A good short piece by Alex Massie in The Spectator (UK)
Current laws amount to a kind of rent-seeking that protects organised crime and discriminates against both the consumer and the small producer.
This is obviously offensive for any number of philosophical, moral and economic reasons. If Drug Warriors were really motivated by health concerns […] then they’d favour legalisation since nothing would do more to spur innovation and the development of high-buzz, low-risk narcotics. But they don’t really care about that because what they really object to is the buzz itself. Hence their determination to prosecute a pointless, expensive, futile, counter-productive, grubby, shameful war that won’t be won. It’s about scolding people and controlling their choices and never mind anything else.
Yep. That’s the hallmark of the authoritarian sadomoralist.
Ive always thought that myself. Its the buzz itself they dont like. After all , pharma tries to make drugs without a buzz to make you feel good. Isnt the point of drugs to make you feel good?Pharma or otherwise? Its like making food that doesnt fill you.
Misery loves company. If I cant feel good neither can you.
Isn’t that the whole purpose of “methadone maintenence?”
Massie has it right. And this is why I have said that unless we emphasize the low overall footprint of drug use harm i.e. total drug-use harm compared to total users, reform won’t make large inroads. Arguments around gaining and saving revenue don’t matter much if one’s hostile to the core purpose of the activity viz. getting high.
Daksya, I beg to differ. The average American couldn’t care less about dueling studies. They really don’t care about relative harmlessness of cannabis compared to legal drugs such as alcohol or nicotine. It’s only the dyed-in-the-wool prohibs who get twitchy about people getting high.
What most Americans do care about in these cash-strapped times is money…namely, the lack of it. And any government program that takes money from them when they need it so badly and wastes it – as the DrugWar demonstrably does – isn’t going to fare well when that waste is exposed.
This is part of the reason why the prohibs are sweating bullets about (and tried to strangle in the crib) Senator Jim Webb’s panel on the prison system. because it will show exactly how that money is wasted, and to paraphrase an old saying, ‘all roads lead to drug prohibition’.