Drugs Resource

The Drug War: Legalize?

Something I find intriguing is the legalization debate; most may know that there are, at any given time, quite a few organizations out there attempting to legalize either medical marijuana use or personal use by consenting adults. But most probably don't know that there is now a building force attempting to change that fight to a full-on legal and political battle to legalize all drugs, from marijuana to methamphetamine. Namely, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, the largest group of police, DEA, judges and district attorneys who believe, from experience, that fighting fire with gasoline has had an opposite effect.

I can understand why this sounds like a horrible mistake and I myself am not 100% sure that this can be done without causing unforseen problems. It's not an end-all be-all solution to addiction but it is certainly a novel way to cut illegal drug traffickers legs out from under them. Recent reports indicate that it is easier for kids to get their hands on marijuana than it is alcohol because alcohol is legal, regulated, taxed and quality-checked by our government and economy. Plus, think about it; no teenager is going to build a distillery or farm a crop of tobacco plants. But they will certainly grow a few pot plants in their closet, especially when the profit motive is nearly $1000 per full plant.

You can bet their are traffickers with a full-on crop of 500 or 1000 plants, and there is a half a million to a million dollar crop right there. Even if they have five fields and four of them are destroyed by law enforcement, he still makes an extremely tidy profit off of the one left. So long as he isn't caught, it's a win-win situation, and the second he is caught, those beneath him erupt into gunfights to decide who steps up to succeed. And there's the catch; stop a murderer and they stop killing. Stop a dealer and someone steps up to replace him. It's the legal equivalent of running in place and it does no good.

Violent crime is not, believe it or not, associated with drug use itself. It is associated with the buying/selling of drugs and the violent crime that addicts resort to in order to finance their needs. The logic is that by legalizing drugs, they will be much cheaper to produce and therefore dealers wouldn't profit and wouldn't have a reason to sell. No one would want to buy from them because they could go to the store and pick up a baggie of the same stuff for a fifth of the cost and with the confidence that their drugs aren't laced with something. An end to the violence would be nice; but what would gangs and dealers resort to to support themselves then? The poor would become poorer. But at least we could take that $70 billion a year spending on the drug war and use it for education and rehabilitation. And many deaths related to overdose are accidental, obviously, and a result of the harder drugs being cut with additives that clearly are not advertised.

So long as Americans feel the drug issue is black and white, there will be no tolerance. According to regular polls in nearly every state and county, roughly 50% of citizens support legalization of small personal amounts of marijuana and the politicians are roughly the same, with the 60's and 70's generations now hitting office. If any time is ripe for legalization, this is it, and I think it may never happen if not now.

This is something I follow pretty closely and may end up being a very regular topic on here, but that is because it is a topic with new developments nearly every day. More on this at a later date.

posted by Jigsaw @ 10:52 AM