Alcohol use leads to the deaths of 79,000 in this country every year. It is linked to a high percentage of all assaults, fights, rapes, spousal abuse, and child abuse. Alcohol reduces inhibitions and increases aggression. On the other hand, marijuana use produces relaxation and passivity and has never been linked to even one death, ever.
The lesson is that making a behavior illegal does not stop the behavior; it never has and never will. It only serves to make criminals of those who continue to do it, create a massive bureaucracy charged with enforcement, drain tax dollars away from more productive programs, and facilitate the formation of an illegal industry that will provide the service or sell the product. The end result being that crime actually goes up instead of down.
What is the answer? Decriminalization will not remove the profit motive which drives the violent turf battles among the criminals running the industry. Legalization, however, would ensure quality control thus keeping users safer, regulate sales thus taking the criminal element out of it, free up law enforcement to deal with other crimes, greatly ease overcrowding in our penal system, and provide revenue for government agencies to deal with treatment and rehabilitation. A sometimes overlooked benefit is that users would no longer have to deal with a criminal element to obtain marijuana thus removing themselves from some very bad influences.
But such common sense and practical views are met with aggressive resistance from pharmaceutical companies who fear the competition that a legal marijuana industry would bring for their legal drugs. Law Enforcement agencies have also gotten used to the bloated budgets that come with a "war on anything. And more recently, the development of a prison-industrial complex has created a powerful lobbying group that would like to see the profit-making prison industry grow, not shrink, and that means encouraging the imprisonment of more, not fewer, people.
Whenever people make a lot of money from something they will fight fiercely to maintain the status quo to protect their power and profits often employing a well crafted misinformation campaign to scare the public into submission. The war on drugs is no different. Resistance to change is fierce.
It's certainly acceptable to be against mind-altering drugs on moral grounds. But the answer is not prohibition, it is education and treatment and the best way to accomplish that is through legalization. Unfortunately for Americans, their money and their children will continue to be wasted on a war against a relatively benign behavior until a majority of voters realize that you cannot ever win a war against a behavior through the use of brute force and that there is a more sane and compassionate way.
You can learn more on the movement to legalize marijuana
from groups like the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws
(NORML) and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). You can also listen to Houston radio station KPFT at 90.1fm and
their shows "Cultural Baggage and "Century of Lies" hosted by Dean Becker airing at 6:30pm and 7:00pm on Sundays.
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