A man is dead and a Fish and Game warden injured because of the futile and violent war on marijuana. The armed confrontation occurred on a pot farm in Santa Clara County on August 5, following a raid that uprooted 10,000 to 50,000 marijuana plants. That might sound like a lot until you consider that the state seizes hundreds of thousands of plants every year yet has failed to make a dent in the multibillion-dollar Californian marijuana industry. Even if the program had some measure of success, it would not be worth the loss of a human life.

Some can easily shrug off the death of someone on the wrong side of the government's drug war, but next time it could be an innocent bystander simply caught in the crossfire. Or it could be someone like rancher Donald Scott, who was gunned down in 1992 by L.A. County Sheriffs searching his property in the middle of the night, supposedly for marijuana crops—which they never found. Marijuana has never killed a single person, but the war on marijuana endangers us all.

In a recent press release announcing this year's Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP), California Attorney General Bill Lockyer grumbled that "[t]he illegal gardens seized by CAMP are . . . presenting increased risk for innocent hikers that may inadvertently stumble across one of these gardens that are guarded by armed men."

The only reason for the armed guards is that the plants are illegal. Most economists agree that banning a product drives it underground and raises its price. People willing to risk peril—such as a potential armed melee with state agents—eventually dominate the market. In short, what happened with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s is happening all over again with the drug war: Organized crime and police state tactics escalate together in a never-ending cycle, police resources are diverted from investigating and combating crimes against person and property, and use of the verboten substance continues unimpeded.

In recent years the number of annual arrests for mere possession has reached about 50,000 in California alone. But we can't exterminate a plant that humans have used for six thousand years. Any attempt to use state central planning to stop the marijuana trade will face the same obstacles that socialism always faces—namely, human nature. If people want something and are willing to pay for it, there is little you can do to stop it. The only question is, What type of marijuana market do we want: an open, legal one, regulated by the forces of reputation, competition, and peaceful conflict resolution, or a violent black market right out of the history book chapters on Al Capone? It's no mystery that liquor distilleries don't get into turf wars anymore. Legalize marijuana, and we can expect similar peace to follow.

According to recent surveys, at least 1.6 million Californians have used marijuana in the last month, and more than half a million use it every day. They are not going to stop anytime soon. They are no threat to anybody, and it is a waste of scarce resources and a betrayal of America's libertarian founding principles to try to dissuade them with the blunt instruments of jail time and crop eradication programs. Yet California wastes about $1 billion a year just in enforcement costs.

Unfortunately, marijuana prohibition is federal policy, as was clearly seen in the recent Supreme Court case overriding California's medical marijuana laws. The State of California should challenge such federal encroachments on our sovereignty—or at least refuse to assist in the crusade. The national drug war is out of step with Californian sentiments, and yet CAMP Commander Michael Johnson brags that his "program is the largest law enforcement task force in the United States devoted solely to assisting local law enforcement agencies with the eradication of large-scale marijuana grows."

The program could be five times as large, and while it might seize even more crops and arrest ever more people, a sizable number of Californians will keep using pot. No amount of tough-on-crime rhetoric or increased drug-war funding will alter this fact. For the sake of our pocketbooks, our liberties, and our safety, it is time to declare peace in the wretched war on pot.