RS 6: An Economist Gets Stoned

  In the podcast "An Economist Gets Stoned" they talked about drugs and how legalizing them could have an effect on the economy.  In 2012 seventeen states including Connecticut had legalized the use of marijuana for medical use only.  Medical marijuana is only distributed to those with proper documentation because it is not street legal. 
   In this podcast Plant Money interviews a Harvard economist by the name of Jeffery Miron.  Miron did a study of the economy on the use of marijuana and whether or not making marijuana legal would help boost the economy due to people being taxed on the plant.  Miron claimed the drugs would become cheaper because of increased elasticity due to the legalization and more easily accessible.  He states that the reason being that black market drugs are so much more expensive because of the fact that they are illegal and that there is a lot that goes in to the business to make sure it is not discovered by the police. 
   I personally believe that legalizing marijuana would solve a lot of problems if people did not take advantage of this law nor did they harm anyone and just stayed to themselves.  The way I look at it is this, legalizing the drug would allow for the government to create a tax on the drug making a profit from it.  Also, by legalizing it you do not have to pay the law enforcement as much to watch out for the drug deals.  In my eyes it would help our struggling economy.  Marijuana plants are no different then a normal plant.  These plants just give you a high if you smoke them, if used within reason it causes no harm to others.  In the United States we live by laws that promote freedom, so we should be allowed the right to smoke the plant in controlled amounts. 
  Relating this podcast to elasticity is rather simple.  Legalizing marijuana would increase supply and in my eyes increase the demand because people will now want to try a drug that was once deemed illegal. So with supply and demand up, elasticity is also up.  And with the elasticity up it allows for the price of the marijuana to decrease in a big way because more people are willing got buy it and its not such a high demand due to the fact that it was illegal and hard to get because you had to find a black market dealer.
  To look at this topic from the other side of the spectrum if you are talking about my personal opinion there are reasons to believe that making this drug legal could boost the prices.  The government could pass laws to control prices on the drug allowing them to control how much is sold due the high asking price.  But to me honestly I just do not see them asking for large prices because if it was made cheap and governments taxed it, then they would make bundles of money off of it and it would soon become a million dollar business.  So to me I think making marijuana legal would benefit everyone and by it being illegal right now is just a hassle to law enforcement because the sales of illegal marijuana is never going away and is only going to get bigger and will continue to cause a problem.