So, recreational marijuana did very well in this year’s elections; there are now eight states (including California) where marijuana is fully legal, and a bunch of others where medical marijuana is legal and/or recreational marijuana is decriminalized (mere possession is a minor civil infraction only, more like a speeding ticket than a “Go To Jail” crime). Right now, it seems like the pro-marijuana side is winning.
But the question for this thread is, should legalization go beyond marijuana, and if so, how far? Total legalization of sale, possession, and use* of all drugs (heroin, meth, “krokodil”)? Or full legalization for some drugs (beyond marijuana and alcohol), and if so, which ones? (LSD, mescaline or peyote, maybe ecstasy? Maybe legalization for anything that’s to the left of/below alcohol on this chart?**.) Continued distinctions (for some or all currently illegal drugs) between sale/distribution and personal use/possession, or between legalization and decriminalization?
*I would say that even total legalization of “use” doesn’t necessarily preclude “time, place, and manner” restrictions–we got rid of alcohol prohibition a long time ago; that doesn’t mean it’s legal to drink and drive.
**Chart for illustrative purposes only. If you think “the position of Dried Toad Dust on that chart is totally wrong!!!”–in either direction–that’s not the same thing as disagreeing with the idea behind the chart in principle, or with the idea that something like that sort of assessment should be done when considering which drugs to legalize.
Personally, I’m kind of cranky and libertarian on the whole subject–my knee-jerk reaction is to say “Legalize 'em all, dammit!”–but I admit that a lot of that attitude is simply disgust with the War on Drugs and all the damage that the W.o.D. has done to civil liberties and racial justice in this country. Pragmatically, I could probably be persuaded that, OK, maybe selling crack cocaine at the grocery store isn’t actually such a great idea. (“Crack-O’s! Part of this complete breakfast! Crack-O’s give you the energy you need to get through the day and do lots of cool stuff and keep going until you crash and burn!” “Mommy, mommy, mommymommymommy pleasepleaseplease let us have Crack-O’s pleasepleaseplease we love Crack-O’s so much please mommymommymommy buy some right now!!!”)
(I’m sure we’ve done this topic in the past, but with the wave of marijuana legalization, it seems like a reasonable time to re-visit the issue.)
I honestly don’t buy the common argument that with enough carefully selected drugs available, there won’t be any demand for the stuff that remains illegal. I could be persuaded, but I haven’t been yet.
I favor an incremental, step by step approach. Step one is getting recreational marijuana use decriminalized/re-legalized in all 50 states. After that, all the states will have enough money to afford the time and resource requirements of further study.
Seriously, things that are clearly proven to be a potential harm to oneself or innocent others should probably be regulated at least like alcohol is. Your cocaines, your heroins, your crocodiles and bathroom cleaners, er, bath salts. Not your Mary Janes. Your Mary Janes should be regulated equally as the tomatoes you grow in your yard are.
IMHO.
This may be a tangent, but in these discussions it seems like someone always claims, or references a study that claims that legalization actually decreases drug use. That doesn’t make sense to me. What’s the proposed mechanism? Some amount of the forbidden fruit effect I can see, but who are all these people giving up marijuana after it’s legalized? Are they drug hipsters? “You were cool before you sold out, man.”
Anecdotally, I know a lot of people who would smoke weed if it were legal, especially if workplaces relaxed their drug testing policy. Or people who would do harder drugs but don’t because they’re too expensive or they’re afraid of impurities or not knowing what’s actually in it, problems which would disappear after legalization. I find it hard to believe that hallucinogen use wouldn’t skyrocket after legalization, especially since the popular science press has been singing its praises for so long.
I really don’t like the idea of legalizing most of these drugs. Some are addictive with a single dose and ruin lives. Yes, I know alcohol causes many problems too, the war on drugs is largely ineffective, and collecting taxes is better than funding gangs.
I’ve always taken the position: if it grows in the ground, you should be allowed to grow and sell it, obviously with some common sense government restrictions/regulations (i.e. it’s not cool for farmers to sell corn soaked in formaldehyde so we need some government involvement at some basic level for any consumer product for safety reasons.)
For the “synthetic” and “manufactured”, things that are totally produced in the lab from precursor chemicals (meth, LSD, MDMA etc) and “highly processed” drugs like heroin/cocaine that may start out as the simple poppy (or coca) plant but go through a pretty serious manufacturing process to end up as a consumable drug. So I am making distinctions between the sale of say, coca leaves and opium vs refined cocaine and heroin.
For any “psychoactive plants”, my opinion is they should be legal, and regulated similarly to any other agricultural product in terms of production. At point of sale they should be regulated similarly to the other currently legal plant drug–tobacco.
For the synthetic and manufactured drugs, I think legalization presents practical difficulties. These drugs basically need to be made by professionals and the production regulated similarly to the regulation of prescription medication, because people doing this at small scale frequently use dangerous adulterants and etc–basically they cannot be trusted to just do this safely on their own any more than we trust Pfizer, Pfizer is subject to government inspection and regulation. At the same time, due to the negative social connotations and liability out there, I’m not sure the drug manufacturers (or any company above a certain size) is going to want to shoulder the legal and reputational risk of producing and selling these chemicals.
Right, my home region of Appalachia is basically being destroyed by an opiate problem. It’s almost entirely been “created” by a 20 year period of extreme over-prescription of oxycodone and hydrocodone. That has been largely curtailed in recent years, with greater scrutiny of unscrupulous “pill mill” pain clinics, but the addictions acquired do not go away with easy access to the legal pills, and heroin basically is the same thing, and is cheaper anyway, and keeps you from suffering the horrifying withdrawal effects.
Not saying all these people are saints (some are my own extended family, and I know they aren’t), but there’s a hell of a lot of them who never would’ve thought they’d be injecting dope in their veins–their addiction started with something they reasonably thought they should’ve been able to trust–a doctor, and prescribed medication for genuine pain (that usually didn’t require anything like a narcotic pain killer), once that addiction gets hold of them you really do become a different person and from what I’ve seen this type of addiction is almost incurable, and very often fatal.
