What Mark Kleiman Wants You To Know About Drugs

The public policy guru guiding state legalization efforts.Mark A. R. Kleiman is the Professor of Public Policy at UCLA, editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis, author of many books, and generally regarded as one of the nation’s premier voices on drug policy and criminal justice issues. Mr. Kleiman provides advice to local, state, and national governments on crime control and drug policy. When the state of Washington needed an adviser on the many policy questions they left unanswered with the passage of I-502, which legalized marijuana in that state, they turned to Kleiman. In the past two years, Kleiman has co-authored to Q and A-style books: Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (2011) with Jonathan P. Caulkins and Angela Hawken; and Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know (2012) with Hawken, Caulkins, and Beau Kilmer. Here, excerpted from the two books, is a brief sampling of Kleiman and his colleagues on a variety of drug and alcohol issues. Is marijuana really the nation’s leading cash crop?“Alas, the facts say otherwise. Analyses purporting to support the claim must contort the numbers, citing the retail price of marijuana but the farmgate price of other products, or pretending that all marijuana consumed in the United States is sinsemilla, or ignoring the fact that most marijuana used in the United States is imported, or simply starting with implausible estimates of U.S. production…. marijuana [is] in the top fifteen, but not the ...
Source: Addiction Inbox - Category: Addiction Authors: Source Type: blogs