In all the chatter about stimulus plans and mortgage relief and a looming trillion dollar deficit I have to be frank and honest.
Why are we not even discussing a few changes to the war on drugs? By the time you read this the combined state and federal governments will have spent more than nine hundred million dollars “fighting” drugs this year. Yes, you read that right. This Year. That’s five and one quarter days, one of which was a holiday. Granted, that does make a lot of jobs; there are DEA agents, corrections officers, bureaucrats and many other fun jobs you never dreamed of as a child.
Sadly, it seems these employees (or their employers) are not very good at those jobs. The War on Drugs is a miserable failure. Since it began the retail price of many drugs has dropped considerably while the street purity has skyrocketed. Yes, that’s right. We’ve spent untold billions in order to make drugs better, cheaper and more readily available.
Yet because these drugs are illegal we cannot tax them. Not only is the war on drugs costing us money to fight, it’s losing us a valuable revenue stream.
Why?
Marijuana is less harmful to the human body than alcohol. When ingested via means other than smoking it is less harmful than tobacco. It’s a remarkably clean drug that offers better treatment for many chronic pain conditions than the current FDA approved marketable drugs.
Even though it has many benefits I can’t pretend marijuana causes no harm at all. I’ve seen fat and lazy pot smokers ramble through the haze of their lives, wholly convinced that Cheech and Chong are actually funny and Doritos actually taste good. I know a couple of guys who aren’t living up to their potential and I’ve met some folks who have had trouble getting pregnant thanks to a muted sperm count attributed to heavy pot smoking.
The thing is that I also know a few alcoholics. I know women who’ve been beaten within an inch of their lives thanks in part to liquor. I also know tobacco smokers with lung cancer and emphysema.
This remarkable lack of consistancy in our regulatory policies is costing us money and lives. It’s that lack of consistency that has me pleading for common sense drug policy in America. I don’t use marijuana. If it were legal I still wouldn’t. I’m not into this argument because of my love of kind bud. I’m just here because I’m befuddled. The country is going broke but we are still throwing money away on a stupid war that makes no sense at all.
Why aren’t we talking about this?
I’m with you there. I’ve never even so much as tried marijuana (not even once), and really have no desire to, but can’t for the life of me figure out why it’s illegal.
We’re not talking about it, Kat, because if we decide to go for consistency we’ll decide to get it by outlawing alcohol. Because this is America, where that’s how we roll here. Shhhhh!
I absolutely agree with you, and like you, have exactly zero interest in using drugs myself.
It’s funny, I recently ran across some video clips of past presidential debates, and 20 years ago this War on Drugs issue was red hot. In the time preceding the War on Terror, it was always an issue that was good for getting a little rise out of the public for political purposes.
But it has never been about common sense or intelligent debate. I am not a conspiracy kook, but I would say that the obscene amounts of money involved is what’s really behind us continuing this foolish “war”. As you noted, there is a huge payoff for a number of law enforcement and government agencies, for competing legal products like alcohol, and for organized crime. Just follow the money.
If the purpose was removing drugs from use, then yeah, it would be a huge failure. However, if the purpose was to create a permanent underclass of non-voting former felons who just happen to be overwhelmingly black and male, reducing competition for other legal drugs, and making work for enforcers on both sides of the law, I guess we’re doing it just right.
The sample size is too small, really, but I note that in looking at my high school class and surrounding classes 25 years on, the serious stoners have mostly pulled themselves out and have done remarkably well. The hard-core sneaky drinkers (jocks and party girls) have, on the other hand, not fared so well and some of them are tragically messed up.
Every time I tell my college history students that until 1913 you could buy morphine from the Sears catalog along with the needles to stick it in your arm, they absolutely freak out. They can’t believe things like that used to be allowed. Then I really blow their minds by telling them that the government and medical establishment promoted morphine addiction (as an alternative to alcoholism–you may get drunk and beat your wife and/or kids, but the needle produces an entirely different reaction).
We’d never admit promoting “legal” drugs today, but of course the budget would be even worse if we didn’t have all those nice liquor and cigarette taxes to spend.
Hey Kat,
Did you perhaps catch this post on reddit yesterday? In case you don’t like clicking things, I’ll tell you. It was a story by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, our future Surgeon General, in Time titled “Why I Would Vote No On Pot”.
This comment on reddit summed up my feelings exactly:
“What he fails to grasp is that it really isn’t about the health risks/benefits – if it were, we’d have banned tobacco and alcohol long ago.
In fact he, as do most people, has this exactly backwards – it’s not about justifying the legalization, it’s about justifying the criminalization. Everything should be legal unless there is a compelling reason for it to be illegal. Burden of proof should be the other way around”
P.S. I like Doritos.
I like Casey’s comment a lot.
I am not a pot smoker and never have been. But I’ve been close to and related to many. And a fair number of alcoholics. And yep, the alcohol is much worse (though both are bad).
But I think the big reason that pot is illegal is that it would be far too difficult to tax. It’s too easy to grow and use on your own (unlike tobacco and alcohol, which are a little more difficult to refine into usable and palatable forms).
Interesting thought Lesley. I’d never considered that.
I don’t see that, though. They could make it legal to consume but illegal to grow your own, if that were the issue.
That quote Casey mentions is pretty much the same way I think about the whole issue. Well, except for the Doritos thing.
I know what you’re saying, Lesley, but I just can’t help thinking that the ease of use being the fundamental reason to make something illegal is just crap when it comes to Liberty.
Being “too difficult to tax” shouldn’t be an issue. Tomatoes are widely popular and easily grown at home. Yet, the market for tomatoes and the taxes generated by their sale remain strong.
Also, the step before justifying the criminalization is establishing the point at which the citizenry granted the government the authority to criminalize or regulate a given behavior or good. Unfortunately, the Commerce Clause has been stretched beyond recognition.
To be clear, I don’t look at “too difficult to tax” to be a legitimate reason for criminalization, rather it was simply another factor in the entire issue that i’d never heard before or considered.
[...] friend Kat takes up the war on drugs in a post today, and a commenter notes that from a civil liberties perspective, Gupta’s [...]
They could make it legal to consume but illegal to grow your own, if that were the issue.
Our government already grows their own. The only “legal” pot farm in the United States is at the University of Mississippi.
Alcohol is easy to distill, yet it is regulated and you will get put away for “moonshing”.
Tobacco is also easy to grow, but each grower has to have a “tobacco base” denoting how much acreage you can grow in order to sell the crop.
Marijuana can be treated in the same manner, there’s no reason to keep flushing money away putting stoners in prison.
I’m tired of my government treating me like a child.