I don’t like to talk about issues I don’t see as important and that distract from the real political peril of our nation, and that is the onslaught of socialism. However, I find I have to question the social liberals supporting the legalisation of cannabis, and using economic grounds as the main plank of their argument.

Don Brash used the $100 million cost of policing the marijuana laws as his reason for wanting them done away with. I don’t have any information on what marijuana users cost society.

However Otago university completed a report (in 1997) on the use/ abuse of alcohol in NZ. The reports findings were-

The estimated cost of alcohol abuse for 1 year included direct and indirect costs. Costs such as lost production resulting from premature death and sickness, reduced working efficiency and excess unemployment comprised indirect costs.

Direct costs included hospital costs, accident compensation payments, police and justice system costs. A range of social cost estimates was constructed based on various prevalence rates of alcohol abuse, discount rates for lost production and the excess unemployment rate.

Using a range of assumptions regarding the proportion of each event attributable to alcohol, the sum of social costs ranged from $1045 million to $4005 million in 1991. The direct costs ranged from $341 million to $589 million, respectively.

OK, so even if we accept that marijuana use may have less damaging effects than alcohol, and we’d have to be generous to do that, it would seem that the economic argument for de-criminalising drugs of any kind fails miserably.

There may be acceptable and rational arguments for legalising cannabis, but the argument that it costs $100 million to enforce existing laws is not one of them.