Issues that Divide Us #2: Drugs

Of course, I am referring to illegal drugs of all kinds, whether they be prescription drugs, obtained without proper authorization, or drugs that are illegal in all cases. The various injustices surrounding the extortionate cost of many legitimately-prescribed drugs is an argument for another day.

The biggest question that looms over our society today is over the status of marijuana, medicinal or not. My co-AC content producer, Donald Pennington, has written an excellent article, which I commend to your attention on the subject, and for which I will provide a link. In a nutshell, the best reasons for legalizing marijuana are 1) that we have more important uses for our limited prison resources than to incarcerate people who smoke, grow or even sell the stuff; 2) it is not physically addictive, the way tobacco certainly is; 3) it almost certainly has medicinal uses; 4) if controlled and reasonably taxed, it could help substantially to get distressed localities, such as California, out of a severe budget crunch; 5) to remove the illegality and prospect of incarceration, will remove the incentive for the criminal element to sell marijuana.

What the article I cited did not do, and did not claim to do, was to examine the arguments in favor of the present pot laws. Keep in mind, if marijuana is not a physically addictive drug, it can easily become an emotionally addictive one. It is naïve to say the drug does not produce addicts: it does. The only difference is the biological dependency that makes other things like heroin and cigarettes more difficult to get over. Marijuana by itself, not laced with some other horrendous agent, such as PCP, does not inspire wild, destructive behavior, but it does sap ambition. And, while too much ambition is a bad thing, a person ought to have at least some. Finally, the stoned driver is every bit as dangerous as the drunk driver.

But consider for a moment: how does our society deal with liquor? It is legal where jurisdictions permit it (Remember the amendment repealing Prohibition did not make liquor legal across the board. Rather, it left it up to individual jurisdictions whether or not they wanted to legalize it. Even today, there are "dry" counties and townships. If that's the way they want it, they should be able to have their wishes respected, since they can no longer impose them on the rest of the nation.).

On the other hand, the individual who chooses to drink is responsible for his behavior. The inebriated motorist who runs over a five-year-old child is not permitted to get off with the excuse, "It wasn't my fault, officer. I was drunk." Likewise the host of a party who permits some immature young person to drink him or herself to death (which can and does happen) can be considered legally liable. The point here is that legalizing a mood-altering substance does not remove the user's responsibility to behave lawfully. My belief is that pot should get the same deal as booze.

That said, if it does come about, I can see all our politicians, from both sides of the isle, slavering and rubbing their hands with glee over the windfall of revenue that will come streaming into local and national treasuries. Yes, of course, that is one of the arguments for legalization, but, if you, our leaders, get too greedy, as I can just imagine you will, then you will have fixed only a small part of the problem. If you make legalized marijuana so ridiculously expensive that it is going to cause potential purchasers financial distress, what do you imagine will happen? To save, not just a buck but a big bunch of bucks, many, many users will eschew the legalized stuff and get theirs tax-free on the black market, putting the criminals right back in business and making a new class of criminals out of the users.

As it is, I sometimes shake my head at the craven cowardice of our politicians-again on both sides-who are too frightened to make the general taxpayers pay for all the services they clamor for, so they look to escalate the so-called "sin tax" by jacking up the tax on liquor and cigarettes yet even more. In a very short time, people, you are going to tax those things off the legitimate market and onto the illegitimate market, where they are already available to some extent. Of course, making the poor pay more for their smokes is not going to balance the budget by any means, so our national debt skyrockets. I'm only saying, bear this in mind if and when the opportunity to tax marijuana arises.

Okay, that was the easy part. Now what about the so-called "hard drugs?" To tell you the truth, I do not have a ready answer for this one, except that the subject needs to come up for open and public debate.

Well, there is one easy fix that ought to be put in place. Let's stop pretending that crack cocaine is something other than cocaine. The harsher penalties against that drug in rock form have obviously been instituted to put more black people in jail for a longer time, while the children of high society can toot the powder, sometimes with nothing worse than probation if they are caught. Lawmakers, I do not presume to say what the penalty should be for cocaine use or sale. If you want to bust all users and sellers of all cocaine for thirty years, then so be it. If you want to lighten up on those same people, that's fine too. Let's have some justice to the system, please. That's all.

But the bigger and harder question is should cocaine and drugs that are even more dangerous be legalized? Should they all be lumped in the same category, for that matter? I think if you remove the aberrant behavior that comes with illegality, some of these drugs may not be inherently that dangerous to others, while others may be. Thus, a junkie who no longer has to steal to get his heroin might not be such a grave threat to society, but a PCP user is likely to act in a crazy and destructive way, no matter how he got the stuff.

So, what about those drugs that themselves do not have a strong propensity to cause violent behavior? Should we legalize them? Again, by far the largest harm the heroin addict does to society comes from the things he must do to get the money to feed his habit. Second on the list is the violence that comes from the "drug lords" battling over territory, where many of them think it's perfectly all right to gun down a small child in their attempt to take out a rival with a spray of gunfire. If you legalize these drugs, you put the thugs out of business. No amount of armed security we put in place on our southern border and no amount of cooperation on the part of our neighbors is going to stop the Mexican drug cartels anywhere nearly as effectively as taking the premium out of the products they sell by legalizing them for use.

Might people overdose and die, though? That is an excellent point. For a long time, my position on legalizing the drugs harder than marijuana was that, if one person, who would have otherwise refrained, dies from an overdose because heroin became legal, than we as a society are all complicit in that death. On the other hand, some may take the harsher view that the person who died from the now-legal overdose, brought it on himself or herself. (And, at that, with the legalized drugs under some control and standards, the overdose might become a little less likely). That may be too simplistic a point of view. Many addicts did not have becoming a junkie as their life's ambition and probably feel trapped in a hopeless situation. They are not undeserving of our compassion.

Well, consider this: people sometimes drink themselves to death. All people who smoke are, to a greater or lesser extent, smoking themselves to death. What we have to ask ourselves as a society (and, again, I do not purport to know the correct answer) is: do we act as occasional enablers for destructive behavior that might not have otherwise happened in exchange for defeating the very worst criminals in our society? Anybody who imagines we are someday going to catch, jail or kill all of those monsters, and that will be the end of it, is nothing more than a babbling fool.

Then too, should we presume to tax these harder drugs? To do so will put us in the position, in effect, of dealing the drugs. On the other hand, it would be good to have some oversight as to their distribution. This is an extremely complicated issue.

Still, it is an issue we need to discuss, openly and freely, without recriminations to individuals. Of course, I know perfectly well that our political leaders could face some very real recriminations (i.e., being tossed out of office) by bringing the matter up. But stop and consider, my cowardly lions of Congress. Suppose you do get voted out of office for having the courage to discuss something the demagogues will punish you for? Most of you are lawyers, and, without doubt, the most successful and prestigious law firms in your former constituency would be ripping each other's faces off in the competition to land you as a full partner. Also, you will be able to command huge bucks for opening your yaps at any number of occasions. Finally, you are well and generously pensioned, even for having served one term in your elected office. That is as it should be, but it is in place so that you can have the financial freedom to take the unheard-of courageous stand, without the threat of penury looming in your future.

Finally, we have the matter of abused prescription drugs. Oddly enough, though I tend somewhat to be more open to legalization of many illegal drugs, I am dead-set against removing the restrictions on prescription drugs. First of all, insidious as they are, cocaine, morphine, heroin, LSD and other such drugs have been with us for decades, if not centuries. We know and understand a lot more about them than we do many of the prescription drugs that are illegally obtained and sold. Then too, no doctor is even allowed to prescribe cocaine, for example (and never should be), but, because these other drugs have some legitimate use in the practice of medicine, to ease up on their severe restrictions would make the current malpractice mess seem reasonable by comparison to what would follow.

And remember, Michael Jackson did not overdose on heroin.

Sources

AC Content Producer Donald Pennington
Own observation