I’m all against the prohibition of “drugs”, not because I want to see them readily available to everyone, but because prohibition has proven time and again not to work.
Basically, drug prohibition is like trying to fix a leaking dam by piling more and more money in front of it until the water stops.
Drugs should be handled just like tobacco and alcohol: regulate and tax.
Do you honestly imagine that even if “hash” was totally legalized in all 50 states that it would be freely distributed to incarcerated prisoners as a kind of tranquilizer???
Millions of people bitch that prisoners get to watch a little TV or occasionally eat a Hostess cupcake; Giving them mind-altering drugs to enjoy whilst serving their sentence would be about as popular as having the taxpayer foot the bill for each prisoner to get a monthly “good behavior” hour with a 20-year-old hottie from Emily’s Erotic Escort Service.
I’m one of those people… marijuana included.
But drug prohibition has an immediate, negative effect on your life in many ways.
First, when there are no legitimate avenues to obtain drugs, people will get them through illegitimate means. This creates crime, and not just the victimless crime of purchasing an illicit substance. It creates a black market, and people willing to break the law to make money selling drugs are often the same people who are willing to steal, intimidate, batter, and murder their way to more profit. This drives the crime rate up significantly, and even if you aren’t one of the people victimized, you still have to pay taxes to support law enforcement, the courts, and prisons to deal with it. There are currently more than 2,000,000 in American prisons, and approximately half of them are there for drug crimes. That’s an enormous bill to foot.
Second, because drug use is stigmatized and there are so few avenues for treatment of addiction, addicts must resort to illegal behavior to get enough money for their next fix. That means stealing, prostitution, panhandling, mugging, housebreaking, and other crimes. The crime rate increases, so does the rate of incarceration, and so does the cost for all of us.
Third, when a substance is legalized and regulated, it becomes much more difficult for children to get their hands on it. Tobacco is currently extremely hard to get if you’re under age, but marijuana is easily purchased. Retailers face extremely harsh penalties if they sell to anyone under age, which means they have an incentive to enforce the requirements for ID and refuse to sell to the under age. Because marijuana dealers are already breaking the law, they have no incentive to exclude kids from their clientele. So, no one’s talking about allowing a 15 year old to walk into a convenience store and pick up a bottle of crack. Very few are even talking about allowing adults to purchase crack, and even if it were legal, the dynamics would be much different from selling, say, marijuana in a retail store.
Fourth, driving under the influence laws exist for all manner of substances, and the most abused one in this instance is alcohol. Legalizing a drug does not mean it’s okay to use it and drive while altered anymore than it’s legal for someone over 21 to get wasted on tequila shots and then go driving.
Fifth, surgeons of all sorts use and abuse drugs of all sorts. The question is not whether the drug they use is legal, but whether it affects their performance at their jobs. A surgeon who picks up knife while altered on alcohol or any other drug faces severe civil and criminal penalties.
Sixth, we’re talking about legalizing and regulating recreational drugs. We’re not talking about legalizing them because we want lots and lots of people to use them. We’re talking about legalizing them because it minimizes the harm done and actually decreases drug use. The use and regulation of prescription medications are a completely different topic, though many of the drugs which fall into that category could certainly use a review.
Well, see, you’re contradicting yourself. When you make something like marijuana illegal, you make it easier for kids to get it. When you make alcohol legal but cocaine illegal, you set up a nonsensical double standard that creates more crime, causes people to distrust law enforcement and the legal system, creates addicts, and refuses those addicts any treatment for their disease.
Sure, there’s a group of people who want everything legal and free because they want to run around high all day long and not suffer any consequences. They’re in the minority by a whole lot. The rest of us want drugs legalized and regulated because the current approach does far more damage than legalization would, and because we find the current laws inconsistent, intrusive, and violative of our civil rights.
Really? Everyone? Even if it’s driving five miles above the speed limit? Even if it’s not declaring all the stuff you purchased on Amazon so the government can charge you the sales tax you didn’t pay at that time?
It was okay that the state of Texas used to imprison men who had anal sex before the Supreme Court told them it was unConstitutional?
It’s okay that Federal authorities arrested Peter McWilliams on drug charges for using medical marijuana when the state of California said it was okay?
Some laws are unjust. Some are ineffective. Laws prohibiting the use of recreational drugs are both.
My own feeling is that I would prefer all current illicit drugs remain illegal. While I realize pot is fairly harmless in the long run, you’d be a lot more likely to convince me it was the right thing to do if it wasn’t available in smokeable form. Whether it is or is not less harmful than tobacco, smoking will damage your lungs, which increases the incidents of lung disease, which increases the cost to society in the form of higher healthcare costs. I also don’t want to have to walk through your ‘pot cloud’ as you smoke out in public. It’s amazing that there is a stigma to cigarette smoking now, but pot smoking is someone ‘progressive’. It still makes everything smell like crap.
As far as the ‘tax and regulate’ thing, I just don’t think that’s going to happen. Any moron can grow a pot plant, which is exactly what they will do when the taxes on your ‘state permitted’ pot becomes too high. The difference is that making your own (good) alcohol or tobacco is not something most people have the knowledge or conditions to be able to do themselves. As such, they are effectively forced to buy it from a store. That is not the case with pot. You buy a lamp, buy some seeds, water your weed, and it grows. Why bother with the taxed version from ‘the man’ who regulates the amount of THC, charges too much, etc.?
If you put it out in the open, it will have the same stigma.
That makes no sense at all. One thing I remember from the scary lecture in medical school about pharmaceutical marketing is some statements from pharmaceutical marketing people which portray the physician as a barrier between the drug companies and the drug consumers. Don’t you think they’d greatly prefer to be able to sell statins over the counter?
I wouldn’t be so sanguine about the “safety” of legalization.
Right now, legal drugs kill more people than illegal ones, (and that’s not including alcohol, though sometimes it’s involved).
Huh. Interesting. Everyone I’ve seen stoned, from the nice college kids to the dodgy characters, just got various shades of giggly and spacy and occasionally slightly paranoid.
Not immediately, no, but a while down the line, who knows? Cigarettes are available to buy in prisons, purely for the feelgood factor; ‘hash’ (why on earth the quote marks, BTW?) could be too. And your answer didn’t touch on my question at all.
This one did, though:
:smack: Makes sense.
Apparently you didn’t realize this, but smoking tobacco (actually smoking anything) is completely banned for inmates in around 90% of all prisons in the USA (apparently a few Southern states are the remaining holdouts) and that includes all federal correctional institutions.
If you are asking me why prison guards would be against allowing their charges free access to potent intoxicants such as hashish, I guess that is something you will have to ponder for yourself.
Nope, didn’t have a clue that smoking was banned in US prisons. Ignorance fought.
OK, I get that legalization would (arguably) remove the stigma and open up avenues for treatment. But I assume you’re not saying that legalization would reduce use, are you? Because I’m not seeing how it does. So why wouldn’t the same problems with addiction remain? It’s not like gambling addicts haven’t done some pretty nasty and illegal things to feed THEIR fix.
So what’s the point of legalization if it’s not freely available? Wouldn’t that state still have most of the same problems of illegality? I realize there’s some parallel to be drawn to the drinking age, but I’m not aware of anyone arguing that alcohol has the same effect on brains and such as drugs…?
No, alcohol and tobacco are actually MORE damaging to “brains and stuff” than pot is. This is something that the government has known since, oh, the 60’s?
The reason the government is against pot of because, as someone upthread pointed out, it’s almost impossible to tax because anyone can grow their own.
Fine, then, that just makes the issue that much more complicated. What justification is there, then, NOT sell crystal meth at convenience stores and LSD at supermarkets alongside the Skoals and Bud Lite?
I have to respond to this one. This is anecdotal, because I’ve not done a nationwide survey of drug researchers, but most of the drug researchers I know are in favor of legalization. Being a drug researcher in Colorado, the people I work with are actually very excited about the research opportunities provided by the change in the laws. These are people who want to answer questions such as, what effect does legalization have on drug use, new users, existing users, etc.?
The correlation between academics and liberalism certainly applies to drug researchers, so most of them are probably inclined to support legalization, but they’re also scientists and, in my experience, are open to having evidence change their minds. For example, many support medical marijuana, despite predicting and then confirming that a great deal of medical marijuana is diverted to recreational use for non-licensed users. Of course, most of these academics are also smart enough to realize that medical marijuana is a foot-in-the-door law towards full legalization.
Additionally, the fact that the drugs are illegal does not make the researchers money. Most of these people also do research on alcohol and nicotine use. As long as governments and private organizations continue to give grants to study drug use and abuse (regardless of legality), researchers will continue to study this area. If the grant money dried up, for any reason, then the researchers would move on to other topics.
I totally disagree with your assertion that its easy to grow good quality pot at home. I remember people trying this back in college. It was trash. If you can afford the hydroponic setup or a lamp farm then you could damn well afford to buy pot from stores.
Actually, I suspect it is just the opposite. More likely if drug companies had their way everything would be OTC and unrestricted advertising with no mention of adverse side effects would be the norm. Requiring prescriptions unfairly restricts consumers rights to buy whatever the hell they want, whenever they want, at whatever price the market will bear ;).
Thank you. It isn’t like the entire country can start growing pot. First, from what I hear, most wouldn’t grow it indoors because it smells like skunks. Second, there is a growing season, drying process… etc… etc…
Everyone in the country can grow tomatoes, but backyard gardens have not put grocery stores or vegetable stands out of business.
In most (all?) states, anyone can make wine or beer at home. That hasn’t put state stores out of business.
I think it is very unlikely that backyard plants will make a major dent into taxes and regulation.
Portugal legalized all drugs in 2001. Against many guesses, it has gone quite well.
Even I would have thought that legalizing the harder drugs would be a questionable thing, but I’ve been proven wrong.
The fact is, people are going to do drugs, just like they’re going to drink alcohol, have sex, etc… Prohibiting those things is useless. (Prohibition Amendment during the 1920s, for instance)
Another fact is that some people are going to get addicted. Not everyone who drinks alcohol is a raging alcoholic, not everyone who uses porn becomes terribly addicted, etc., etc. However, some will, and those things are legal.
The best thing you can do is educate people about treatment options and give them those options affordably, instead of leaving them in their own ignorance to fend for themselves, and then punishing them when things spin out of control.
If you think legalizing drugs takes the ‘money’ aspect out of the equation, you’re naive.
As soon as drugs become legal, thousands of different companies will start pushing you to buy THEIR version of the product.
All this does is flood our society with advertisements for hard drug use, and turn so called recreational users into addicts.
As said so many times before, drugs require moderation and most people do not how to exercise moderation.
Alcohol is already a problem, why add to that so a % of the population can get their jollies off?