Yet many more alcohol related, train, automobile, plane, and boat accidents do nothing concerning the legality of alcohol consumption? Driving while intoxicated is illegal, but you can still drink. Even possessing a small amount of bud is illegal (previous experience talking here). If all it takes to legalize marijuana is to pass the same driving laws I am all for it. I can see the slogan now. Don’t toke and drive.
It is amazing how much the political climate has changed since the 1970s. As usual, tomndebb has accurately summed up the main reasons for the change. I also believe that a big reason for the shift in public attitudes toward cannabis were due to a direct strategy of White House Drug Czar William Bennett.
As I’ve mentioned in other threads, the terms “hard drugs” and “soft drugs” were once widely known and used. “Hard drugs” described substances such as heroin and cocaine, while “soft drugs” was mainly used for marijuana. These terms were used to reinforce the fact that there is a vast difference between the use and social costs of these drugs. However, a major part of our “War on Drugs” strategy has been to erase the distiction between these two classes of drugs. By taking the term “soft drugs” out of our discourse, the debate has been, in effect, closed. It’s an Orwellian tactic, but it has been amazingly effective. In the minds of many people, there is no longer any distinction between marijuana and drugs such as heroin. They are all “drugs” and therefore inherently evil.
William Bennett, author of the Book of Virtues persued a very effective strategy during his term in the Bush Administration. He, more than anyone else, is responsible for closing the debate on marijuana. Previously, illegal drugs were dealt with as a health issue. But this presented a problem: if drug users were sick, then the government has some responsibility to help them. Bennett got around this by proclaiming that drug use was, in fact, a moral issue. He used circular reasoning to justify this position: Drug use is* wrong* because it is illegal. Why is it illegal? Because it is wrong! And drug users are immoral people! It was during his term that there was a massive shift in federal drug funding away from rehabilitation towards law enforcement.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like our drug policy will change anytime soon. President Bush has appointed John Walters as our nation’s new Drug Czar. Walters was Bennett’s second-in-command, and in a 2001 Weekly Standard editorial he said the views that “we are imprisoning too many people for merely possessing illegal drugs” and “the criminal justice system is unjustly punishing young black men” are the “great urban myths of our time”.
If you’re interesting in reading a great book detailing the recent history of our “war on drugs”, check out Wall Street Journal reporter Dan Baum’s Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and The Politics of Failure
I don’t know if there has ever been an unbiased look at the carcinogens of marijuana smoke, there may have been studies, but they are likely to be as farcical as a recent study to “prove” that marijuana was addictive:
The government scientists put IVs that contained THC into monkeys, the control group just had saline solution in their IVs. The monkeys with the THC IVs pressed the button that administered the doses more often than the monkeys that got salt-water. Scientists’ conclusion, “Marijuana is undoubtedly addictive”. My conclusion, “Monkeys like getting stoned.”
The worse part about the war on drugs is that on the one hand, they’ll lock you up for toking, and on the other hand they allow pharmaceutical companies to push all types of drugs on you.
Smoke pot to relax…bad!
Take little pink pills to relax…good!
The vast majority of people in this country are utterly ignorant sheep, willing to think, talk, and act in any way the television tells them. This is the reason for most of the idiocies we live through today, such as SUVs, MTV, our insane paranoia over nudity on television coupled with our acceptance of graphic psychotic homocide…