Just for fun, a few stats from the AP:

The regions with the 10 highest and lowest rates of marijuana use by residents 12 and over, according to a report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration:

Highest use:

1. Boston, 12.16 percent

2. Boulder, Colo., 10.3 percent
3. Southeast Massachusetts, 9.53 percent
4. Portland, Ore., region, 9.48
5. Champlain Valley, Vt., 9.37 percent
6. San Francisco region, 9.24 percent
7. Hawaii Island, 9.22 percent
8. Central Massachusetts, 9 percent
9. North Central California, 8.93 percent
10. Washington, R.I., 8.81 percent

No real surprises — it’s the liberal border regions. Blue counties all, if I’m not mistaken. Not that there’s a correlation, of course.
Lowest use:

10. Northwest Iowa, 2.28 percent


9. Northeast Iowa, 2.53 percent


8. Southern Texas, 2.59 percent


7. Central Iowa, 2.63 percent


6. Lake region and south central North Dakota, 2.65 percent


5. Northern Nebraska, 2.65 percent


4. Southeast Oklahoma, 2.77 percent


3. Eastern central South Dakota, 2.78 percent


2. Badlands and west central North Dakota, 2.81 percent


1. Central Nebraska, 2.88 percent

Low population where survival still takes day in and day out work (why would anyone live someplace called the Badlands?).

On the other hand, southern Texas is a shocker. How many drugs flow through that region? Lots! And none of it sticks?

From Forbes:

A founding father of the Reagan Revolution has put his John Hancock on a pro-pot report.

Milton Friedman leads a list of more than 500 economists from around the U.S. who today will publicly endorse a Harvard University economist’s report on the costs of marijuana prohibition and the potential revenue gains from the U.S. government instead legalizing it and taxing its sale. Ending prohibition enforcement would save $7.7 billion in combined state and federal spending, the report says, while taxation would yield up to $6.2 billion a year.

The report, “The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition,” (available at www.prohibitioncosts.org) was written by Jeffrey A. Miron, a professor at Harvard , and largely paid for by the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), a Washington, D.C., group advocating the review and liberalization of marijuana laws. …

“There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana,” the economist says, “$7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven’t even included the harm to young people. It’s absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes.”

I wrote a term paper for an Econ II class decades ago that said the same thing. I got an A.

But does anyone think that this will really change anything?

The report will likely not sway all minds. The White House Office of Drug Control Policy recently published an analysis of marijuana incarceration that states that “most people in prison for marijuana are violent criminals, repeat offenders, traffickers or all of the above.”

I doubt that this will even set off any serious debate given the mindset of those driving the War on Drugs, but it should. Check out the War on Drugs Clock. It currently shows that over $21 billion has been spent so far this year and that over 300,000 people have been arrested on marijuana-related charges.

Hmmm . . . my opposition to the larger War on Drugs must be related to the fact that I’m a Neolibertarian and not a Republican. After all, Cato is against it.

The number of arrests for marijuana climbed over a ten year period until they account for almost half of all drug arrests according to the Sentencing Project, a left-wing think tank.

The study found that the proportion of heroin and cocaine cases plummeted from 55 percent of all drug arrests in 1992 to less than 30 percent 10 years later, while marijuana arrests rose from 28 percent of the total to 45 percent. There has been little impact on our prison population (only 6% of the arrests resulted in felony convictions) and household surveys show that there has been little change in consumption by the general population.

If these facts are true we should decide, is this really how we want to be spending our resources?

The government is responding by touting studies that suggest a link between early marijuana use and mental illness. But the studies aren’t able to document a causal relationship — the studies fail to account for the possibility that early users are predisposed to mental illness for other reasons.

BTW, guess which country leads all the others in drug-related crimes. Why it’s the progressive nordic country of Norway:

Norway had nearly 1,000 drug crimes per 100,000 residents, compared to 560 for the USA and 350 for Sweden …

Update: Right Side of the Rainbow has more, including verbiage from a conservative think tank that rejects the concept that tougher drug laws significantly decreases drug use and supports the Sentencing Project’s position of increasing treatment programs.

See, there are things conservatives and liberals can agree on.

The drug lords of Columbia have developed a strain of coca that produces up to four times more cocaine than traditional plants:

Continue Reading »

A study (yes, there was actually a study done for this) has determined that the poor residents of West Virginia are paying more for illegal drugs than people in other states:

Statistics complied by the National Drug Intelligence Center and announced by U.S. Attorney Kasey Warner, said state residents pay more for powder cocaine than any other area of the country, except for parts of Vermont, Virginia, South Carolina, North Dakota and Montana.

Handy information to have before making that next big decision to move.