More than half of Californians believe that marijuana should be legalized and taxed. We agree with one half of that proposition, and Governor Schwarzenegger has pronounced himself ready for a debate on it. The governor has not been moved to this by any especial commitment to principle, but by the usual factor that moves and shakes those who move and shake in the state capitals: the hunger for revenue.

California is broke, and 56 percent of the state’s residents want a marijuana tax to cover the budget shortfall. The math supporting this proposition is doobious: California suffers from excessive spending, not from insufficient taxation, and it is unlikely that a tax on marijuana, even a very high one, would be sufficient to repair the damage that Schwarzeneggerism has wrought.  Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a San Francisco Democrat, has introduced a bill that would legalize marijuana in California and establish a regime of taxation and dealer-licensing, but it is estimated that this would raise only $1.3 billion a year. The belief that a marijuana tax is going to provide an easy fix to California’s budget problems is a vapor.

Though crisis presents opportunity, California’s marijuana liberalizers should not hide behind the fig leaf of financial emergency; instead, those who seek the decriminalization or outright legalization of marijuana should proceed on principled grounds — and the authorities in Washington, D.C., should let them. Federalism provides an eminently sensible approach to the question of marijuana legalization, inasmuch as there is no reason that Malibu has to take the same route as Salt Lake City or Houston. And though the president and his circle have shown themselves surprisingly hostile to the notion of marijuana liberalization, the administration has taken an important first step toward rationalizing Washington’s side of the equation by suspending federal raids on law-abiding dispensaries in jurisdictions that allow the use of marijuana for medical purposes.

While California is not likely to raise a particularly impressive sum through marijuana excises, it will spare itself a good deal of wasted resources and human suffering. Some 65,000 marijuana-related felony and misdemeanor arrests are made each year in California. And though only a fraction of those arrested end up in the penitentiary — and some of them are dangerous criminals who deserve to be there — the cumulative effect of these prosecutions is an immense squandering of human capital. Critics habitually focus on the costs to the state — in the form of expenses related to police, prisons, courts, and parole officers — but spare a thought for the prosecuted, too. Drug abuse is a problem of consequence, even when it comes to relatively benign substances such as marijuana, but the deleterious effects of pot smoking are not nearly as severe as those of imprisonment. A marijuana habit generally will not interfere with one’s ability to find and keep gainful employment, for instance, or to otherwise conduct one’s life independently and productively; a felony conviction will.

The failures of prohibition are too widely documented to bear much more commentary. It is worth noting that California teenagers are about as likely to have smoked marijuana as they are to have smoked a cigarette (15 percent in both cases) an underwhelming outcome given the extravagant resources lavished upon what has too long been known as the “War on Drugs” — and praise is due to White House drug czar R. Gil Kerlikowske for his desire to retire that over-ambitious phrase.

In the calculus of public good, the costs of marijuana interdiction and the invasive paternalism associated with it outweigh the costs that are imposed by marijuana use. We ought not pretend that there is no downside to legalization, much less allow ourselves to be seduced by the arguments of the marijuana-is-good-for-you camp; it is enough to measure the price of liberalization against the price of prohibition and to employ sensible judgment. 

So we welcome the governor’s new openness on this issue, which finds us in the unaccustomed position of agreement with some of our opposite numbers on the left side of the political spectrum. The question of marijuana prohibition is instructive because it requires us to measure with some precision the circumference of the private sphere, and we hope that progressives who have been attracted to this issue appreciate that the lessons of government limitation have wider and fuller applicability. The grass is a little greener on the side of liberty.