Innocent Bystanders

Why I Was Hoping Prop 19 Would Pass In California UPDATED November 5, 2010

Posted by Michael in Crime.
36 comments

IMPORTANT UPDATE [DaveinTexas]:

This post was instigated by Anon, a first-time visitor, who castigated liberals and conservatives alike in a thread below.  Of conservatives, he remarked:

you believe you should legislate the behavior of responsible people. Just sayin’…

Sandy Burger replied — her rejoinder was this:

By the way, the idea that Republicans want to control your private life is paranoid (for most Republicans, at least).

I’m guessing  that Anon was pissed off by the failure of Prop 19, a ballot initiative in California to regulate and tax the distribution of marijuana.  On that issue, I agree with him.

Look, I don’t want to encourage hippies to smoke weed, but let’s face it, they are going to do so anyway.  If any state is going to be a haven for pot-smoking hippies, California (as opposed to Texas) is the right place for them.

I reckon this guy can survive the inevitable (since yesterday) economic meltdown of California just fine:

Plus, I seriously think we need to do what we can to defund the Mexican drug cartels.

If you compare alcohol, nicotine, and marijuana, you can’t make sense out of our controlled substances policy. I think weed should be a public health issue, not a criminal issue. I’m leaning that way about coke.  Lets get real — people are going to self-medicate for recreation.  It has been a staple feature of human culture for millennia.

The idea that marijuana is a hugely addictive “starter drug” that leads straight to heroin has been thoroughly debunked.  It is relatively benign compared to alcohol.  The risks of cocaine have been similarly exaggerated.  Cocaine is widely accepted as a middle-class recreational drug that is harmless if used in moderation, like beer, and harmful if used in excess.

The Gold Standard on this issue should be alcohol. We tried Abolition, and it did not work. We just funded powerful and murderous criminal gangs. So, I’m thinking, if something is not worse than alcohol, we should address it as a public health issue, not a criminal law issue.

Right now, we are funding and arming enormously dangerous criminal organizations, and wasting billions in law enforcement resources that are better directed elsewhere, for no good purpose.  The giant sucking sound of our drug market has our southern neighbors like Mexico and Colombia fighting for their lives.

Beheading has become a commonplace tactic in Mexico’s drug wars.  They remind me of Al-Qaeda, and they are here in our country. They worship money instead of Allah. Otherwise, they have no scruples or kinship to humanity.

Our billions of dollars of law enforcement aimed at drugs that are less harmful than alcohol or nicotine have a perverse effect. We are artificially inflating the price of marijuana and cocaine, simple agricultural products  which require little processing (compared to cigarettes, beer or wine) and which would naturally be dirt cheap.  This drives genuine addicts to break into someone’s house, or to commit an armed robbery, just to acquire a product they otherwise could easily afford at a licensed and taxed store, much like hard-core drunks can score some Mad Dog with a little panhandling.

You also can steer consumers away from really nasty shit, like meth, which is easily cooked up in the backwoods of Indiana and, realistically, we don’t have any way to stop it.

Plus — BONUS — if the trade is regulated, you have a better shot at suppressing the use of  these substances by juveniles, whose as-yet-unformed brain structures place them seriously at risk if they consume these products.

Just my opinion.

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