To toke or not to toke? That has been the question springing up like whack-a-mole all over the country. The effort to legalize marijuana has won small battles, but despite record-setting support for legalization – 46 percent by the latest Gallup poll in Oct. 2010 – marijuana remains illegal in most of the country, including Minnesota.

Why is marijuana illegal, exactly? The drug has a complicated legal history, and its prohibition is intimately tied with industry monopolizing and even hints of racism against the black men of blues music from the early 20th century, who had a reputation for smoking up, but the better question is why is it still illegal?

Prisons are overflowing with peaceful potheads who just wanted to listen to their Pink Floyd, man, and the government is sinking more and more of your tax dollars into keeping the Drug War going. But is this a battle worth fighting? First thing’s first. Does it work?

Well, um. No.

According Public Library of Science (PLoS) Medicine, Americans are twice as likely to have smoked pot as the Dutch. You know, home to Amsterdam, the city that sells pre-rolled spliffs at the counter of your local cafe. Up to 42 percent of Americans have smoked weed, higher than any of the other 16 countries surveyed.

According to the Department of Health and Human services, 7.3 percent of teens reported using marijuana on a regular basis in 2009, and 62.5 percent of all people who have smoked marijuana first toked when they were under 18.

Asking whether the Drug War is working is a bit like asking, “Is our children learning?” No, George. No they isn’t.

And what is the cost of this pervasive war against nearly half of all Americans? Let’s put it this way: according to Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University, New York alone spends an estimated $3 billion a year on enforcing marijuana prohibition, and nationally, an estimated $13.7 billion. For comparison, that’s more than Minnesota spent on education this year, and nearly as much as NASA’s entire budget in 2008. Yes, you read that right. NASA. We spend almost as much on chasing pot heads as we did on NASA. And remember, that’s just weed.

The Drug War, like virtually every attempt at any sort of prohibition before it, has been a dismal failure, and marijuana is the starkest example of that.

But beyond that, there’s the question of whether there is even any good reason for marijuana to be illegal.

Does marijuana truly serve as a gateway drug into harder substances? No, according to a 12-year study by the University of Pittsburgh. Social factors like poverty and parental absence were strongly correlated with a drug progression, but use of marijuana by itself was not an accurate predictor. Gateway theory, while a compelling and scary piece of propaganda, has been debunked repeatedly since the 90’s.

While it is true that most hard drug users used marijuana first, it is also true that most hard drug users used alcohol and tobacco first. And yet, we don’t see boogie-boogie commercials telling us that having a couple drinks on a Friday night will inevitably lead to smoking crack.

Is marijuana a medical or social evil beyond the likes of alcohol? That’s a negative, Roger. According to the Clinical Neuroscience Society, alcohol is in fact more harmful to brain development in teens than marijuana.

Alcohol also carries a reputation for inspiring violence and sending freshly-minted 21-year-olds to the hospital with overdoses. Alcohol addiction is so powerful that the withdraw can literally kill you, an attribute it shares with only two other drugs: benzodiazepam, and rarely (and indirectly) heroin. Marijuana carries no such burdens to its name. In fact, marijuana’s most significant harm is indirect; the harm caused by black market drug cartels.

There is no doubt marijuana is mind-altering, motor impairing, and can be abused like any other drug. There is no doubt there should be age and vehicle operation laws regarding the use of any mind-altering substance. But it is strikingly odd that it is legal to consume a drug which carriers such serious risks as alcohol, and another is banned which is comparatively far less harmful.

In addition to that, it’s financially stupid.

All the money we spend chasing pot smokers, over-burdening police forces and overflowing prisons is essentially being poured down the sink. With a preventative impact of virtually zero, the prohibition of marijuana serves to do nothing but bog down the system and drain the taxpayers.

So what does legalization look like financially, then? According to Stephen Easton of the Fraser Institute, not only legalizing but selling marijuana could rake in anywhere from $45 to $110 billion dollars per year, providing one heck of a booster shot to the arm of our flagging economy.

Americans are, after all, one of the world’s most prolific tokers.

The human toll would be incalculably improved, reducing the violent presence of gangs and cartels, freeing up our police forces to respond more quickly to other crimes, and regulating the quality of the drug, eliminating injury and death caused by laced marijuana.

And finally, there’s the golden egg in the middle of all this.

Hemp.

You can’t smoke it – or at least there’s no point in doing so – but its value cannot possibly be overstated.

Hemp can be used for everything from clothing to paper to plastic. Yes, plastic. Henry Ford built one of his first Model T’s from hemp plastic, and built it to run on hemp gasoline. This technology has been around for quite literally over a century, and in that context, it becomes easy to understand why hemp production was banned in the US if you know anything about the lobbying industry.

And yes, these two things are related. According to US Federal law, hemp is banned explicitly because of its relation to marijuana (although one can’t help but wonder if the reverse is actually more true).

While several states have attempted to legalize the cultivation of hemp within their borders, they have not begun growing it due to resistance from the Drug Enforcement Administration, despite the fact that hemp is rather useless as a recreational drug.

Hemp is also easier on the land than, say, cotton. It requires less space and water, and also fewer pesticides/herbicides according to the Stockholm Environment Institute. When you take into account that hemp has a nearly endless list of uses, and calculate how many of those uses could partially or entirely replace their present petroleum equivalents, hemp does well in the environmental department.

It also looks rather handsome in the political and economic arena. Not only could it reduce our foreign dependency on mercurial and dictatorial nations, but it would also create more jobs on American soil – something we desperately need.

In essence, the criminalization of marijuana and its sister plants is a complex political story, but there isn’t a single line ever fed to the American public explaining its illegality that is actually true. The legalization of marijuana and its sister plants makes social, fiscal, and political sense.