Cop Caught Having A Joint. At His Own Ganja “Plantation”.

I swear this could be the Dude from The Big Lebowski in real life. Reported in the Star:

An auxiliary police constable was caught smoking ganja while watering his marijuana plant at his security post at the Sultan Abu Bakar Dam in Cameron Highlands.

Cameron Highlands OCPD Deputy Supt Yahaya Othman said the man was busy fussing over his 90cm-high plant when the police caught him at 5pm on in Ringlet.

“At the time, he was also smoking a joint he had just rolled for himself,” he said, adding that the police managed to ambush the man following a public tip-off.

The 28-year-old man, who has worked as a security guard at the post for the past eight years, had apparently been growing the plant for over two months.

“He grew it close to his security post, near some bushes,” said DSP Yahaya.

The story got me interested into digging more pot-related stories, and one story in particular caught my attention. It’s by some marijuana-advocate who says that by criminalizing pot, the US government actually loses $42billion dollars a year on lost tax revenues and rehabilitation costs.

Can “Pot Tax” make new schools, hire new teachers, and help stop the oncoming recession? Rob Kampia of The Drug Reporter (now, wouldn’t you like to work for THAT publication, eh) thinks so:

Why $42 billion? Because that’s what our current marijuana laws cost American taxpayers each year, according to a new study by researcher Jon Gettman, Ph.D. — $10.7 billion in direct law enforcement costs, and $31.1 billion in lost tax revenues. And that may be an underestimate, at least on the law enforcement side, since Gettman made his calculations before the FBI released its latest arrest statistics in late September.

The new FBI stats show an all-time record 829,627 marijuana arrests in 2006, 43,000 more than in 2005.

Basing his calculations mainly on U.S. government statistics, Gettman concludes that marijuana in the U.S. is a $113 billion dollar business. That’s a huge chunk of economic activity that is unregulated and untaxed because it’s almost entirely off the books.

Of course, the cost of our marijuana laws goes far beyond lost tax revenues and money spent on law enforcement. By consigning a very popular product — one that’s been used by about 100 million Americans, according to government surveys — to the criminal underground, we’ve effectively cut legitimate businesspeople out of the market and handed a monopoly to criminals and gangs.

Strangely, government officials love to warn us that some unsavory characters profit off of marijuana sales, while ignoring the obvious: Our prohibitionist laws handed them the marijuana business in the first place, effectively giving marijuana dealers a $113 billion free ride.

All this might make some sense if marijuana were so terribly dangerous that it needed to be banned at all costs, but science long ago came to precisely the opposite conclusion. Compared to alcohol, for example, marijuana is astonishingly safe. For one thing, marijuana is much less addictive than alcohol, with just nine percent of users becoming dependent, as opposed to 15 percent for booze. And marijuana is much less toxic.

Heavy drinking is well-documented to damage the brain and liver, and to increase the risk of many types of cancer. Marijuana, on the other hand, has never caused a medically documented overdose death, and scientists are still debating whether even heavy marijuana use causes any permanent harm at all. And then there’s violence. Again, the scientific findings are overwhelming: Booze incites violence and aggression; marijuana doesn’t.