Legalising v decriminalising pot

This article was published in The Economist 18 June 2010

There are clear harms entailed in the practice of putting lots of unenforceable or unenforced laws on the books and consigning a significant swathe of your population to the category of lawbreakers. On the one hand, this promotes contempt for the law. On the other hand, it allows police and government to lock up many people at will, since most people are always violating some law or another, and that's a discretionary power that governments tend to abuse for repressive political purposes. The government also derives extortionary power from its ability to lock people up at will, which leads to corruption. In autocratic countries across a wide spectrum of development, from Guinea to Russia, you tend to find all of these things occurring together: a broad range of normal economic and political behaviour is criminalised, the citizens treat the law as an arbitrary set of irritating technicalities to be evaded, government uses police powers to repress political opposition, and police and government officials make their living by shaking people down.

Parts of this syndrome (criminalising normal behaviour, contempt for the law, shaking people down) also describe the way drug laws function in much of America. So the question arises of whether we should legalise pot.