What models are they using?! When I was in law school, I heard a very interesting guest lecture by a law professor from another law school who has studied the

What models are they using?! When I was in law school, I heard a very interesting guest lecture by a law professor from another law school who has studied the history of Prohibition (of selling alchohol) in the United States. People who were opposed to Prohibition, that is people who thought that alcohol should be legal to produce and sell, pointed out that Prohibition greatly increased corruption of police forces in many places. People who supported Prohibition pointed out that alcohol causes many medical harms for many users. The historical record shows that they were both right. When Prohibition was repealed, corruption of local police forces to prompt police to look the other way and not enforce Prohibition went down, but deaths from cirrhosis of the liver and other bad health effects of alcohol went up. I'm on record here on HN (I won't look up the links to previous comments just now) as being persuaded by Richard Branson's argument that decriminalizing marijuana in the country Portugal reduced use, and thus ended up reducing individual and societal harm from marijuana. That country still has court-supervised drug treatment programs (but without criminal penalties) for drug users. As far as I know, Minnesota's de facto policy is much like this. There is a federal law of the land in the United States that criminalizes sale and even possession of marijuana, but there is minimal enforcement here of statutes against possession of small amounts of marijuana. There is a big industry here of drug treatment centers, and people come to Minnesota from all over the world to get clean from drug addictions. If we can devote more law enforcement resources to more serious crimes, and fewer to enforcement of minor possession offenses, I'm fine with that. But I also hope that most people never start to use marijuana at all, and everyone who does use it is careful to get a reality check from sober people on how well they are really functioning.