Last November, more than 75 percent of voters in Mississippi voted to legalize medical marijuana. By February, neighboring Alabama’s Senate had passed its own legalization bill for the third year in a row. Of Alabama’s four neighboring states, only Tennessee still treats all marijuana possession as a crime. If this is where weed stands in the deep south, its legalization recreationally in 18 states (as of this writing) should not be surprising. More than 128 million Americans now live in these states, including New Mexico, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Virginia, and nearly 224 million live in states that have legalized medical marijuana use. According to an April 2021 Pew poll, more than 90 percent of Americans (and more than 80 percent of self-described political conservatives) now support legalization in some form, with 60 percent in favor of recreational legalization. Given this reality, conservative leaders should reconsider their traditionally hostile approach to marijuana and embrace the end of state cannabis prohibition as both good policy and an embodiment of core conservative principles.
As the conservative economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell is fond of observing, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” In his book Basic Economics, he elaborates, “Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses.” So how does this thinking apply to cannabis? For nearly a hundred years, the great symbol of government overreach by progressives has been the effort to prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol, which resulted in a constitutional amendment adopted and reversed in less than 15 years. The United States learned the hard way that the costs of trying to enforce alcohol prohibition (increased gang violence, trafficking, and aggressive policing) far outweighed the benefits (reduced consumption of alcohol and its attendant social ills).
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