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an argument that never offered the chance for me to present here so far might be useful to you guys as well, I made this post more than a year ago on another board but you might find the history interesting, even if you don't agree at first. I've had good luck with it though, one of the biggest war games on the net has a set of boards one of which is debate and I've argued this out with them there. When I started most thought I was nuts, now most shout down anyone that even suggests prohibition :) As nuts as it may sound at first, look into it. Just because we've been on another road that doesn't mean we belong there. Here's the argument I started with there.
Legalization is the only answer, not only for pot but for all drugs. But, legal doesn't mean over the counter for everything, some such as PCP we do need to think hard about how we want to deal with them and restrict use to the medical community as much as possible. What we're now doing doesn't work though, not on any level.
An interesting detail that many aren't aware of is that for most of the history of mankind drugs were legal, and for much of the history of the U.S. drugs were legal. This whole prohibition idea is a fairly new one on the national or world concern level, though it had been tried at a smaller scale in the past and normally failed. Up till 1906 opiates, pot and its extracts such as hash, heroin, and most other substances were often included as up to 50% of the "tonic" that we gave to our children or grandmother for a tooth or back ache, some properly labeled and many not.
Back in 1906 the U.S. passed the single most effective bit of anti drug abuse legislation that we or to my knowledge anyone else has ever passed. The Pure Food and Drug Act specified that a product was "misbranded," "if the package fails to bear a statement of the quantity or proportion of any alcohol, morphine, opium, cocaine, heroin, alpha or beta eucaine, chloroform, cannabis, chloral hydrate, or acetanilide."
With the passage of that act opiate use dropped from an estimated 3-5% in the nation to roughly 1% on no stronger urging than people being told what they were taking. If we'd stuck to that approach we might be fine today, most people aren't stupid. Use today including legal prescribed use is probably as high or higher than it was at the time, we've gained nothing for 70 years of death and ruined lives.
In fact we've lost, a lot. Cops used to enforce the type of laws where people would pay them to hang around, now they enforce the type of laws where people would pay them to go away. It's forced an attitude shift, rather than protect the public from predators they had to become predators themselves and hunt for "criminals" that nobody was reporting and who was hurting nobody, and where often there's easy money or property to be had that few would report missing. We've lost the trust and respect between cops and the public as well as between the Government and the public.
Protecting the kids? Not even close. Drugs are easier to get than alcohol is, it always has been. Once a dealer takes the step to deal he doesn't care what the age of his client is, he's already risking prison. In a regulated establishment they have every reason to card people for the same reasons they do with alcohol. We've not only put them at serious risk of easy access to drugs, we then had the brilliant idea of ruining our credibility in the process and haven't stopped yet. Most overdose deaths are due to contaminated substances, allergic reactions to the agent used to cut the product, or to unknown potency levels. All prohibition related, not drug related. If properly labeled with clean needles the costs of addiction would fall dramatically. Most crime the same, it isn't because they are stoned, it's because in Government created black market they are forced to fight for territory with guns instead of with commercials or lawsuits.
Madness, murder, insanity was the first litany of lies about pot. That was followed a short time later with the claims that it was more addictive than heroin and the contradictory to the first claim idea that it now turned the kids into pacifists and was a tool of the communists. Then we tried a string of other lies and junk science including suffocating several monkeys and pretending it was pot related and we have a professional drug liar (some call him czar) out there whose job seems to be to make it up as he goes and see what he can get into print.
Back in 1906 we didn't have a drug problem that we couldn't have a huge effect on with a little simple education, people trusted their Government then. Today, we have a big problem, and we created it ourselves. The kids know we lied about some things so they don't trust us on anything else either and find out for themselves, they get stoned to our old reefer madness movies and laugh at the lies. Then they wonder what else we lied about, so experiment. We turned drug abuse from a health problem into a status symbol and integral part of the counter culture, and we've nobody to blame for that but ourselves. If we'd instead offer them accurate science based info so we weren't on separate sides we could then attack drugs the same way we did racism, work toward an attitude shift that teaches responsibility and makes abuse about as sexy as a case of hemorrhoids or VD would be. Just another nasty health problem rather than a part of youth rebellion.
More of the same isn't the way out. The truth and rational discussion of health care and educational rather than criminal alternatives is.
And BTW, what has been the result of all of this other than the near destruction of our own freedoms and society? We've managed to support and finance terrorists and organized crime from one side of the world to the other for decades, and we know it. If we want to destroy terrorism and organized crime it's pretty damned simple, remove their funding. Let our farmers grow what the terrorists now grow, let our pharmacies or liquor stores distribute instead of the street dealer. They are plant extracts that ancient people have used for centuries or longer, there's no reason for them to cost much more than a bottle of Rose Hips or Ginseng. Cut the throats of organized crime and terrorism, when the price falls and there are legit sources they no longer have a market that's worth enough to attract dealers, and their funding takes a bigger hit than anything else we could do.
Want another bonus to ending the war? We've seen a 6 times growth in the prison population since the late 1970's, and a pretty heavy growth in the load on our court systems too. We probably spend about as much as year between State, Federal, and foreign aid spending related to the drug war as we do in Iraq right now. We all panic about the cost of Iraq, but we do this every year and the costs just keep getting higher as we year by year escalate the efforts. We spend more in a year or two now than we used to in a decade. Want another one? How about our overloaded court systems, ending the war on drugs and reducing both those arrests and the violence related to them would reduce the load on our court systems by a great deal, perhaps offering them as much as twice the time per case that they now have. Real cases, real crimes against people rather than because you took or sold something that someone didn't like.
So, why are we in this drug war again?
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