A Fantasyland in the Reality-Based Community

I enjoyed reading both Atrios and Kevin Drum take Andrew Sullivan to task for his fantasy-based approach to balancing budgets, but sadly, they both got it wrong in countering Sullivan's claim that legalizing and taxing marijuana would be helpful for improving the budget. Drum says:

Legalize marijuana and tax it. This is so speculative that it seems faintly absurd to include it, and in any case it's a tax increase. Total savings: $0.

Atrios says:

The rest are policies which don't do anything in and of themselves (balanced budget amendment, line item veto, earmarks), in the realm of fantasyland (taxing marijuana), too ambiguous to really address directly ("corporate welfare"), or do nothing for the health of the budget generally unless you support raiding payroll taxes (social security benefit cuts).

Drum's statement is wrong on several fronts. The first is that legalization is not necessarily a tax increase on anyone. If you legalized marijuana, the price would drop due to the risk of growing, transport, etc no longer factoring into the price, so it would be possible for the price to remain the same to the average consumer while seeing that a certain percentage of money can be collected for treatment or education programs. Second, there is a staggering amount of money spent (arguably not all at the federal level) to process the 750,000 people who are arrested for marijuana charges every year. I'm not sure what that exact number would be, but I'm sure it's higher than 0.

Atrios' response that legalizing marijuana is "in the realm of fantasyland" brings up an interesting comparison that everyone on the left should think about. According to a recent Zogby poll, 46% of Americans believe that marijuana should be legalized and regulated. This is the same as the 46% of Americans who believe that Feingold's resolution should pass, which is in line with the 47% of Americans who oppose Bush's ability to wiretap domestically without a warrant. Both issues (wiretapping and the criminalization of marijuana) are strongly opposed by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and supporting both issues plays into negative Democratic stereotypes. Why is it that the left seems to overwhelmingly believe that one cause is so important (wiretapping), while the other is a fantasyland (marijuana), even though the illegality of marijuana has led to much bigger problems than illegal wiretapping has or probably ever will?

UPDATE: I clarified some of the things in the last paragraph, which was hastily written as people started showing up for DL last night...

UPDATE 2: I corrected a spelling mistake in the first update, which was hastily written at lunch...