Should Congress make using marijuana legal?

Marijuana prohibition is a failed public policy that is wasting valuable law enforcement resources, and needlessly destroying the lives and careers of hundreds of thousands of good, productive citizens each year in this country. The costs of prohibition are far worse than any harm that may be caused by marijuana itself.

We spend an estimated $10 billion annually in a futile effort to identify, arrest and prosecute marijuana smokers and those from whom they purchase the drug.

This is an almost unbelievably stupid use of resources that should instead be fighting serious and violent crime, including terrorism. Is anyone really more frightened by marijuana smoking than by violent crime? Who decides these priorities?

The result is that more than 700,000 Americans are arrested on marijuana charges each year, and 88 percent of those arrests are for simple possession of marijuana, not cultivation or sale.

We have declared war against a whole segment of our population, without cause. The vast majority of marijuana smokers are good citizens who work hard, raise families, pay taxes and contribute in a positive manner to their communities. They are not criminals, and we must stop treating them like criminals.

Treating the responsible use of marijuana by adults as a criminal matter is a misapplication of the criminal sanction and invites government into areas of our private lives that are inappropriate.

Most of us agree that the government has no business coming into our home to learn what books we are reading, the subject of our personal telephone conversations, or how we conduct ourselves in the privacy of our bedroom.

Similarly, the government has no business getting involved in the decision of whether we smoke marijuana or drink alcohol when we relax in the evening. In a free society, those are decisions we permit the individual to make, free from government interference.

In 1977, President Carter, in a speech to Congress calling on lawmakers to decriminalize minor marijuana offenses, said, "Penalties against drug use should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against the possession of marijuana in private for personal use."

Carter's words remain true. It is time we stopped arresting responsible citizens who happen to be marijuana smokers.

Additionally the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws supports the establishment of a legally regulated market for marijuana, with age and quality controls, where consumers could buy marijuana for personal use from a safe legal source.

As we learned with our failed experiment with alcohol prohibition in this country, only a legally regulated system will eliminate the crime, corruption and violence associated with a "black market."

Let's end this misguided war against our own citizens and stop arresting responsible adult marijuana smokers.

At the same time we are making tobacco illegal? Fat chance.

It's all about the lawyers. People can buy smokes with labels that essentially say that "using this product will kill you" and when they end up with cancer, they are able to sucessfully sue for millions of dollars.

Before any drug becomes legal, There would need to be a good deal of housecleaning in the legal industry, replacing the current climate of sue happy plaintiffs and lawyers with personal responsibility.

I was reading about Ghengis Khan, who would drive civilians toward the enemy in front of his cavalry, using them as cannon fodder. Perhaps this would be a good use for lawyers in Iraq.

"Listen to me and understand this: A man is not
defiled by what goes into his mouth, but by what
comes out of it."
Matthew 15:11

"The voters in this country
should not be expected to decide
which medicines are safe and effective."
Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey

"If people let government decide
which foods they eat and medicines they take,
their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state
as are the souls of those who live under tyranny."
Thomas Jefferson

"Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of
temperance. It is a species of intemperance within
itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in
that it attempts to control a man's appetite by
legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are
not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the
very principles upon which our government was
founded."
Abraham Lincoln (1809-65), U.S. President.
Speech, 18 Dec. 1840, to Illinois House of
Representatives

"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been
lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For
nothing is more destructive of respect for the
government and the law of the land than passing laws
which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that
the dangerous increase of crime in this country is
closely connected with this."
Albert Einstein, "My First Impression of the U.S.A.",
1921

"I am against Prohibition because it has set the cause
of temperence back twenty years; because it has
substituted an ineffective campaign of force for
an effective campaign of education; because it has
replaced comparatively uninjurious light wines and
beers with the worst kind of hard liquor and bad liquor;
because it has increased drinking not only among men but
has extended drinking to women and even children."
William Randolph Hearst,
initially a supporter of Prohibition,
explaining his change of mind in 1929.
From "Drink: A Social History of America"
by Andrew Barr (1999), p. 239.

"Alcohol didn't cause the high crime rates of the '20s
and '30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today's
alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does. Trying
to wage war on 23 million Americans who are obviously
very committed to certain recreational activities is
not going to be any more successful than Prohibition was."
--US District Judge James C. Paine,
addressing the Federal Bar Association in Miami;
November, 1991

"There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that
authorizes the federal government to wage war against
the citizens of the United States, no matter how
well-meaning the intent. The Bill of Rights means just
as much today, as it did on the day it was written.
And its protections are just as valid and just as
important to freedom today, as they were to our
Founders two hundred years ago. The danger of the drug
war is that it erodes away those rights. Once the
fourth amendment is meaningless, it's just that much
easier to erode away the first and then the second,
etc. Soon we'll have no rights at all. " Jim Robinson,
5/9/01 155

"Narcotics police are an enormous, corrupt international
bureaucracy ... and now fund a coterie of researchers
who provide them with 'scientific support' ... fanatics
who distort the legitimate research of others. ... The
anti-marijuana campaign is a cancerous tissue of lies,
undermining law enforcement, aggravating the drug problem,
depriving the sick of needed help, and suckering
well-intentioned conservatives and countless frightened parents."
William F. Buckley,
Commentary in The National Review,
April 29, 1983, p. 495

"I am so tired of all the arguments for and against
legalizing. It should be legal because this is
America. People that claim anything else should never
be allowed to claim they value freedom and liberty
without being laughed at in the face."

59 posted on 02/14/2003 2:29 PM EST by ks2papa (I Love
Freedom More Than You)

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