Marijuana.com

xxdr_zombiexx

Crossposted from GreenState Project and Smirking Chimp

What costs more: Global Natural Disasters or America's War on Drugs?

Well...go on... take a guess.

You know the answer but it seems so absurd. It's hard to say it.

That's because it is a study in absurdity.

The world community spent $30 billion for global disasters in 2007. That $30 billion represents what was actually covered and paid for. It appears there was another $45 billion in assessed damage that wasn't paid for.

That article cites global warming as a very real factor in all this and indicates this will all only get worse.

Now consider this: America spends $50 billion a year on it's "war on drugs" alone, $500 billion since the 1970's.

All for nothing.

Paul Armentano, of NORML, writes in Ending America's Domestic Quagmire, that America spends $50 billion a year now on you-know-what.And a recent journalistic tour de force in Rolling Stone magazine cites "After Thirty-Five Years and $500 Billion, Drugs Are as Cheap and Plentiful as Ever: An Anatomy of a Failure."America wasted more money arresting people and putting them in prison than the world community spent trying to clean up and deal with 950 identified natural disasters.

Money spent vigorously making people's lives more difficult, rather than spent on making people's lives LESS difficult.

More from the Rolling Stone article, which talks at length about the failure of the War on Drugs military-style cocaine interdiction: People who smoke marijuana are a considerably larger percentage of the population that "drug addicts" or hard drugs users not otherwise specified.

Law enforcement arrested over 800,000 Americans for pot last year. Is that not astounding? How can that be "unimportant"?

If you realize that pot smoking isn't the horrible thing the ONDCP and others wish for you to believe, that all they will ever tell you is hype and propaganda; if you understand it is far less impactful than tobacco or alcohol (being non-fatal is one handy measure), and if you add to this realization that the main consequence of pot smoking is arrest and involvement in America's "justice system", then you should be able imagine that pot should not be "illegal".

If marijuana is relegalized, what will they have to do? The "pool" of hardcore drug users is dwindling, which is good for us but not so good for law enforcement budgets. Legal marijuana removes a huge focus of law enforcement attention.

Now, if you focus all that manpower and money wasted on marijuana n dealing with the hardcore folks, I suppose they could all be arrested and put in jail. Or community policing. Something that helps the community.

The legislative and law enforcement approach to "drugs" has been a failure, if for no other reason than it is fundamentally the incorrect solution to the problem. Addiction and drug abuse are medical problems first and foremost.

With the population of hard drugs users, one main issue is that in jail they still require care and a lot of these people will be high-maintenance and expensive to keep in prison. Treatment options and availability should be increased. In the end they need treatment because this is a medical issue first and foremost. So one way or another the government is going to pay for treatment for these people.

Which means, legal or illegal, you the tax payer WILL pay for their treatment, like it or not. I say it's better to fund treatment - make it part of the coming healthcare overhaul that is long overdue in this country.

For those who gasp or get all addled when this topic surfaces, relegalization means 2 basic things:

1: It means that cannabis was once legal. And by following the rules of the Constitution, reformers wish to make it legal again.

2: Relegalization means regulation.

Tobacco and alcohol are the models for rendering dangerous elements legally available. Regarding specifically tobacco regulation: citing statistics claiming that slightly more tenth-grade students have smoked pot than tobacco as evidence that regulation of tobacco works.What about the prison industry, though?

Lots of folks are in prison in America.

It's been a growth industryAnd we are no safer.

It's irresponsible.

Democratic Policy

It should be the goal of the Democratic party, since it's going to cast off the corporate influences and become a party of "the People", to end the "war on drugs" as it is now known.

The cannabis plant would be relegalized and regulated post haste. This is one of the few major issues that can be corrected relatively easily, quickly and cheaply. There is a massive logjam of laws that has to be addressed, but law enforcement can be ordered to stand down on all cannabis-related matters and their attention immediately diverted to more pressing issues. (unless we find we simply have too many...)

A committee would be needed to work on releasing marijuana prisoners from incarceration.

Effective drug policies would be drafted, including harm-reduction perspectives and drug-diversion courts for addicts.

All of this can start with Democratic Candidates talking about "the need for reform", when the issue arises. Because the issue is so highly emotional, thanks to decades of highly-emotionalized propaganda, real leadership on this issue will come in the form of Democratic leaders who talk simply and plainly about the overt failure of drug policy, and lament that change is needed.

Nearly half of America openly supports changing cannabis laws and doing something about the out-of-control nature of the current war on drugs. Democratic leaders should want to tap into that.

We spend more on chasing pot smokers and drug addicts in the US alone than was spent globally cleaning up from a year of natural disasters. Think what good could have been done with all that wasted money and human effort. It's just wrong to work that hard and spend such astronomical sums of money to make people more miserable than to help make them less miserable.

But then, I am a liberal.

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Alien Space Signal

There's no money for your issue so long as we're squandering $50 billion a year on the DrugWar. Ben Masel

Fear became the ultimate tool of this government - V.

 

Hashishi

A robust and uncompromising one- the only kind!

I think the argument that the population`s mean exposure to cannabis would be lessened in a legal environment stands. I`ve got no figures, but I remember reading, for instance, that Dutch cannabis use amongst the resident population has been in decline- couldn`t swear by it, though. Still, the consequences of a recently relegalised environment seem logical to me.

There is a basic paradigm that needs to be recognised: without a regulated market environment, you have anarchy. As has been recognised throughout history, anarchic systems don`t benefit humanity much. To be more specific, cannabis becomes a currency from the bottom to the top of the ladder- as is the way of the black market.

The Dutch system combats this by creating a legal buffer: it allows certain establishments the right to sell marijuana on their premises and everybody to smoke and possess marijuana in certain quantities and on certain premises but it remains effectively illegal for the vendors to buy the cannabis. That`s my understanding, at least.

So here`s the crux, as I see it: the international drug war is a force of its own and it will encroach domestically- no matter what. Large gains can be made through creating a buffer, as the Dutch have shown: by creating a regulated market for cannabis and perhaps other drugs, and certainly the majority can be decriminalised for possession of liberal amounts: we`re not worried about people having weed handy to 'share': we`re worried about those who actively participate in a competitive market- regardless of their intentions, they are engaging with an enemy to effective international security and the methods by which they go about it have been shown to be socially harmful in a large enough proportion of cases to warrant serious concern.

Nixon might have declared the drug war, but he didn`t start it.

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SWP



"I'm not into this detail stuff. I'm more concepty." -- "If I know the answer I'll tell you the answer, and if I don't, I'll just respond, cleverly." -- "Secretary Powell and I agree on every single issue that has ever been before this administration except for those instances where Colin's still learning." -- "As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns: the ones we don't know we don't know."

Viper420

I don't think this is a liberal or conservative issue. Ron Paul is in favor of legalized MJ and most people wouldn't consider him a liberal. William F. Buckley is a conservative and supports MJ legalization.

xxdr_zombiexx

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xxdr_zombiexx

Note that "liberal" and "libertarian" are related to "liberty".

Cannabis relegalization is an umbrella issue, the polar opposite of a wedge issue. Gay marriage is a fabulous example of a wedge issue - designed to split groups apart. An umbrella issue trenasenced discernible diffrences to encourage unity. Relegalization is that issue.

Regarding my liberal comment, that is best viewed in contextRelegalization, to me, is a branch of social work. It will improve life in these United States for all people, not just a tiny wealthy demographic.

I posted this article at Daily Kos, where it got featured on the "Resue" list (Honorable mention), Smirking Chimp, where it got 1500 reads in about a day, and it got run across the BUZZFLASH BUZZ box on the BUZZFLASH front page.

We have 10 months until elections. This 10 months will be wild and NOW is the time to really hammer on candidates as well as public opinion. Despite being blacked out of the Mainstream Media (like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich), cannabis reform IS a viable issue.

2008 Democratic candidate positions on Cannabis Reform is an overview of the different Democratic candidate positions on cannabis reform. I didn't waste time on GOP attitudes since, aside from the quirky Ron Paul, they will never entertain relegalization.

While the Democrats have been almost completely useless in getting reform moving, they don't have reefer madness as a guiding internal value. [See this in particular.]

I have noticed over the years that "conservatives" seem to think reform is their issue, but they've never done anything but expel hot air over it.

It is properly a liberal/progressive issue.