Steve Lopez visited a former Orange County judge who is not just supporting a bill that would legalize marijuana so that the state could tax it, but he is willing to go on the record to say that the war on drugs is a lost.

I’m sitting in Costa Mesa with a silver-haired gent who once ran for Congress as a Republican and used to lock up drug dealers as a federal prosecutor, a man who served as an Orange County judge for 25 years. And what are we talking about? He’s begging me to tell you we need to legalize drugs in America.

“Please quote me,” says Jim Gray, insisting the war on drugs is hopeless. “What we are doing has failed.”

As far as I can tell, Gray is not off his rocker. He’s not promoting drug use, he says for clarification. Anything but. If he had his way, half the revenue we would generate from taxing and regulating drugs would be plowed back into drug prevention education, and there’d be rehab on demand.

Lopez writes “If Gray had his way, no one under 21 could buy drugs. But anyone older than that could legally buy marijuana — which, he says, causes nowhere near the amount of death and disease as alcohol. The state would need to see how that works, he said, before moving on to legalizing the sale of harder drugs. Sure, he says, legalization might lead to more toking at first, but he believes drug use would wane when it’s no longer forbidden and the novelty wears off.”

So the question is, what do you think? Have we lost the war on drugs? Is it more economical to legalize the weed and tax it? State your case below in the comments and/or vote in the poll here.

– Tony Pierce-  Los Angeles Times