The Grit: Drugs. What Are We So Scared Of?
Let’s make this clear from the start: Drugs are bad. You want to keep well, stay focused, live long and prosper? Don’t do ’em. Don’t hang out with people who do ’em. If you’ve got time on your hands, read a book, take up a hobby, serve your community. Don’t get wasted. There’s nothing big or clever about being off your face.
But humans like getting high. Recreational mind-altering substance use is as old as society itself. Marijuana, peyote, opium, mushrooms, alcohol and hundreds of other plant-based narcotics have been adopted throughout history the moment their properties became apparent.
Yet with a few minor exceptions, we now live in a world where the cultivation, propagation and trading of anything but alcohol is illegal. This is the age of prohibition, and every year prohibition costs billions of dollars and thousands of lives.
The prohibition policy might be justifiable if it were working, but it isn’t. Every day, millions of people in America are still getting high.
The history of prohibition is well documented. Banning alcohol in the ’20s created a countrywide network of organized criminals, and was largely considered to be a big mistake. Why then, is the legalization of other drugs, like cocaine, LSD, marijuana, and amphetamine, still non-negotiable?
You will often hear politicians say they’ve seen too many young lives destroyed to consider changing the law on drugs, but y’know, alcohol, gambling, guns, and fast food all ruin lives. Gonna ban all that?
For the past five years, aided by the U.S. government, Mexico has been engaged in its own war on drugs. Five years ago the number of murders linked to organized crime (fueled mainly by North America’s demand for narcotics) was below 5,000. In 2011 it reached an all time high of 16,694. That’s not a success.
America’s federal expenditure on drug prohibition is more than $15 billion a year. At state level it is more than $25 billion. What effect is that money having? Last year a quarter of all 12th graders admitted recent use of illicit drugs (mainly marijuana). That’s not a success.
According to the CATO Institute, legalization would save roughly $41 billion of expenditure on prohibition and bring in an estimated $46 billion in tax revenues.
This is not an attempt to get heroin on the shelves in Wal-Mart. Mind-bending chemicals, like guns, are extremely dangerous. But it’s time to acknowledge the demand will never go away.
Furthermore, the Latin American crime cartels would be denied their main source of income. President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia said recently:
“A new approach should try and take away the violent profit that comes with drug trafficking. If that means legalizing, and the world thinks that’s the solution, I will welcome it. I’m not against it.”
Even the U.S. Ambassador to Colombia has been forced to recognize legalization is “on the table” while hurriedly stating U.S. opposition to it.
And from our leaders? Our candidates? While legalization isn’t “on the table,” suprisingly there is a growing recognition that the decades-old, head-in-the-sand approach is failing.
For the last couple of years the Obama administration has taken a new approach to the treatment of individuals who take drugs, acknowledging that it is as much a social health issue as a criminal justice one. On the domestic front this is having an effect; drug consumption across America has fallen.
In fact, the former police officer who now runs Obama’s Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) has admitted that styling America’s approach to illicit drugs as a “war” is not helpful. In November the ONDCP finally came to the conclusion that “we cannot arrest our way out of our nation’s drug problem.”
Interestingly, one consistent voice on the right about the War on Drugs is Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul. He believes Federal drug laws should be abolished because a) it’s not for Congress to try to control peoples’ behavior, b) it’s costing waaaaay too much money and c) it’s not working.
But legalization, the one thing that would end the criminal activity, and begin to deal with the social stigma, is not being considered. At least, not yet.
This is not an attempt to get heroin on the shelves in Wal-Mart. Mind-bending chemicals, like guns, are extremely dangerous. But it’s time to acknowledge the demand will never go away.
Prohibition is ruining thousands of innocent lives and costing billions, which could be far better spent elsewhere.
Any politician who ignores this is turning a blind eye to slaughter. What are they so scared of?
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