Posted on 01/13/2003 7:31:37 AM PST by MrLeRoy
Twenty-five years ago, Lester Grinspoon noted in his classic study, Marihuana Reconsidered, that "the single greatest risk encountered by the user of marihuana is that of being apprehended as a common criminal, incarcerated and subjected to untold damage to his social life and career." What was true then is even more true today: around 700,000 Americans are arrested annually for simply possessing marijuana, and more than 10,000 Americans are currently in jails and prisons because they have been convicted of marijuana possession, and no other crime.
The government's propagandists are taking full advantage of these statistics: A new anti-drug commercial depicts the potentially devastating arrest of a teenage marijuana smoker (drug convictions bar students from receiving federal educational loans), and concludes: "Marijuana can get you busted. Harmless?" The commercial's unintentionally surreal message - that marijuana is illegal because it's harmful, and it's harmful because it's illegal - is one that seems likely to fill any young person capable of independent thought with contempt for both our marijuana laws and the dangerously authoritarian logic that supports and enforces them.
Imagine if one were to extend this logic to, say, freedom of the press: The government could produce commercials depicting the arrest of young people caught reading "subversive" literature, in order to drive home the point that, if you happen to live under a sufficiently repressive regime, merely reading the wrong sort of book can be hazardous to your health.
Anti-drug zealots will reply that books, unlike marijuana, are harmless. This is of course preposterous: few things are more dangerous than books. How many millions of deaths can be traced to the publication of The Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf or, for that matter, the Bible and the Quran? Yet this is hardly an argument for the repeal of the First Amendment.
The idea that something ought to be criminalized because it isn't "harmless" is a key feature of the authoritarian mindset. It's an idea that allows for the criminalization of just about any imaginable activity, since almost nothing in this world is harmless. Marijuana isn't harmless, but it isn't nearly as harmful as, for example, alcohol - a substance that causes thousands of fatal overdoses every year (no one has ever died from an overdose of marijuana).
So why don't we make America an alcohol-free nation by criminalizing alcohol? The superficial answer is that we tried that once and it was total failure. (Attempting to eliminate marijuana use has also been a total failure: almost half the current adult population - nearly 100 million Americans - has used marijuana, and several million Americans continue to use it regularly). The more nuanced answer is that making America an alcohol-free nation would actually be a bad thing, even if it were possible.
This isn't merely because the costs of prohibition are so high. Most people who drink alcohol have benefited from the experience more than they've been harmed by it. What anti-drug zealots are incapable of acknowledging is that the same holds true for marijuana users. Indeed the evidence is overwhelming that, for the vast majority of marijuana users, their use has had no significant harmful effects, and many good ones.
Yet as Grinspoon pointed out a quarter-century ago, "reason has had little influence in this matter." The criminal prohibition of marijuana, he said, was due to "cultural factors that have nothing to do with the effect of the drug itself." In the years since, little has changed, as we waste billions of dollars, and give free rein to an increasingly dangerous authoritarianism, in the futile attempt to stamp out this largely benign practice.
I guess now no one will have any way to counter what I say.
Right, the WOD in its current form. ;-) But no more of a waste of time than this campaign for the joys of a free brain impairment utopia.
Why characterize your opponents rather than address issues?
Don't let a loud minority gross you out.
Don't let a loud minority gross you out.
How many diligent and responsible drug addicts do you know? All the ones I've seen, in the process of choosing their poison, become wastes and un-employable. So at that point they most definitely will start doing the same thing they do under the WOD. At which point in the spiraling behavior of a drug addicts life do they normally seek help of their own will? It's an idealistic notion that they will not rob, steal and even kill to satisfy their need. It's equally as naieve to believe that they will seek help the first time they realize they have a problem.
Drugs need to be illegal and the punishment for trafficking in drugs (buyer/seller) should be more strict - not less.
The more important question, really, is this: given your fervor to criminalize things, and your zeal to deprive your fellow countrymen of their rights and possessions because of what you believe and "know to be true," don't you think you owe the people you're screwing up the 'chute the benefit of knowing what the EFF you're talking about?Apparently not.
I've known addicts of the drug alcohol who have held down jobs.
All the ones I've seen, in the process of choosing their poison, become wastes and un-employable.
You need to start associating with a better class of people.
So at that point they most definitely will start doing the same thing they do under the WOD.
That doesn't follow; unemployed addicts of the cheap-because-legal drug alcohol can get drug money without robbing, e.g., panhandling, collecting cans, odd jobs.
Too bad about your Jets. Those "old dudes" did 'em in quite effectively.
No, I'm just stating observations that don't square with your perception of reality.
This will be an argument rather than a discussion so I'll just bow out.
Flee---take no chances of having your preconceptions challenged.
At what point do alcoholics normally seek help of their own free will? An addiction is the same, regardless of the drug.
If drugs were not so expensive (due to being illegal) one would not have to rob, steal and kill in order to obtain the funds required. During Prohibition, alcohol was more expensive. Drunks need not commit crimes to obtain booze. The same rules of economics would apply to drugs.
Bottom line is that in human history, "Prohibition" has never worked. .... not ever. On the other hand, education does work
I agree. It's quite sad that some people are so obsessed with what chemicals others are using in private that they're willing to sacrifice the Bill of Rights and the concept of individual freedom in order to catch and imprison them.
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