Conor Friedersdorf nails it: It Is Immoral to Cage Humans for Smoking Marijuana — in The Atlantic
There are times when locking human beings in cages is morally defensible. If, for example, a person commits murder, rape, or assault, transgressing against the rights of others, then forcibly removing him from society is the most just course of action. In contrast, it is immoral to lock people in cages for possessing or ingesting a plant that is smoked by millions every year with no significant harm done, especially when the vast majority of any harm actually done is borne by the smoker.
That there are racial disparities in who is sent to prison on marijuana charges is an added injustice that deserves attention. But if blacks and whites were sent to prison on marijuana charges in equal proportion, jail for marijuana would still be immoral.
America has used marijuana charges to cage people for so long that it seems unremarkable. The time has come to see the status quo for what it is. A draconian punishment for a victimless crime has been institutionalized and normalized, so much so that even proponents of the policy are blind to its consequences. […]
I submit that a more urgent problem is Americans who shy away from talk about the dubious moral status of marijuana prohibition. It is, at its core, an exercise in using people as means to an end. The end is maintaining a stigma against marijuana use. And the means is locking humans in cages with dangerous people.
One day, we will look back at that tradeoff in moral horror.
Exactly.
Yes, yes, yes!
This post and the referenced article are the perfect rebuttal for the failed status quo.
Bravo! Bravo!
As we move away from the immorality of cannabis prohibition, these folks will be dragged kicking and screaming;
http://tinyurl.com/lsv48ea
Jeez. The loyal opposition will remain loyal to the bitter end. And ignorant.
Ignorant’s the word. Right on cue her fox news fan base launch into a dems v repubs argument….as if that had anything to do with the ongoing wod?
My nice-face reply to one of the commenters: The ignorance of the comments there is truly astounding.
“Also I have heard the things that are being put into marijuana these days is much more potent than what used to be.” -Kandylynn
Yes, water, light AND soil of all things. It’s horrible what goes into making a plant grow. I’ve even heard that some of those dastardly “other” people sing to their plants!
One of my favorite comments went something like this;
“We don’t need another intoxicating substance introduced into this country.”
Right, and Colorado and Washington are having their cannabis air lifted from a nefarious marijuana barge located somewhere in the Pacific. There’s never been any marijuana in the US until just recently. No, not ever.
So true, Howard. The ignorance is stunning. Just yesterday I was reading a letter from an MD in Florida and all I could think was the ignorance was absolutely stunning… and he’s a doctor. Which makes it even worse. Scarier. That a trained physician could be that ignorant.
There is a grimness that comes with knowing much about the drug war. This heightened state of awareness seems to crush spontaneity while casting a dark shadow on all other aspects of life, at least for freedom lovers with a conscience, and those lacking a preternatural hysteria about drugs.
It’s the same feeling one gets from reading German novels set during the Nazi era. Novels like Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada. Or Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner. Fascist oppression affected people in ways that made daily routines for ordinary Germans bleak, uncertain, and dangerous, regardless of whether one was by definition an enemy of the state, or acted as the good German.
The Snowden revelations, and the complicity of the drug war in the creation of the present surveillance state, have exponentially increased the threat to freedom of action and thought throughout the world. The present government has within its surveillance power the ability to arrest the entire segment of casual drug consumers using manipulated data. Truth and justice are irrelevant in a corrupted government. The goal is to make us forget what it means to be free citizens. If these were the only threats posed by the drug war, it would be enough to justify ending it.
Freedom is about choosing between Pepsi or Coke . . . Browns or Vikings . . . Adidas or Nike . . . Fox or NBC . . . Pop radio or Pop radio . . . Saturn or Nissan . . . go medium or go large in the value meal. That is why millions of soldiers risk(ed) their life.
indeed… never as a child (ever ever ever) could I imagine being a child witnessing a drug raid in my home. It’s a disconnect my mind can’t make. Tho’ in perspective, had my father and mother been communists or black or yellow or any other condemnable-group-of-the-day, that wouldn’t have been true.
But there was always a point on which my childhood heroes stood – they fought for our freedom. And truly, by the words of our founding documents, our freedoms are inviolable and should our government grow to become a violator of those freedoms, the yoke of responsibility to redress those grievances in whatever manner the times dictate as most efficient to that end falls upon our shoulders.
As an adult, that penchant for heroes shifted as I learned history in a bit more detail and context. Crazy Horse and Gandhi, Edward Abbey and Mother Theresa… Bob Marley, Monty Python and all the avatars that graced my life with their own unique glow… all have made me a better advocate for all those for whom I speak.
I’m a happy guy. Until I’m not and I’m never happy with the WOD. The longer I stay at this the madderer I get. And if I ever need it I can think of my dad slogging thru the snow and frostbite in France, lugging around his machine gun trying to just stay alive in frozen hell. If he were here to hear me tell him what was going on, he’d be with us and just as mad as we are.
My mom on other hand would warn me to wear my helmet… “watch out for those falling bricks, you know that wall isn’t stable. And take your gloves!” Thanks mom… I know.
*rant off*
sorry… did I mention I called the psychotic hotline to get their predilections for the gnu year? I felt like Alice…
We did good last year, can’t wait to see what we get to do this year. Speaking of predilections, I sure hope the prohibs keep up their media blitz… public scorn and humiliation is as good as they get from here on out.
Although blacks use of marijuana is no higher than whites they are 4 times as likely to be imprisoned,,all you have to do is visit your local TDC and verify it for yourself.
I would say it has a lot more to do with their economical status,,they can’t afford lawyers,,that is why all prisons are filled with 99.9% poor,,if cops busted rich people for pot the arresting officer would probably miss hours on the job sitting through hearings and trials instead of arresting more marijuana users,,,it is not cost efficient giving prosecutors cases that won’t plea bargain and they have to spend limited funds on going to trials,,,besides,,if the police start busting rich people for marijuana possession laws get changed,,,poor people just keep on marching into prison.
Completely OT but just wanted to give a heads up to anyone planning to visit Payette, ID:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/walking-in-broad-daylight-is-suspicious-behavior/
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That one ranks right up there with the guy who got pulled over and searched because he was doing precisely the speed limit. At least the judge did toss that nonsense and even lectured the cop for doing it.
Don’t let me give them any ideas but it sure wouldn’t shock me to learn that some cop somewhere decides to pull someone over and search a vehicle because motor vehicles are often associated with the transportation of “narcotics.”
WOnderful. Well written and straight to the black heart of marijuana prohibition.
The power of status quo bias in shaping our perceptions and opinions is tremendous. That’s certainly the case with drug prohibition, and it applies even to those of us who oppose it. Drug prohibition is not merely an “ineffective” policy or a “waste of resources.” It’s not even just an “immoral” policy. It is a shockingly barbaric and evil policy.
aye Francis… we make it humorous here on the couch twixt ourselves but there is nothing funny about WODbeast.
Friedersdorf’s piece is spot on. But it’s still anger-lite.
Our indignation is truly righteous. WE didn’t make Peter McWilliams choke on his own vomit and die. WE aren’t the cops SELLING DRUGS that shot Patrick Dorismond. WE didn’t shoot Kathryn Johnston and plant pot in her home. WE haven’t been hiding for 40 years the FACT that cannabis is an effective cancer fighter. We don’t care what microscopic particles are in anybody’s urine… and we haven’t been committing fraud for a century.
I continue to stand on my statement that the drug war is a war of oppression and that those maintaining the WOD and profiting from the WOD are traitors committing treasonous acts.
And that spineless Prez Choom… he talks good but he don’t walk his talk. Cowardice? Bought-and-paid-for? or just too cool for school? Whatever. He’s as guilty as any.
If I couldn’t joke about it I would be carrying an AR 15 and hunting some sick mother fuckers.
word
Kevin likes to point out that “only a small percentage” of US state and federal prisoners were convicted of cannabis possession. This still adds up to thousands of people.
Over the last 50 years it’d be hundreds of thousands.
“In the United States, drug arrests have tripled in the last 25 years, however most of these arrests have been for simple possession of low-level drugs. In 2005, nearly 43% of all drug arrests were for marijuana offenses. Marijuana possession arrests accounted for 79% of the growth in drug arrests in the 1990s. Nearly a half million people are in state or federal prisons or a local jail for a drug offense, compared to 41,000 in 1980. Most of these people have no history of violence or high-level drug selling activity” – page 4
“With over 5 million people on probation or parole in the United States, drug use on parole or probation has become the primary basis by which thousands of people are returned to prison. These technical violations of parole or probation account for as many as 40% of new prison admissions in some jurisdictions.” – page 6
–Drug Policy, Criminal Justice and Mass Imprisonment, by Bryan Stevenson
Stop your whining Malc, Keith Humphrey’s says the prison population has fallen THREE YEARS IN A ROW!
…I can’t for the life of me understand while all these anti-prohibition types are so upset when mass incarceration isn’t even an issue any more under the Obama administration.
…I can’t for the life of me understand while all these anti-prohibition types are so upset when mass incarceration isn’t even an issue any more under the Obama administration.
Come now, Strayan, surely you’ve been reading the finely-edited-to-remove-any-rational-debate talking points at the Redaction Based Community long enough to know that it’s because anti-prohib types are all “opinionated, stubborn, ignorant, irrational, and angry” by nature.
23 million marijuana arrests since 1937 and counting,,,even now the federal government continues paying bounty money for marijuana arrests,,which means no matter what a memo recommends for a DA or prosecutor the police are going to arrest you for their funding,,,drug war still on!
Kevin likes to point out that “only a small percentage†of US state and federal prisoners were convicted of cannabis possession.
Yep. We didn’t really need that civil rights movement because “only a small percentage” of negros were being lynched. And, like the majority of those convicted prisoners, they were black. So it’s alright then.
I really hate it when someone of privilege downplays oppression against minorities as if they were equally affected. Like when Kleiman says “I think it’s worth taking the transition cost†to escalate the worst and most racist policies of prohibition to support tax revenue and high prices in re-legalizing states.
If and when America looks back in horror, I think it would be a good idea to remember the drug warriors who caused all the horror.
Payback is hell. Talking to you, drug warriors.
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Yesterday I bumped into a standard issue “well the death penalty would eliminate drug use once and for all” clown. It got me searching for failures of the death penalty among the usual suspect countries. Hold onto your hats my friends, this one is from the “beam me up Scotty, there’s no intelligent life on this planet” category:
Never in even my most extreme hallucinations did I think that I’d hear about a man already sentenced to death for dealing get busted for dealing. So have we reached the outer limits of the outer limits yet? No way, if you see a black swan, don’t be shocked if you turn around and see an entire flock. From page 4, same link as above:
Damn it Scotty, energize! Energize! Mr. Scott…? Mr. Scott…? Scotty! Don’t leave me here! I’m still alive for the love of god! Mr. Scott…?
The prohibidiots still have room to get more extreme on this though Duncan. I wouldn’t be surprised if they start to argue that anyone caught with drugs should be executed on the spot so they can’t go on selling drugs whilst they await the firing squad.
The prohibitionist are being run out of office,,this is just a start,,watch as cities and towns start removing the people that want to continue arresting marijuana users just because it helps them buy more military gear.
LA Sheriff Lee Baca expected to resign Tuesday
http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/local/los_angeles&id=9384016
LOS ANGELES (KABC) — Eyewitness News has learned that embattled Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca is expected to resign.
A source in county government, who spoke to the sheriff, told Eyewitness News that Baca intends to announce his resignation Tuesday morning.
Baca, 71, called the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and met individually with members of his command staff to make his intentions known.
The decision comes in the middle of Baca’s re-election campaign, and as 18 of his deputies face federal charges for inmate beatings. “snip”
He is the biggest opponent to marijuana reform in LA,TMK,and having him out is only half the job,,,getting him replaced with someone willing to lose the federal funding for marijuana arrests will be the problem.
Hopefully, the voters of LA County will elect a true Constitutional Sheriff this time, but I really do not expect it, I think most Californians wouldn’t know how to even determine if a candidate understands the Constitutional purpose of the Sheriff. Something about CA seems to make the people who live there blind to both the history of this country and to the reality of the mess they have created with the people they’ve elected over the past 50 years (or longer).
Noam Chomsky calls drug war a race war:
(watching CNN,,every show has a marijuana legalization story and not one pot joke yet,,impressive.)
5 pieces of propaganda Kevin Sabet wants you to get confused about while he lies his ass off. Thanks to the Huff for the prohibitionists forum on rebuttal lies: http://tinyurl.com/n4cyvpk
David Frum is already hitting the tweet button.
My bad I thought it was new. Its some old stuff from June.
OK, let me try to make up for the error of my ways. Is it immoral for a lobbying firm chairman to write an article entitled: Who will say no to marijuana? One whose lobbying firm includes multiple pharmaceutical interests?
http://tinyurl.com/lkxrsso
You can take a gander here: http://tinyurl.com/kq5b3jw
wow… that is sooo bad. If I wanted to look like a dumb-ass in a nat’l mag I would’ve written it just like that!
im sure hes hoping that most of his readers will be unaware that his 10 biggest clients are pharmas with a direct interest in the suppression of mmj. thanks t c for the research and tip off.
It just goes to show something: prohibs live in a mental bubble. It’s the only place their Walter Mitty fantasies about ‘saving society from drugs (and druggies)!’ can survive. Expose said fantasies publicly, and Reality immediately crushes them, courtesy of the Internet.
Many years ago, I read over at DEAWatch the ruminations of an agent who complained that they didn’t ‘educate’ the ‘kids’ well enough to be good little anti-drug robots (Of course, he couched it in more neutral terms, but that was the gist). They didn’t invest enough in an Internet ‘presence’ to counter reformer efforts.
Completely left out of his urinating-and-moaning was the fact that they were already known as the purveyors of lies, particularly to kids, and that the kids figured they were being lied to and went on the Internet and found out just how much they’d been lied to.
A long time ago, a science-fiction writer named Jerry Pournelle had posited that the Soviet Union could not continue in the age of the personal computer because the people could use them to find out the lies behind the official pronouncements.
The exact same dynamic is at work WRT drug prohibition. People are using the Internet to subvert the foundation of lies that the prohibitionists built up, oh-so-painstakingly, to create their own little taxpayer-funded ecological niche. That foundation is under attack daily from millions upon millions of virtual jackhammers, triggered every time someone use a computer to fact-check a prohib’s lies.
And that’s just about every time they move their mouths or type on their keyboards. Makes things so much simpler, doesn’t it?
Points for mentioning Jerry Pournelle (another of my favorite authors, got quite a few of his books on my library shelves).
Frankly, I don’t understand why it is taking so long to turn the public opinion against the prohibitches. Their lies were already being fact checked and exposed back in ’89, and not only online. 24 years to get only this far? S o s l o w in the age of instantaneous communication.
Windy, I can only surmise that with the slow ascent of the DARE Generation into its’ social and political majority, the impetus for change began to rise with them; the previous generation was too ensorcelled by prohib BS (which played on that generation’s innate racial and ethnic prejudices) to think anything needed reforming.
With them out of the way, courtesy of the Grim Reaper, the field became open for the long-suppressed reform impetus to finally erupt openly and fill the niche being vacated by those who blindly and unthinkingly supported prohibition.
The tech was always there; it was just there had to be enough people to desire to use it to effect the necessary change. That was the tipping point, the critical mass, so to speak. And, I’ll throw my tuppence in the hat, and say that, speaking as an ersatz historian, that was in 2009 with the Mark Phelps incident.
The ritual, formulaic, career-salvaging self-flagellations common to celebrities caught with contraband that were initially engaged in were greeted for the first time by a collective yawn, followed by a “Yeah, yeah, right, and we know it’s all kabuki, anyway, weed’s not that dangerous, so stop boring us with this BS.”
I knew back then and wrote as well right here that that was it; the long awaited tipping point had arrived, and that our time had come. That that collective yawn signaled that the old messages, that were specifically tailored for the previous generation, had been rejected by their replacements, and that would signal in turn the rise of a generation more socially and politically disposed to re-legalization. And everything that’s happened since then, with few exceptions, has followed that pattern.
A confluence of forces have arrived together from different quarters to produce a ‘perfect storm’ of reform. Computers were one catalyst among many. But once they were being wielded by enough reformers, they became the weapons for justice they are proving to be.
Excuse me, my bad; it was Michael Phelps, Olympian extraordinaire. ‘Amotivated’? Yeah, right, pull the other leg…
Comments are one-sided. Against. As expected by everyone except the author of that bilge.
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