In March, a bill was introduced in the Senate which, if passed, would legalize state medical marijuana programs at the federal level, and take marijuana off the Drug Enforcement Agency's Schedule I drug list. Schedule I is reserved for drugs so dangerous that neither cocaine nor "meth" makes the list. The new law would move marijuana down a level of severity to join those substances, which the DEA classifies as having "less abuse potential than Schedule I drugs" like pot. Lest this sound like an arcane matter of federal drug classifications, let us be clear: Drug crime is the leading path into the federal prison system, and Americans put more people in federal prison for crimes related to marijuana than any other drug.

There are state laws on the books that specify prison sentences of five years for the possession of an ounce of marijuana. In Florida, the growing of 25 marijuana plants constitutes a second-degree felony. This is insane. To lock a man or a woman in a cell for anything to do with this plant ought to be something out of a dystopian novel. Yet we've gotten used to it, and on a grand scale. From 1980 to 2008 the U.S. prison population more than quadrupled, to 2.3 million. With about 5 percent of the world's population, the United States of America today is home to almost 25 percent of the world's prisoners. This makes us the world leader in incarceration, in raw numbers, and second only to the Republic of Seychelles, population 90,024, when it comes to the rate at which we lock up our people. The so-called "war on drugs" has played a major part in this unprecedented shift: there are about 10 times as many people in our prisons today for drug offenses as there were in 1980.



Still, we should take comfort in the fact that these are mostly violent criminals and hardened drug kingpins, right? Not so. About half the inmates in the federal prison system are there for nonviolent drug crime – up from 16 percent in 1970 – and the leading drug involved is marijuana. Of course, none of this seems to have made marijuana remotely difficult to procure for those who want it. If once our federal prisons might have functioned to keep violent criminals off the streets, today they serve chiefly to lock away economic offenders, disproportionately members of ethnic minorities historically excluded from the mainstream economy. After drug offenses, the next most prevalent way to become an inmate in the federal prison system is through undocumented immigration, that other nonviolent "crime" I discuss in these pages.

If the situation at the federal level is out of control, how does it look at the state level? Variations in policy from state to state can make the picture seem complex, but the following image shows, at a glance, where things stand. The words in the map summarize the laws in each state. In the states shown in red, it remains a crime to sell or possess marijuana. In the states shown in green, marijuana is legal. The other colors represent the spectrum of laws in between, as indicated in the key at the top:



Agustín Crawford/usmarijuanalaws.com

Notwithstanding variation across states, year after year, possession of marijuana is the leading charge in drug arrests nationwide­. This represents a precipitous rise. Arrests for marijuana possession, as a portion of all arrests, have tripled since 1991. When it comes to arrests for sale and manufacture, marijuana runs neck and neck with hard drugs nationwide. Only a portion of these arrests leads to jail time, but to take comfort in this would be a bit like pouring liquid into a funnel and, reasoning that the spout is small, taking one's eye off of the overflowing container beneath the spout. The war on drugs, with its heavy use of mandatory sentencing, has grown a prison population of nonviolent offenders (nonviolent, at least, when they enter).

I will never forget, while observing counseling sessions at a nonprofit program, hearing a woman speak of half a lifetime spent in prison for being caught holding drugs during a bust. Imagine trying to get a job in the lawful economy after years in prison. Even if you have never known someone who has "done time," try to put yourself for a moment in the shoes of one who has over a nonviolent offense related to drugs. As a group of my undergraduates dramatized in a video they created last year, if the drug is marijuana, this is comparable to being locked in a cell for being caught with a bag of coffee. Move over Pablo Escobar – meet Howard Schultz, head of the notorious Starbucks cartel. It sounds ridiculous, but is our war on drugs any less so?



To be sure, the U.S. has problems with addictive drugs. According to the Central Intelligence Agency, our country is the world's largest consumer of cocaine and the leading consumer of Colombian and Mexican heroin. This represents a severe problem with enormous human costs, but it is a problem the drug war has utterly failed to solve. Contrast our experience with that of Portugal, which in the 90s had high levels of drug addiction. A little over a decade after the country decriminalized drugs, taking the funds it had been spending on its version of the drug war and investing them in treatment and public health, addiction had dropped by half.

Yet when it comes to marijuana, the effects of the drug itself pale in comparison to those of the mass incarceration its prohibition has fed. Marijuana speeds heart rate and produces intoxication, yet it is virtually impossible to overdose on pot, and the health risks associated with it are notoriously mild compared to those of legal drugs like cigarettes, alcohol and the pharmaceuticals to which so many turn for chemically-induced relief.



Still, some may ask, won't decriminalization send the wrong message to vulnerable teens? Leaving aside the question of why our policymakers are not at least as worried about the binge drinking culture on campus or the widespread abuse of pharmaceuticals, let us focus on the question that understandably concerns many parents. Has the repeal of prohibition in key states sent a pro-marijuana message to kids? The answer, at least for now, appears to be "no." Early evidence suggests that as the repeal of prohibition has gained steam in those states, teen marijuana use has gone down.

As the Washington Post's Chris Ingraham pointed out, teen use actually appears to have risen with the expansion of the drug war, and then leveled off as medical marijuana programs picked up speed. It is tempting to wonder whether the cadre of stiff, frowning authority figures imposing taboos around marijuana might not have given it greater adolescent allure. Whichever factors are responsible for the correlation Ingraham observed, what seems clear is that the feared Rise of the Slackers has failed to come with legalization. According to Forbes, since Colorado's dispensaries took off, there has been a slight decline in marijuana use there while, nationally, overall use has been on the rise. Colorado's governor, who opposed his state's legalization amendment before it went through, suggested that it is mainly the people who were smoking illegally before legalization who are smoking legally now.



But what about driving under the influence of marijuana? Should not this, at least, be a cause for grave concern? I once had a cab driver tell me, while I was paying the bill, that he felt he did his best driving when high, because he could really feel the flow of the traffic. What I felt was happy to be home in one piece. Still, I would have felt the same way had he made the identical claim about good Scotch whiskey.

Actually, had he been drinking, I should probably have felt much greater concern. Research suggests that the impairment effects of marijuana on drivers may be significantly less severe than those of alcohol. In controlled studies, marijuana appears to impair peripheral vision and reduce the driver's capacity to manage distractions, but unless used along with alcohol, it fails to impair performance in many of the most severe ways in which alcohol has been shown to. To operate a high-powered vehicle in anything but the clearest state of mind is a highly serious matter, of course. Yet this can be addressed through appropriate laws the way drunk driving is today, as opposed to through penalizing possession, manufacture and sale.

What exactly have we, as a nation, been smoking, to sustain this second failed national experiment with prohibition and allow it to fuel mass incarceration? In the 1920s, alcohol prohibition proved to be a boon to organized crime; over the last 30 years, the drug war has been a wrapped present to the international drug cartels. While states across our land continue to imprison nonviolent users and low-level growers and dealers, such cartels depend for a non-trivial portion of their revenues on the false premium supplied by prohibition. Since prohibition has been repealed in key states, the prison population appears finally to have begun to decline, and cartels face falling prices for marijuana.



The rollback of prohibition throughout the states in the union must be a priority for those of us who care about public safety and economic sanity in America. In the face of Colorado's experience, we can put to bed exaggerated fears of marijuana-fueled degeneration. What we do need to be afraid of is the fact that the U.S. now imprisons more people than any country on earth. With Russia and China we account for half of the world's people behind bars. Meanwhile we continue to make marijuana a funnel to the prison system and pour our people into it like there's no tomorrow. In my home state of New York, a pioneer in mass incarceration for nonviolent crimes, through its so-called Rockefeller drug laws, one out of every eight arrests is still for marijuana possession alone.