Einstein, insanity and the war on drugs
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- Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own -
Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. His definition fits America’s war on drugs, a multi-billion dollar, four-decade exercise in futility.
The war on drugs has helped turn the United States into the country with the world’s largest prison population. (Noteworthy statistic: The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population and around 25 percent of the world’s prisoners). Keen demand for illicit drugs in America, the world’s biggest market, helped spawn global criminal enterprises that use extreme violence in the pursuit of equally extreme profits.
Over the years, the war on drugs has spurred repeated calls from social scientists and economists (including three Nobel prize winners) to seriously rethink a strategy that ignores the laws of supply and demand.
Under the headline “The Failed War on Drugs,” Washington’s respected, middle-of-the-road Brookings Institution said in a November report that drug use had not declined significantly over the years and that “falling retail drug prices reflect the failure of efforts to reduce the supply of drugs.”
Cocaine production in South America stands at historic highs, the report noted.
Like other think tanks, Brookings stopped short of recommending a radical departure from past policies with a proven track record of failure such as spending billions on crop eradication in Latin America and Asia while allotting paltry sums in comparison to rehabilitating addicts.
Enter Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an organization started in 2002 by police officers, judges, narcotics agents, prison wardens and others with first-hand experience of implementing policies that echo the prohibition of alcohol. Prohibition, now widely regarded a dismal and costly failure of social engineering, came to an end 75 years ago this week.
As LEAP sees it, the best way to fight drug crime and violence is to legalize drugs and regulate them the same way alcohol and tobacco is now regulated. “We repealed prohibition once and we can do it again,” one of the group’s co-founders, Terry Nelson, told a Washington news conference on December 2. “We cannot arrest our way out of this problem.”
FROM AL CAPONE TO DRUG CARTELS
“In the 20s and 30s, we had Al Capone and his gangsters getting rich and shooting up our streets,” said Nelson, who spent a 32-year government career fighting drugs in the U.S. and Latin America. “Today we have criminal gangs, cartels, Taliban and al-Qaeda profiting from the prohibition of drug sales and wreaking havoc all over the world. The correlation is obvious.”
The before-and-after sequence is so obvious that the U.S. Congress passed a resolution in September noting that the 1933 repeal of alcohol prohibition had replaced a “dramatic increase” in organized crime with “a transparent and accountable system of distribution and sales” that generated billions of dollars in tax revenues and boosted the sick economy.
That’s where advocates of drug legalization want to go now, and some of them hope that the similarities between today’s deep economic crisis and the Great Depression will result in a more receptive audience for their pro-legalization arguments among lawmakers and government leaders.
The budgetary impact of legalizing drugs would be enormous, according to a study prepared to coincide with the 75th anniversary of prohibition’s end by Harvard economist Jeffrey A. Miron. He estimates that legalizing drugs would inject $76.8 billion a year into the U.S. economy — $44.1 billion through savings on law enforcement and at least $32.7 billion in tax revenues from regulated sales.
Miron published a similar study in 2005 looking only at the budgetary effect of legalizing marijuana, the most widely used illicit drug in the United States. That study was endorsed by more than 500 economists, including Nobel laureates Milton Friedman of Stanford University, George Akerlof of the University of California and Vernon Smith of George Mason University.
“We urge…the country to commence an open and honest debate about marijuana prohibition,” the economists said in an open letter to President George W. Bush, congress, governors and state legislators. “At a minimum, this debate will force advocates of current policy to show that prohibition has benefits sufficient to justify the cost to taxpayers, foregone tax revenues and numerous ancillary consequences that result from marijuana prohibition.”
The advocates of current policy, led by outgoing President George W. Bush’s drug czar, John Walters, never took up the challenge to discuss cost-benefit equations. His Office of National Drug Control Policy has focused, with the single-minded determination of a moral crusader, on doing the same thing over and over again.
But the United States is not alone in pursuing drug strategies that are based more on wishful thinking than on sober analysis. If you put faith in declarations by the United Nations, a “drug-free world” is an attainable goal and the war on drugs all but over.
In 1998, a special session of the U.N. General Assembly forecast that the illicit cultivation of the coca bush, the cannabis plant and the opium poppy would be eliminated or significantly reduced by the year 2008, a deadline that also applied to “significant and measurable results in the field of demand reduction.”
The clock is ticking towards midnight, December 31, 2008.
— You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com. For more columns by Bernd Debusmann, click here. —
Want to debate? Send in your written submissions to debate@thomsonreuters.com.
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youre not gonna see legalization any time soon, neither bigger sentences against offenders. think about it, when taliban were ruling, afghanistan produced 10 to 15% of the world heroin, now its up to 90%. kosovo was promote a country by western country and they are rule by druglords. my point is we are rule by importers and our army airplanes are probably use to bring the stock in.
I’ve been smoking marijuana since I was 28-years old. It’s only helped. The ‘war’ should be against stupidity, which seems to reign in all high places!
If the ACLU and Norml want my money, they should just sue the boards of education for abject failure to live up to their mission statements – which all teachers and students are hardily ascribed to. My son’s high school is a mix of drugstore, liquor store and bordello. The cops patrol the halls, but don’t do anything to keep drugs etc out of the classroom. Guaranteed, though – there are over a hundred illegal drug items on campus for every item of liquor-store origin.
Put it in the ABC store, hombre. Does away with the criminal element, frees cops to hunt for real bad guys, and helps get rid of the deficit. People are going to get what they want – and its high time that the law of the land began reflecting reality.
That’s an interesting point of view. If you legalize the consumption of drugs, like marijuana, just to combat the black market, drug dealers or who sells drugs, must register their business to survive, uh?
So, they start selling drugs legally, but as happen to alcohol and tobacco, society will start a campaign to stop its consumption, because is dangerous.
So, who is crazy enough to legalize a product that will be considered bad to other’s health?
Ah, ok, it creates dependence, taxes… I understood now.
Thank you for your thoughtful article on “Einstein, Insanity and War on Drugs” it is always nice to read that someone is trying to reverse the inequality begun with the foundation of the passage of the Controlled
Substances Act and foundation of the DEA. One can clearly see that there is widespread social opposition to unbridled drug use. In the Netherlands, where cannabis is legal to grow and buy in small quantities, use of the drug is reported to be lower than in the United States, because of social exclusion and disdain people have for drug consumption. In my personal experience as a writer, who just recently
learned about Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), I have found that the often violent opposition to reason in regard to drug laws is not quashed until one has reconstituted the drug regulation system as a pharmaceutical health profession.
For peace of mind what needs to be done is transfer the DEA to the DHHS, near the FDA and the International Narcotic Control Board (INCB) from under the supervision of the UN Office of Drugs and Crime to the World Health Organization and cut responsibility for drugs from the UN
Office of Crime. Essentially drugs are and always will be a medical issue. Pharmacy is a health profession devoted to the sale of high quality, affordable drugs, that make people healthy and happy. Pharmacists are there to counsel people, and their physicians, regarding
the danger of adverse drug reactions. One should note that pharmacies are nearly always filled with booze, cigarettes and junk food because they are intrepid salesmen of perishable goods with a long shelf life.
Pharmaceutical drugs (100,000 in hospitals) take 10 times more lives than illicit drugs (3,000-30,000) and substances of abuse manufactured in animal research, university and government laboratories take even
more (1 million) annually, in the US alone.
Nixon really made a mess of things. He seems to have substituted illicit drugs for gold in the standard weights used in the biased scales of justice and irreparably damaged both the justice and health systems,
as well as began, what is now, crippling income inequality and international trade deficits in the US and to a lesser degree in the entire developed world. The central reason for this seems to be that although the Attorney General licenses all drug distributors, including your personal extortionist doctor, he knows absolutely nothing about medicine or pharmacy and tends to act in the corrupt interests of corporations and professionals, rather than the consumers. To make
matters worse in the deep shade of psychiatry, that in 1970 had just invented ways to torture the alleged mentally ill with anti-psychotic drugs, it is the Probate Judge, who also adjudicates wills, enforcing
the consumption of medication, as no self respecting drug “pusher” would do on the streets, it is he who is the Drug Enforcement Agent (DEA), and to strike fear in your heart might also enforce other substances of abuse to hasten the administration of wills. Afghanistan and Columbia, the world’s largest cultivators of opium and coca, were quickly subverted and remain dependent upon foreign military assistance to fight civil wars against the political establishment of National Opium/Coca
Agencies under Arts. 23 adn 24 of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.
I believe these are all the major issues, besides legalizing the cultivation and sale of small amounts of marijuana, and praising drug treatment for drug addiction, also a health/social work profession, because drugs, like alcohol and tobacco are not considered virtues, they are vices, but more tolerable than the medical dictatorship, in one’s own family, most consumers are fleeing, To learn more read,
Sanders, Tony J. Drug Administration. Hospitals & Asylums. Chapter 8.
http://www.title24uscode.org/DAY.htm
Sanders, Tony J. State Mental Institution Library Education. Hospitals & Asylums. Chapter 4
http://www.title24uscode.org/SMILE.htm
How can people – like Warwick an others here – argue that legalizing addictive/harmful substances is somehow a moral failure when the two biggest killers BY FAR (alcohol and tobacco) are legal? Why not criminalize those substances? Oh, right…we know it doesn’t work. You can’t legislate a market away – it was true during Prohibition, and its true now. Drugs of all kinds are here to stay.
On the “bright” side, the government has learned at least a little from the prohibition experiment. They’ve learned that if you keep the substance legal, but steadily remove the places where it’s legal to use it, you can at least get people to cooperate with that end of it. They’re still trying to figure out how to get people to quit smoking once it’s only legal to do in their bedroom under a blanket with the lights off on odd Tuesdays. As soon as they get that figured out, they can finally solve all our really big problems… like our gross misuse of free will, civil liberties, and other nuisances. The government has also been actively brainwashing the general populace into believing that marijuana was directly responsible for everything from an increased mexican crime rate to terrorism. They’d look like fools if they turned around at this point and contradicted themselves. That’d be like President Bush announcing to the nation that there were no WMD’s in Iraq, or that there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11… Oh… right.
We can acknowledge that the war on drugs was long ago lost. It’s in every city and small town across the US. That’s not exactly how it was envisioned to come out.
Not only would tax revenues increase but the legal system would become a whole lot less hectic in the day to day functioning. Face it drug cases are by far the largest percentage of what is passing though and bogging down the serving of justice.
As has been mentioned, as long as drugs such as marijuana are held illegal, this system will continue to be a problem.
There are people whom will do drugs. No mandating of how it will be by law will stop it. That’s why illegal drugs are our second (black market) economy, allowing money to flow out of the country like water. We evidently can’t print it fast enough to cover that which is leaving the country. True it is not the only reason for money to leave the country as long as our currency is considered the worlds standard but it has a large part to do with it.
We have a mini-war on the streets in cities across the nation today as innocent bystanders happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time next to a target that the shooters who can’t aim and hit their targets become the KIAs. Remove the financial reward of these drug dealers and near over night, shootings will become less and less of something everyone fears because they can not stop it.
You see, it’s not just those doing drugs that are suffering from the problem. If you live in a large city, you never know when the morning might come and you wake up to find out your spouse or worse a your child might have died in the night as a bullet came through the wall of your home.
Because drugs are illegal there is no place to buy them over the counter. Those that will do them are forced to deal with criminals in the process. One of the side results of that is scorn for the police and the laws they are forced to enforce. This in turn becomes a pervasive attitude from the public towards the law.
This is exactly how the term pig came to be when mentioned in the derogatory terms for the police. Unpopular laws eventually result in this. So not only are we making criminals by the multitudes as these laws are applied but society begins to look at law units with disdain.
We are spending what is near some small third world countries annual budgets. I believe by this time we have proven throwing money at it isn’t working, nor is adding manpower to it making a dent in the drug flow. What we have revealed is that there are tons of ways for terrorists to slip things into the country and it is shown how to do that by other drug kings near daily.
MIKE ponders: If criminal enterprises are willing to risk life and limb to sell drugs illegally, what makes anyone think they won’t risk life and limb to avoid paying taxes on drugs and continue to sell them illegally?
I REPLY: Illegal street dealers cannot financially compete with legal, regulated dealers. This can be proven by looking at the two most popular drugs in North America – alcohol and tobacco and of course, most over the counter drugs.
There is no street trade for tobacco or alcohol.
There is at the moment a relatively small street trade for controlled pharmacueticals, but that is due in large part to the current monopolies enjoyed by a small number of American Rx companies and by the fact that we have two tiers of consumers for Rx pharms.
Americans with insurance coverage get Rx pharms at about 1/4 the price paid by Americans without insurance coverage.
Eliminate that discrepancy and street dealers would not be able to compete.
DOM imagines: Does anyone know what the most smuggled-in product is in the United States? Cigarettes!
I REPLY: Utter nonsense.
Tobacco products do see some interstate diversion via illegal methods due to varying tax levels by state, but evn with this smuggling, over 99.9% of all tobacco sales are made by legal and licensed dealers.
The most smuggled product in North America is marijuana with upwards of 30million Americans as buyers.
The next two most commonly smuggled items would be cocaine (3 to 4million American buyers) and firearms.
I enjoyed reading your article and agree with most of your points. In the comments, including the “best comment”, I keep reading ‘the 2 most deadly drugs are legal’. Now come on, do you really believe cocaine is less deadly than alcohol or heroin less deadly than tobacco? The two most deadly drugs are legal because they are legal and readily available. Not as many people do cocaine because there are serious consequences with the law. If people could buy cocaine at the gas station, you can be sure there would be a new “most deadly drug” at the top of the list. I’m all for legalizing marijuana, and I could even support legalizing everything. Let people do what they want. If the life of a crack fiend is the life they choose, let them have fun and die an early but quick death of heart failure. If they want to smoke a joint while they watch Scooby Doo, so be it. Don’t sheepishly disregard the facts of how dangerous these drugs are by labeling tobacco as more deadly than morphine or cocaine or heroin though. Give me a break.
There are a number of misconceptions about the health effects of illegal drugs and narcotics compared to the popular legal drugs.
For example, how many of the commentators realize that:
(1) Nicotine is the most addictive of all drugs and it’s use results in more deaths than all the illegal drugs combined.
(2)The effects of withdrawal from alcohol addiction are much worse than from any narcotic or other physically addictive drug.
Marijuana has been sold legally under governmental control on the open market and at a fair price for more than a decade in both Switzerland and The Netherlands. Neither country has seen an increase in harder drug use as a result, and the coffers of both nations have been handsomely increased as a result of the taxes obtained from marijuana sales. America could learn something from their example.
This is something I have given a lot of thought to recently. I was a Customs officer on the Mexican border in Arizona and just finished writing a book on my border experiences. In my border world statistics had flesh and blood faces. I was personally involved in hundreds of people being busted and eventually sent to prison for marijuana smuggling. The vast majority of them did not seem to me to be really criminal types. The genuine bad dudes did pop up from time to time. But many of the hapless smugglers were just poor Mexicans hopelessly caught in that country’s grinding poverty. And the rest were more like the guy next door down on his luck or some kid with more guts that sense, or, very often,just some lazy schmuck looking to made an easy fast buck.
I think it would have made more sense to sentence them to a job than to prison.
This has nudged me off the fence. I’m joining LEAP.
Score one more vote for repealing prohibition.
Why not start with legalizing marijuana? We could gauge the results in increased tax revenues, reduced law enforcement costs, and health and social impact.
If the results are favorable and the negative consequences few, we could then legalize safer cuts of cocaine–maybe like the original Coca Cola… or a new drink at Starbucks?
Another convuleted antiseptic, academic arguement in favor of the legitimization, NOT LEGALIZATION, of some of the MOST DANGEROUS AND HARMFUL CHEMICALS EVERY USED BY THE HUMAN RACE. Quite frankly, to have a supply and demand discussion and rationalize the use and distribution of these letal chemicals is outraageoius. I would invite the author to do some due dillience on the effects of these drugs on the users, these are toxic in every sense of the word. The riciculous assumption of the captial poured into our economy would be mroe than offset by the avoidable health consequences of exapnded usage of these substances, including Marijuana.
People like this author should learn tha true sulutions to every day problems are not contained within the arms length discussions of academic eggheads with not clue what it is like to face drug abuse issues face to face with addicted familieis and indviduals.
It is not insanity to try ot prevent the more widespread usage of these drugs, until a better efforts is made by the American Public that continues to consume and pay for the violence and death associated with it, we have to keep doing the same thing,
Jose Marquez is a Drug Prevention Consultant in San Antonio TX and may be reached at jmarquez@pagpllc.cm
The prohibition of marijuana came about because lawmakers in California wanted an easy means of arresting and detaining Mexicans who were coming over the border to do farm labor and were being used as a vehicle to sew fear among voters.
Now the prohibition has taken on a life of it’s own, supported mostly by the Religious Right.
The Drug War has ruined our inner cities, promoted the growth of gang culture throughout the United States and broken up millions of families over the years by subjecting millions of Americans to cruel and unusual terms in prison.
Telling someone what they can and cannot put in their own bodies is the ultimate invasion of privacy. It goes against everything our Constitution represents. It’s evil and it’s kiling us.
Well, after spending many years in doing Gang & Street Work, being a Juvenile and Adult Probation-Parole Officer and supervisor in a correctional facility before being an investigator of state and local governments, I buy the argument that we should end the prohibition on drugs just as we did on Alcohol.
I think that legalizing drugs and maybe even taxing them would go a long way towards ending the illegal drug trade and violence that we experience on the border. There would be little profit to be made by the drug cartels if there were legally accessible and affordable drugs available to those who chose to use them. While I agree that there are some hard drugs that can addict and mess folks up, for the most part this is a medical issue not unlike alcoholism and I believe should be treated that way.
The article mentioned the high number of incarcerated folks in the US. That is an accurate description of our Correctional State of Affairs.
And we as a public pay dearly for the choice our society has made on the handling and treatment of the violators of our drug laws. Jailing folks is an extremely uncost-effective way to punish most folk. In fact most jailed folks could do well in medium or low custody facilities thereby decreasing our care and custody costs. (In 2007, as an example Minnesota paid an average of $47.12 to $78.78 per day depending on the custody level or $17,198.80 to $28,754.70 per year per inmate. If your curious there is a 2004 DOJ report that recaps the expenses for 2001 at: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/spe 01.pdf )
(As a side note it is even less cost effective to impose capital punishment not even counting the numbers of folk who may have been wrongly executed. A Study showed the Maryland spent on the average of $37 million for each of the death sentences it fulfilled. An Indiana study showed that it cost them 37% more to execute a prisoner than to have them serve life without parole. See: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-de ath-penalty
Personally I like life without parole anyway as a better punishment that lasts for years rather than seconds. And, if there was an error in the case, you can rectify it.)
Inaddition, when we incarcerate those folk, I have rarely seen good or even adequate treatment programs in institutions that have high rates of “cure” or non-recidivism. I have seen better and more effective programs in the free world
In my opinion, we would find it cheaper as a society to let the addicts stay on the street and have access to legal drugs and treatment which would remove most reasons that cause them to break laws to feed a habit. But it is our Christian/puritan ethos that does not allow that approach, so we pay and pay and see no progress other than increased jail populations and gang drug wars over turf and money.
Now I am not saying that we should not prosecute and jail folks who break our laws. We do need to do that to keep order in our society.
But we choose what laws are on the books and how or if they are enforced and what the penalties are.
We can save our secure and costly institutional space for those dangerous violent offenders. And put minimum and medium security cases in community correctional facilities and save tons of taxpayer dollars.
By decriminalizing drug use we would also find that there would be relief for the Courts, Prosecutors and Defense Attorneys. We would have to increase the number of community mental health resources, something we promised to do when we closed the mental institutions in our country but never funded.
I guess I could go on and on about this subject including how medical staff who were taking care of my son-in-law’s mother who was dying of pancreatic cancer encouraged her to get some marijuana to help with pain. But she being a very religious person could never bring herself to use it as she thought it was “wrong”
Lost in looking at the forest is the very obvious tree that continued prohibition against soft drugs feeds what are billions into the coffers of those “enforcement” is after. Exactly who came up with the logic of making your adversaries stronger to defeat them? Remove their funding, and more than half the problems are gone.
Financial arguments alone do not provide sufficient reason to repeal criminal drug laws and legalize their sale. There are many arguments (of similar importance) beyond the financial – and, further, I’m sure that the economic analyses performed in the past don’t account for a plethora of other problems associated with drug legalization. There are political principles, economic factors, and moral issues encapsulated within our collective responsibility in making drug policy.
Yes! Drugs may have severe impacts on the individual, and on our communities that are detrimental – and may be exacerbated by legalization. However, legalization of drugs may help remove the criminal stigma of their use; instead, social pressure will become the ultimate (and most appropriate) conduit for controlling these substances in our communities. Of course, the free use of drugs in the privacy of one’s home may not have any detrimental effect on any other person not located in that home – where may I step in to initiate the use of force against my neighbor, where her actions have no detrimental consequence to my health or property? Heavy addiction to legalized drugs, and the correlated increase in availability may mean that far more people are tempted by and succumb to their overuse. Just as alcohol has claimed many happy families and created a negative pall in many communities; excessive drug use may do the same.
Would rehabilitation cure these issues? probably not, but maybe! More likely, legalization will bring to the surface many issues of addiction, and provide additional (effective) avenues for handling and curing addiction.
The consultant in San Antonio must be on the take to advocate doing the same thing forever when it accomplishes NOTHING. In fact, the problem worsens daily and the world wide problem affects us directly also. Jose sounds like he is saving the country from drug use. I got news Jose–they are buying MORE every day!!
Making the US gummit the ONLY buyer, who could play the cartels against each other for price, selling it cheaply to individuals through the pharmacies, logging the buyer as a user, would go a LONG way toward eliminating much of the problem. It would still require keeping a border patrol and drug forces to capture the illegal entry of drugs and it would take some time to carry it out. Eventually the drug force on ALL the police districts in the country could be cut down to a coupla officers. It didn’t happen overnight and it won’t be cured overnight.
But, think of all of the officials that the drug money couldn’t buy anymore? Think of all of the robberies, the muggings and the murders, committed for money to buy drugs, that could be eliminated!!! Think of all of the young women that might be saved from the prostitution world through the temptation of drug use.
To me, the reasons for repealing the prohibition of drugs overwhelms the reasons to keep on the same non-effective path.
BTW, when drugs were legal about the only ones using were little old ladies on cough medicine and the coca cola drinkers. Occassionally the pharmacist had a problem and THAT is dangerous but could be stopped by random testing.
The benefits seem huge to me. One thing is for absolute certain: It couldn’t be any worse than it is.
“How can people – like Warwick an others here – argue that legalizing addictive/harmful substances is somehow a moral failure when the two biggest killers BY FAR (alcohol and tobacco) are legal? Why not criminalize those substances?” – stevelo
Yes, the 2 biggest killers are alcohol and tobacco – is it because of their lethal potential or the fact that it is available to and used by a much wider part of society due to their legal nature? What I was trying to say was that it’s a lot easier to repeal prohibition that it is to implement it. If we legalise drugs and get it wrong, it is going to be one huge task of getting us back to where we are.
Why can’t a well-funded public education and awareness campaign along with effective rehabilitation services policy be implemented as an initial step to tackling drugs. While you never stand a chance of removing every user, it would at least provide some preventitive health care – which tends to be a lot cheaper in the long term than reactionary health care.
Government regulation of the drug trade won’t stop the black market because there will always be someone who is willing to do it cheaper – look at media piracy and illegal tobacco for example. Regulation will merely end up with a less expensive method of obtaining drugs for existing users and the removal of existing barriers which may have prevented potential future users from using. The profit margins aren’t going to be as big but the market will have grown significantly.
You will never remove the drug trade and whether the penalties are effective is of much doubt – but making improvements in terms of better rehabilitation and education programs, you could at least provide a better approach than what is being offered now. Tackling the social reasons behind drug use and related crime would be much more effective than just spending money making the same old mistakes known as this war on drugs.
Einstein also said “Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence”. Those who try to outlaw things that tear society apart – based on intelligence – are opposed on the grounds that, it would just be easier and net a better payoff if we let it go.
This is yet another discussion that starts so far beyond the limits of reason that it is impossible to drag it all the way back and start over. It seems to imply that the best way to get rid of a problem is simply to declare that it is not a problem anymore and suddenly everyone is rich and happy. Wow! Why have we not done this sooner. We could pay for the bailout with drug tax money… cocaine is not harmful to people or society, we just overreacted… Hey, now all the drug offenders will have to be let out on the street… Wait, are we going to use all the tax money to pay for their care and feeding or to rehab all the people lying in the gutter because they simply had too much fun? Are all the drug dealers going to get licenses now? Will the money be used to fund all the underfunded addiction-treatment programs? Will the cyclical nature of such a things ever catch up with itself. Does a dog ever catch his tail?
why not?
Smoke Rasta ……. Ski Fasta
or
Smoke Marijuana……..Ski where ya wanna
or
Smoke Pot………Ski Hot
Oh by the way, marijuana is already socially accepted despite the Federal Gov.’s best efforts
Hey, Craig; you have some idea of giving drug dealers a pharmacists license??
You’ve already decided it can’t be done, huh?
What is going on right now can’t be done. Isn’t being done and won’t be. Just a continual drain of resources, time and money and the problem gets continually worse. But you like that route, eh?
Society will laugh at our policies in 20 years. Tobacco and alco-bevs are legal but marijuana is illigal. Seriously…we are very stupid beings. Wake up to reality and legalize everything. The war on drugs is not being fought correctly. Legalize it and then deal with individuals with help not prisons…..
Anytime something is prohibited an underground market for that thing is created. Current drug policy seeks to wipe out this illegal economy by feeding it more customers.
Has “Change” truely arrived at the White House? I doubt it.
A major argument that is being overlooked here is that not all drug users are drug addicts. It was said here that the only reason that alcohol is a top killer is because its legal -> that can’t be right! there have been numerous studies done over the past year that have demonstrated that drivers under the influence of marijuana are safer than those under the influence of alcohol. Recently there was an anonymous study that found that approx. 30% of adults in the U.S. smoke on occasion marijuana (and that’s just those that admitted to it). Most of those 30% have legitimate jobs and are living amongst non-smokers who probably don’t have much idea of this. Should we lock all those people up? Maybe it would be more financially sound (as well as moral) to pull our heads out of the sand an wake up to reality.
I don’t advocate the legalization of all drugs, some stuff out there is really harmful. But there is also stuff that while illegal is more of an infringement on human rights than a governments attempt at protecting its populous. One thing that’s for sure, is that if we do change our drug policies, we have to do it in a rational and sustainable manner (we don’t want a bunch of dutch tourists coming here to get hopped up on mushrooms). Radical change can lead to pandemonium, so for now – one step at a time. Lets start with letting each state decide what to do with medical marijuana…
Yes, let’s legalize drugs the same way when we repealed Prohibition. That way instead of tolerating bad behavior in hiding, we can get it out in the open and find a new #1 leading killer of Americans. Drunk driving has been at the top of the list for too long…
I do agree that we shouldn’t do the same thing over and over again – How about we seal off the border that 90% of our drugs are imported across? That’s a doable action, and costs far less than incarceration.
Businesses also should do their part. If more businesses either required their employees or were mandated to be drug free, people would straighten up. Look at what Arizona did with illegal immigration – denying jobs to people involved with committing crimes is pretty effective. Not saying I’m condoning this, but it’s food for thought.
I have never used an illegal drug in my life. If it were legalized tomorrow, I still would not. With that being said, I find it ludicrous that the government can tell me what I can and cannot do to my body in my home.
Justifying the need to outlaw drugs by saying what people “might” do is absurd. By that rationale, should it be illegal to sell candy bars to diabetics? They might go into a sugar coma while driving.
Hold people accountable for their actions that affect other people. If they go out and drive high, stoned, whatever, punish them severely, the same as a DUI.
As far as “giving drug dealers licenses,” stop it. Big Tobacco is ready right now to start mass producing marijuana cigarettes. Where do you think people are going to go to buy them? From the guy on the corner or at the state store? Alcohol was legalized and where do you buy it now? At the state store, liquor store, etc. I have yet to find anyone going out to buy whiskey from a back alley.
The initial resolution to the issue of drug prohibition
lies with states’ rights. If enough individual states decide to temper or change drug enforcement laws, then it might become a national trend and ultimately federal law. The financial benefits, in terms of taxes and less
demand on law enforcement are obvious. There must be a
way of creating fair and sustainable legislation that
would allow for ‘free drug use’ IE: marijuana, but at
the same time protect the populace from the harder, more dangerous illicit drugs that pervade our country.
Indeed, sealing up our borders against massive traficking would be a good start.
By the way. Are the heavily armed Hispanic drug cartels
still growing huge amounts of ‘weed’ in our National
Forests?
Policy makers should look at law enforcement as an industry. Drug laws and their enforcement represent the major source of revenue for this industry. It is unlikely, given the strong lobby of corrections, judges, police and all others who derive their income from this failure in social engineering, that any rational policy will ever evolve.
Welcome to the welfare state.
T grow and maintain a police state,the current drug laws are required.
There are other, serious effects of the ‘war on drugs’. The Mexican government fights and ongoing, losing battle with corruption that permanently mires it in third world status. Columbia, too, must fight our war on drugs, with government corruption, and violence in the streets a commonplace thing.
Once drugs are legalized, resources can be turned to treating addicts and dealing with the social damage that drugs have already done to our society.
The “war on drugs” will never succeed as it is a phenomenon driven by demand, not by supply. No matter what the price, you will have demand. Unless you are willing to imprison most of the upper class, the issue will continue to exist no matter how successful one is in the eradication of supply. This is likely known by most in government already. IMHO, the “war on drugs” is most likely being driven in the hopes of expanding government power.
I hope the majority of People in America are as rational as Leman Russ and not as irrational and ill-informed as b-rad.
Daren, you are correct but, to a prohibitionist, who believes in controlling other’s lives for their own good, the first time you use a drug you are hooked and that one use debases your character so horribly you need to be removed from decent society so as not to infect their children. You see how b-rad just promotes ways to punish them based upon the absolute assumption that drug use is bad and for their own good they should “straighten up.” I think he would thrive in a dictatorship.
Greg has similar beliefs. He thinks that for some reason not sending drug users to prison is going to cost him more in hospital costs than he is current paying in prison costs where, by the way, that user is still using. Yes Greg, you can get drugs in prison. He thinks like b-rad that just because they use drugs their character will be so debased they will wind up “lying in the gutter because they simply had too much fun.” Thank god our forefathers didn’t succumb to smoking marijuana! Wait a minute. Yes they did and I do not remember seeing any reports of Washington lying in the gutter. Anyhow, like Duncan Fowler stated in his last paragraph many good people out there have been convinced by exaggerations and lies that MJ is just “Bad” and using it is “Wrong.” We live in such a judgmental society it is a wonder we can tolerate each other. I think the Constitution and the Federalist Papers should be taught as a high school course. I think reality about our society and history needs to be taught in our schools so we know and can see the mistakes of the past and understand that to continue to make them is Wrong. To take the freedom away from someone who has not violated a right of another is Wrong. And we need to recognize when people and organizations demonize something in order to achieve and end for what it is. The ends justify the means. The same philosophy Hitler used in his campaign to control the world. And one of the biggest mistakes a government can make. To the prohibitionists I say look around you. See the Gangs, the organized crime. One Million people are being released from prison each year and even more are entering. One million people, ex-cons with no right to protect them selves; no right to vote or to representation; many of whom are very bad people. People who murder, rape, steal, and molest children make up many of this tsunami of disenfranchised sub-culture. Why? Because, drug use has been demonized to the point that there are mandatory minimum sentences that keep the drugies in jail while, to make room, we release the most dangerous elements back into our society. Thank YOU Mr. and Ms Prohibitionist! You have saved us all.
What I’ve always found odd is that it took a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol, yet they were able to make every other drug illegal without one. The Federal government doesn’t have the authority to make drugs illegal.
Why should pot be illegal? Because the only companies poised to grow, package and sell it are the tobacco companies. Look at how they bastardized tobacco by adding so many additives and chemicals that American cigarettes have been banned in many countries. If Marlboro is allowed to sell joints we will end up with marijuana that is addictive and cancerous.
I’ll take mine home-grown, thank you.
“…find a new #1 leading killer of Americans. Drunk driving has been at the top of the list for too long…” – B-rad
Interesting claim. The CDC disagrees with you… http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/FASTATS/lcod.htm
#1 Heart Disease
#2 Cancer
#3 Stroke
Alcohol or related deaths isn’t in the top 3.
Just as prostitution was leagalized, the users of the legal drugs and services will seek out legal channels of distribution simply becuase they will be controlled and likely to be safer than buying drugs from the corner skeezer high on xxxx and risk getting mugged or shot.
As far as “giving drug dealers licenses,” stop it. Big Tobacco is ready right now to start mass producing marijuana cigarettes. Where do you think people are going to go to buy them? From the guy on the corner or at the state store? Alcohol was legalized and where do you buy it now? At the state store, liquor store, etc. I have yet to find anyone going out to buy whiskey from a back alley.
I have long been a supporter of legalizing marijuana however as a parent I now think perhaps decimalizing the possession of small amounts, instead of legalizing it, would be a better solution. (Friends in Switzerland tell me horror stories of young kids high in class because it is easy to purchase it legally there) This way people who grow for their own use, and people who possess small quantities, would not be in danger of prosecution, therefore cutting down on the cost of arresting and prosecuting individuals who use it socially. There would still be a cost to prosecuting large scale growers and dealers. But if you can grow your own plant at home why bother paying the street cost. Perhaps we’d see more people take up gardening as a hobby again, that wouldn’t be so bad. ….
I don’t do drugs and I am against using them, However, I don’t support anything that tells me what I can or can’t do to myself, even if I know it is harmful.
Milk can clog arteries and cause a heart attack and death. Is the Government gonna start a war on Milk? Where does it end?
If people want to kill themselves my doing crack I say let em. Spending my taxpayer dollars on locking up people for doing things that should be no ones business anyway is insane.
I have a pot smokin female friend with a teenage child. When she declared to me that she thinks pot should be illegal I asked her this question;
“You smoked pot in high school right? she said yes”
“Did you tell your parents? No
“When you ask your son How was school today, do you think he is gonna say, Ah great mom I smoked some pot and screwed a chick today!………….?….Uhhhhhhhh”
Our children are NOT going to be honest about drug use… That is the reality. Lets put the money to use in fighting terrorism and rehabilitation of drug users and make a legal drug industry with sensible controls and with the new jobs and taxes, put some big money into the economy as a result. At the same time we make room for real criminals who commit violent crimes.
At the same time, this would put gangs and organized crime out of business. They would be forced to get real jobs like the rest of us instead of making fortunes and protecting those fortunes by killing thousands of people.
Lets wake up to reality here and get into the 21st century. The so called Drug War is the colossal failure of the 20th century. Time to get smart.
You mean all drugs? Crack, heroin, meth, cocaine and pot? Are you nuts! Meth addiction is THE most addictive street drug out and has, I believe, some tragically low recovery rate, 15%. Most addicts die. I regret voting to legalize medical pot in California. I thought this was going to be a legit use of medication but, instead these “clinics” are little better than pot dens run by drug dealers. Some look more like opium dens for pot addicts rather than medical clinics. What a joke. Your article only points to the profit margin drug sales will produce. Are you a Milton Feedmanite? Profits at any cost. You and advocates for drug legalization are not looking at social consequences. Happy booze is legal? You should add up the cost of alcohol related illness, injuries, family disfunction, countless people in counseling because of growing up in alcoholic families, ect. ect. The price tag I am sure is far bigger than the profits from booze sales. Now imagine legalized street drugs.
Happy this is the 75 anniversary of legalized booze? 12 years ago this past Thanksgiving my brother died from his drug and alcohol addiction. I am against legalized street drugs and I think alcohol sales and advertising should be further restricted. What is needed is more education about the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse and addiction, especially for young children. My brother started with pot in Jr. high school and ended at 40 a heroin user and an alcoholic. Both drugs and alcohol are addictive substances and that does include pot. Having known a couple of pot heads I can tell you they need their pot as much as any drunk or “druggie” needs their drug. One has graduated to other drugs.
Have you heard that the Dutch are now restricting so called “soft drug” sales because they are tired of the troubles “drug tourists” are bringing to their country. Did someone say high drivers are safer than drunk drivers?!?!?! First driving under the influence of any drugs or alcohol is illegal if you are impaired. Secondly your statement is little comfort to sober drivers like me. People should never drive while impaired by drugs or alcohol.
If you think pot smoking is safer than cigaret smoking you are wrong again. My spouse is a nurse and has seen more than a few pot smokers in hospital with SEVER lung diseases. All caused from pot smoking. Of course these pot using patients are in denial about the cause of their illness even when the doctor tells them why they can’t breath.
Fighting drugs seems to be like fighting California fires. Once you declare war on either, instead of removing the need or the cause, you create a massive industry that feeds on itself–both the drugs and fires become valuable commodities.
http://feww.wordpress.com/2008/10/24/soc als-godfather-brush-fire/
I loved a comment from Jesse Jackson regarding legalizing drugs. He said we would be trading street criminals for corporate criminals. Look at the history of the U.S. Heroin and cocaine were legal and then banned because of the harm they were doing people. Heroin was ADVERTISED by vendors as a remedy for crying babies! The History Channel ran a great show called the History of Drugs, and it featured segments on various mind altering drugs: alcohol, narcotics, pot, pills. You think you can handle your drugs safely? Go ahead… play with fire.
mark schalter wrote: “Switzerland and The Netherlands. Neither country has seen an increase in harder drug use as a result, and the coffers of both nations have ”
This is now no longer true. Read an article last month about dutch cities and towns are now restricting soft drug sales because of the problems being imported by drug tourists. They are also trying to curb the harder drug sales that have been found to be happening due to drug tourism.
Posted by bkskiispow -Oh by the way, marijuana is already socially accepted despite the Federal Gov.’s best efforts
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Ah, no it is not. Many people do not find pot smokers acceptable. That junk stinks. Yuck.