So all these luminaries get together to publish a report that details how the trillion dollars spent on the war on drugs has only made things worse. They mention how corruption is rampant because of drugs. And they conclude with the controversial notion of pulling the rug out from under drug dealers by… wait for it… legalizing pot! Basically the rationale here is that if people choose to harm themselves, so be it. Tax it, regulate it and stop wasting time and money fighting it.
The White House of course disagrees. Ass nugget Rafael Lemaitre of the ever-so-beneficial Office of National Drug Control Policy says: “Drug addiction is a disease that can be successfully prevented and treated. Making drugs more available — as this report suggests — will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe,”
OK, dickweed, listen up: putting a regulatory structure on marijuana and the like does not make these drugs more available. It makes them less available. Way less! Think about this for a minute. Suppose I’m a 16-year old today who wants to alter my state of consciousness. On my limited budget I can buy alcohol or marijuana. Which one is easier for me to buy today? There hasn’t been an active war on alcohol since the 1930’s. However, as a hypothetical teenager I can’t just go buy some right now. Why? Because it’s regulated and carefully controlled. Yes it may be “available” in every store that sells groceries. But I can’t get some. It’s not going to happen. It’s such a silly idea that movies get made about it (see Superbad for example). Even adults have trouble buying perfectly legal booze sometimes. For example, if I wanted some booze at 7am I would go to the nearest liquor store and find out that they don’t open until 11am! After 11pm I am similarly out of luck. And British Columbia has fairly liberal liquor laws compared to other places I’ve been (like Ontario where the liquor store closes at 4pm on a Sunday).
Now suppose in today’s world I am a 16-year old who wants a bag of weed. How many phone calls do you think I need to make in order to make that happen? More than one? Does my dealer have to shut his licensed, regulated, monitored till down at exactly 11pm or risk a huge fine? NO! You know why? Because he doesn’t have one! Does he have to fear the Weed Inspector coming along and shutting him down and imposing a huge fine for selling to minors? NO! Guess why? No weed inspectors! The marijuana market exists entirely outside of government control and always will unless the government gets into the business themselves. There will always be someone ready to assume the risk in order to reap the huge profits. The White House can lecture all day long about service and sacrifice and duty to country and all that but at the end of the day some kid is going to choose making hundreds of dollars a day slinging sacks versus tens of dollars a day flipping burgers.
I don’t know who is perpetuating these stupid drug policies but someone needs to slip a cunt over their heads and fuck some sense into them.
Not to mention the fact that keeping recreational drugs illegal creates a black market, which leads to organized crime and drug wars. I’m sure most citizens of northern Mexico would prefer legalization or decriminalization to what they have now.
There’s this concept professionals like to call “fronting.”
Asking the senior executive in the government office expressly responsible for controlling drugs and enforcing existant policies whether or not he’ll agree his job is completely fucking redundant will get you the definition of a text-book reply. Seriously, he’s there because heagreeswith their policies; it’s what you’d call a self-selecting position.
He’s not a politician. He’s an administrative director. He takes orders and he smiles like he likes them, damned regardless of what his own opinion is.
FWIW alcohol laws are much more relaxed in most of Europe - here in France for example, anyone can just buy beer/wine at the supermarket. Hard liquor too, but it’s under lock & key (presumably more to do with theft than minors drinking).
Yet we don’t have significantly higher problems with alcoholism - yeah, you’ll get teenage drunk driving and kids drinking themselves into a stupor on Saturday nights, but not significantly more so than in the US I believe (don’t have hard stats at hand, just anecdotal experience). I have a theory that the fact kids start boozing up around 14-15 but can’t drive until 18 has something to do with that. 3 years head start to figure booze out makes a big difference.
Oh, and despite free access to a solid hangover, people are still slinging the weed, even though it’s really less practical (got to know a guy who knows a guy, got to pay in cash, got to risk getting ripped off, etc…)
It’s all well and good to want to legalize drugs. Very progressive and all that. But you need to replace it with a better excuse to expand prisons, meddle in the affairs of other countries, or to militarize the police and all the drug fighting government entities that demand that money stream. Yeah terrorism is alright too, but that really ebbs and flows and isn’t as widespread. Why did the Soviets have to close up shop?
…and product safety issues, which regulation would take care of.
I had a brother who struggled with heroin addiction, and tried to clean up his act several times. He died of an overdose in the late 1980s, during a crisis caused by sudden wide variability in the degree of adulteration of street-level heroin, ranging from “barely heroin” to completely uncut. What’ll be? You don’t really know until it’s in your arm. Close to 200 OD’s per year in Vancouver during this period.
Sometimes people express surprise when they find that I advocate safe-injection sites and decriminalization of hard drugs like cocaine and heroin, since I don’t use them. I think it’s pretty reasonable - if the people who are going to use have access to a (relatively) safe and consistent supply, expect a reduction in harm.
I sometimes snoop the internet on one of my brother’s old drug buddies (who, like my brother, was basically a good guy in spite of his drug use) and this produces mixed feelings. On the one hand, I’m glad to see that he has since straightened up, has a very good job, a family, and organizes for youth sports. I’m really glad for him, but I also am a bit sad that my brother didn’t see thirty or settle down similarly with only a few wild and troubled years to look back on.
I think he probably would have made it, if the supply of these substances was regulated.
I don’t really understand how people can think that taking the supply off the black market and regulating it would increase use. Like everyone else, hard drugs have been conspicuously and readily available to me every time I’ve gone downtown to see a movie for more than twenty years. It’s not possible to make heroin or cocaine any more easily available - but it is possible to reduce the harm that the use of these substances causes.