U.S. Surgeon General “Marijuana Can Be Helpful for Pain”

If Marijuana can be helpful for pain, it is a complete contradiction of Federal law. The Justice Department designates marijuana as a Schedule I controlled substance, a category for drugs that have no accepted medical value and have a high potential for abuse. Well, according to the Surgeon General, marijuana can be helpful to treat certain types of pain. "We have some preliminary data showing that for certain medical conditions and symptoms, marijuana can be helpful," said Murthy, who became surgeon general in December. Get the full story by clicking here. He says much more information is on the way.

So, we are spending BILLIONS just to defend our country from this drug that could help treat certain types of pain. Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron estimated that the federal government spends about $2.4 billion annually on enforcing anti-marijuana laws, which is on top of about $5.3 billion that local and state governments spend annually. Under prohibition, we also forgo the roughly $6.2 billion in tax revenues that Prof. Miron says would be generated if marijuana were regulated and taxed like alcohol and tobacco.

But that's only part of the cost of marijuana prohibition. The federal government has spent over $1 billion since 1998 on TV, radio and print anti-drug ads that have focused overwhelmingly on marijuana, often neglecting far more dangerous drugs like methamphetamine. Click here for more facts. So we would make BILLIONS by just not enforcing the law.

Michigan has made some big bucks on Medical Marijuana. The state doesn’t tax its medical marijuana sales, but the various fees associated with the program not only covered administration costs in the 2012 fiscal year, but also led to a $6.3 million surplus.

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