Does Legalized Marijuana Mean Legalized Heroin and Crack?
Bruce Mirken, Marijuana Policy Project
At the Marijuana Policy Project, we hear it all the time:
"Well, if you legalize marijuana, doesn't that mean you'd have to legalize
everything? Where does it end?"
It's a common question with a simple answer: It ends with
whatever laws that we as a democratic society think make the most sense -- no
more, and no less.
Marijuana, after all, has been in human use as a medicine
and social relaxant for at least 5,000 years, and illegal in most parts of the
world for less than 100. At no time did marijuana laws have much of an effect
on laws regarding other substances.
When you think about it, that makes perfect sense. Alcohol
is a drug, after all (and a much more dangerous and addictive drug than
marijuana, by the way), yet its legality certainly hasn't meant we have to
allow legal access to marijuana or anything else.
As our name implies, the Marijuana Policy Project deals only
with marijuana. We claim no expertise about other drugs, and take no position
on what the laws should be regarding alcohol, cocaine, heroin, etc.
But we do take the commonsense position that laws should be
based on facts. If the idea of drug laws is to prevent the harm that drugs do,
those laws should be based on an accurate understanding of those harmful
effects, so that we don't inadvertently pass laws that do more harm than the
drug itself.
We've clearly done that with marijuana, whose risks are so
modest that Dr. Leslie Iversen, Oxford University pharmacology professor and member
of the British government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, wrote
recently, "Overall, by comparison with other drugs used mainly for
'recreational' purposes, cannabis could be rated to be a relatively safe drug."
Compared to the limited harm caused by marijuana, the harm caused by
marijuana prohibition is immense: Over three-quarters of a million lives are
turned upside down each year by arrests for simple possession -- families torn
apart, educations disrupted, careers ruined, simply for choosing to relax at
the end of the day with a drug that's safer than beer.
And the harm isn't limited to marijuana users. By pretending we can
make marijuana go away, we've forfeited any ability to regulate its production,
marketing, and sale. We've handed a monopoly on a very large market (marijuana
is, after all, America's largest cash crop) to unregulated criminals -- people
who commit violence, trash the environment, and have no compunctions about
selling to kids.
The risk/benefit ratio for marijuana and marijuana prohibition is
clear: Prohibition causes far more harm than marijuana. Is that the case for
cocaine or heroin? I don't know. What I do know is that they are separate
questions, and America is quite capable of answering them one at a time.
Sign up for the OV Daily Newsletter
OV Social
1. It doesn't work. It doesn't work for marijuana and it doesn't work for heroin or crack cocaine.
2. It never will.
3. Prohibition is the drug policy of choice of drug cartels, because it's the doundation for their business. If the drug cartels are for the prohibition of drugs shouldn't the responsible people oppose prohibition? Let's legalize, control and regulate "illicit substances" not to solve the drug problem but to address the gangs, guns , crime , health issues, deficits, trade imbalance, funding of terrorism and a dozen other crises worsened by ouu US policy of drug prohibition.
4. And the drug problem -- lets send in the doctors , not the police. Let's use reality-based educational programs and public service announcements to dissuade drug use as we did with cigarette consumption. (That means no more D.A.R.E. in the classroom and no more "anti-drug" ads by the Partnership For A Drug-Free (laugh) America.)
Great work Bruce!
Scientists have discovered that one of Bob Dylan's most famous
lines, "everybody must get stoned," tells it like it is. They have found that our brains manufacture proteins (canabinoids) that act like marijuana (THC) at specific receptors in the brain itself.
The debate over medical marijuana , hemp or cannabis is really a scandalous controversy over whether this very effective, safe and easy-to-grow herb should be allowed to compete with expensive and dangerous pharmaceuticals .
A regulated market for all drugs is safer for the individual and society .
We have freedom of religion , all faiths are welcome here, but we have separation of church and state to keep the government out of moral issues. That is how our founders set things up based on Jesus' teachings.
Laws against moral issues, like suicide, drug abuse and sex acts are mostly useless or worse counter productive as far as prevention. They are against our founders and Jesus' teachings of freedom of choice, of free will. Moral issues belong to the individual's beliefs or church philosophy.
The government is best left out of our personal moral dilemmas. They are needed to protect us from fraud and violence. At present they are too busy trying to be our moral police instead of our safety police.
Murderers and other violent predators roam free, while we police nonviolent adult social, medicinal and religious drug use . Limited resources can be better-spent catching pedophiles, rapists and killers. More time could go toward stopping DUI and those selling drugs to minors.
Marijuana prohibition has been a total failure and is perhaps this country's greatest mistake. Not only has it created criminals out of nearly a third of the country's populace, it costs our society billions of dollars every year, creates a strain on our prison system, and has little or no effect on marijuana use in the US. In some cases, prosecuting marijuana use has turned non-violent, middle class kids into violent and unpredictable, career criminals. Once a person has a criminal conviction on their record, they are far less likely to find a good job and become a useful member of society. Other countries with more liberal drug laws have much lower rates of drug addiction among their people. I invite you to my web-page devoted to raising awareness on the assault on our civil liberties: http://freethegods.blogspot.com /
Plant derived alkaloids such as morphine, novacaine and many other drugs similar to Heroin and Cocaine are already in wide use. If Bristol-Meyers sold a legal but mild form of cocaine, how would that end the world? For me, I pray to God to have chocolate chip cookies criminalized because I find them to be highly addictive, and of no redeeming nutritional value.
Let Freedom Ring.
Probably not, but if it does, so what? We need to make those substances legal again anyway. Prohibition never works and is the cause of almost all "drug related" crime and social problems.
Many people want to reduce the penalty for crack cocaine, on the grounds that it is unfair to send users to prison for so many years when the sentences are so much more lenient for powdered cocaine. But if they didn't use crack cocaine, they wouldn't get sent to prison for it.
What is the purpose of drug laws , anyway? Is it so that people will not use these drugs, or is it because we want users to spend a substantial amount of time (but not too much time) in prison?
If laws cannot prevent people from using crack cocaine, then maybe the government ought to give addicts free crack cocaine so they don't have to commit crimes for it, so they won't be creating a business for criminals, so that they won't have to recruit other users to fund their own habits, and so that if they cannot limit their own use they'll just go ahead and die already.
Am I the only one who thinks my headline sounds stark raving mad? Yet we hear that very sentence repeated over and over when it comes to the illegal drugs.
Basically, providing "free crack" (or heroin) only makes sense when we're thinking inside the Drug War Paradigm. Only when we refuse to consider alternatives or can't even conceive of any other reality than having a "drug war" do we end up with this illogic.
In a legal market there wouldn't be any legitimate need for government to provide drugs for free.
However, in legal markets there would be a lot of need for different regulation. Clearly something like heroin needs to be regulated differently - and stricter - than cannabis .
What all out legalization would enable is this: we would be able to lay out a "defensive perimeter" of legal drugs that are regulated much like alcohol and tobacco. It would work because most people (of the minority that would use at all) prefer the milder drugs. You would see LESS people go nuts with heroin, crack or meth, because they can now afford and access opium extracts, codeine pills, powder cocaine and straight amphetamines.
Mind you, these are NOT drugs without risk, but it is much preferable to have people injecting heroin.
Basically, people are smarter than the nanny state people think. I'm by far convinced that part of the attraction of marijuana is the fact that it's remarkably safe compared to other drugs.
The trouble is that if we let the private market supply crack cocaine, providers will have an incentive to promote its use, and a freedom-of-speech claim to do so, and money to lobby the government not to be too discouraging about crack cocaine use. If the government provides free crack cocaine, none of this applies.
Does this logic apply for alcohol ? Well, after Prohibition many states allowed liquor to be sold only at government-operated ABC stores. And maybe if we'd applied this approach fully and forbidden advertising of alcoholic beverages, we might retain some of the advantages of prohibition. For cultural reasons, we decided not only to let people to obtain alcohol legally, but we also decided to re-normalize the use of alcohol in society -- with competing brands promoting the taste of their products.
I don't think we _need_ to normalize the social use of crack cocaine and heroin -- we just need to minimize the economic cost of addicts doing what they insist on doing.
Or, just end the morally bankrupt " War on (some) Drugs " to pull the rug out from under the criminal gangs that need prohibition in order to thrive.
That will probably be the next logical step for those who are involved in the business. Because business is business. Once it becomes legal it's use will be promoted and that's business. It'll probably take a whole generation of a desensitize people to take that next step. But it surely can happen.