Dear Colleagues,

For the past 75 years, we have been waging a "war on drugs" that includes treating the possession and use of small amounts of Marijuana as a matter for the criminal justice system. We have spent billions of dollars investigating, prosecuting, incarcerating and monitoring millions of our fellow-citizens who have hurt nobody, damaged no property, breached no peace. Their only "crime" was smoking a plant which made them feel a bit giddy.

People across our Commonwealth have spent time in prison, lost time at work, been forced to hire lawyers and had their lives disrupted and sometimes destroyed because they used a product less dangerous than beer, less risky than children's cough-syrup and less addictive than chocolate. They used a product which has never killed anybody, and whose societal harm comes from its prohibition rather than its properties.

According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, in 2006, an average year, 24,685 marijuana arrests were made in Pennsylvania, at a cost of 325.36 million dollars. Each year we not only spend a similar amount, we leave several hundred million dollars on the table in taxes that we do not collect because marijuana is illegal, rather than regulated and taxed. Aside from the moral issues involved, we simply can no longer afford the financial costs of prohibition.

Further, prohibition has done what it did in the case of alcohol in the last century. It has created violent and bloody turf wars between drug cartels that kills many people in our country and elsewhere. The black-market violence associated with alcohol ended with the end of prohibition. The same will be true of Marijuana.