marijuana is far and away the most used of all illegal drugs. It is also the one law enforcement finds the most, both in large quantities and in small personal use amounts. And it’s the one that’s going to cause the most “false positives” with dogs or electronic sniffers due to residual odor or small bits and fragments they can’t find. If it was legal it would save law enforcement a lot of time that they could be spending on far more important matters.
You worry about lives destroyed and productivity lost and so on. Even though millions and millions of people use it, marijuana is not destroying that many lives or causing us that much in lost productivity, certainly not nearly as much as drugs like meth, cocaine, and heroin, or even prescription drugs and alcohol. It’s just not. Most pot smokers are occasional or at least moderate smokers. They work, do what they’re supposed to do. They aren’t causing a lot of problems. If you were to work my job for a while I think you’d soon see that the biggest threats are meth, cocaine, prescription drugs like Oxycodone, hydrocodone, and even Xanax, and alcohol. We don’t have much heroin around here but I’m sure it’s a big problem where it’s prevalent. What you’d see though is that these substances I’m talking about cause an awful lot of problems. Most of the people out there forging checks for instance are going to be meth addicts or pill addicts. (We don’t have much cocaine around here either but where cocaine is as prevalent as meth it’s every bit the problem meth is.) I represent an awful lot of people and it’s getting to the point now that I can pretty much look at their picture and their criminal history and even if there are no drug offenses I can make a pretty good guess as who has a drug problem before they even come in my office. Those with a lot of thefts and forgeries. etc., on their records are in most cases going to be addicted to highly addictive expensive drugs like meth or pain killers. Those with a lot of domestic batteries on their records in most cases have a problem with alcohol. A good 75% or 80% of all my domestic violence cases are cases where some jerk can’t handle his liquor and he feels compelled to beat up on people when he gets drunk. Meth will contribute to some of that too. And drugs like Xanax, I’m always getting some chick whacked out on that crap who will black out out and walk out of a store without paying for something and drive home and get into a wreck or something like that. That drug is abused like crazy and doctors are practically handing it out like candy. These are the drugs I see causing the most problems. I’ve never once heard a woman say that my husband is a great guy until he starts smoking pot and then he gets mean and beats on me. I here that all the time about alcohol and some of these other drugs. And you don’t see a lot of cases where people are stealing to buy marijuana either. People steal cigarettes like crazy though, and more drunks than you would think will try running off with a case of beer or a bottle of liquor without paying for it. Marijuana just doesn’t contribute to a lot of crime.
As for lost productivity, there probably is some of that but not a tremendous amount. According to the government surveys most all people who report that they smoke marijuana also claim to have full tie jobs. People don’t get too hungover to go to work from pot like they do from alcohol. Some probably do smoke pot and go to work and don’t do as good a job as they could, but I don’t think there is any evidence that a significant portion of marijuana smokers go to work stoned or get high while at work. I would think that would probably be something stupid teenagers working at fast food restaurants would be likely to be more than adults who need their jobs and have a lot more to lose. That would never be legal though, and of course employers could drug test employees if that becomes a problem. I tend to think though that most who would be problem drug users are already using drugs. I think some people are just built that way. They have some need to get wasted, and are likely to take just about any kind of drug they can get their hands on. That type of person isn’t deterred by drug possession laws and I think for the most part are already using drugs. Those few out there who don’t smoke marijuana simply because it is illegal are I would think going to be more responsible type folks who if they did smoke marijuana would be less likely to be stupid about it than those at the opposite end of the spectrum and those in between who are already using marijuana. Even if we had another 5 million or so smokers I don’t think we’d see any tremendous loss in productivity because I think the vast majority of them would handle it just fine and be able moderate their use and not let it become a major problem.
I need to close. I’ve got way too much work to do. I think Freerepublic probably causes more loss in productivity for me at least than if I were to smoke pot in the evenings. I just don’t care for smoking pot, and I what little free time I have I like to spend sober and with my family.
Have a good one.
I mentioned 10 billion would be partially recovered annually from marijuana law enforcement. That includes the highway enforcement you mentioned.
Regarding the difficulty of growing marijuana. I could describe orchid growing in ways that make what you mentioned sound simple, but it’s my experience that orchid can be as difficult or easy as you make it. Orchid Growing is Easy is the equivalent of Growing Marijuana Indoors & Outdoors - Easy steps That Teaches You How To Grow Marijuana In Your Own House Or Closet! If marijuana were legal and I could charge 10% of today’s prices, I could probably make car payments with my 10’ * 25’ orchid house with very little work.
You listed revenue from commercial grower salaries as a potential benefit, but that’s the same as income from today’s illegal growers. And since the sales price will go down, it doesn’t even fully replace it. Sure, there’d also be tax income tax generated, at least from the portion that’s over the taxable threshold, but that’s money that’s now going directly into the economy, bypassing federal hands.
Another issue you raised, if pot radically becomes stronger, even occasional users are more likely to be operating with a debilitating buzz. That adds to greater social costs.
It’s not my experience that social costs can be dismissed by simply saying that dope smokers are not as bad as chronic alcoholics, heroin addicts, crack heads etc… In addition to their effect I mentioned on the military, I use to install custom lighting with a talented electrician who smoked a few times at lunch in my presence. It was kind of pathetic seeing the difference in his abilities before and after lunch. Sure, he could function, but he was relatively forgetful, unfocused generally unimpressive. I was just a newbie between college semesters, but almost as capable as him on some jobs when he was stoned. I also have a relative who graduated St John College Annapolis 10 years ago who used a variety of drugs, but claims for most of the time since graduation she only smoked marijuana (and now claims to be off that too). But she’s been working as waitress and living in her parents basement with her son for the last 8 years. She doesn’t drive either. Socially, she’s a brilliant girl, but regular pot use has a way of draining away people’s drive and motivation and to delay gratification and pursue goals that actualize their abilities. It has a lingering effect on their short term memory, their ability to concentrate, their judgment and I think to their ability to accurately reason sequentially. For better or for worse, it leads people to deconstruct their values that I mentioned, and chronic users tend to replace them with a kind of cynical rejection of success, often forming a somewhat paranoid or conspiratorial image of society from their crippled thinking. Sure there are exceptions, like there are among healthy smokers and drinkers, but I think that’s the most common psychological effect of regular use. Regular users generally don’t excel at school, work or in their personal lives. There’s more on that here: Cannabus link to mental illness strengthenedAccording to this survey, casual users are twice as likely to be unemployed, and daily users (accounting for about 12% of total users) are more than 3 times as likely. I see they’re all more likely than not to be cigarette smokers, bringing all those problems along. And I read there that only about half of daily users are addicted to other drugs or alcohol.
If the marijuana market size numbers you last posted are correct, there must be other problems. If 25,000 metric tons/year are consumed a year, that’s about 55 million pounds, equaling 882 million ounces or 25 billion grams. That’s about 2 billion grams per month. And if the average user smokes 7 grams per month, then there’d need to be a lot of waste or 295 million marijuana users in the US.
Considering such a profound policy change as legalization, we should at least follow through with some kind of simple model of our assumptions to see if the additional taxes are worth any offset from the social and economic costs of any increase in use. Do we raise my previous lower count of marijuana users to match the higher estimates of the market size that you introduced? Or do we estimate people are smoking a whole lot more than a quarter ounce per month? If we radically increase either, then taxes received would be greater, but the cost of 25% more use/users would be multiplied by the same amount. So maybe instead of $2.7 billion in additional tax revenue, there’s $10 billion. But instead of the social and economic cost of 250k more chronic users, we deal with the price of 1 million additional Americans sabotaging their potential.
To make do more than talk past one another making wild guess, we need to model what we know and assume and support those assumptions. If they have to become increasingly radical in one direction to support our position, we know something’s wrong.
I understand your productivity complaint with this discussion. It probably doesn’t speak well for me spending so much time on a subject I have so little interest in. If it goes on, I’ll be included in the statistics of lives ruined by marijuana.
There are limits to how strong marijuana can be though. It is claimed that they’ve actually found some indoor grown marijuana that was over 30% THC. I don’t know whether I believe that or not. The government loves to exaggerate and employ less than honest scare tactics when talking about marijuana. I do know though that most of the indoor stuff they find growing in this country is not over 15%, but they do find some over 20% THC. It may be possible to grow it over 30%, but I doubt it could be much stronger than that. Most of the THC is actually on the outside of buds and leaves in and around the buds. It’s in the resin that comes out of tiny little hairs growing from the plant material. The resin is not anywhere close to 100% THC. It’s what they make hash out of, and hashish is rarely anywhere close to 30% THC. Most comes from North Africa and isn’t nearly as strong on average as indoor grown marijuana. It’s closer in strength to cheap Mexican pot. But from what I’ve read sometimes hash can be a little stronger than 30% THC if it is made from resin that comes from premium indoor grown marijuana. I’ve also read that growers have real problems with mold when they grow the really powerful stuff. It tends to have dense sticky resin frosted buds that will get moldy if it’s too humid or if they get wet. The strongest stuff is not suitable for growing outdoors. I don’t think they could get it much stronger than the strongest out there today because it would be even more difficult to grow without major mold problems, and because there has to be a significant amount plant material to make all this THC containing resin that isn’t anywhere close to 100% THC in the first place.
If marijuana was legal, I doubt there would be much grown indoors under artificial lights. Commercial growers would grow it outside, and for the most part probably would not focus on hard to grow high THC varieties, but would look for hardy uniform varieties that could be grown, harvested, and processed with as much mechanization and as little human labor as possible. I could also see them using multipurpose plants, ones they grow for fiber and/or seed, harvest mechanically, remove the resin for processing into hash, and then use the fiber for textiles and industrial purposes and seed for food or animal feed products, cooking oil, cosmetics, etc. With hash producers would be able to produce a more uniform product, blending various resins and additives to come up with a consistent product that always looks and smells and tastes the same, with a much longer shelf life, and potency levels that are the same for every batch. I would think it would be easier to mechanize the entire process if they went that route, and it does seem to be the American way to process the heck out of everything we consume. My bet is that unless hash remains illegal after they legalize marijuana or tax or regulatory problems get in the way hash will end up becoming more common than raw marijuana in the legal shops. Pretty hand manicured buds grown in greenhouses will be comparatively expensive, like fine wine or single malt Scotch.
I see what you are saying about just how much 25,000 metric tons is. I doubt that much is consumed here. The actual amount consumed has to be considerably more than the 1006 metric tons they estimated people consumed when they did the last consumption estimates though. We seize a good bit more than that every year and there is no way law enforcement are seizing more than half of the marijuana on the market. It may be that people consume closer to the lower end of the supply estimate, closer to 12,000 metric tons.
Personally, I don’t believe the government survey results on drug use. I think people lie on these surveys about whether they currently use drugs and in many cases about whether they have ever used drugs. I don’t doubt at all that they underreport how much they use either. Studies have shown that people tend to significantly underreport how much alcohol and tobacco they consume on these types of surveys too. I don’t know how much the average pot smoker consumes in a month, but I do know that there are pot smokers out there who smoke a good bit more than 7 grams every single day. There are heavy pot smokers that smoke several pounds a year. Although most pot smokers probably don’t smoke more than a quarter ounce a month on their own, the actual average is quite likely higher than 7 grams a month just because of the minority who smoke several times that every month, or maybe even every week. Seven grams isn’t that much. It’s a quarter of an ounce, about how much the tobacco weighs in 8 or 9 filtered cigarettes.
As for people ruining their lives with marijuana, I don’t doubt that happens, but I think it happens a lot less than you think it does. I used to smoke pot when I was younger. I’ve known a lot of pot smokers over the years. I still have some friends that I know smoke marijuana, and there are probably others I deal with that smoke it who don’t let me or hardly anyone else in on their secret. And I deal with a lot of people who use every type of drug as a public defender. I’ve never really known anyone though who has ruined his life with marijuana, except for those who’ve gotten in serious legal troubles for being involved with it. I hear about people who have messed themselves up with marijuana, but I’m always a little suspicious of that. I’ll talk to family members of clients, their preachers, friends, etc., and will sometimes hear that my clients have ruined themselves with marijuana. What I generally find though is that these people aren’t just smoking marijuana. They’re usually heavy drinkers and/or on other much worse drugs in addition to being pot smokers. People just think they’re only smoking marijuana, or they don’t want to talk about the other stuff, and of course the people with problems with these substances don’t want to tell everyone about their problems. A lot of them are in denial and don’t even think they have a problem. Admitting that they smoke marijuana is one thing because it’s not that big of a deal. Admitting that they smoke crack or stick needles in their arms is another thing altogether.
Some people it seems just have some sort of “need” to get just wasted. They’re likely to be the ones that overdo it with any intoxicant they use, and they’re likely to be the ones who for some reason feel like they need to be on something all the time. I don’t know how much of this is just a psychological problem, all in their minds, or if it’s just that people are wired differently. But some people are just a lot more prone to substance abuse problems than most. They’re more likely to become addicted, and more likely to have real problems from substance abuse. Usually it seems people like this don’t just stick with one drug, they’ll take just about anything they can get their hands on. Some do just stick with one drug though for the most part. If it’s alcohol that they stick with, they’ll have major problems. If it is just marijuana that they go overboard with, they probably won’t live up to their potential and probably won’t lead particularly productive lives, but I don’t think the problems they’ll experience (and inflict on others) are likely to be nearly as damaging to them or others as they would be if their “drug of choice” was alcohol or something like prescription pain killers or drugs like meth, cocaine or heroin. It will also be a lot easier for them to kick their destructive habit than it would be for an alcoholic, or someone addicted to pain killers, meth, cocaine or heroin. I wouldn’t say marijuana is not addictive, but it isn’t nearly as addictive as these other drugs I’ve mentioned. Only a small percentage of marijuana users become addicted and it’s not an addiction that is particularly hard to overcome for most who do become addicted.
Your relative living in her parent’s basement, do you think she’s being honest about the extent of her drug use? Having dealt with an awful lot of drug addicts, I kind of doubt it. If she was a big time party girl in college using all kinds of drugs and she’s still single with a kid and living in her parents basement I doubt she wasn’t doing anything but smoking a little pot after college. Does she go out partying much still?
Then again, maybe she’s just a screw up. Maybe she would never have been able to hold it together very well even if she hadn’t partied so much in college. Maybe all the partying was just a way of medicating herself because she has some deep psychological/emotional problems. Mental illness and substance abuse go hand in hand. People with psychological problems do not tend to be the happiest people and they’ll often turn to intoxicants to try to get happy, or at least be numb to their pain. Although there is no doubt that substance abuse causes people problems, it is often going to be a symptom of psychological or emotional problems that already exist, and even if the person in question had not started abusing intoxicants their lives wouldn’t exactly have been just peachy anyway.
I just don’t see pot as being as debilitating as you do. You say that it “leads people to deconstruct their values” and that “chronic users tend to replace them with a kind of cynical rejection of success, often forming a somewhat paranoid or conspiratorial image of society from their crippled thinking.” I think you are describing screw ups in general who can’t seem to get their lives together. I think that the person who smokes dope constantly to the point that it has a serious negative impact on their lives is in the minority. You’ve read some propaganda that says casual pot smokers are twice as likely to be unemployed and daily users three times as likely. That’s probably true, but then again regular drinkers are probably a lot more likely than non drinkers to be unemployed too, just as other drug users are probably a several times more likely to be unemployed than non drug users. That really doesn’t tell us much. Bums will be bums and people with too much time on their hands are liable to get themselves in trouble. The fact is though that the overwhelming majority of marijuana smokers work full time jobs. Look at SAMHSA’s numbers for pot smokers 26 and older. For 2005 they said that about 7,508,000 people 26 and older would admit use of marijuana in the month preceding the survey and 5,221,000 of those were working full time jobs. Only 839,000 were working part time jobs, and only 415,000 were unemployed. (The rest were in the “other” category which I assume would cover students, people on disability, and retired persons.) See Table 1.36A http://oas.samhsa.gov/NSDUH/2k5NSDUH/tabs/Sect1peTabs1to66.htm#Tab1.36A
If you scroll down to Table 1.36B you’ll see that slightly more than 50% of people 26 and older who are full time employed will admit having used marijuana in the past and around 8.5% admit using it in the year leading up to the survey, the percentage would be higher if you didn’t include people over 55 or so who grew up before marijuana really became popular. I bet the real numbers are a good bit higher still for all age groups because I doubt everyone is all that honest about illegal conduct when speaking to government workers who come knocking on their doors asking questions. I’ve also seen SAMHSA numbers indicating that something like 11% of all people with children under 18 smoke marijuana. And of course the percentage of people for people 18 to 25 who admit use is really high. I won’t look much at that age group for full time employment because so many are still in school or otherwise haven’t settled into a career yet. But look at males in that group. Scroll up on the same page to Table 1.35B and you’ll see that close to one third of all males in that age group would admit on a government survey that they’ve smoked marijuana within a the past year, and more than a fifth will admit use within the past month. Are all of these millions of people just ruining their lives? Are most of them? I don’t think so. Most of the young ones will go through their wild stage and grow up and leave the marijuana behind. Most of those who keep smoking it will be moderate smokers who hold down full time jobs, just regular hard working people who happen to like to smoke a little weed now and again to unwind. Very few will be knuckleheads that smoke morning noon and night and let this activity impede their performance in life.
What most people see of pot smokers are the worst case scenarios. You hear about people getting in trouble. You hear about losers who can’t pull their lives together and you hear people blaming that on marijuana. You see jerks like the electrician you worked with who think it’s okay to smoke pot at work. You don’t really hear about all the productive people who are doing just fine in life who happen to smoke a little pot. They aren’t talking about it. That’s the kind of thing most people would keep to themselves, especially if they have good jobs and reputation to protect. There are probably people in your neighborhood and people that you work with or have regular dealings with that smoke pot, people you respect, and you’d just be shocked if you found out about their little secret. There are millions and millions out there who do it at least occasionally. Some are very successful people, most are just average, but that’s the way it is for people who don’t smoke pot too.
Smoking pot is just not something that is terribly debilitating for most people who do it. Just like drinking though doing it constantly is likely to cause people problems and make them less productive. Most people don’t go crazy with it though. It’s something they do every once in a while or maybe even every evening, but most grown ups who smoke the stuff aren’t doing it morning, noon, and night. Teens and college age kids who smoke it probably go overboard more than older people, just as we see with alcohol, but most people quit as they get older or settle down and moderate their use so that it doesn’t interfere with their lives. There are people who go way overboard with it, and they’re the ones most likely to go way overboard with other intoxicants as well. My guess is that most people with that inclination are already smoking pot if they have any interest in pot smoking. There probably aren’t many like that who want to smoke marijuana but won’t just because it’s illegal. If we see an increase of a few million users when marijuana is legalized, the percentage of problem users among these millions will likely be a good bit lower than the small percentage of current pot smokers who are problem users today. It won’t be a big deal for most of the rest.
It’s late and I have to close. I probably will not be able to spend much time on Freerepublic in the next few weeks, so if you respond to this post I may not be able to return the favor. I’ll be in court most of this week and I have several jury trials scheduled for the next couple of weeks after that. Most of them will get worked out but that will take a lot of time and I know I’m going to have to try at least a couple of them this time around. I’m probably not going to have much free time the rest of this month. I’m covered up. I’ve enjoyed this conversation though. We just disagree on this issue and that’s not likely to change. It’s good though that we can disagree and not have the conversation devolve into a name calling one upping match as so often happens on these threads where people talk about drug laws.
Thanks. I’ll see you around.
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