You’re ignoring how much dependence was “saved”!
Hey, what a great idea! You take a kid smoking weed, maybe snorting some coke, stick him in prison with a bunch of actual hard core bone-thugs to train him up good, add in some unrealistic minimum sentencing, and you can graduate a REAL criminal with an understandably sharp axe to grind against the society that sat by and allowed this travesty in the first place.
And the really good news? It only costs us hundreds of billions of dollars, and incalculable cost in terms of human life and suffering while we keep weed illegal so that gangs can kill over its profits.
Yeah, I say we turn over the entire economy to the geniuses who still pursue such wonderful schemes, now that we know how good it works out for everyone, and what a great deal it is.
;-/