Agreed that we cannot guess the effects of getting rid of the drug war, but I doubt that traffic accidents would go up. I don’t have anything to back this up, but I think that alcohol use leads more to driving under the influence than smoking pot. Since it is already legal, and since I don’t think drug usage rates will change much with legalization, I don’t think accident rates will change. Just my opinion mind you, YMMV.
I think that pot smokers tend to overestimate their driving abilities, and underestimate their degree of stonedness, from personal experience with people who partook.
I would probably eat pot, too, if the stuff was legal. Most days, I don’t need to drive, or do anything more complicated than load and inject a few syringes.
This thread looks better suited for Great Debates. I’ll move it there from The BBQ Pit.
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Gfactor**
Pit Moderator
What, I didn’t swear enough? I can change that!
Could be. It has been a long time since I hung around with stoners. I used to do a lot of drugs back in the day, but if they were legalized, I wouldn’t start back up again. I still get the opportunity every now and again to get stoned, and I just don’t see the point. I think there are a lot of people out there who feel similarly; I just don’t see consumption rates increasing a lot if they were legal. The people who want to get high, already get high.
I am in favor of legalization as much as the next guy, but it would seem that common sense would tell you that the supply and use would increase.
First, everyone that uses now would almost certainly continue using if you could buy it at Wal-Mart, no? So, it is at least equal right there.
And while most of the rest of the people wouldn’t start, there would be a significant subset who would decide to try it if it is as easy as plunking down cash at the convenience store versus going into the ghetto or asking your stoner friend where to get some. The fact that it is now legal would probably cause another subset to use it. Maybe cops, for example, who don’t do it now because it conflicts with the demands of the job.
But surely if the current users continue, at least one more person will start using causing an net increase, right? What users will quit solely because it is now legal?
I am certain that the incidence of marijuana would increase significantly, but who cares? I am not so certain that it would work that way with harder drugs. You might see some marginal increases, but I think that the danger of the drugs themselves is a deterrant.
Maybe, though cigarettes and alcohol both have non-trivial dangers associated with them, and people still seem to partake.
The demand for pot is not perfectly inelastic. So yes, if you decreased the cost, both in dollars and in risk of being caught and prosecuted, pot use would probably increase.
However, the question that’s gone begging is, “Is this a bad thing?”
I can think of a lot of positive outcomes from legalized pot. For one thing, it might displace the use of other drugs - primarily alcohol and over-prescribed prescription drugs like Oxycontin.
Frankly, I’d rather live in a country where 30% of the people smoke pot and 45% drink alcohol than one in which no one smokes pot and 75% of thepeople drink alcohol. Alcohol is much more physically damaging and socially damaging. Alcohol makes some people violent, and it makes them risk-takers. It’s a bad combination.
My father was an alcoholic. His brain was gone by the time he was 50, and he died in his early 60’s. In contrast, I know people who have been heavy pot smokers their entire lives, with no apparent ill effects. If we could move more drinkers to pot, the world would be a better place.
Also, let’s say the absolute use of drugs went up. So what? Is there evidence that countries which have higher pot consumption have suffered for it? Fortunately, we have a very good comparison: Canada has the highest rate of pot usage in the world. About 17% of the population claim to have smoked pot at least once in the last year. That’s over four times the world average. About 30% of school age children smoke pot.
So, has it wrecked Canada? Let’s see… Our violent crime rate is low, we have the best economy in the G8, our kids outperform most of the world in education, our personal debt is half the U.S., and household net worth is now higher in Canada than in the U.S. Canadian worker productivity is as high as the U.S.'s, and we incarcerate a lot less people.
You can look at pretty much any of the social factors that legal pot is said to put at risk, and Canadians are doing just fine. Pot use doesn’t seem to be hurting Canada in any way.
Also, let’s assume that drug use would increase, and that it would be bad. The question to be answered though is not whether increased drug use would be a bad thing, but whether it would be worse than the obviously huge toll the war on drugs is taking on the U.S. and the world in general. Consider:
The War on drugs costs the U.S. over $50 billion dollars per year, including state and federal governments.
The War on Drugs is destabilizing countries on the U.S. Southern Border. Drug lords in Mexico have grown so powerful they threaten the government itself. To gain support for interdiction in other countries, the U.S. has gotten in bed with some pretty unsavory characters in Central and South America, which has caused it to lose popularity with the people in those countries. The Taliban are partly funded from the poppy trade. The Warlords who profit from the poppy trade are driven away from the Americans and into the arms of the Taliban by American insistence that the poppy fields be destroyed.
Needle sharing contributes to HIV infection rates. If drugs were legal, this would not happen with anywhere near the frequency it does now.
There are millions of people incarcerated in the United States from drug violations. It costs about $450,000 to jail someone for life. This is hideously expensive. These people, primarily males, are also not available to look after their children, which leads to increases in the problems of fatherless children and single mothers.
Violent crime in the U.S. is driven largely by gangs in the inner cities, and they in turn are largely driven by the huge profits to be made selling illegal drugs.
The need to buy drugs on the black market puts otherwise honest people in constant contact with some really bad influences. It turns ordinary people into criminals and undermines the rule of law.
And I could go on. The damage from the war on drugs is immense, and getting worse. Really, is it worth all that just to keep 5-10% of the population from relaxing with a joint once in a while?
As for the argument that pot is a ‘gateway drug’: Canada has four times the world average pot consumption, but our use of harder drugs lke ecstacy, LSD, and heroin are no higher than the world average.
How do those drugs compare to the supply of various legal substances that can produce consciousness altering experiences in the right doses? DXM, Kava, salvia, morning glory, etc.
There are tons of drugs invented by Alexander Shulgin (2ct7, 2cb, 2ce) which either are still legal or only became illegal a few years ago.
The point is, there are legal recreational drugs that have very low popularity among the public. I really don’t know how that relates to popular illegal drugs like meth or heroin, but prohibition itself is a complex matter. I would assume far more people use marijuana than use some of the legal drugs out there.
Where did you get the figure of $450,000 for a life in jail? I have read it costs roughly $30,000 a year to keep a person in prison, so 450k would only cover 15 years or so.
http://blogs.uscannenberg.org/news21/spring09/2009/03/spending-more-on-parole-will-h.html
You made some good points though. And as far as prohibition, I have heard several people who were in gangs at the time say (in books and on film) that the appearance of crack cocaine really empowered gang culture in the 1980s.
I’ve met far more casual drinkers and smokers than I have met casual crack users. I’ve met people that have TRIED crack and didn’t become crack addicts, but no one that used it on occasion. An argument might be made for Cocaine, but I think it’s equally valid to argue that Cocaine isn’t quite as horrifying as we like to make it out to be. I’ve done Cocaine, Crystal Meth and Heroin all more than once and never became addicted, but there came a point where their side-effects and the possibility of addiction made me put them down. Cocaine is the only one that I have a remote possibility of doing again. On the other hand I’ll smoke an American Spirit or a Rollie on occasion, and I like to drink, though I have cut down on drinking and probably should cut down even more as I’ve started to get hangovers from even low levels of consumption.
Part of the problem is the lack of a rational policy at all. What serves as ‘education’ is lies at worst and hyperbole at best. We teach people that the drugs are worse than they actually are, thus making people who are prone to use them skeptical of the dangers. Doing Cocaine once in a while is unlikely to hurt you, but overdoing it is almost certain to hurt you. Because we don’t really try to teach people about dosage in a rational manner, people who end up doing Cocaine think the exaggeration was an outright falsehood. Every casual drug user I’ve ever met makes fun of DARE and Just Say No as being a bunch of propaganda bullshit. The ‘Parents the Anti-Drug’ commercials are equally ridiculous.
I believe firmly that it is possible to educate people about the negative effects of things without saying, ‘ZOMG IT’S GOING TO KILL YOU AND EAT YOUR SOUL!!!’, for some reason our culture has decided that ‘ZOMG’ is the appropriate response to any danger no matter how dangerous it really is. I guarantee you, a few months jail time is far worse for someone than possessing cocaine and using it.
Most studies I’ve seen point to the opposite. Here’s an old one from US DOT Mainly chosen because I didn’t want to use NORML.
**Sam Stone **makes excellent points. So does mswas. Further support for legalization goes to the economics.
Most common street drugs are derived from plants, and their baseline cost can be compared to other agricultural products. Consider, say, wheat and its derived product, a loaf of bread. To produce this product we input:
[ul]
[li]Capital investment in land, machinery, and knowledge[/li][li]An annual expenditure for seed, fertilizer, farm overhead expenses, harvesting, labor, etc.[/li][li]Transportation from farm to storage, then ultimately to mill and processing, including all overhead[/li][li]More transport from mill to finishing plant (bakery)[/li][li]Finishing itself, with its own capital investment and overhead[/li][li]Miscellaneous additional expenses for such trifles as the plastic bag the bread sells in and even the screen printer who produces them[/li][li]Advertising to convince people they need and want bread[/li][li]Transport to retail outlets, and amortization of the cost of appropriate space in those outlets[/li][li]Disposal of unsold “expired” product[/li][li]A profit for each of the handlers along the chain[/li][li]And I’m sure lots more……[/li][/ul]
All of this for an agricultural product grown, harvested, and with significant processing finally brought to market. Last time I shopped I bought the end product, bread, for less than $2 a pound. Compare this price to illegal agricultural products like, say, pot or cocaine. These too can be farm grown, and with some greater or lesser degree of processing, brought to market. Price difference on the illicit market though is at least 3, perhaps 4 orders of magnitude greater. And virtually all of this difference is profit, almost exclusively for the transporters and multi-stage distributors.
Legalization would kill the illegal empires when legitimate businesses can invest in a new agricultural product and make a profit on retail prices probably also around the “dollars per pound” level of bread. All of the social ills associated with the illegal trade, things like gang warfare and street violence and bribery of officialdom of various stripes would diminish because there would be no economic incentive to support them. This would also change the face of the inner city, where ‘Rich Drug Boss’ would no longer be every ambitious kid’s role model. And it would free our police, courts, and prisons from an insane burden. Along with the economic savings, perhaps the US would no longer be the Western world’s leader in percentage of its citizenry incarcerated, a rather dubious distinction at best.
Providing we are smart enough to tax this new trade but not tax it at such a punitive level as to make illegal trade economically competitive, we could make huge amounts of money available for education and interdiction programs on a scale never before imagined, thus at least attenuating if not eliminating any spike in new usage of drugs. Further, it might be argued that at least some of the societal harms from so called hard drugs are due not just to the drug itself, but to the cost. A cocaine addict feeding a $200 a day habit needs to steal and fence at least $2,000 worth of other people’s property just to buy drugs. Even a $20 daily crack addiction probably requires a ten or more times higher dollar value of illicit activity. It is this societal cost, beyond the cost to the individual addict in terms of health and familial destruction, that is directly attributable to the illegal nature of the supplier. Yet the actual value of the drugs involved, simply as agricultural products, is probably measurable in pennies. Let addicts and those who wish to indulge have it at cost, then spend some fraction of the societal savings on real education and treatment programs.
Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment Of War On Drugs by James P. Gray, an Republican judge.
I don’t see how heroin could ever be legal in the US. It’s too dangerous, and the difference between an effective dose and a lethal one is too small. It would be safer if it were legal, but it will never be as safe as Vioxx, which is banned. What that has to do with the legal status of pot, I’m not sure. If there’s ever been a pot overdose, I’ve never heard of it. I don’t think the two drugs share anything in common that they don’t also share with Jarts.
A rebuttal to that is that heroin bought on the street is more dangerous because you don’t know what impurities are in it or the concentration.
Store bought heroin available in low doses mixed with low doses of drugs like NMDA antagonists, ibogaine or narcan (all of which can slow dependency and addiction) would be safer IMO than the stuff in the street. Plus it would be cheaper and people wouldn’t need to commit as many crimes to feed their habits.
Marijuana is illegal because once upon a time legislators were convinced that Negro Dope Fiends were a threat to civilization. Seriously.
In addition, marijuana is talked up among certain groups because it is associated with high-status intellectuals. Conversely, tobacco is talked down because it is associated with the low-status poor.
http://www.leap.cc/cms/index.php Cops that waste their lives enforcing drug laws sometimes learn what a waste it is and how much damage they do.