8 Reasons to End Prohibition of All Drugs Immediately
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
The following list delves into the external consequences of the
drug war to illustrate how drug users and non users alike, would be a
lot better off if prohibition ended immediately.
The
drug war is one of the most misunderstood subjects in the mainstream
political dialogue, even among people who are sympathetic to the plight
of responsible drug users. It is rare for someone to come out and say
that all drugs should be legal, but in all honesty this is the only
logically consistent stance on the issue. To say that some drugs should
be legal while others should not is still giving credence to the
punishment paradigm and overlooking the external consequences of drug
prohibition, or prohibition of any object for that matter.
There is no doubt that drug abuse
is a serious issue in our culture, primarily because people are so
depressed and beaten down that they self medicate just to be able to
tolerate the average day. However, a prohibition policy is a policy of
violence, because if you happen to be caught with any of these banned
items you will be forcefully taken against your will and put in a cage,
and if you dare to prevent this kidnap from taking place you will
inevitably be killed. This is the fundamental issue surrounding the drug
war that we need to be focused on. Instead of bickering over how to
slightly reform drug policy, or arguing about which drug is more harmful
than the other, we need to be pointing out that prohibition itself is
an inherently violent policy that rests upon the stone age concept of
punishment.
As I alluded to earlier, there are many external factors that are
effected by the drug war that many people don’t take into account. That
is because when you carry out acts of violence, even in the form of
punishment, you then create a ripple effect which extends far beyond the
bounds of the original circumstance to effect many innocent people down
the line. The following list delves into those external factors to
illustrate how drug users and non users alike, would be a lot better off
if prohibition ended immediately.
(1) – Reduce Violent crime – The steady increase in
violent crime over the past few decades is directly correlated with the
escalation of the drug war. As we saw during the times of alcohol
prohibition, when you ban any inanimate object, you create an incentive
for people to get involved in the black market distribution of that
object. Since there is no accountability, or means of peaceful dispute
resolution within the black market, buyers and sellers are forced to
resort to violence as their sole means of handling disagreements.
Eventually, this violence spills over into the everyday world and
effects everyone’s lives. No one could imagine Budweiser and Miller Lite
in a back alley gunfight, but less than a century ago during alcohol
prohibition, distributors of the drug were involved in shootouts on a
regular basis, just as drug gangs are today. Of course, all of this
violence came to an immediate end when alcohol was legalized, however,
it was not long before the establishment found a new crusade in the drug
war, which allowed them to continue the same policy just with different
substances.
(2) Improve seller accountability and drug safety -
In the black market one of the major drawbacks is that there is no
accountability among the people selling the drug. Since anyone can get
kidnapped and thrown in a cage for even dealing with the stuff, it
really doesn’t make sense for people to be plastering their names and
logos all over the drugs. In this age of corporate mercantilism logos
and branding may seem like a really tacky idea, but when looking at the
black market we can see the value in such things. Someone who is selling
a product with their name on it, is going to go through far greater
lengths to ensure the quality of their product, as opposed to someone
who would remain anonymous.
This anonymity creates an incentive for people to be dishonest with
what they sell. This could lead to rip offs, or downright contamination
of the drug with unwanted harmful substances. This is why there was
bathtub gin that would make you go blind if your drank it during alcohol
prohibition. This is also the reason why some of the harder street
drugs today are cut with toxic chemicals that increase the chance of
overdose ten fold. The fact that the drugs need to be smuggled also
creates the incentive to make drugs more potent, and thus in some
circumstances more dangerous. The increased potency and decreased
availability inevitably leads to a massive increase in cost. The
increased cost is a whole other issue with its own unique side effects
in regaurds to drug safety. When the price of the real drugs go up,
people just start huffing paint thinner, smoking bath salts and cooking
up crystal meth in their basements, which is then even many times more
dangerous than the unbranded drugs on the black market.
(3) – Reduce Drug Availability to Children – Many
children have houses that are filled with alcohol, yet most of them find
it way easier to get drugs than to get alcohol even though alcohol is
legal. Even if there were no legal age restrictions on alcohol, the
societal and family norms would be just as effective at deterring
children from then a formal prohibition policy. If we look overseas at
countries that don’t have age restrictions on alcohol, younger people
are oftentimes much more mature and informed about its effects than
children in the west, and are more likely to make responsible decisions
about mind altering substances. In Portugal where drugs have been
decriminalized for some time now there has actually been a double
digit drop in drug use by school age children.
(4) – Reduce nonviolent Prisoner population – A vast
majority of the prisoners in the united states are there for nonviolent
non crimes, many of which stem from the drug war. Currently, there are
more people in US prisons than were in the gulags of Soviet Russia at
its worst. Putting nonviolent people in cages, bringing violence against
nonviolent people is a horrible violation of natural law. However, if
you have no sympathy or compassion for the casualties in this drug war, I
would point again to the external consequences which effect even the
most vocal prohibitionist. According to the most cited Judge in the
United States, Richard A. Posner,
the government spends $41.3 billion per year of your tax money on law enforcement measures against mostly small time drug users.
(5) – Real crime can be dealt with – Even in areas
with a declining homicide rate, the murder cases that are going unsolved
are continuing to climb. Police departments and buerocrats have a
million excuses, but the drug war is one of the primary reasons for this
occurrence. On one hand indiscriminate killings become more common than
crimes of passion that are easy to figure out, but there is a much more
sinister aspect of this as well. If you look at the rate of
incarcerations for drug offenses, and how incredibly often drug cases
are “solved” and found in favor of the state, it becomes obvious that
the police have more of an incentive in their day to day activities to
hunt down drug users than murderers. These people aren’t selfless public
servants as the propaganda on primetime television would lead you to
believe, they are average people just like you and me. They will even
tell ya “im just doin my job”, so like most of us, when they are on the
job they try to get the most amount of money for the least amount of
work, and murder cases are really tough work.
A cop could even miss his quota by taking the time and effort to hunt
down a murderer, instead of grabbing a kid with a bag of pot, which is a
lot easier to find and a lot easier to catch. Quotas are another thing
that many police departments deny, but time and time again evidence
surfaces that proves otherwise, recently a
former NYPD officer has come forward
saying that he used to ticket dead people just to meet his quota. This
is not to say that all cops are nasty people, but the way that their
jobs are monopolized by the state and focused on the drug war corrupts
their position and forces them to hurt innocent people and violate
people’s rights even if they have the best of intentions.
(6) – Encourage genuine treatment for addicts – As a
result of international drug treaties most of the world has remained
trapped in a punishment mindset when it comes to dealing with the social
problem of drug addiction. While an addiction may be problematic for
the person involved and everyone that they come in contact with, they
are not a criminal until they actually hurt someone or damage their
property, and even then they are a criminal because of their
aforementioned transgression not because of their drug addiction. Even
the treatment that we see today is not genuine because it is forced on
people and doesent address the reasons why they are doing drugs in the
first place. In other words, today’s treatment programs just try to bash
the idea that “drugs are bad” into peoples heads, instead of really
communicating with these them, treating them like human beings and
overcoming the underlying issues in their lives that are pushing them
towards lives of drug addiction.
(7) – Prevent drug overdoses –
As I mentioned earlier most drug overdoses that happen today wouldn’t
occur if it wasn’t for the artificially high potency of drugs that we
see today. However, what is even more sad is that of those overdoses
that do happen, many more of them could have been prevented but were not
because witnesses were too afraid of the police getting involved to
call for help.
9 states out of 50 in the US
currently have good Samaritan laws to give legal amnesty to anyone who
brings an overdosing person to the hospital, but that measure wouldn’t
even be necessary if prohibition wasn’t a factor in the first place. The
fact that people are actually afraid to call an ambulance in this
country should really tell you something about the level that the police
state has risen to.
(8) – Protect individual rights – Thanks to the drug
war, merely on the whim of saying that they smell something cops are
now able to enter homes, search cars and totally violate the rights of
nonviolent people. The drug war and terrorism are the two biggest
excuses used to violate peoples rights, yet according to the national
safety council you are
8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist.
The very existence of the drug war to begin with, or a prohibition on
any object is a fundamental violation of natural rights that should not
exist in any civilized society.
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