Argument: Marijuana prohibition is impossible to achieve

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"420 Campaign - Top Ten Reasons Marijuana Should Be Legal". High Times. March 13th, 2007 - "10. Prohibition has failed to control the use and domestic production of marijuana. The government has tried to use criminal penalties to prevent marijuana use for over 75 years and yet: marijuana is now used by over 25 million people annually, cannabis is currently the largest cash crop in the United States, and marijuana is grown all over the planet. Claims that marijuana prohibition is a successful policy are ludicrous and unsupported by the facts, and the idea that marijuana will soon be eliminated from America and the rest of the world is a ridiculous fantasy."

Stephen J. Dubner. "On the Legalization — or Not — of Marijuana." New York Times, Freakenomics. October 30, 2007 - "While marijuana is, in fact, remarkably free of toxicity, the consequences of annually arresting 300,000 mostly young people were not. Once I grasped the absurdity of this prohibition, I became devoted to the cause of changing these laws...Despite the increasing number of arrests, the growing demands of employers for urine tests, and the ubiquity of misinformation purveyed by the government and anti-marijuana organizations, the number of Americans who experiment with or regularly use this substance continues to grow. A December 2002 CNN/Time magazine survey found that 47 percent of American adults had tried marijuana. The number of people who use it regularly has increased to about 15 million."

Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). "On the Legalization — or Not — of Marijuana." New York Times, Freakenomics. October 30, 2007 - "Regardless of one’s view of marijuana use as normal or immoral, healthy or unhealthy, the fact is that over 70 years of government prohibition has done little to nothing to achieve the long-stated public goals of increasing youth perception of harm from marijuana use, reducing youth access to untaxed and unregulated marijuana, increasing treatment for marijuana abuse and marijuana-related emergency room visits, and incarcerating users and dealers. In 2003, the Office of Management and Budget presented the Drug Enforcement Administration with a zero rating on a hundred-point scale for achievement of the bureau’s stated goals — an utterly failing grade."