What continues to amaze me is that the Gubmint refuses to recognize one simple fact: Dope is easier to get than booze, because it’s not regulated as a legal drug. When I was in high school, it was a royal pain in the ass to get beer. Nothing fosters teen ingenuity like the challenge of trying to get a twelve-pack from the local Mom 'n Pop’s without getting carded/busted. We made fake I.D.'s, bribed street people, pestered older siblings, snuck stuff from our parents, etc. Yeah, it was hard. But not so hard that we felt the need to make or deal our own. But make no mistake, if booze became that hard to get, we’d be building distilleries that would make Jack Daniels proud. We were reasonably smart kids. We learned how to ferment grape juice in bio class; learned how to perform distillations in chem. class. The glassware was easy to get. The raw materials available at any grocery store. But the availability through “legal” channels, though difficult to circumvent, left us little motivation to go that far. It’s probably just as well; if we’d learned to distill on our own out of necessity, bootlegging would have been mighty attractive.
Pot? 'Shrooms? Acid? Where I went to school, all you had to do was ask the right kid. Next week, boom, there’s a nickel-bag in your locker. Absolutely painless. Sure, it was tough to get crack and heroin in Southern Maine, but none of us were interested in that, anyway. I tried them all before I even got to college. Why not? It was easy. See, thing is, some kids figured out that if they had the balls to hook up with some shady characters who were local dealers, they could make a tidy profit for themselves as middlemen to highschoolers. Those of us (like myself) who were too chickenshit to go to dealers directly, were willing to pay what our student connections were asking, which, really, wasn’t all that much. So, there you go, you idiot bureaucrats, instead of kids making fake IDs and buying beer at a market, you’ve got them growing and/or distributing and dealing the stuff as part of what is literally an international contraband economy. Anti-drug enforcement does NOTHING. It had ZERO impact on our lives in high school. Sure, if you were an idiot, you might get caught for sparking up a doobie in the boys bathroom; but any kid who used a modicum of discretion was essentially in the clear, unless he/she got incredibly unlucky. The local keystone cops couldn’t find their asses with both hands. The local lobstermen were only too happy to haul up traps full of whatever some other guy up the coast dropped in the bay, and sell it to us kids at 5x markup.
The Feds. need to get real. The war on drugs was lost before it started. All it has done is created a thriving contraband economy and jailed a bunch of hapless non-violents. It has absolutely no impact on use, or distribution, and essentially just drives up costs, whilst generating negative revenue via lost taxable commerce coupled with billions squandered on trying to catch rain with a butterfly net. Legalization of ALL narcotics is the only sane thing to do in the face of the spectacularly wasteful failure that is the “War on Drugs”. The Feds. need to accept it’s a lost cause from the supply side, let non-violent small-time users and dealers out of the prisons they don’t belong in, educate to minimize demand, and tax the newly legal narcotic market as much as it can bear before generating the same black markets that already exist. The revenue would more than pay for treatment of addicts, who, after legalizaiton, would proably not number much more than already exist.