> There is a lot of money, and plenty of high-paying jobs with full pensions, that are kept afloat by the criminalization of drugs.

This is the heart of it.

There's a reason that my local PBA is losing their minds over the potential for drugs like marijuana becoming legal, and it isn't because marijuana is harmful. It's because 60% of the town's budget goes to funding law enforcement salaries, benefits and pensions, and the majority of arrests in this area are for marijuana possession.

PBA = police officers’ union (for those like me who didn’t know)

But does it necessarily follow that law enforcement budgets will be cut if weed is legalised?

Ideally, how might the budget be reconfigured constructively with the same dollar amount to make a better community?

> Ideally, how might the budget be reconfigured constructively with the same dollar amount to make a better community?

Attrition of police officers with those remaining for only when force is required, while bolstering social worker and community outreach services and funding. Non violent emergency calls go to social response.

St Petersburg, Florida is making a go of this. Budgeting details in the link below.

https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/region-pinellas/st-peters...

It's not so much a question of law enforcement budgets as it is municipality budgets. Many of these smaller pass-through towns make significant money harassing travelers (speed traps) and through seizures of property. If MJ is legal, they can no longer use things such as "I smell marijuana" as a pretext for exacerbating a traffic stop or stacking more charges.

How do you quantify the revenue derived from that?

You can literally look it up or file a FOIA request.

To this end, MuckRock[1] is a non-profit SaaS platform that can assist you in filing requests for public records.

[1] https://www.muckrock.com/

Why would we keep breeding the same number of horses after switching to cars?

So change the incentives. Don't get rid of the war on drugs rewards, redirect them to things like catching serial killers or rapists or whatever.

The vast majority of arrests are from small drug offences. Unfortunately there just aren't enough actual criminals to justify the amount of money they want.

There are nowhere near as many of those.

on the other hand, we do an awful job catching them, so more resources could be put to use there than they're currently getting.

Instead of ruining people's lives, we could just raise taxes slightly, but I doubt that will fly.

The threat of ruining people's lives is part of the racket. Kids are arrested and charged for low-level drug offenses for doing something innocuous like smoking a joint. Then, prosecutors in municipalities will offer them plea deals and offers to expunge their records in return for paying exorbitant fees and participating in a jobs program for probation officers.

Why would someone take a plea deal and agree to pay municipalities what often amounts to thousands of dollars in fees? Because students with drug offenses on their records can have their eligibility for student loans stripped, potentially ruining their chances at bettering their lives through education. A drug conviction will pop up on every background check if their records aren't expunged.

Got caught smoking a joint in a park with friends. All of us white. They told us to throw out the material and move on. I wonder if the same scenario would occur if we were brown?

So like many horribly broken things, it’s a jobs program.