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Yes.

Justifications.
1) Reallocates scarce policing and criminal justice resources to violent or non-consensual and non-transactional crimes. Prisons need not be filled with non-violent offenders (drug dealers) for example. And police have real police work to do.
2) Consensual vice "crimes" are behaviors that police must actively intrude upon the private affairs of civilians in order to investigate. Without actual complaints, such as the violence associated with illicit drug trade, domestic abuse associated with alcohol or narcotics, or human smuggling associated with prostitution, police must invent investigations rather than run down actual criminal actors. This is a serious limitation on human freedom which has very real human costs and penalties (costs for offenders and their families) even before considering the actual financial costs of running anti-drug operations (costs for authorities and the taxpayer).
3) This investigative arm serves to incentivize very simple sting operations which mostly catch lesser or very trivial criminal behavior (street level rips) rather than the more substantial or nefarious (druglords). It's much harder to do this with marijuana anyway than cocaine/crack/heroin, because distribution often takes the form of networks of friends rather than street level open air markets.
4) Helps deal with foreign policy concerns. Most of the immigration "problem" vis a vis violence with Mexico is related to drugs, and that largely, but not exclusively, marijuana. Eliminating the black market price premium and permitting domestic production would cut down considerably on this being a profitable but violent and well-armed industry. The overarching drug war also funds operations of narco-terrorism and violence in Colombia along with much of Latin America (Jamaica for instance) and most notably heroin in Afghanistan with the funds diverted to various nefarious bodies. Including corrupt government officials, speaking of which…
5) Reduces corruption of government officials by making it unnecessary to enforce certain legal restrictions which are looked the other way or flaunted by large segments of the population.
6) Increases the likelihood of appropriate research on any necessary test of active intoxication via marijuana while one is, for example, operating a car or at a place of work, such that intoxicated drivers could be properly penalized or workers properly treated (or dismissed) by their employers without intrusive and wasteful mandatory testing regimes.
7) Tax revenues from legal products, while not substantial and almost certainly lower than supportive government officials project they would be, could be used for appropriate drug prevention programmes (such as can be found) or especially for drug treatment for addiction and problem users (eg people who have committed crimes under influence of drug or alcohol), further cutting down on crime rates by targeting resources on non-recreational use or abuse.

I guess I am the exception to that point. Back in my younger, self-destructive days, when I did drugs, I actually did not do any marijuana into yeeeeears after I was already doing the harder stuff.

I'm not sure if legalizing only marijuana would reduce crime. It might a little. But I still think it should be legalized. There are other reasons for legalizing marijuana.

Legalize it and tax it!

There are several responses to this
1) Gateway drug theory implies that using marijuana induces people to use cocaine. In fact there are major holes in that theory. Many, if not most cocaine users STARTED with cocaine (if not alcohol, or milk, as the joke goes on that absurdity). Primarily what determines the gateway logic is not the substances, but the users themselves. Most users of marijuana either stop at pot or at "worst" experiment briefly with other substances. This is statistically true if not obvious from observing most casual or even heavy drug users.

2) Demand for cocaine and other substances is way down in places that have legalised or decriminalised marijuana (California, Netherlands, Portugal, etc). If your theory does not work the way you say it does in the rest of the world, I'm highly skeptical that it would work that way in America. One reason for this is that you break a supply chain between illicit substances and licit ones. When people go buy beer or alcohol, they generally do not find a bag of weed or crackpipes on sale with it. People who want only alcohol are freed from such things in the same way that marijuana could be supplied absent more challenging substances to legalise. Breaking this supply chain leaves most people content with their choice of mind-altering substance.

3) One probable response I would use to your complaint that demand for cocaine would go up is to legalise or decriminalise the sale of that as well.

4) You didn't actually directly address the question of whether this would reduce crime or not. Have you an opinion on that or do you merely want to spout your anecdotal evidence as though it somehow contradicts medical science and analysis (when it does nothing of the kind, I haven't seen gateway drug hypothesis, for any drug, much less marijuana, being credibly cited by scientific study in decades), and ignore the criminality angles? Why should it be a crime to sell a product or service to consensual consumers, or to possess it or use it (responsibly)?

For many harder drugs, that's actually the way that works rather than an exception.

I don't know, lets smoke on it…

Legalizing ANY of the so-called recreational narcotics will not reduce crime by any stretch of the imagination. It didn't reduce crime when alcohol was legalized – the criminals just went on to other crimes, like trafficking drugs.

Wrong again SunTzu.

Bank robberies and murders skyrocketed during the 1930's, only the U.S. involvement in WW2 brought a reduction in violent crime in the 1940's. Organized crime went into drug trafficking after WW2 which brought on a series of "gang wars" that left many a dead body around the cities of Chicago and New York. Only after the large crime organizations moved into the legal gambling businesses in Nevada did the crime rates seem to go down, but even that statistic is misleading due to the rampant corruption of our modern day politicians. Today most of the narcotics trafficking is taken up by the Mexican and South American drug "cartels" since most of the former organized crime syndicates have invested heavily into the labor unions and corrupt political arena in the U.S.

Violent crime has a nice gigantic hike in the 1920s from which the next 4 decades were a lull. Relative crime rates were low for decades. Period. "Spectacular crime" rates were high in the form of bank robberies or gambling/drug rings, but these were minor by comparison to the alcohol bootleggers. Violent crime overall did not recover to those mid/late 20s rates until the late 70s. When the "drug war" became again a national agenda issue.

Crime rates did go down initially under Prohibition, and much petty crime (drunken disorderly, assault, etc) also went down and stayed down. But violent crime and corruption skyrocketed by the end of the decade and plummeted when the trade was again legalised (well, some forms of corruption did). The graph for the 20th century looks like two giant mountains are parked in it for murder and incarceration rates. One in the 20s and one in the 80s (incarceration rate per capita is still extremely high at present).

Wonder why that would be?

http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzz…

Here's the graph. Homicide rates were high in the 1930s (the early 30s mind you…, when prohibition was either in effect or only partly repealed, dry counties for instance remain today in some parts of the country), but they did not "skyrocket". They were already high and simply plummet after. Most other crime rates flattened out, leading to an overall drop in incarceration rates (murder is not a particularly common crime usually).

As for organised crime going heavily into narcotics trafficking post war, you may want to look at arrest/incarceration figures since ww2 on drug trafficking. It doesn't spike until the 70s and 80s. Which implies that even if they are trafficking the stuff, they were getting arrested, in general, only for something else (violent acts related to trafficking).

As far as Chicago's "gang wars" post-WW2. I grew up there. You may want to look at crime rates in Chicago specifically…. because my history of Chicago does not include a gang war during that time period. "The Outfit" pretty much ran things without a fight. The dead bodies were during the boom time of Prohibition, and then later when the FBI (and later Daley) started to squeeze in the 60s and 70s. When they were generally whacking informants rather than having dramatic headline gun battles.

If your Chicago history and time line is that fuzzy and distorted, then I'd be highly skeptical of the rest, even without knowing most of it to be incomplete or incorrect.

I think one should first ask the question, why link marijuana, weed, cannabis, ganja, matekoane with crime? I think the link is not so firm as to assume that all criminal smoke weed. This therefore unjustifies the debate herein. People do a lot of crime under the influence of alcohol. Infact, come to think of it, I am so many years old but I have never heard of someone commit a crime and then claim being high..its alway intoxication -from alcohol. Some do crime from no influence at all…So, my comment is simply that since there is no particular link on crime to marijuana smoking, then we should not even crack our heads on the topic…let us rather go for a smoke.

What should be illegal is if you don’t puff, puff, pass, and share the green with the scene. Don’t be cheap with the peeps lol. I don’t smoke but I would partake if it were legal. Crime will exist no matter what but if it were legal marijuana related crimes would change in nature if not decline.

Let me ask a counter question:

Has legalizing alcohol reduced alcohol crime?

And to be specific, has it reduced alcohol-related crime, especially violent, criminal sales activity?

What would be the effect of locking up everyone with a jug of wine for 10 years?

People will still waste their lives away on intoxicants and useless activities, that will not change.