Yep, it's a countdown. Lets get it on.
By the way, in case you're assuming that I am just a druggie who wishes my habit was legal, I've never actually done any drugs in my life. I don't even smoke. And if drugs were legal, I probably still wouldn't do them. But that's not the point. The point is, I should have the choice.
10. The illegalization of drugs is incompatible with the idea of personal responsibility, an integral part of our country's heritage and purpose. Free market capitalism depends on personal responsibility - Socialist economic policies, like welfare, are simply a shift of responsibility from the individual to the government. People who support this often like to use the words 'public good', 'public interest' or 'for the benefit of all'. But remember, this is the same argument the government uses to take away your house to allow Walmart to put up a store. It is the responsibility of individuals to decide what is best for themselves, not the governments responsibility. Unfortunately, government erosion of personal responsibility has become more and more commonplace. For instance, Kellogg's, under pressure from the Center for Science in the Public Interest (notice the 'public interest', please) and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (a group that, by its name at least, wants to take the duties of parenting away from parents, and put them in the hands of the government), agreed to change their packaging and not target kids unless the food they are advertising meets the Global Nutrition Criteria. Now, when a company does this on their own, I applaud them - good nutrition is important. However, when the government forces them to do it, it takes away the responsibility of the consumer. Cases like this, and like the lawsuit against Burger King which claimed that Burger King is knowingly increasing its consumers risk of heart disease by using trans fats, send the message that it is not your fault that you're fat, but the fast food company's. It sends the message that the parent isn't at fault for letting their kids eat as much junk food as they want, its the companies that sell the junk food. It's another symptom of our lawsuit-happy culture, which is caused, quite simply, by the erosion of personal responsibility - nobody accepts the blame for their own problems.
It may seem like I went off on a tangent there, but it all leads up to this: it is not the government's place to determine what is best for you. That's your job. And it's not someone else's fault that you're fat, or smoke too much, or are addicted to a drug. That's your fault. And some people with socialist mindsets will accuse me of being insensitive. Not true! I have plenty of compassion for those with addictions and who are down on their luck. But it's not the government's job to protect you from yourself.
Period.
9. If alcohol and tobacco are illegal, why aren't other drugs? A recent study published in The Lancet ranked drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, in terms of how dangerous they are. The three critera were the physical harm they do, their addictiveness, and their impact on society. Alcohol managed to come in 5th out of 20, ahead of amphetamines, LSD, marijuana, anabolic steroids, and ecstasy. Tobacco was 9th, ahead of all the aforementioned save amphetamines. Of course, the people doing this study use it as a reason to restrict drugs and tobacco even more, but it can just as easily be used to suggest that these other drugs should be less restricted. The dangers of smoking marijuana are minimal compared to those of using alcohol and tobacco. Not only is marijuana far less addictive, but the effects on the brain (potentially exacerbating existing mental disorders, some short term memory loss) are insignificant compared to those of alcohol (liver disease) and tobacco (cancer), which are often fatal. In addition, while you can overdose on alcohol (several hundred people in the US do each year), there has never been an overdose of marijuana. While overdosing on alcohol simply requires one to drink three or four times as much as they need to get drunk, overdosing on marijuana would theoretically require one to smoke 40,000 times more than they need to get high. Which, needless to say, is impossible. You can smoke pot till you pass out, and you would still need to smoke thousands of times more in order to kill yourself.
8. It would make drugs safer. Because drugs are illegal, there is obviously no government regulation of them, nor are their health warnings like you see on cigarettes. Because of this, drug producers and traffickers aren't bound by any regulations, and often drugs can be contaminated or dangerous. Most street drugs are cut (diluted) with other substances, and different dealers cut at different rates. Doing as much cocaine or heroin as one usually does, but from a different source, could be fatal. Legalizing drugs would open them up to government regulation, who could then regulate packaging and quality control - you would be able to read what percent of the product you buy is the actual drug, the drug would be cut with safer substances, and the companies that sold them would have to include instructions on their use and recommended dosage. And given that corporations stake their reputations on their product (and killing customers isn't exactly an efficient way of making money), making the drugs safer would be in their best interest as well.
7. Prison doesn't solve drug addiction. People who are addicted to drugs should be in clinics, not prisons. In fact, it makes it worse. Despite the existence of prison-based drug programs, the prison culture makes people more likely to do drugs and develop their addiction, not less. Obscene amounts of money are made by prison inmates who deal drugs. It is quite possibly the worst enviroment for someone with a drug addiction, and if that's not enough, it's putting money in the pockets of, not just drug dealers, but far worse elements of society - murderers, rapists, and the like.
6. It would crush drug lords and organized crime. Legalization of drugs would allow for the creation of American companies to market these drugs. It would eliminate the black market for these drugs, as the prices would go down, and the drug trade would be taken out of the hands of criminals and criminal enterprises. Companies would grow their own drugs (and many, like cannabis, can be grown in the US), instead of dealing with foreign drug lords. It would deal a huge blow to the Mafia, who supply heroin. It's a huge amount of money that, instead of going criminals, could be going into the American economy.
5. The exorbitant amount of money spent on the 'war on drugs' by the US Government - somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 billion dollars - could be put to other, more productive uses. The war on drugs has not stopped drug use - in fact, drug use is as prevalent as it has ever been. In addition to saving the money the government uses to crack down on drug users, they would potentially be able to tax drugs. The federal tax on cigarettes brings in billions of dollars every year (the number is declining, but much of this has to do with laws restricting where one can smoke).
4. Legalizing drugs would make the court system more efficient. Court cases take months, appeals can take years. If the courts no longer needed to deal with drug offenders, then cases would take less time, and appeals in higher courts would be decided faster and by better informed, less overworked judges. Prison sentences have been shown to be relatively ineffective in breaking addictions, especially compared to other kinds of treatment.
3. It would stop prison overcrowding. Over half a million people are in prison for drug offenses, and in 2004, drug offenders accounted for 21% of state prisoners and 55% of federal prisoners. The US not only has the highest imprisonment rate in the world, but, in fact, the US has the most prisoners period - even more than China, which has four times our population. Prisons should be for people who commit crimes against others, crimes against society. You cannot commit a crime against yourself. As a result of all this, more and more prisoners are getting out early - even violent offenders. In many cases, drug offenders, and especially drug dealers, get sentences comparable to murderers and rapists - the federal sentencing guidelines for dealing drugs often allow life imprisonment.
2. Legalizing drugs would decrease violence dramatically. Of violent criminals, it is estimated that roughly a third committed their crimes for drug-related reasons. Most of these individuals would not have committed these crimes if drugs were legalized - there would be no need. Drugs would be exponentially cheaper, so people wouldn't have to commit armed robbery and similar crimes to finance their habits (through comparisons with countries where drugs are legal or their illegality is not enforced, it is estimated that drug prices would be hundreds of times cheaper if they were legal in the US), and since organized crime wouldn't be involved in the sale of drugs anymore, violent crime and murders related to the drug trade would decrease to almost nothing. It has been estimated that half of all burglaries and thefts are related to drugs, along with significant percentages (in the 20-30% range) of murders, car thefts, assaults, and armed robberies are drug-related.
1. Everything really comes back to this: government-organized social reform doesn't work. Ultimately, prohibition of alcohol in the 20s didn't just fail to solve any problems, but it created far worse problems. The prohibition of alcohol essentially created the Mafia as we know it today. And the scary thing is, the business they did in the 20s is miniscule compared to what they, and drug cartels, are doing today by selling drugs. Prohibition has, historically, been a miserable failure. Not only did it help create organized crime, but it also caused a significant reduction in respect for law enforcement. Consumption of alcoholic beverages did not decrease for a significant period of time. Only in 1921 was there a dip in consumption, and beginning in 1922, alcohol consumption resumed its pre-prohibition levels. In fact, more alcohol was consumed in the years from 1922 on, during prohibition, than in 1918, before prohibition. Beer sales took a pretty solid hit, but the use of spirits and wine increased. It caused increased corruption among official and law enforcement - a current problem that would have been #11 on my list of reasons to legalize drugs. The problems created by the prohibition of alcohol in the twenties are the same problems we're encountering today with the prohibition of drugs.
