Should we legalize marijuana? If we legalize, what in particular should be legal? Just possessing marijuana and growing your own? Selling and advertising? If selling becomes legal, who gets to sell? Corporations? Co-ops? The government? What regulations should apply? How high should taxes be? Different forms of legalization could bring very different results. This second edition of Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know discusses what is happening with marijuana policy, describing both the risks and the benefits of using marijuana, without taking sides in the legalization debate. The book details the potential gains and losses from legalization, explores the middle ground options between prohibition and commercialized production, and considers the likely impacts of legal marijuana on occasional users, daily users, patients, parents, and employersand even on drug traffickers.

Discussions about reducing the harms associated with drug use and antidrug policies are often politicized, infused with questionable data, and unproductive. This paper provides a nonpartisan primer on drug use and drug policy in the United States. It aims to bring those new to drug policy up to speed and provide ideas to researchers and potential research funders about how they could make strong contributions to the field.

U.S. demand for illicit drugs creates markets for Mexican drug- trafficking organizations (DTOs) and helps foster violence in Mexico. This paper examines how marijuana legalization in California might influence DTO revenues and the violence in Mexico.

Legalizing marijuana in California would lead to a major decline in the pretax price, but the price for consumers will depend heavily on taxes, the regulatory regime structure, and how taxes and regulations are enforced. The lower price and nonprice effects will increase consumption, but it is unclear by how much. There is much uncertainty about the effect on public budgets; even minor changes in assumptions lead to major differences in outcomes.