Why All Drugs Should Be Legalized

          My main reason for being in favor of the legalization of all drugs is that the illegality of drugs is not what prevents people from doing them. I will discuss this more throughout. But if we decide that is a true statement, then what really is the purpose making drug illegal? The goal of making drugs illegal (I think) is to restrict the use so that those who are not experts about the substance do not make mistakes with it and hurt themselves or others. However, I think the logic of solving that problem with that solution is very flawed. I think additionally our history of attempts to win the “war on drugs” shows that this policy plainly isn’t working. Particular examples of it not working are the terrible violence in Mexico the past few years that has resulted in senseless reckless ultra violent death of those involved in the drug trade, public officials trying to combat the drug trade, family members of both of these groups, and just plain ordinary citizens who live in Mexico. Another example is the swelling prison populations we’re facing domestically. Even if you don’t care about any of these who suffer from this policy because you think they are less important people, let me explain what a terrible fiscal policy this is for our country that leads to more extraction of American wealth, something you must care about... unless you’re a nihilist of course.

          Ok, here is why this logic is flawed, simple. If you want to influence an individual’s behavior so that they don’t make mistakes, you have to educate them on the front end before they make mistakes. This policy does not accomplish that. This policy provides consequences only once the crime has been committed. Retroactive education on drugs (i.e. incarceration, rehab) is not completely useless in combating the problem, but I don’t think it is very effective. How many celebrities with expensive drug problems only need to go to rehab once? How many drug addicts face multiple drug convictions? Once drugs have gotten to the point where they are mentally or physically addicting it is generally too late to have a true complete recovery. This is also the point where prosecution of drug use or possession has little effect. Drugs are very tricky in that they aren’t a thing where you can just let psychological conditioning take its effect because it alters mental perception. They make you think you are getting a good outcome and should repeat the behavior when really you are probably getting a bad one. Addicts can get sober, but it is a very long tough process and in many of those cases there are real irreversible consequences from the use that has already been done be it mental, physical, emotional, stunting of career development/opportunities, etc. So as this policy of illegality does not successfully deter consumption it does not provide any real benefit and drags along with it numerous other problems

          Education in the home and in school goes further than any legal tactic in actually helping the problem, because it is a preventative measure. When people make the decision to do drugs I think it is often due to experimentation or influence. This is the area where education helps you make informed decisions so you are A) less likely to experiment B) have enough information to stand up to the influence or C) if you decide you still do want to experiment after learning what drugs can do, you are at least peripherally aware of how to do drugs safely. Knowing the answers to questions like “What is the correct dosage for someone who weighs 150 pounds?” or “Is sharing needles safe?” or “Can I mix drug A with drug B?” is very helpful if you are actually doing drugs. However, those who are doing drugs are much less likely to ask these questions if it is illegal because asking them is essentially an admission of guilt. I think it's natural to have curiosity and having these conversations will only help people make better decisions. This can all be done, and will be done more effectively, if drugs are legal.

          The illegality of drugs is also simply not an effective policy because it doesn’t actually prevent people from getting them. I think we can agree that the demand for drugs in fairly inelastic, meaning that a relatively large change in price will have a relatively small change in the quantity consumed. This creates a very strong incentive for those who are willing to risk the legal barriers to supply this product because they can charge high prices for it and have large margins of returns. My evidence that similar addictive substances are generally inelastic, large taxes on cigarettes hasn’t significantly affected cigarette sales. I don’t think there are too many who cite money as the reason they stopped smoking, are there? I would assume that health, whether it's the individual or those around them, is by far the number one reason people quit smoking. So basically health education is the deterrent not the taxes levied on cigarettes. So since there is such a strong consistent demand for these addictive products, there is a strong incentive for there to be drug suppliers who will get crafty and find ways to avoid getting caught so they can provide for their consumers. Watch The Wire (a show I delusionally still think is real) if you want some ideas on how crafty the drug trade really is. This is just my opinion based on things I witnessed growing up in California and I don’t have any statistical evidence to support it, but I think in many cases in this state it is easier for teens to acquire marijuana, the illegal smokeable, than it is to get cigarettes, the legal one. To buy a pack of cigarettes you need a fake ID, or need to find someone who is older than you and is willing to risk purchasing for a minor. Whereas marijuana takes none of those things. I was offered weed for the first time in the seventh grade by a classmate. And I went to the rich white kid middle school. I was never offered cigarettes... just saying.

         From a legal standpoint it is contradictory to consider drugs of the same class that largely do the same thing and have really only insignificant differences to be legal in some cases (morphine, hydrocodone) and illegal in others (opium, marijuana). Why can’t the latter group just be treated like any other FDA regulated drug and have it be prescribed by doctors? Have other recreational drugs which don't really serve a medical purpose be certified by the FDA like any other consumable product so we can at least ensure that it was made in a safe processes, so teens aren't dying from ecstasy that was cut with Drain-O by some independent dealer in a basement somewhere. I think the only difference between legal and illegal drugs is the stigma attached to them. I think this is one of the root problems that we have in our views, it is difficult to think in an idealist way (I never realized how much of an idealist I am at heart and in my views until very recently, btw) because we've become very accustomed to the structure that we're used to even if it isn't beneficial for us. It’s hard to imagine anything different than what we’re currently experiencing, and so we generally just fear the worst. But it is acts of real revolution and willingness to change a system that doesn’t make sense that are real advancements. I’m thinking back to the Civil Rights movement or the American Revolution. The path to real progress is to think about what is ideal, compare that to what we have, and figure out how to close the gap, hopefully without terribly bad things happening. Aren’t we all better off that those revolutions happened? Ok, that’s a digression. But really, we ended Prohibition and the alcohol industry has been functioning in social acceptable ways for nearly 80 years now. Yes, it’s not always perfect or pretty, but people are filling bars across the country every week and surviving and not having the sky fall on their heads or the Gods burn the world down. This is a progressive policy, but that doesn’t mean that it will have a bad result. Prohibition is sometimes referred to as the "Noble Experiment," which it really was. But I think we proved that while to try to get rid of these substances by making them illegal is a noble cause, it isn't the right solution. I think it is about time that we realized that all these substances have the same issues that surround them and making different rules for different drugs is like debating price, it's still the same deal.

          We also need to consider the health benefits of legalization. If drugs are legalized the consumers of drugs will be much easier to target. You can put Surgeon General warning labels on your heroin loaded syringe 10-pack that tell you what the product will do to you. You can have more open doctor patient dialogues because the illegal stigma, and resulting shyness on the topic for fear of castigation or repercussions, will be gone. There will also be less senseless death. We see it in Mexico how important drug money is to certain people and how much is at stake. Bringing this all into the light makes this go away. Remember Al Capone? He was the reaction to Prohibition. Domestic and foreign drug cartels are the reaction to drug illegality. Has there been any organized crime bosses running the alcohol industry since 1933 when Prohibition was repealed? No there hasn’t because companies have taken over. While still not perfect they are a much more transparent and safe form of business than organized crime. Yes there are some people still brewing moonshine in their bathtubs, but that is the tiniest fraction of what is sold to the public and there is little crime related. Ninety-nine point nine to nine places is done by legit business operating in full daylight getting all the required licenses etc. Deaths from the sale, manufacture, or transport of alcohol is down almost 100% since the end of prohibition… I would gather. I don’t know why we wouldn’t see the same phenomenon with drug legalization.

         Here are the fiscal problems that relate to having drugs be illegal and how legalization will fix this:

#1. The money spent to purchase these drugs is exported overseas. With a full crackdown on the production of drugs in this country all we have done is shifted the supply. Yes there are a couple of small operations hidden here and there in some people’s hydroponics closets or in the remote parts of the Santa Cruz Mountains, but the majority of illegal drugs that are consumed in this country make their way here from other nations. This leads to money going out the door into Central and South American countries. This is the extraction of wealth from our country. How do you think the Mexican cartels get all those assault rifles that they have more firepower than the Mexican law enforcement? Our nation’s consumption pays for it. Milton Friedman once said, "See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true." The government suppresses domestic supply and essentially limits supply participation to only those large groups that have the means to figure out ways to get drugs into the country, whether they are getting fleets of vehicles like trucks planes and submarines, paying individuals to take risks in getting across the boarder and paying off boarder patrol to look the other way. To me this situation is worse and surely on a much bigger scale than blood diamonds in Africa. If drugs were legal, production would begin domestically for companies that would have a competitive advantage due to shipping and import costs over anyone outside the country. It would create a new industry, one that is almost recession proof no less. That means more jobs domestically. And the market price for drugs would drop from what it currently is at. This is caused in part by the current illegality premium but also due to many competitors that would be allowed to enter the market. So the illegal methods of importing drugs would still be illegal based on customs laws, but foreign production of drugs won’t be nearly as lucrative, and it would eliminate the need for organized crime to meet supply. It would cut the market right out of the illegal drug trade. Hopefully our pharmaceutical companies and the rest of our strong corporate structure can figure out how to get a jump on this before we have foreign companies coming in here. Maybe there can be provisions that says only domestic companies can sell drugs at one of our tens of thousands of pharmacies for the first 10 years after legality is passed before we open it up to foreign competition. I’m very rarely for more money going to large US corporations, but I do trust them slightly more than a Mexican drug cartel, though admittedly it’s pretty close when I really think about it.

#2. There will be extra tax revenue from the importing of foreign drugs legally, and from the domestic industry that will create itself if granted the opportunity to sell drugs to the public. Currently no taxes (ok maybe someone is paying taxes) are paid on illegal drug sales even though it is required under the tax code. Actually I'm very curious how the cannabis clubs and other pot business are filling out their federal tax returns because though it is legal in California they are admitting to the federal that they are committing a federal crime. And it's not that the government needs more money, but it wouldn’t hurt to have that money redistributed through government channels. Maybe we would have enough to better fund Social Security or put more into education?

#3. A significant amount of money will be saved on the constantly overwhelmed narcotics divisions of law enforcement which can reassign themselves to investigate more important crimes like murders, rapes, and white collar fraud. This also includes the prison system that has 97,472 federal inmates as of 2010, or roughly 51.1% of all federal prisoners, alone on drug convictions that require us as taxpayers to house and feed and build more facilities toward while we spend more money clogging the courts getting all the convictions through, according to this data http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Prisons_and_Jails#Data. Meanwhile we cut education funding.

Note: The one financial fall-out I can foresee would be an expected plummet in our current ‘baggy’ industry which is a robust staple of American commerce that will erode as I’m sure corporations will find a better way to package the stuff.

          Ok, if we’re actually considering this you have to ask, well what would legalization look like? I’ve already gone over some of the financial impacts, but I think the biggest concerns are social. First I feel that even if drugs were legal, companies should continue to be allowed to drug test new hires and current employees to ensure that there aren’t drugs in the work place because that can lead to all sorts of problems. The same way showing up drunk is still frowned upon. And I also think that driving under the influence of drugs should continue to be illegal, the same way it is still illegal for a legal substance like alcohol. And we can still restrict the use of these substances to ‘doctor prescribed situations’ and/or with age restrictions. Let’s put it with tobacco at age 18, we can even move alcohol there while we're at it so we're treating them all the same, which they really are for practical purposes.

          There are a couple of counterpoints that I would like to refute and I will do so now:

 #1. Marijuana is a gateway drug:
First of all, the gateway thing won’t matter if we just legalize them all. But to incriminate the drug and not user does not make sense. Marijuana cannot possibly be called a gateway drug until the individual first decides to do use marijuana. At that point that person has then shown a willingness to experiment with drugs because just prior to using marijuana they agreed to do it. So when they repeat that same behavior on what is deemed a 'harder' drug we consider it to be a different behavior and blame the last drug they used for it? It doesn't make sense.

#2. Legalizing drugs would increase the amount of drugs that our country uses:
Being as honest as I can be I think most people at some point in their lives experiment with controlled substances, even if it’s just alcohol, cigarettes, or even prescriptions drugs to see if they have some help to offer. Of these, some become social users, some try other things too, some never do it again, and some become dependent. Every person has a different reaction, a different experience, and get involved for different reasons. But it is natural experimenting that many people go through in their lives whether the activity is legal or not. According to some data 42% of Americans have reporting using marijuana even though it is federally illegal. The other reason I stated that people do drugs is influence, it comes from your friends, musicians and other idols, a parent figure, and peer pressure. I actually think that for as many that will pick up drugs because they can if they are legalized, there will be an offsetting number who don’t simply because it is no longer illegal and therefore not perceived as dangerous or cool which can often be incentives as much as deterrents. Additionally, usage rates in the Netherlands, where marijuana can be purchased in government regulated coffee shops by anyone over 18, are similar to usage rates in the United States.

#3. Drug laws are effective at preventing drug use.
I have read a few pieces that say things that drug laws work because of such and such example. There is an argument that Sweden, which boasts drug use at about a third of the European average, that these laws work there where they spend the second highest percentage of their GDP of the European countries on drug control. However, when they decreased spending on education and rehabilitation in ‘90s drug use rose. There are also stats about the ‘Just Say No’ campaigns during the ‘80s in the US that saw a drop in drug use. While I think those are both good arguments, they are not in fact arguments that drugs should be illegal, but rather arguments that spending money on prevention and rehabilitation is effective, which is something that any country that legalizes drugs can and should continue to do. There is no evidence that illegality and subsequent prosecutions reducing use decreases use, and in fact, I think the evidence shows that it really has no effect on use.

          I want to end this post by stating that I do not use drugs beyond alcohol. But the reason I don’t do them is not because of the potential for legal repercussions. I don’t do them because I’m not interested. I love my mind and how it works. I fear that adding foreign substances could jeopardize my essential being and change how I think and perceive. I don’t need anything else to bring me up or get me higher at this point in my life. Similarly, I don't take prescription or other legal drugs unless I absolutely have to for medical reasons. But someday down the road I might decide that I want to, and I think I should have the right to screw up, experiment, try various drugs, and make whatever personal mistakes that I want in my own life. Ultimately drug use is a choice that needs to be made for each person at the individual level, not the federal level, and we have to trust adults to make these good choices in their life, in the same way that we have to trust them to make good financial decisions and not screw up their life. We can help them by educating them to make good decisions. However, not everybody ends up making good decisions, but making drugs legal won’t encourage anymore people to do drugs than making it illegal has prevented people from doing drugs.