This has been a very interesting debate. I appreciate all the comments everyone has made.
I’m gonna have to drop out now, and my position remains unchanged.
I’m sorry, I just can’t envision a United States where everyone has easy access to “kind bud”. :eek:
This has always been one of my favorite subjects; my very first post on this board was for a “legalize pot” thread. It is a shame we don’t have more pro-pot prohibition people around here, this subject is too one-sided on this board.
A few points I would like to make…
While it is reasonable to assume legalization will result in increased usage, it may also result in a reduction in alcohol use. (Anecdotal evidence [for what it’s worth] available upon request.)
Will legal pot make it easier for kids to get? Probably. As things are now it is easier for kids to get weed than it is for many adults. There are parents who send their kids to school with money to “score them a bag”.
How can the government tax it if everyone can grow it himself or herself? It’s easy to brew beer at home but somehow Budweiser is still in business.
Will it ever be legal? There are a lot of older people who believe marijuana is worse than alcohol, and they all vote! After more of this “Reefer Madness” generation passes on we may see a change.
For those of you who think things would be better if alcohol were illegal, just take a look at what happened when we tried that. It did not go well. While you’re at it, look at some of the reasons it was made legal again. Do any apply to our present situation?
Lekatt said: “It always comes as a surprise to outlaws, that a very large majority of people in this country do follow the law. They are honest, moral people.”
Actually, the truth is that honest, moral people do not knock over gas stations when they’re short of cash. They do not kill Grandpa in order to inherit his money. They do not shoplift, or make false insurance claims, or print counterfeit money in their basements. Honest, moral people of the male persuasion do not commit rape whenever they get horney. It is not laws that prevent them from doing these things. They do not go through life thinking, “gee, I could sure use some dough; I’d rob that convenience store, if it weren’t for those darn ol’ laws”. Honest, moral people are not being kept honest by the force of law; they’re the ones who don’t need laws to keep them honest and moral.
Not that dishonest, immoral people are kept from committing crimes by the force of law. The law has no magical power over anyone. The point of law is not to keep people from committing crimes. The point is to set penalties for law-breaking.
I know we’re on the same side in this, and I agreed with most of your post, but the above quote bugged me a little. Of course the law is meant to keep people from committing crimes. The definition of a crime is: “a social harm proscribed and made punishable by law”.
We don’t want people to commit social harms. We want people to conform to our current moral standards and expectations. Since we don’t want people committing those social harms, we have to figure out a way to deter them. That’s where legal penalties come in. The more serious the crime, the more we want to deter people from committing it and so we impose a harsher penalty. The underlying purpose is to deter. There would be no point in setting penalities otherwise (regulation purposes notwithstanding). Why else would we bother?
I know we’re on the same side in this, and I agreed with most of your post, but the above quote bugged me a little. Of course the law is meant to keep people from committing crimes. From Perkins & Boyce “The purpose of the criminal law is to define socially intolerable conduct, and to hold conduct within the limits which are reasonably acceptable from the social point of view.” You cannot “hold conduct within the limits which are reasonably acceptable from the social point of view” without attempting to deter conduct which falls outside those limits.
The underlying purpose of criminal law is to deter. There would be no point in setting penalities otherwise (regulation purposes notwithstanding). Why else would we bother?
You’ve got to be kidding me.
Please disregard my first post in response to Hazel.
Why is it the hamsters don’t start really moving until you WANT them to be slow?
Votes for legalization.
I disagree. I’m not sure that legalization would lead to any great increase in use – but if there were an increase, would that be a bad thing? Wouldn’t most of any increse be at the expense of alcohol use? Seems to me that individual users and society would both be better off if there were a shift from alcohol to marijuana. I think it’s less harmful to the user, and less likely to produce behavior that harms others.
Re teenagers, I think it’s at least somewhat easier for them to obtain marijuana than alcohol. Dealers don’t care how old a customer is, as long as (s)he has the money to buy the product.
Re the burden on society, I think the real burden is the burden of the war on drugs.
Would that that were the case! 
I think, of the two substances, alcohol is more harmful – but suppose I’m wrong. When you come right down to it, it’s irrelevant which is more harmful. In either case, prohibition is a cure wose than the disease.
Dogzilla said: “…think about all the jobs that are created to build our overcrowded prisons, which are filled with drug offenders. In fact as of 2002, 54% of the prison population is comprised of drug offenders --down from 60-some percent in the mid=90s. If we legalized… how many prison guards, doctors, food service employees, administrators and lawyers would suddenly be looking for work? I think the economic impact would really be enormous and there’s no hard data to say the federal government would make all its money back by taxing weed.”
Yes. The prison-industrial complex. The reality is that any powerful industry can get whatever it wants by handing out campaign contributions. We’ve got a lot of private, non-govt prisons these days. This industry is against anything that would reduce their supply of prisoners. Legalizing / decriminalizing marijuana would reduce their supply of prisoners.
I’ve been saying that govt should handle pot as it does alcohol and tobacco: legal, taxed, and regulated. But it’s true that it’s easier to grow your own pot than it is to grow your own tobacco / brew your own beer / distill your own whiskey / stomp your own grapes. I suspect that, post-legalization, the people who would go to the trouble of growing their own will be outnumbered by the people who would rather buy it at the corner store, but that’s just my opinion. Anyway, the amt. of revenue govt would get from taxing legal pot is questionable, while the amt. of money politicians get from the prison-industrial complex is a sure thing.
King’s Gambit said: "I believe there are a large amount of people in our society who under legal circumstances would smoke pot, but currently do not, because: a) they don’t know where to find it in their current situation, b) they are afraid of being arrested, c) they are afraid they may be randomly tested at work, d) they are just plain tired of trying to “score” in an underground black market.
“If pot were legal, these people would be free from all of this, and would buy pot. Of these “new” pot smokers, a certain percentage will develop habitual pot smoking traits (smoking everyday, multiple times). Some of these people will smoke irresponsibly (driving, before work, etc.). Some of these people will become full out pschologically addicted; Other parts of their life will begin to suffer.”
Yes, I agree, this is a possibility – but wouldn’t the new pot users be better off than they were before legalization? Before legalization, they were using (and in some cases abusing) alcohol, a more harmful substance.
Hamlet said: “The perception that the drug war, and the prison service industry, is somehow a money-making enterprise or is a cash-cow for the government is almost laughable. I find it incredibly far fetched that any of the States, or the Federal Government, thinks that the prison system is a good way to spend money.”
It’s not that govt officials just spontaniously, on their own, come to the conclusion that the prison system is a good way to spend money. It’s that they, upon receiving generous campaign contributions from pvt prison company execs, came to the conclusion that it would be a bad idea to repeal any law that is now sending a lot of people to prison.
No, it really wouldn’t. As I pointed out in this thread earlier, my husband works in a prison of over 2,500 inmates, and only two or three are in there for marijuana posession, and these guys had mass amounts, not “personal use.”
There are a few who are in for dealing, but generally, they were caught with other drugs as well.
But trust me, it wouldn’t barely make a dent in the prison population. There are plenty of murderers, rapists and theives. Even if you accept the upper numbers of people incarcerated for marijuana possession (which I don’t, because “posession” can include people who had a ton of the stuff-- they just weren’t prosecuted for dealing because of lack of proof) it’s still a relatively small portion of our prison population.
Secondly, prisons are grossly overcrowded as it is. The prison in which my husband works is currently at 150% of its rated capacity. Inmates are sleeping on cots in the hallways. Ask just about any correctional employee, and I bet they’d tell you they would scream with delight if you told them that a percentage of their population would decrease.
Third, the inmates affect the budget of a prison very little. The big costs: maintenance, payroll and utilities would still be there, even if the poplation was less. Each inmate costs a couple of bucks a day, at most, to house, clothe and feed. (Medical care, of course, is very expensive, but most inmates are perfectly healthy and avoid the doctor whenever possible.)
Right now, most state prisons are being run on a skeleton crew, and cutting just about every expense that they can because of budget cuts. They have more inmates to deal with, but the budget keeps getting smaller.
Fourthly, my husband is pretty high up in the chain of command. He works with the highest eschelon of prison administrators in my state. I can state with complete assurance that they’re not trying to keep things illegal so they can get more inmates. Why would they? They have no financial incentive-- the govenor is not about to increase their budget because they got, say, five thousand more inmates. That’s not the way it works.
I don’t know where this perception that there’s this dark conspiracy involving prison administrators and corrections officials comes from. Most of them are folks just like you: I’ve met them at parties, and I can attest that they seem to be perfectly normal folks, not drooling over the idea of cramming more people into the already overcroded correctional facilities. They’re more worried about which programs they can keep and which ones they have to cut, and the normal managerial headaches.
In fact, some of the most important programs in the institutions are designed to keep the inmate from* coming back.* They put a lot of time into these: job training, job placement, counselling, social skills, drug and alcohol programs, anger management, etc.
Really, private prisons aren’t that much different. Yes, they’re paid by-the-prisoner, but the amount per inmate is so small as to make little difference if there were a few less inmates per prison. But that wouldn’t happen anyway: the state would have plenty more to offer them to take their place. There’s no shortage of violent offenders that I’m aware of these days.
Yes, the intention is to stop people from doing whatever’s being outlawed. We may think in terms of laws preventing bad actions, but that doesn’t make it so.
What is the effect of laws? Do laws that forbid actions actually stop people from doing them? Does the existance of a law stop people from engaging in the outlawed action? As I tried to say in the post to which you’re responding, the reason most of us do not engage in murder for gain or revenge, rape, child molestation, armed robbery, shoplifting, etc. is not a result of the existance of laws against these actions. If a court for some reason invalidated the laws against armed robbery and it took the politicians two weeks to pass new laws that conformed to the court’s decision, how many of us would go on a robbery spree, or even commit a single robbery during those 14 days? Criminals, OTOH, are not deterred from crime by the existance of laws.
What these laws are saying is, “X is a bad thing. If you do this bad thing, we will make every effort to catch you, charge you, try you, convict you, and imprison you for Y years”. We need laws against murder, rape, robbery, etc. We’ve got to do something when people harm other people. I’m all for laws against such things.
What’s futile, and often counterproductive, are laws that forbid actions that (a) harm only the person doing them, and/or (b) are not considered wrong by a substantial percent of the population. Prohibition of alcohol was a failure, prohibition of marijuana is a failure, and prohibition of tobacco would be a failure, were we to attempt it.
Re (b) above, make that “not considered wrong” and/or “considered justifiable”. Examples: Prohibition of recreational substances fails because too few people think it’s wrong to use the substances. Prohibition of abortion failed because even people who considered abortion genuinely wrong often decided that, wrongness notwithstanding, having one was justified in their circumstances.
Lissa, I don’t think the overworked managers and employees of govt-run prisons are lobbying politicians to keep anything illegal. It’s the owners of the pvt sector prisons that I suspect of such lobbying.
Maybe I’m wrong. But if it isn’t the pvt prisons, who is it that benefits from keeping marijuana illegal? I can’t see why it remains illegal unless some group or other sees the law as benefitting them in some way, probably in some financial way.
The main reason why it’s still illegal is because any politician who supports legalization is comitting political suicide. Their opponant would have a field day: “This guy wants to see crazed druggies roaming the streets, robbing your house, and eating your children! Won’t someone PLEASE think of the CHILDREN!?”
Americans are very succeptilbe to moral-panic voting, and most people are still pretty ignorant about drugs after generations of brain washing, ala D.A.R.E. They would probably tar and feather any politician that dared to broach the subject.
What I really love about the anti-pot propagandists is that they seem to be publishing information that they know to be false. Gabriel Nahas is still the anti-marijuana crowd’s darling pet, even though he has been discredited by the scientific community on more than one occasion.
What bothers me most is that the information that the studies detailing the dangers of dope have been widely refuted, and often the methodology of these studies has been called into question- many of them seem to have been deliberately rigged to get the desired result- is easily available. There is no excuse for these people to be publishing their "information’ as fact.
On at least two separate occasions, the White House has commissioned commissions to study drug use, particularly marijuana, and make recommendations. In 1972, the Schafer Commission studies the issue and failed to find any evidence of mj’s causing crime, insanity, an amotivational syndrome, or any physical or mental problems. The commission recommended repealing laws banning the possession and use of mj. Then, in the 1990’s, the Clinton (I didn’t inhale) administration had the Institute of Medicine do a study of its own, which came back with similar results and recommendations.
Both studies were swept under the rug.
The United States government deliberately ignores the recommendations of its own researchers and keeps marijuana illegal, and the public disinformed.
Amazing.
I agree. But the effect of actions do not determine what the intent of those actions are. You said the intent of law is not to deter, but to punish. That is not true. The intent of criminal law is to deter, as you admitted in your subsequent post. The effects are not always that, but that does nothing to change the intent. To say the intent of laws is to punish instead of deter because punishing is all the law ends up doing is a classic post hoc fallacy.
Couldn’t agree more.
decriminalization doesn’t lead to increased drug use
A very new study that came to the conclusion that decriminalization doesn’t increase drug use - done by UCSC.
This blows away that argument.