Marijuana generates more arrests than any other illicit drug. Much of that doesn't have anything to do with law enforcement specifically targeting drug infractions. Much of that is literally somebody's driving a little funny, gets pulled over and the cop smells the marijuana smoke or sees the baggie on the seat. There are relatively few police officers out there who are spending their time trying to catch people using marijuana. More in suburban and rural areas obviously than in urban areas, but marijuana enforcement isn't a very high priority, it's just that there's a lot of marijuana smoking.
And there are a lot of people that still act as if it were more or less legal. And therefore, violate Cheech and Chong's first rule of marijuana smoking, which is don't blow smoke [in a] cop's face. So there are a lot of arrests. Most of them don't lead to much of anything, except annoyance and embarrassment.
Now at the federal level, where there is a lot of effort at domestic marijuana production, you get a substantial number of people going to prison for mostly large scale cultivation. There are relatively many marijuana prisoners in the federal prison system, but that system holds only about 10% of the nation's prison population; the other 90% are in state and county institutions.
The federal prison system is heavily oriented toward drug offenses, somewhat more than half of all federal prisoners are in for drug offenses. And some noticeable fraction of that is marijuana. But still, if you look at the overall burden of drug law enforcement and drug related imprisonment, marijuana doesn't count very high. These are all guesses, no one really has good numbers. My best guess is that there are about 400,000 people in prison or jail at any one time for drug offenses: possession, not very much possession, some possession, distribution offenses. Of that something less than 10%--30,000 or 40,000 people--are in prison for marijuana offenses.
That's a lot of prisoners, but it's not a very large fraction of the overall prison effort. When people talk about the drug problem generically, whether they're talking about drug abuse or the cost of drug law enforcement, and then immediately switch the topic to marijuana, that's a little deceptive. Nothing we do about marijuana can really put a dent in either the problem of drug abuse or the problem of drug-related law enforcement and imprisonment, because those problems are overwhelmingly about other drugs.
Marijuana laws have become a symbolic battleground, where the real battle is over what we should do about cocaine. Some people say, "The Netherlands has legalized cannabis, and nothing terrible happened; therefore, the U.S. should legalize cocaine." There are four problems with that proposition. First, The Netherlands haven't actually legalized anything, though flagrant retail marijuana dealing is tolerated. Second, we don't really know much about what the effect has been on rates of marijuana use there. Third, something that worked for the Dutch might not work here. Fourth, cocaine isn't cannabis.
And, yet, what to do about cocaine is really the big drug policy question, unless you're courageous enough to address the problem of what to do about alcohol, which accounts for more violence, more crime, more sickness, more death and more arrests than all other drugs combined.
