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.
Check your system clock -- it's 2003.
Slavery was ended, and women given the vote, BY CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT; no amendment was passed to turn the Commerce Clause on its head.
Check your system clock -- it's 2003. </>
Your reliance on quintessential liberal rehtoric is revealing.
How typical. Common sense is illogical and an accurate description of what our society would look like should Liberaltarians have any influence is name calling and unfactual, I remain glad your "cult of selfishness" is irrelevant in this country.
Now go back to your dorm room, hit your bong and play some Dead…leave the discussion to the grown-ups. OK dude?
Is the Constitution an enduring document - it's meaning fixed and absolute - or is it a "living, breathing document" whose meaning changes with the times?
You have provided no facts or logic in support of your claims about "common sense" or "what our society would look like."
Now go back to your dorm room, hit your bong and play some Dead…leave the discussion to the grown-ups. OK dude?
The above is your idea of how grown-ups discuss, eh? LOL!
I've noticed that. Unfortunately any time you question anything about WOD some here automatically brand you as a Libertarian. Apparently in their mind it is the summation of all insults and the only thing they can come up with.
The Constitution gives the federal government no authority to act against such a person---nor against a downstate Illinois farmer who grows acres of marijuana for sale within Illinois.
The title said that: "Marijuana's harm illusory." My point is that it isn't illusory at all, but that it is likely to be less than the cost of maintaining the WOD. Just as there was a downside to legalizing alcohol that was less than the cost of keeping it illegal.
I emphasize that because we're getting out of the area of theory now, or at least I get the sense that we are, and into the area of actually enacting a serious change in social policy in this arena. We can either factor in the downside ahead of time or we can get blindsided by the critics who will be screaming for a reenactment of prohibition just as soon as the downside becomes evident. I'm for being proactive, that's all.
Crummy title, that, since the author did not make such a claim. (I know it's not the author's title, as this piece has appeared elsewhere under another title.)
Of course it doesn't. The Federal courts have allow the Government to take over many things not permitted by the Constitution. The question is not whether are they allowed to do something, the fact is that they can get away with it.
Just exercising my Right of Free Speech. Do you have a problem with that Adolf?
What's it cost to house a prisoner for a year, Bob? 40K maybe? Mulitplied by 10,000 that's 4 million dollars, and 10,000 jail spaces so we don't have to parole REAL criminals earlier.
How mush does the average worker pay in taxes yearly, Bob? The average income is around 39K, so let's say the average worker pays 8,000 in taxes per year. Multiplied by 10,000, that's pretty close to a Million dollars of lost tax revenue.
Net savings, 5 million dollars a year to government and 10,000 available prison slots to house real criminals.
This is your version of "grown-up" discussion?
More specifically, your Right To Look Like A Twit.
Do you have a problem with that
Not at all---it gives me something to mock.
Why is that not the question? Isn't that exactly the question conservatives should be frequently asking?
They went, all right.
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