Opinion: Drug Czar Needs To Check Out All The Unicorns In Jail

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"The fact is today, people don't go to jail for the possession of marijuana," Walters alleged on C-Span. "Finding somebody in jail or prison for possession of marijuana is like finding a unicorn. It doesn't exist."

Early this month Walters told viewers of C-Span that 800,000 Americans had not been arrested on marijuana charges. Is he just uninformed or telling a lie to make things look better?

"We didn't arrest 800,000 marijuana users," Walters proclaimed. "That's [a] lie."

The figures though are easy to prove that in 2007 police arrested 872,000 US citizens for weed. Those arrests were mostly young people carrying a small amount of weed for personal use. Three out of four arrested were under the age of 30.

Unicorns are becoming more common in the prison systems. There are now 33,655 state inmates and 10,785 federal inmates behind bars for marijuana offenses. That's a heck of a lot of unicorns.

It takes an average reader about a minute to read an article. While you were reading this post, two folks toking a joint were busted. That's just a guess, but with 738,915 Americans getting arrested in 2006 for possession only it comes down to about two arrests a minute. That leaves 90,710 arrested for sale and manufacture of marijuana. Looking deeper into the sale though some of those include people who have a plant or two for their own use or for medical use.

The United States could be making a fortune instead of spending one housing offenders in jail. As Newsli.com reports:

Most Americans have no idea of the massive effort going into a war on marijuana users that has completely failed to curb marijuana use,” said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C. “Just this summer a new World Health Organization study of 17 countries found that we have the highest rate of marijuana use, despite some of the strictest marijuana laws and hyper-aggressive enforcement.

“With government at all levels awash in debt, this is an insane waste of resources. If we regulated and taxed marijuana as we do beer, wine, and cigarettes, we could save tens of billions of dollars, better control marijuana’s production and distribution, and cut off a huge source of funding to criminal gangs.”

So what's the real deal? Is Walters watering down figures or is the FBI reporting more arrests than there really were? I think on this one, I am leaning with the FBI.