Not much point in reading an article arguing for weed prohibition when it doesn't have a single word about alcohol vs. cannabis, which is of course the real issue.
I think that the case for cannabis legalization and drug law reform can be made without any necessity to resort to whataboutist arguments. Opponents prefer arguing on the merits of comparisons between pot and alcohol to arguing in favor of the Drug War on its merits- which, upon examination, are practically nonexistent.
They are both psychoactive drugs but alcohol has FAR more of a link to VIOLENCE than cannabis does, and excessive alcohol use is FAR more damaging to physical health than excessive cannabis use. How dare people use the more dangerous drug and ORDER their FELLOW CITIZENS not to use an indisputably safer one! And to make it worse, the people giving the orders are the same folks who go on and on and on and on forever about freedom. The only freedom they care about it their goddamn own! Stinking hypocrites without a leg to stand on!
came here to say “I’m an alcoholic… that’s it, that’s all I wanted to say.” that attitude is also reflected in the super brief line about how “most people” are not suggesting broader legalization policies for drugs like cocaine. sir…a drug is a drug is a drug is a drug, their physiological effects and addiction rates and addiction outcomes differ, but just because one addictive drug was the choice of the British empire (or more than one- alcohol, caffeine, nicotine) it doesn’t mean other drugs are inherently different in ANY way whatsoever with regard to smart public policy for addictive drugs that maintains a focus on public health and bodily autonomy. I am sympathetic to the idea that marijuana legalization has not been pursued in a nuanced enough way to protect public health and safety, but you lose me completely when your takeaway is “well you know politically it would be hard to do in a better, positive way so instead of this big dumb policy let’s go back to the other one.” marijuana arrests keep people out of work and struggling, and while state prison time might only be slightly more than 1 in 10 (!!!) for drug offenses I think there’s an argument to be made that peoples lives and finances and health (and their faultless children’s) are far more drastically impacted by criminalization than by addiction, which by the way isn’t helped AT ALL by criminalization!!! I’m for highly regulated drug legalization or decrim and I appreciated the link to alternative models, I’ve also considered that it might be best executed through medical care (to where your doctor could “prescribe” a psychedelic or MDMA or a recreational drug in a moderated amount upon request to maintain a usage record for intervention if necessary). consumption limits are not a bad idea. a complete lack of consistency just because that’s what has been done up to this point IS. because our healthcare system is fucked too, and mental healthcare is treated like a joke, over 50% of US counties don’t even have a licensed psychiatrist - so the idea that continuing to criminalize addiction for some substances while allowing people intoxicated on others to spike crime rates, all because we can’t treat and deal with addiction like the public health crisis it is, is maddening. the idea that people don’t care about quality control also drives me crazy, it goes back to your point, people would still be making bathtub gin if safe alternatives weren’t available, and the economic lens is just… “Colorado has had legal weed for 10 whole years and 1/3 still buy illicit” oh shit you mean in one decade the entire nature of buying & selling drugs hasn’t shifted after a century of reliance on illicit networks?? I’m shocked!!! it’s just so goddamn frustrating, I agree with the “more persuasive arguments” that people should be able to do what they want with their bodies and drugs are fun, but I also know with my brain that drugs are addictive and statistically everything that we criminalize from a puritanical mindset becomes completely corrupted and dangerous for people in the absence of regulation. internet porn is addictive, and it can be degrading, and there is exploitation, but the second it becomes criminalized it will be an all out free for all for the people in that world, for consumers, and effecting everyone outside the prison industrial complex negatively. it’s so easy to sit in one life that’s gone one way and go “no no, that’s better, that’s better for all the rest of us” but the continuing pattern is that it’s not, that plenty of men of status and wealth are completely physically addicted to alcohol or cocaine or another drug of choice, they are not exempt from public health crises, they are not exempt from benefiting from the labor of sex workers, they are not exempt from gay sex or other formerly criminalized behavior that is associated with morality instead of physiology, and it’s unfair and gross to act like some things should remain criminalized just because some people can get around that without huge, life altering consequences. it hurts all of us, it really hurts people in recovery because it’s crowded in secrecy… and it’s tiring. rant over ugh I had so much hope for this analysis.
"you lose me completely when your takeaway is 'well you know politically it would be hard to do in a better, positive way so instead of this big dumb policy let’s go back to the other one.'"
Really. The argument already contained some disputable points, but that was where it completely went off the rails.
Myself, I think the marijuana and alcohol are about the same. Soft drugs that aren't good but maybe shouldn't be flat out illegal. Tax and regulate.
It's certainly possible that prohibition might have been a better idea in decades past. It's harder to prohibit things that are already prevalent and have a market, and that has to affect whether you try prohibition. But the cat is out of the bag.
The real problem is that people want to consider pot cool and blame crime on criminalization. It would be better if pot were lower status and everyone admitted that crime had different causes (and possibly that the IQ and inhibition lowering affects of drugs increases crime).
You can think what you like pal but if you were to look at reality you would see that alcohol causes way more problems than weed. I mean just ask a cop. Fights in bars? Check. Fights at pot parties (or "coffee shops" in Holland)? Nope, not really. For the record I like 'em both. So what?
A fight in a bar typically only ruins one evening. Like you, many people like 'em both. Do we really need stoned people driving drunk? Isn't being simply drunk bad enough? I've been that terrified passenger with a stoned drunk at the wheel on more than one occasion. I'm grateful and lucky to be here and to have never witnessed other innocent people dying. The only thing worse than a drunk is a stoned drunk.
So for some reason with someone both stoned & drunk you're okay with drunk. Which is utterly stupid 'cause driving drunk is waaay more dangerous than driving stoned.
But if you routinely ride with drunk drivers you really are quite stupid. I'd rather walk. Actually if someone is gonna drive drunk some pot might be in order since it would probly get them to slow down. Would only work if they were regular pot heads.
If people driving under the influence of cannabis were actually a serious problem worthy of law enforcement concentration, it would have made the headlines decades ago, because millions of people have been doing it regularly for decades. It's only been 'discovered" as a "problem" or "menace" in the aftermath of legalization in some of the states, as if the situation only emerged in the last ten years.
I used to drive a cab in Sacramento, on the night shift for years; I regularly hauled passengers who had driving license suspensions for DUI. I never once had a passenger who had been arrested for driving under the influence of marijuana. I've talked to lawyers and police about "marijuana DUI." I used to solicit those observations. In all my conversations, I heard of one case- and it was someone who was pulled over while smoking behind the wheel.
In the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, I attended a couple dozen music concerts in arenas and stadium-sized venues where the majority of the crowd got high before, during, and after the show. I used to stay until the parking lot had cleared out, because if there's one thing a driving professional can't stand, it's being stuck in traffic. In my decades of show-going, I observed a total of one fender-bender in the lot.
If cannabis was as bad as alcohol, the headlines in the aftermath of every one of those shows would have featured multiple collisions and mass carnage on the highways. Or, at minimum, mass arrests for DUI. If cannabis DUI had presented a problem, finding out about it would have required only a glance at the next day's headlines.
My argument is not that cannabis is worse than alcohol. My argument is that alcohol can be consumed as a beverage as opposed to a drug. Many people have one or two drinks and then refuse the second or third drink. Sober, no menace to anyone, on the road nor in a bar. Cannabis is always consumed as a drug. The people who claim that they need cannabis to deal with pain would consume it as a drug anyway. The mostly men living on the streets doing opioids are less likely to have started out as alcoholics than to have started out as pot smokers. Cannabis is too often a gateway drug. Alcohol has wreaked enough havoc on society. Why would anyone want to add YET another drug to the mix? There are not too many great "stoners" in history. There are, however, many great happy drunks in history. Winston Churchill, for one.
As a teenager in the 1970s, I occasionally drove A) drunk, B) stoned, and C) drunk and stoned. C was definitely the worst ... I can't tell which was worse between A and B.
I agree that the impairment increase from even a small amount of alcohol added to cannabis is significant. I've been known to add a beer or two to a cannabis buzz, but only on occasions when I'm not driving. I'm hesitant to even get on a bicycle if I'm doing that.
But I've had extensive experience and observation of the effects of driving after using cannabis alone, and my conclusions are roughly in lines with those of Andrew Weil, MD over 50 years ago: in the commonly used dosages, cannabis is a catalyst to a mild mind-altering shift that isn't nearly as profound or debilitating as alcohol intoxication, and once people become familiar with the effects, as a rule they're able to perform activities like driving capably. Safely enough that I've never worried about getting in the car with a driver who had been smoking pot...hey, I was a cab driver.
Andrew Weil got it right about weed 50 years ago, in The Natural Mind. There's a reason why sports like snowboarding, halfpipe skateboarding, and surfing have such a long association with weed smokers, even at the elite level. Athletes trained in their skill can do all sorts of fancy gravity defying precision tricks while high out their mind on kine bud. That isn't possible with alcohol. Nobody ever learned how to carve those tracks while drunk. The extreme athletes save the beer for the ski lodge, the backyard, and the beach. At the physical coordination, balance, and athletic performance level, it's no contest: marijuana doesn't impair experienced users, but alcohol follows a very steep increase of impairment with increasing quantity.
This finding has repeatedly shown up in driving simulator tests, incidentally. The researchers keep trying ways to make weed wrong in those studies; these days, studies resort to tactics like force-toking the subjects (including cannabis newbies) for fifteen minutes and shoving them in the simulator ten minutes later- or torturing the data by moving the goalposts of the parameters said to detect impairment- in order to do it. And even then, the experienced stoners refuse to play along.
I'm of the mind that the epidemiological evidence is where the rubber meets the road on this question- there's plenty of data available, and even laypeople with basic math skills (ratios, percentages) can make reasoned and accurate inferences from the numbers without third-order extrapolated meta-analysis, chi-square distributions, or regression plots. Long story short: the smartphone began to add a whole other level of complication to safe driving about 10 years ago, and hopefully the problem will level off and decline. But we've had millions of stoned drivers on the road for around 55 years, and their performance doesn't track differently from the average. There's even some statistical indication that they do better. Even as far as clinical studies, after 40+ years of driving simulator tests, the meta-takeaway is still "the evidence for impairment is inconsistent." A neat choice of words. And not one that's applied to similar studies of alcohol impairment.
( That said, I'm opposed to using per se alcohol levels as sole proof of DUI. I think police cameras and performance tests are more accurate. I heard enough credibly narrated horror stories about overzealous DUI enforcement as a cabdriver in California that I've gotten very skeptical of chemical forensics to determine impairment. Scores of DUI convictions have been overturned and cases dismissed on account of investigations into bad lab work, in some local regions of the US. Peter Lance really booked a case on DUI enforcement abuses in his writings on the topic. http://peterlance.com/wordpress/?p=1214 )
Some skilled skateboarders can handle a bit of alcohol, I suppose. But you'd have to be a hell of a young, eagle-eyed mesomorph- and a practiced drinker- to skate half pipe after drinking a 40 oz. beer. I can't imagine anyone making a regular practice of that.
Mentally, I think a cannabis buzz is about equivalent to a one or two beer high, at most. But I've realized- also through experience- that I don't want a one-beer high when I'm learning a new scholastic skill, or a mental activity like learning a new language or a musical instrument. I want a two-coffee high, at least until I'm able to get a confident grasp of the activity. I want to learn stuff, not be high all the time.
I, too, occasionally drove drunk or drunk and stoned as a teenager in the 1970s. (I'm early 1970s. The HS class of 1973 is on the whole very different from the HS class of 1979, culturally.) It really was a different world...I knew at least one guy who had racked up three DWIs by his senior year in high school. And that's how long it took him to get his first license suspension. His first offense, was, I shit you not, a $50 fine. I think he also got 3 points on his driving record- and, if memory serves, 9 points meant a suspension. He got three DWIs in three years, the last one he wrapped his GTO around a telephone pole. So that was the 70s.
That guy was one of several of my high school classmates to get popped for alcohol DWI. But I never once heard of a single one of my classmates getting into an accident of any kind while driving stoned on pot, much less being pulled over for DWI. That empirical observation also influenced my opinion that marijuana didn't impair good driving the way alcohol does.
Not that I occasionally drove while high on pot, of course. I did it all the time. As did many of my classmates. I've since concluded that getting high on weed all the time at that age was a wrong, bad decision- at minimum, a terrible waste of time, opportunity, and my own resources. But impaired ability to drive safely was never part of the problem.
As for my experiences driving drunk on alcohol: for the grace of G~d, here I am, unscathed and unmarked by guilt. I never got in an accident, and not once was I pulled over by police, not even the time (or two?) when I was so loaded that I had to hold one hand over my eye to stay in my lane. I will give credit to what remained of my good judgement at the time that I had slowed the speed of the car to 15 miles an hour in order to compensate for the delays in my reaction time.
Yes, I was a bust. Even if it was only $50 and 3 points on my record, my parents- whose car it was- would have been scandalized. The weight of a full-scale shonda, only gentile style (more cross-cultural similarity there than is implied by the Yiddishism.) All it would have taken is crossing paths with one patrol car. But I was spared.
As for mixing cannabis with alcohol: if I'm not driving, I can pace a drink every hour while eating and have fun while being happily spaced out on pot. I might do that a couple times a year. Social occasions in the summertime.
But in the days when I drank to get drunk- a practice that predated my pot smoking, and one that I've long since given up- a few tokes of weed, and spin city. The vomitorium, baby. No bueno.
That untoward reaction to adding weed on top of a drunk would probably require only one toke of today's overhyped unsubtle superweed that I don't care for, incidentally. But since I have little use for pseudo-elite ultrahigh THC indoor grown factory weed, and even less use for getting hammered on booze, I don't plan to find out.
Many bar fights end in death or permanent injury. Many women are killed and raped by violent alcoholics. Cannabis does not have the same link to violence that alcohol does, you're not being fair.
I've seen my fair share of bar fights ... I don't know where you grew up but in my small Canadian town, no one ever died nor ended up with a permanent injury. I don't doubt that many women have suffered at the hands of a violent drunk (I'm a happy drunk, by the way) but that is no argument for pot, er ... cannabis.
The alcohol and cannabis comparison is flawed. Alcohol CAN be enjoyed simply as a beverage rather than as a drug (e.g. I have never seen my mother finish her second drink over a 50 year period). Cannabis is ALWAYS enjoyed as a drug even when used medicinally. Full disclosure: I enjoy both of them as drugs.
You're blowing smoke to try to confuse people. The use of the drug alcohol is so much more likely to lead to catastrophe than cannabis use that there is utterly no comparison.
How many people do you claim cannabis kills in a year? The figure for alcohol has skyrocketed in recent years to well over 100,000 lives a year, many of them innocent victims of murder and drunk driving murder.
Couldn't agree with you more. Let's treat alcohol like they did during Prohibition and see how it goes. I don't claim any number when it comes to cannabis but I was stoned enough times as a teenager to know that it is every bit as dangerous as alcohol.
I don't think so. I've certainly seen folks take a coupla puffs & then pass. Not what I usually do to be sure. But back when my liver could handle alcohol I didn't stop at one drink either. I think you're confused by words. We tend to call pot a drug but not alcohol. But that's just word usage. One can drink NA beer if one only wants the beverage experience. Most folks drink the kind with alcohol. 'Cause they want the effect, possibly in a light sort of way, just a little more relaxed etc
Lol I don’t think you know what a drug is. If my friend has a beverage containing THC and doesn’t finish it they are still ingesting a drug. Your mom is ingesting a drug even if she’s not getting *twisted* and alcohol is always enjoyed as a drug too bc water and other beverages…exist 🫠
a drug is defined as “a medicine or other substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body.” so advil is a drug as much as heroin as much as viagra as much as alcohol as much as nicotine as much as ketamine. commonly used in contexts like “the war on drugs” to indicate “a substance taken that affects mood or behavior that is taken for its physiological effects (sophoriphic, stimulant, analgesic, etc.)”. alcohol meets this definition, as does mdma, as does heroin, as does oxycodone, as does prozac. thanks for your input 😊 big statement, really glad you didn’t try to back it up.
it is telling the author never bothers to attempt to explain *how* re-criminalization would be enforced as a practical matter.
further, this polemic contains some other major fallacies (perhaps by design).
for example: it is conventional wisdom that today's cannabis is much stronger than cannabis of yesterday. this is true -- and what was it that happened in the intervening decades? it was prohibition. it is also conventional wisdom, at least among cannabis experts, that the potency spike was a result of prohibition. thus the author's neat conclusion that prohibition equals weaker product is ill-informed speculative fiction.
further, to claim cannabis's effect on the criminal justice system begins and ends at marijuana arrests is to admit at best a superficial understanding of the criminal justice system. for starters: 1/4 of the prison population is incarcerated for parole violations. a common parole violation is a positive drug test. cannabis is the most readily detected drug. what is cannabis's effect on parole violations? this does not even appear to enter the author's thinking. what's more, he fails to consider (perhaps deliberately) marijuana criminalization as an entry into the criminal justice system. a drug arrest can lead to many downstream negative consequences, including reduced employment opportunities, which in turn can lead to (wait for it) more serious crimes.
as for the rest: I see cherry-picking studies that support his thesis and ignoring the many more that detract from it; I see hoary tropes and I see bias in search of intellectual foundation. at least he didn't trot out the gateway drug fallacy?
You are an expert at setting up straw men and knocking them down. The substitute isnt opiates - its alcohol.
Its not just pain and MS - its also ADHD and Autism. The arrests even if they don’t lead to prison can result in taking away of kids, denial of student loans, and losing of jobs.
I am ASD and ADHD. I am 40. Time and time again, when I quit THC/CBD, my life gets worse. My job performance actually suffers. I gain weight. I drink more alcohol.
You would vote to keep me away from it. It is hard for me to accept people like you.
I did quit again last year because my source was also dealing fentanyl.
Result? My life is objectively worse.
I can vape THC/CBD and it affects me very differently. Stimulants calm me down - I can drink coffee and go to sleep.
If I went to a doctor, theyd give me amphetamines or Xanax. Compared to those, pot is like water.
Here because the times columnist cited you in his pitiful op-ed "Legalizing Marijuana is a Big Mistake". As was already mentioned in the comments, arguing about the "costs of marijuana use" without comparing them to the costs of perfectly legal alternatives such as alcohol is misleading at best. For instance, alcohol is the fourth leading preventable cause of death, killing an estimated 140,000 people annually. Marijuana, on the other hand, is linked to about 350.
Further, trying to draw a connection between an increase in opioid related deaths and legalized marijuana is tenuous at best. It could just as easily be argued that the increase in opioid mortality is linked to the concurrent proliferation of Fentanyl in the American drug market as well as the fact that "street" dealers, due to a reduction of marijuana related profits, are pushing their harder products more, cutting it to boost profits, etc.
As for arrests generally increasing, it's also quite possible that law enforcement, not pre-occupied with marijuana related offenses (which tend to be attention grabbing due to the smell and possible indiscretion of marijuana users when buying off the street), are actually able to focus on more pressing issues.
However, I think my biggest qualm here is your dismissing something being recreationally enjoyable as a viable reason for legalization. Why is alcohol legal? Why are cigarettes legal? Its arguable that they cause far more harm than good, and cigarettes especially tax the American health care system extensively. These, however, are available primarily because people enjoy them (and of course, because there is profit to be made). Personally, I don't even believe that a reduction in arrests or opioid deaths is necessary in the argument for legalization. Instead, given that a large portion of the population enjoys it, and the overall costs are minimal and tend to be related to personal issues (self-degradation or potentially some mental health issues) as opposed to societal issues, I see any reasoning beyond it being popularly enjoyed as extremely superfluous.
If you don't want to smoke, then don't smoke. If you don't want your kids to smoke, well, even legal marijuana isn't available to minors. However, stop trying to hide behind useless, unrelated statistics and instead look at the fact that that cannabis prohibition in and of itself only came into being in 1937 and, generally speaking, is a very recent thing considering the history of cannabis use stretching back to ancient civilization. Is marijuana legalization really the hill to die on when people are being gunned down by legal firearms on a regular basis?
If you can use killer alcohol, I can use far safer weed. Period. The damage done by alcohol supremacist thug bigotry over the last 100+ years is infinite and much of it is irreparable. Lives destroyed and blighted by this POS law.
Reductionist and paints an outdated, fragmented, and thus incomplete picture, all the while vacillating between passive language and a sort of pseudo-intellectual, authoritative "I..." statements.
Never a mention of ethanol, which would seem to check the exact same checkboxes that this author says merit criminalization. Inconsistency and blatant dishonesty(lie by omission) sticks out to any honest reader, instantly negating any authority might have been established.
Bulk of article is just boilerplate filler. With the exception of providing data charts, the author has put forward zero original thought, nor brought anything new to the table. Outdated: Not a peep about the Hemp(thca) Industry, 2018 Farm Bill, or other recent developments. Boilerplate: Never attempted to tie multiple ideas together(easiest way to have an original thought) that didnt already come prepackaged that way.
Not sure what the point of the libertarian rant was about. The "look where I was intellectually and see how much I've grown"-story betrays the genuine, underlying heart of, "look and see how smart I am." So you essentially went from having conservative values but not wanting to force others to confrom.....to having those same conservative values and now feeling a need to force others to conform.
Tl;dr: Your introspection is miles wide, yet barely skin deep.
Somebody definitely did & that's who I was responding too.
Ah, the slippery slope argument. You do realize that to make that work you have to explain why this particular slope is slippery, don't you? There's plenty of slopes I've managed to climb. Both literally & figuratively. And I stayed on top as long as I wanted to. No slipping.
No one has the liberty to use weed (smoked or otherwise) and no one has the liberty to use alcohol? Why not and who decides? What about the solemn pledge of liberty and justice to all? What else do you claim the right to ban cause you don't like it?
True, you said that you had on more than one occasion ridden in a car driven by a drunk person. In response I said you were stupid. Which I still believe. Whether I'm stoned or not.
Not much commentary on what I believed was utter nonsense: That tax revenue from legal pot sales were going to be a game changer for state government. Any poll in NJ would find a major public concern is out of control property taxes and local government budgets. Yet Gov Murphy hasn't even suggested this supposed windfall of revenue as a cure for these issues.
Additionally, as a heavy user for 2 decades I can certainly attest to the the drugs inhibition of productivity and creator of other social ills.
Yes, alcohol creates similar, if not worse, affects. I agree 100%. But does that mean we should just throw the baby out with the bath water?
california nets more than $1 billion per year from cannabis taxes, more than double cigarette and alcohol taxes combined. it is not funding the pentagon by itself by any means but any argument that tax revenue is insignificant is deeply unserious.
The baby in your analogy is the people who prefer weed to booze and we've been wantonly throwing them out with the bathwater for many generations, needlessly and most bitterly dividing and weakening ourselves in the process
Alcohol is a major killer of Americans and cannabis is no such thing. You really need to focus on the science of alcohol vs. cannabis and stop trying to rip rights away from your fellow citizens..
One other way that drugs and crime relate is that illegal drug markets are a massive funding source for criminal groups. The estimates I saw were billions of dollars in illegal revenue in California alone. Other evils like prison gangs are also amplified by drug revenues. Even if making marijuana legal doesn't keep people out of jail directly, perhaps it defunds crime?
It's also possible that, at least with recent legalization, we are in this awkward middle where the legal supply system is still too crippled to compete the drug gangs out of business. Or perhaps fentanyl and the other harder drugs are a larger source of revenue anyway. I don't know for sure.
We're in this awkward middle where prohib states are providing a market for weed being grown illegally in free states. Excessive taxes and regulation play into the hands of the black market as well, California has been a prime example of that.
i don’t think that’s necessarily accurate. i agree that differing legalization status by state is allowing criminal groups to still find a market, but if 2/3 of colorado citizens are buying legal in just 9-10 years that’s promising. this cited i think 1/3 of respondents in a study saying they’d buy whatever’s cheapest, but that doesn’t account for convenience and availability. people believe themselves to be frugal and we generally are, but that doesn’t always translate the way we say it’s going to- ie you’ll get what’s cheapest until your dealer isn’t answering, or until you’re on your way to a friends house and just wanna stop real quick even though it’s maybe 10% more. i live in CA and i disagree that regulatory costs have driven up price so significantly that it props up illicit, you can get legal weed plenty cheap and know the THC content is high, i really think it’s more of an issue failing to crack down on illicit production and protecting the legal market.
One problem is that the market demand remains so high in the states with criminalization that the legal states like CA and CO (and the Feds) are faced with the challenge- and expense- of sorting out the unlicensed growing operations and busting them. That was never even an effective mission in the days when the states had criminalization statutes. Now they're being tasked to continue massive enforcement efforts in order to curb supplies for other US states that won't face the reality of their own demand.
I support the effort to shut down large-scale bootleg growing operations, the same way I support shutting down moonshine liquor operations. (Large indoor operations especially rub me the wrong way. Including the legal ones.) But as long as cannabis remains Federally illegal and interstate transport is outlawed, the illicit suppliers are going to find marked advantages cultivating their sources of supply from within the US rather than dodging interdiction at the national borders. Twistedly enough, many of the large bootleg growing operations in California are now vertically integrated operations funded, staffed, and run by Mexican cartels!
The answer should be obvious- Federal legalization, and the ability to lawfully trans-ship cannabis across state lines. (If a given state is bound and determined to keep cannabis criminalized, so be it...not much different than the way Prohibition played out with alcohol, although even Utah eventually gave up on distilled alcohol Prohibition a few years back.) But the risk-averse political class of our national leadership in Congress and the White House needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the present day on this matter.
i 100% agree - although to your point about utah, i’m originally from arkansas which still has i think the majority of the remaining “dry counties” (not to mention a ban on alcohol sales on sundays. because jesus) but of course there are still plenty of alcohol users and abusers in those counties. i definitely agree with you on the enforcement issues of a mixed status system, but i sort of think about the issues of protecting a legal market and cutting off violent production organizations separately from like the efficacy of taxes/regulation costs and how they affect price and consumer behavior. drugs are often talked about as though they are the same as any other commodity, but there’s a lot of evidence that demand is driven by different factors. i support federal legalization but i also support strict regulation and a more comprehensive overhaul of drug policy. all our current information indicates hallucinogens and MDMA are way way way less addictive than alcohol or nicotine, and might have treatment potential for some mental health issues including…alcoholism. also they’re fun. so ayahuasca is illegal but oxycodone isn’t? there’s just no logic to it except profitability and european cultural history with certain drugs versus others, and when mental health is involved, when you have highly addictive legal drugs and hardly addictive illegal drugs listed schedule 1, you’re making policy based on ideology and not medical science, letting people get hooked and destroy their family’s lives and often die of their addictions to legal drugs and locking up people doing… just different drugs. i’m dying for a little consistency here that centers medicine and physiology and the fact that the illicit drug trade has been made so powerful BECAUSE people want drugs and self-medicate, they aren’t exactly pushing drugs on communities that have zero demand for them. evidenced in part by the fact that a majority of americans already regularly do a drug that has been made widely available, cheap, and socially acceptable.
There are at least as many long-term prescription SSRI users as regular cannabis users. And the SSRIs have much more seriously addictive properties- although the withdrawal is referred to by the euphemism "discontinuance syndrome."
Benzodiazepine tranquilizers are most commonly prescribed for occasional use, not regular use. But millions of people do use them habitually, or admit to overusing or abusing them. They're much more of an overdose liability than SSRIs or psychostimulants. They mix particularly poorly with alcohol, but also often show up in conjunction with opioid overdoses. The most lethal combination is of course alcohol, benzos, and opioids.
So who are we fooling? Tens of millions of Americans are on habit-forming drugs. They have legal drug habits. That might not be optimal from a health standpoint, but it doesn't appear to have led to mass behavioral dysfunction or societal chaos. Certainly not in comparison with the deleterious effects of social media- especially when used by the young and unwary, and people who haven't developed antibodies to unsupported speculations, logical fallacies, and unkind suggestions from anonymous participants.
Tens of millions of Americans seem to be maintaining their prescription drug habits without undue issues. As long as they have them.
Do I think that cannabis is "addictive"? Using the neologized definition that's become mainstreamed by the APA, for some people, yes, it is.
Does cannabis have as much addictive potential as any of the prescription drugs listed above? No.
so well put. americans already regularly using habit forming drugs might like feeling morally superior to americans who regularly use… different habit forming drugs?… but applying arbitrary standards of morality to human bodies has pretty much always been bad policy. maybe it’s not anyone’s job to tell anybody else what they SHOULD be ingesting to physically and psychologically manage their life and enjoy their time here…maybe it’s our job to keep each other from getting hurt and support each other in our various mental illnesses. which include addiction. AA is supposed to be a safe place for alcoholics, a community to help remain abstinent from an addictive drug that has negatively impacted our lives. recently at a meeting a girl who admitted to being on SSRIs tried to force another girl to leave because she takes stimulants. this was not a meeting for people whose lives have been negatively impacted by stimulants. she felt those stimulants improved her quality of life- but the first girl insisted she wasn’t REALLY sober…despite the fact ALL of us were having a cigarette outside 5 mins previously. superiority complexes about certain drugs have literally no place in addiction treatment, it only helps the people trying to feel better about themselves and feeds into the idea addiction is a moral deficiency and not a chemical response and mental health issue. it’s supremely frustrating and i so appreciate everything you said here about it.
Cannabis is nowhere near as effective as opiates for pain, but it's nowhere near as dangerous either. It has value as pain medicine and the idea that opiates (schedule II) can be prescribed for pain but cannabis (schedule I) can't be is both ludicrous and criminally insane. Why so much of the medical profession supports this nonsense is beyond me. History is going to judge them severely.
My main issue is that I want pot to be lower status. I don't necessarily think pot should be regulated differently than alcohol, but I think pot heads should be viewed much like alcoholics.
Furthermore, we need to stop blaming the War on Drugs for crime. Crime happens because low IQ young men think they can get away with crime. That's it. Drugs lower IQ and inhibition, leading to crime. Most people in on drug charges are in because they pled down to it or it's what the DA could nail them on, but they are actual criminals. Anyone whose been on a inner city jury can see this.
thank you. I should have known this comments section would degenerate into discussions about gangs 🙄 ah, but the gangs of coked up boozehound executives continue to roam free, the blood(thirsty capitalist)s and the crip(pling the economy and robbing us all blind)s if you will…
If we're going to talk about the effects of the Drug War, we have to talk about gangs. And money laundering banks, Delaware Corporation real estate tax shelters, and corrupt law enforcement, of course.
uh huh… if you’re talking about distribution networks in the illicit market you do, but if you’re bringing up how “low IQ” people form gangs because they enjoy or gravitate towards violence, as that person was, it’s pretty unnecessary and not really based in reality to my knowledge. gangs might do the heavy lifting of buying from cartels, turning coke into crack, producing (mostly biker gangs with meth), and stepping on product, but studies have pretty consistently shown over the last 20 years that substance abuse is significantly higher in suburbs than inner cities (not a lot of gang activity in suburbs) and rural areas also have higher rates then cities, high rates of alcohol as drug of choice, and substance abuse begins earlier in life. it sounds like you’re talking about looking at the illicit drug trade from a purely economic standpoint, as far as who benefits and how the supply chain operates/persists, and that’s cool, but i tend to focus more on how drug abuse manifests in communities, health outcomes and the societal aspects. gangs and cartels in the drug trade profit off the high demand for drugs in this country, so i think looking at that demand and being real about it makes a lot of sense.
It's imperative to include the social impacts of fueling a massive criminal economy, and the political economy and social milieu of gangland is an integral part of that problem. Declining to address the situation only allows the Drug Warriors who fixate on "how “low IQ” people form gangs because they enjoy or gravitate towards violence" to supply their narrative without contradiction.
You aren't going to oppose that narrative by ignoring it, hand-waving it, or by simply responding with accusatory retorts at the people propounding it. You need to talk about the situation and its ramifications. The Drug Warriors built the Pleasure Island that lures the unwary into the drugs trade and gang life as minors, and then snaps the trap shut once they turn 18. That construction has to be investigated and unpacked. Although personally, I've done enough investigation and unpacking, and I'm long past ready to get on with the dismantling.
There are a lot of twists and turns in the narrative, but the reality is that the Drug War is criminogenic and corrupting. Across the board, low and high. It's as dishonest to view the illicit drugs economy through a lens of accusation as primarily the responsibility of decadent affluent suburbanite consumers as it is to view it as some corrupting influence mysteriously emanating exclusively from "the inner city", etc etc. That just leads to finger pointing and people chasing their tails, and nothing gets accomplished. It's also intolerable to have a criminalization policy in place that for all practical purposes ordains a de facto criminal monopoly over the illicit drugs trade, and then decline to enforce the laws against open retail street dealing, because Social Justice. That's fake policy.
just to be clear, it’s not accusatory to say i’m unsurprised at the trajectory some people will take an honest debate about drug policy, and it’s not my job to make persuasive arguments to every tom dick and harry with an ignorant take. there are plenty of examples of gangs doing horrific things. there are also examples of gangs doing things that are demonstrably positive for the community. does that counteract their overwhelmingly negative actions that endanger and hurt the community? of course not. but that dichotomy is so much of the history organized crime, is the godfather to the sopranos to scarface, is why policy should not carve out space for bad actors and criminal organizations to then exploit their communities and connections for profit. if you really think that legal drug manufacturers have the same responsibility as organized crime affiliates, i disagree. i think resources matter, social acceptance matters, generational wealth matters, risk of violence matters, and in all these nuanced elements that absolutely do impact culpability, there is greater understanding of the economic arguments about drugs. the thing big pharma shares the most with illicit drug trade organizations is the ability to meet a demand for drugs that exists. did cartels in mexico grow to dominate the country by selling drugs to mexican people? no. no they didn’t. that is not even close to where a majority of profits came from. and where did they get the weapons they rely on for social political and economic dominance? oh. that’s right. the us. we give big pharma tools to inflict death and damage too, and these days the cartels ARE moving drugs in mexico - mostly meth, because workers can work longer when they’re on it. i guess i just don’t know why you’re under the impression that suburbanite consumers are responsible for anything except a high demand for drugs, or why you think… that it’s necessary or possible to attribute “blame” to any one geographic group or any other type of group of people when it comes to demand. this is a policy and public health issue, full stop. medicine and drugs are issues that affect humans, human bodies, every society in history. i agree with you on some things but like i said you seem to see policy responses as being primarily driven by economic factors whereas i see policy responses as needing to be driven by public health factors. big pharma isn’t fucked up because drugs are their product nearly as much as they are fucked up because of their political power, their practices, their lack of accountability, the corporatism, the wealth hoarding… like i just see industry issues with big pharma as not entirely sector specific. it’s insurance as well, and it’s deregulated capitalism ultimately. i don’t see gangs as being their street equivalent. i see gangs as a lot of things, but that would be a conversation about societal violence, weak states, community justice and “savage order” types of things (a good book about violence). i used to be the drug dealer for pretty much my whole high school, and i wasn’t in a gang and neither was my plug and neither was his plug. it’s only part of the story and given the complexities of gang violence, the variety of organizations, the factors that have to do with masculinity and lack of opportunity and seeking fraternity, the…idea that selling drugs is “criminal” but murder is CRIMINAL and people are acting like you can talk about both at the same time in a real, ethics centered way… idk man. i just don’t think i’m the person for any convo of the kind you’ve outlined for “deconstructing” when i see the construction pretty differently.
Crime also happens because people with high IQs think they can get away with it and usually do. This has less to do with IQ and more to do with economic status. Rich kids don’t get sent to jail. Poor kids do. You sound like a white man over the age of 70.
According to the drug laws of this country, over 50% of Americans have committed a crime. Whether they've ever been apprehended or not is a different matter. The US is a criminalized society. It's also a society that affords minors considerable protection for criminal acts, compared to adults. Considering that the retail end of the illicit drugs trade is handled by minors, that situation adds up to a considerable amount of influence within youth culture and peer group society, and that influence continues into adulthood. Its extent is influenced considerably by household economic status, educational achievement, and occupational success in adult world. But criminal influence has become pervasive in American society and culture, to some degree or another. Not just in the "inner city."
Not that you've given any evidence of having any familiarity with either drug users or developmental psychology measurements, but there's no direct correlation between illicit drug use and "IQ." The occupations with the highest rate of illicit drugs use include medical students, medical professionals, legal professionals- and police.
The idea that drug laws cause crime doesn't fit the evidence very well.
You have many polities with harsh drug laws and enforcement with little crime, and many polities with loose drug laws and enforcement with lots of crime.
When a drug is legalized, like say marijuana, you don't see any drop-off in crime or arrests. Many people who were getting busted on marijuana charges end up getting busted on something else (often the whole reason they were busted on a drug charge is because its easier to prove or a plea bargain, but they are violent criminals).
Young low IQ men form gangs and like to participate in violent tournaments. They need little excuse to do this, and where you legalize one drug they can choose another, or hoes, or dice, or protection rackets, or who dissed who at a party or on social media. It's enlightening to actually witness trials related to why people kill each other in the ghetto. If you removed drug illegality as an excuse, which many jurisdiction have de sure or de facto, they just use some other excuse.
The main issue with drugs is that it lower IQ and inhibition in users and especially addicts. Such people are a lot more likely to commit crimes under the influence. If you legalize drugs you will get more users and more addicts, which isn't a good for crime.
The simplest way to stop crime is to demonstrate clearly to young low IQ men that:
1) They will be caught with a high degree of certainty every time they commit a crime of any kind.
2) The punishment will be very harsh and thus not worth the risk of getting caught.
If you can demonstrate this effectively then through a mixture of deterrence and incarceration you can eliminate crime, even in terrible demographic circumstances. The question is whether the stakeholders in the state of the willpower to do this.
There are high-IQ street criminals, too- and illicit drugs dealing makes for a particularly attractive place for them to employ their intelligence, notwithstanding the recklessness of the decision, which is typically made by immature young people who haven't made a serious appraisal of the long-term consequences. Yes, smart people can still make bad choices and wrong decisions. (But it's like Disney's Pinocchio: Pleasure Island. You're 15. You're poor. Wouldn't you?)
That undercuts @fp123's argument, but it's obvious that he prefers to view the situation as cut and dried. And, perhaps, using the categorical "low IQ" as a euphemism, rather than just coming right out and saying what he really means. Although even if his labeling is sincerely intended, it's a huge error to exploit IQ measurements as a criterion for public policy initiatives.
It hasn't quite become fashionable yet to question the validity of IQ scores as a measurement of "general intelligence", but I'll get out in front on that by asserting that given what's recently been learned about the limitations of the univariate model of neurotypicality, we should know better. When a sizeable number of individuals on the autistic spectrum perform two standard deviations better on the RPM test than the WISC test- and both of those tests allegedly measure the same "Spearman's g", aka "general intelligence"- that ought to tell us something.
Much of the material on IQ tests like the Weschler is more accurately tests of academic skill sets; RPM is more focused on specific proficiencies at detecting patterns using abstract spatial logic. There are no IQ tests for the acute sensitivity required to proficiently read and respond to interpersonal social cues. And a "high IQ" scoring group of Western academics would probably die before they could pick out a path through a rain forest that an indigenous child could read by the age of nine, using real-world spatial logic. Practice makes perfect, particularly under the neuroplastic conditions associated with early childhood development.
That said, to return to the topic of cannabis: I think it has a strong tendency to get in the way of learning practically any skill, particularly in the initial stages. Pot use by elementary school age and high school age kids is a bad thing, and it needs to be discouraged and prevented. Cannabis can provide creative inspiration and hone performance for (some) people who are already proficient at an intellectual, artistic, or athletic skill- but it's practically always the case that they've already achieved competence without the influence of pot. If someone gets involved with using weed regularly early on, they may never even get as far as learning the basics. This is particularly important in the case of the scholastic skills- literacy and numeracy. It has to be emphasized that without basic competence in those skills, the modern world is a very unfriendly place. And if someone is showing up in class high all the time from an early age, it isn't the fault of the school if they're unable to learn to read, write, and figure.
That's a primary reason why I think cannabis should be legalized- in order to put the market into a realm where age restrictions can be effectively enforced. Under illicit conditions, the retail trade is in the hands of members of the teenage peer group! This is the case everywhere- "gang-related" has nothing to do with it. It's a bad situation when adults find that the best way to score marijuana in a strange town is to ask a teenager.
Cannabis definitely has some drawbacks, and the harm reduction and education situation is something that needs to be worked out in conjunction with legalization. In particular, regular use at an early age gets in the way of acquiring all sorts of skills at the stage when they're most effectively learned. The SAMHSA statistics- which I trust, mostly- indicate that the group that most often uses marijuana the most frequently are males in their teen to mid-twenties years. Sometimes even younger. The vast majority of marijuana users begin in their teens, and by and large their attitudes toward it are adolescent attitudes. That's the wrong way to get acquainted with the substance. Teenagers are a population that needs to have their use reduced to the experimental or occasional basis, at most. I don't hold with the folklore that pot is harmless, just because it doesn't cause the physical impairment of alcohol. The fact that someone can be high on pot without being sloppy does not mean that their learning skills aren't impaired.
I've recently been reading literature on gangs and crime going back to the 19th century, through the early 20th century, the Alcohol Prohibition era, the mid-20th century, late 20th century, and up to today. The role of gangs in American crime- and their power, their financial influence- surged during Alcohol Prohibition, and then in the 1980s, with the street retail trade in crack cocaine.
In particular, there' no comparison between the numbers of gang members in the 1960s and 1970s and what's happened since then.
"...The 100-page 2011 “National Gang Threat Assessment” claimed criminal gangs pose a growing threat in communities throughout the United States.
“The most notable trends for 2011 have been the overall increase in gang membership and the expansion of criminal street gangs’ control of street-level drug sales and collaboration with rival gangs and other criminal organizations,” according to the report.
While there was no data related to how the economy might factor into growth in gangs, more aggressive recruiting and cultural and ethnic factors may have contributed to the increase in gang membership.
Although overall crime in the United States has continued to decline over the past three years, the relative amount of crime inflicted by gang members appears to have increased. The new FBI report claims that gangs are responsible for 48% of violent crime, on average, in most jurisdictions..."
Not just in "the ghetto", either. There are gangs in small towns across America, these days.
Many drugs have been made either outright legal or de facto legal (you can do business un-harassed in many open air drug markets today, and people wander the streets obviously high and nobody does anything). Yet gangs persist, in fact they are more common in those districts with lax laws and enforcement.
By contrast Singapore puts people to death for carrying too much pot and its got no crime at all.
An interesting thing with prohibition is it didn't spring into existence in 1920. Most of New England and NY and the Upper Midwest banned alcohol in the 1850s (it was repealed during the Civil War to raise money for the war effort).
Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s many states, counties, and localities passed various prohibition legislation long before prohibition. If you looked at a map of the US in 1905 huge swaths of the country were effectively already under prohibition, but the crime rate was low, and it was lower in the dry areas then the wet areas. Most gangs were in the big cities amongst immigrant communities, that were thoroughly "wet". Gang and criminal activity was on the rise from 1900-1920, before prohibition, and mostly in the wet areas. The murder rate increased by a factor of 600% from 1900-1920, and only 66% or so during prohibition.
I generally think that prohibition was a net negative:
1) It tried to ban a "soft" drug with deep roots in the culture
2) The ban itself was harsher then many of its supporters expected (most people thought prohibition would ban alcohol content above 3.0%, light beer level, and that it was mainly supposed to prevent binge drinking of hard liquor).
3) The enforcement was basically non-existent. There was no plan for enforcement and few resources applied to it. Local governments, especially those in the cities where people voted wet and didn't want prohibition anyway, did basically nothing. The federal response was more or less stillborn from the start for a wide variety of reasons you can read about.
4) There was a rise in crime associated with prohibition, but there was a bigger rise in crime before prohibition. In a way the prohibition era is just a continuation of the trends of immigration (both from Europe and blacks from the south) and urbanization which you would expect to increase crime rates. Before prohibition Sicilian mobsters were finding other ways to commit crime. And places with prohibition but without Sicilian mobsters seemed to go along peacefully enough.
In short, while I wouldn't endorse prohibition, I don't really consider the be all explanation for crime trends in America at the time, and one quick fix to solve it all. Nor do I think that meth or crack being illegal is the primary driver of crime today.
You want to make the US into Singapore? How about you move there, instead of implying that you find its system superior to the US?
Setting aside the totalitarian implications of that endorsement, consider the practical differences. Singapore has 280 square miles of land area. The US has 2,959,064 square miles of land area, just in the lower 48 states.
Singapore imposes its panopticon surveillance state on a population of roughly 6 million people. The US has 335 million. Around 100 million US citizens are armed. That's a lot heavier lift than policing a postage stamp sized area of docile residents offering a social consensus of consent to a regimented existence out of the pages of A Wrinkle In Time, because Low Taxes.
"Many drugs have been made either outright legal or de facto legal (you can do business un-harassed in many open air drug markets today, and people wander the streets obviously high and nobody does anything)."
That is not "legal."
Legal doesn't mean "we have criminalization statutes, but they're unenforceable, which means that we've handed over a de facto monopoly to career criminals while reserving enforcement to local whims, political posturing, and corruption."
Legal means "we have regulated the supply and marketing of the commodity for purity and safety, and the trade is in the hands of licensed and accountable taxpayers" and "we are allowing medical professionals to do their jobs as they see fit, including allowing the prescription of controlled substances for addiction maintenance while maintaining centralized supervision of the practice in order to prevent diversion through patient abuses like doctor shopping and physician abuses like prescription profiteering." You know, the dereliction of enforcement that allowed the legal opioid problem to get out of hand so badly in the 1990s, because the Federal government had no central database of prescriptions and providers of DEA Schedule II "controlled substances." (I don't blame the DEA for that particular problem, incidentally; they tried to get the funding for an effective centralized Federal prescription drug monitoring program, but the request was shot down in Congressional committee hearings.)
"Yet gangs persist"
The present-day drugs market is similar to the failed experiment of Federal alcohol Prohibition, only exponentially worse. Criminal gangs have been provided a de facto monopoly over the supply chain for the vast majority of the forbidden substances in the country. Americans were spending more on illicit drugs than they spent on food 40 years ago, and if that situation has changed, it's only because food has become more expensive, while the forbidden substances have become cheaper. The illicit drugs industry became a cornerstone of the economy in many parts of the country- not just in the inner city neighborhoods, but in rust belt towns and rural regions from coast to coast.
"they [the gangs] are more common in those districts with lax laws and enforcement."
You are talking through your hat with unsupported- and unsupportable- claims. Ignoring the history of gang expansion in the US, which began in the 1980s, not just with "the cartels" in the 2010s. "The gangs" are the reason that the state of California expanded its prison system to hold a 300% increase in the prison population in the late 1980s and 1990s. It didn't put out the fire. It dumped gasoline on it.
And now, 40 years later- unlike alcohol Prohibition, which only required 14 years to get called off- Gangland has gone dynastic. Children who grew up with their fathers in prison, recruited into gang life. And the children of those children. Recruited into gang life, fueled by the de facto monopoly over a trade that runs to the tens of billions of dollars. Meanwhile, the West Coast and Sun Belt are swamped with addict populations that are 2nd and 3rd-order impacts of an opioid epidemic that began 30 years ago in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. And while in the 1960s, gangs were confined to a half-dozen US cities, now there are chapters from coast to coast, in places like Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Omaha, Nebraska.
Are those gangs going to go away, as long as they've been granted a de facto monopoly over the illegal drugs trade? Did they go away during alcohol Prohibition? Of course not. They go into prison, they get more organized, and they go back on the streets.
I have a hunch about the final solution you have in mind to take care of that problem. You already alluded to it with your praise for "crime-free" (unless you count money laundering) Singapore. I prefer a more modest set of legal reforms.
Your potted history of the alcohol Prohibition era is ludicrous. Alcohol Prohibition produced a windfall for organized crime that protection rackets and gambling could never match. And you go on to post wooden-headed nonsense like this, with your bare face hanging out:
"...places with prohibition but without Sicilian mobsters seemed to go along peacefully enough."
That statement right there shows that you have no idea what you're talking about. Shotgun dry law enforcement killed more than 1200 people in raids across the country over the course of the mid-1920s. One of the main paramilitary enforcement auxiliaries of the Prohibition effort in rural areas was the Ku Klux Klan. Until the Grand Dragon of Indiana was convicted of the rape and murder of a young girl, that is, and the Klan lost its social clout and respectability as purity crusaders.
You've also ignored that elephant in the room, Corruption. The topic that takes up so many pages in Okrent's book Last Call, and McGirr's book The War On Alcohol. The corruption that's persisted and spiraled out of control during the Drug War, as well:
I wouldn't be surprised if you ignored any mention of those links in any reply you might offer. After all, they're so inconvenient to your argument.
But the facts are the facts. The enormous amount of easy money in the all-cash business of illegal drugs is an attractive nuisance of staggering proportions that has ensnared top-ranking officers and entire units of the country's most elite law enforcement divisions. How are poor people supposed to behave any better?
"How about you move there, instead of implying that you find its system superior to the US?"
1) Because there is more to Singapore then crime.
2) Because it's on the other side of the planet and I'm not a citizen, nor are any in my family. Because it's not clear we could get jobs there.
"Setting aside the totalitarian implications of that endorsement"
Yes, people who visit Singapore routinely refer to it as a totalitarian hellhole. It's like they are in North Korea.
Myself, I enjoyed my visit. You should get out more.
"Singapore has 280 square miles of land area."
Singapore is a city. The appropriate comparison for Singapore would be large American cities. However, we could basically substitute any Asian country including big ones like Japan. Tough drug laws and criminal justice systems, lack of crime.
"you know, the dereliction of enforcement that allowed the legal opioid problem to get out of hand so badly in the 1990s,"
You are all over the place here dude. Opioids were legal and regulated like you want and they became a total mess. Is the problem legality or illegality? You can't seem to make up your mind here. Except that somehow an exactly perfect system should have done exactly the right thing, and you call me utopian.
What we learned is that doctors will push drugs that are bad for people if they have an incentive and that they can create their own demand (just like drug dealers). In fact it was worse because lots of people with better sense then to deal with drug dealers would trust their doctors.
If you think legal opioids were a mess I don't see how legal meth is going to go down any easier for you. The same dynamic will go down.
I expect basically every attempt to legalize drugs to go down the way opioids did, but worse the worse the drug is.
"Shotgun dry law enforcement killed more than 1200 people in raids across the country over the course of the mid-1920s."
Like police killings today, this is dramatically less then the # of people being murdered during the same time.
Total spending on prohibition enforcement in 1923 amounted under $9,000,000 in 2023 adjusted dollars. This amounted to $0.08 per person in 2023 dollars using the 1923 population. 0.0006% of GDP. This was not a serious attempt.
But more importantly I'm asking a simple question. Given that the period from the late 1800s until 1920 saw some parts of the country go dry and some stay wet, shouldn't we see a difference in crime rates between them? Shouldn't the dry areas have seen a huge increase in crime during this era? Shouldn't the crime in wet areas outperform them? This is as closed to a randomized trial as we can get.
I don't like prohibition because I think it was the wrong law and it failed most in the places that never wanted it in the first place. But I don't think drug prohibition is the reason for crime, and if you legalized every drug I would still expect to see crime (perhaps worse since addicts are more prone to criminality).
For something called The CAUSAL Fallacy, you sure play fast and loose with stats. You admit that the stats are weak, and that people deserve to be left alone if not harming others (a libertarian ember still glowing?) but then you propose that we empower the state to mitigate risks that are very poorly characterized. Except for prohibition, which has well characterized negative effects on many things beyond prison (holding a job, joining the military, etc) but not on decreasing use.
What is currently happening in most of the world is exactly what should happen. Let states and countries experiment, to reduce the scale of damage done by mistakes on both ends of the prohibition/legalization spectrum. Watch carefully with true curiosity, pretend that you are not smarter than everyone else, and see what happens. Be slow to accept the "evidence" offered by those with a strong POV. Most of it can't be reproduced. And always fight that internal urge to tell other people what to do with their lives.
I know, right? The silence is deafening. Meanwhile, American drowns in the bottom of a bottle and pays a heavy price for it. Ironically, because alcohol, especially hard liquor, is at a record low in terms of inflation-adjusted price up front.
There is really NO credible reason why cannabis should be treated any more stringently than alcohol or tobacco. NONE. And half-assed quasi-legalization seems to be the real problem here, not legalization per se. Just saying.
Not one word about alcohol. What are the chances the author likes to consume alcohol? I'd say pretty darn good.
Not much point in reading an article arguing for weed prohibition when it doesn't have a single word about alcohol vs. cannabis, which is of course the real issue.
I think that the case for cannabis legalization and drug law reform can be made without any necessity to resort to whataboutist arguments. Opponents prefer arguing on the merits of comparisons between pot and alcohol to arguing in favor of the Drug War on its merits- which, upon examination, are practically nonexistent.
It's not the "real" issue. They are two separate issues.
They are both psychoactive drugs but alcohol has FAR more of a link to VIOLENCE than cannabis does, and excessive alcohol use is FAR more damaging to physical health than excessive cannabis use. How dare people use the more dangerous drug and ORDER their FELLOW CITIZENS not to use an indisputably safer one! And to make it worse, the people giving the orders are the same folks who go on and on and on and on forever about freedom. The only freedom they care about it their goddamn own! Stinking hypocrites without a leg to stand on!
See "Graham" above.
came here to say “I’m an alcoholic… that’s it, that’s all I wanted to say.” that attitude is also reflected in the super brief line about how “most people” are not suggesting broader legalization policies for drugs like cocaine. sir…a drug is a drug is a drug is a drug, their physiological effects and addiction rates and addiction outcomes differ, but just because one addictive drug was the choice of the British empire (or more than one- alcohol, caffeine, nicotine) it doesn’t mean other drugs are inherently different in ANY way whatsoever with regard to smart public policy for addictive drugs that maintains a focus on public health and bodily autonomy. I am sympathetic to the idea that marijuana legalization has not been pursued in a nuanced enough way to protect public health and safety, but you lose me completely when your takeaway is “well you know politically it would be hard to do in a better, positive way so instead of this big dumb policy let’s go back to the other one.” marijuana arrests keep people out of work and struggling, and while state prison time might only be slightly more than 1 in 10 (!!!) for drug offenses I think there’s an argument to be made that peoples lives and finances and health (and their faultless children’s) are far more drastically impacted by criminalization than by addiction, which by the way isn’t helped AT ALL by criminalization!!! I’m for highly regulated drug legalization or decrim and I appreciated the link to alternative models, I’ve also considered that it might be best executed through medical care (to where your doctor could “prescribe” a psychedelic or MDMA or a recreational drug in a moderated amount upon request to maintain a usage record for intervention if necessary). consumption limits are not a bad idea. a complete lack of consistency just because that’s what has been done up to this point IS. because our healthcare system is fucked too, and mental healthcare is treated like a joke, over 50% of US counties don’t even have a licensed psychiatrist - so the idea that continuing to criminalize addiction for some substances while allowing people intoxicated on others to spike crime rates, all because we can’t treat and deal with addiction like the public health crisis it is, is maddening. the idea that people don’t care about quality control also drives me crazy, it goes back to your point, people would still be making bathtub gin if safe alternatives weren’t available, and the economic lens is just… “Colorado has had legal weed for 10 whole years and 1/3 still buy illicit” oh shit you mean in one decade the entire nature of buying & selling drugs hasn’t shifted after a century of reliance on illicit networks?? I’m shocked!!! it’s just so goddamn frustrating, I agree with the “more persuasive arguments” that people should be able to do what they want with their bodies and drugs are fun, but I also know with my brain that drugs are addictive and statistically everything that we criminalize from a puritanical mindset becomes completely corrupted and dangerous for people in the absence of regulation. internet porn is addictive, and it can be degrading, and there is exploitation, but the second it becomes criminalized it will be an all out free for all for the people in that world, for consumers, and effecting everyone outside the prison industrial complex negatively. it’s so easy to sit in one life that’s gone one way and go “no no, that’s better, that’s better for all the rest of us” but the continuing pattern is that it’s not, that plenty of men of status and wealth are completely physically addicted to alcohol or cocaine or another drug of choice, they are not exempt from public health crises, they are not exempt from benefiting from the labor of sex workers, they are not exempt from gay sex or other formerly criminalized behavior that is associated with morality instead of physiology, and it’s unfair and gross to act like some things should remain criminalized just because some people can get around that without huge, life altering consequences. it hurts all of us, it really hurts people in recovery because it’s crowded in secrecy… and it’s tiring. rant over ugh I had so much hope for this analysis.
"you lose me completely when your takeaway is 'well you know politically it would be hard to do in a better, positive way so instead of this big dumb policy let’s go back to the other one.'"
Really. The argument already contained some disputable points, but that was where it completely went off the rails.
This seems in bad faith.
Myself, I think the marijuana and alcohol are about the same. Soft drugs that aren't good but maybe shouldn't be flat out illegal. Tax and regulate.
It's certainly possible that prohibition might have been a better idea in decades past. It's harder to prohibit things that are already prevalent and have a market, and that has to affect whether you try prohibition. But the cat is out of the bag.
The real problem is that people want to consider pot cool and blame crime on criminalization. It would be better if pot were lower status and everyone admitted that crime had different causes (and possibly that the IQ and inhibition lowering affects of drugs increases crime).
You can think what you like pal but if you were to look at reality you would see that alcohol causes way more problems than weed. I mean just ask a cop. Fights in bars? Check. Fights at pot parties (or "coffee shops" in Holland)? Nope, not really. For the record I like 'em both. So what?
A fight in a bar typically only ruins one evening. Like you, many people like 'em both. Do we really need stoned people driving drunk? Isn't being simply drunk bad enough? I've been that terrified passenger with a stoned drunk at the wheel on more than one occasion. I'm grateful and lucky to be here and to have never witnessed other innocent people dying. The only thing worse than a drunk is a stoned drunk.
So for some reason with someone both stoned & drunk you're okay with drunk. Which is utterly stupid 'cause driving drunk is waaay more dangerous than driving stoned.
But if you routinely ride with drunk drivers you really are quite stupid. I'd rather walk. Actually if someone is gonna drive drunk some pot might be in order since it would probly get them to slow down. Would only work if they were regular pot heads.
At no point did I claim that I am ok with driving drunk. Period, Jack Stoner.
If people driving under the influence of cannabis were actually a serious problem worthy of law enforcement concentration, it would have made the headlines decades ago, because millions of people have been doing it regularly for decades. It's only been 'discovered" as a "problem" or "menace" in the aftermath of legalization in some of the states, as if the situation only emerged in the last ten years.
I used to drive a cab in Sacramento, on the night shift for years; I regularly hauled passengers who had driving license suspensions for DUI. I never once had a passenger who had been arrested for driving under the influence of marijuana. I've talked to lawyers and police about "marijuana DUI." I used to solicit those observations. In all my conversations, I heard of one case- and it was someone who was pulled over while smoking behind the wheel.
In the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, I attended a couple dozen music concerts in arenas and stadium-sized venues where the majority of the crowd got high before, during, and after the show. I used to stay until the parking lot had cleared out, because if there's one thing a driving professional can't stand, it's being stuck in traffic. In my decades of show-going, I observed a total of one fender-bender in the lot.
If cannabis was as bad as alcohol, the headlines in the aftermath of every one of those shows would have featured multiple collisions and mass carnage on the highways. Or, at minimum, mass arrests for DUI. If cannabis DUI had presented a problem, finding out about it would have required only a glance at the next day's headlines.
The crowd knew this. The cops knew this.
My argument is not that cannabis is worse than alcohol. My argument is that alcohol can be consumed as a beverage as opposed to a drug. Many people have one or two drinks and then refuse the second or third drink. Sober, no menace to anyone, on the road nor in a bar. Cannabis is always consumed as a drug. The people who claim that they need cannabis to deal with pain would consume it as a drug anyway. The mostly men living on the streets doing opioids are less likely to have started out as alcoholics than to have started out as pot smokers. Cannabis is too often a gateway drug. Alcohol has wreaked enough havoc on society. Why would anyone want to add YET another drug to the mix? There are not too many great "stoners" in history. There are, however, many great happy drunks in history. Winston Churchill, for one.
As a teenager in the 1970s, I occasionally drove A) drunk, B) stoned, and C) drunk and stoned. C was definitely the worst ... I can't tell which was worse between A and B.
I agree that the impairment increase from even a small amount of alcohol added to cannabis is significant. I've been known to add a beer or two to a cannabis buzz, but only on occasions when I'm not driving. I'm hesitant to even get on a bicycle if I'm doing that.
But I've had extensive experience and observation of the effects of driving after using cannabis alone, and my conclusions are roughly in lines with those of Andrew Weil, MD over 50 years ago: in the commonly used dosages, cannabis is a catalyst to a mild mind-altering shift that isn't nearly as profound or debilitating as alcohol intoxication, and once people become familiar with the effects, as a rule they're able to perform activities like driving capably. Safely enough that I've never worried about getting in the car with a driver who had been smoking pot...hey, I was a cab driver.
Andrew Weil got it right about weed 50 years ago, in The Natural Mind. There's a reason why sports like snowboarding, halfpipe skateboarding, and surfing have such a long association with weed smokers, even at the elite level. Athletes trained in their skill can do all sorts of fancy gravity defying precision tricks while high out their mind on kine bud. That isn't possible with alcohol. Nobody ever learned how to carve those tracks while drunk. The extreme athletes save the beer for the ski lodge, the backyard, and the beach. At the physical coordination, balance, and athletic performance level, it's no contest: marijuana doesn't impair experienced users, but alcohol follows a very steep increase of impairment with increasing quantity.
This finding has repeatedly shown up in driving simulator tests, incidentally. The researchers keep trying ways to make weed wrong in those studies; these days, studies resort to tactics like force-toking the subjects (including cannabis newbies) for fifteen minutes and shoving them in the simulator ten minutes later- or torturing the data by moving the goalposts of the parameters said to detect impairment- in order to do it. And even then, the experienced stoners refuse to play along.
I'm of the mind that the epidemiological evidence is where the rubber meets the road on this question- there's plenty of data available, and even laypeople with basic math skills (ratios, percentages) can make reasoned and accurate inferences from the numbers without third-order extrapolated meta-analysis, chi-square distributions, or regression plots. Long story short: the smartphone began to add a whole other level of complication to safe driving about 10 years ago, and hopefully the problem will level off and decline. But we've had millions of stoned drivers on the road for around 55 years, and their performance doesn't track differently from the average. There's even some statistical indication that they do better. Even as far as clinical studies, after 40+ years of driving simulator tests, the meta-takeaway is still "the evidence for impairment is inconsistent." A neat choice of words. And not one that's applied to similar studies of alcohol impairment.
( That said, I'm opposed to using per se alcohol levels as sole proof of DUI. I think police cameras and performance tests are more accurate. I heard enough credibly narrated horror stories about overzealous DUI enforcement as a cabdriver in California that I've gotten very skeptical of chemical forensics to determine impairment. Scores of DUI convictions have been overturned and cases dismissed on account of investigations into bad lab work, in some local regions of the US. Peter Lance really booked a case on DUI enforcement abuses in his writings on the topic. http://peterlance.com/wordpress/?p=1214 )
Some skilled skateboarders can handle a bit of alcohol, I suppose. But you'd have to be a hell of a young, eagle-eyed mesomorph- and a practiced drinker- to skate half pipe after drinking a 40 oz. beer. I can't imagine anyone making a regular practice of that.
Mentally, I think a cannabis buzz is about equivalent to a one or two beer high, at most. But I've realized- also through experience- that I don't want a one-beer high when I'm learning a new scholastic skill, or a mental activity like learning a new language or a musical instrument. I want a two-coffee high, at least until I'm able to get a confident grasp of the activity. I want to learn stuff, not be high all the time.
I, too, occasionally drove drunk or drunk and stoned as a teenager in the 1970s. (I'm early 1970s. The HS class of 1973 is on the whole very different from the HS class of 1979, culturally.) It really was a different world...I knew at least one guy who had racked up three DWIs by his senior year in high school. And that's how long it took him to get his first license suspension. His first offense, was, I shit you not, a $50 fine. I think he also got 3 points on his driving record- and, if memory serves, 9 points meant a suspension. He got three DWIs in three years, the last one he wrapped his GTO around a telephone pole. So that was the 70s.
That guy was one of several of my high school classmates to get popped for alcohol DWI. But I never once heard of a single one of my classmates getting into an accident of any kind while driving stoned on pot, much less being pulled over for DWI. That empirical observation also influenced my opinion that marijuana didn't impair good driving the way alcohol does.
Not that I occasionally drove while high on pot, of course. I did it all the time. As did many of my classmates. I've since concluded that getting high on weed all the time at that age was a wrong, bad decision- at minimum, a terrible waste of time, opportunity, and my own resources. But impaired ability to drive safely was never part of the problem.
As for my experiences driving drunk on alcohol: for the grace of G~d, here I am, unscathed and unmarked by guilt. I never got in an accident, and not once was I pulled over by police, not even the time (or two?) when I was so loaded that I had to hold one hand over my eye to stay in my lane. I will give credit to what remained of my good judgement at the time that I had slowed the speed of the car to 15 miles an hour in order to compensate for the delays in my reaction time.
Yes, I was a bust. Even if it was only $50 and 3 points on my record, my parents- whose car it was- would have been scandalized. The weight of a full-scale shonda, only gentile style (more cross-cultural similarity there than is implied by the Yiddishism.) All it would have taken is crossing paths with one patrol car. But I was spared.
As for mixing cannabis with alcohol: if I'm not driving, I can pace a drink every hour while eating and have fun while being happily spaced out on pot. I might do that a couple times a year. Social occasions in the summertime.
But in the days when I drank to get drunk- a practice that predated my pot smoking, and one that I've long since given up- a few tokes of weed, and spin city. The vomitorium, baby. No bueno.
That untoward reaction to adding weed on top of a drunk would probably require only one toke of today's overhyped unsubtle superweed that I don't care for, incidentally. But since I have little use for pseudo-elite ultrahigh THC indoor grown factory weed, and even less use for getting hammered on booze, I don't plan to find out.
Many bar fights end in death or permanent injury. Many women are killed and raped by violent alcoholics. Cannabis does not have the same link to violence that alcohol does, you're not being fair.
I've seen my fair share of bar fights ... I don't know where you grew up but in my small Canadian town, no one ever died nor ended up with a permanent injury. I don't doubt that many women have suffered at the hands of a violent drunk (I'm a happy drunk, by the way) but that is no argument for pot, er ... cannabis.
The alcohol and cannabis comparison is flawed. Alcohol CAN be enjoyed simply as a beverage rather than as a drug (e.g. I have never seen my mother finish her second drink over a 50 year period). Cannabis is ALWAYS enjoyed as a drug even when used medicinally. Full disclosure: I enjoy both of them as drugs.
You're blowing smoke to try to confuse people. The use of the drug alcohol is so much more likely to lead to catastrophe than cannabis use that there is utterly no comparison.
How many people do you claim cannabis kills in a year? The figure for alcohol has skyrocketed in recent years to well over 100,000 lives a year, many of them innocent victims of murder and drunk driving murder.
Couldn't agree with you more. Let's treat alcohol like they did during Prohibition and see how it goes. I don't claim any number when it comes to cannabis but I was stoned enough times as a teenager to know that it is every bit as dangerous as alcohol.
I don't think so. I've certainly seen folks take a coupla puffs & then pass. Not what I usually do to be sure. But back when my liver could handle alcohol I didn't stop at one drink either. I think you're confused by words. We tend to call pot a drug but not alcohol. But that's just word usage. One can drink NA beer if one only wants the beverage experience. Most folks drink the kind with alcohol. 'Cause they want the effect, possibly in a light sort of way, just a little more relaxed etc
Exactly, which is why my mother purchases no/low alcohol beer in the summertime. I was referring to wine and the hard stuff.
Lol I don’t think you know what a drug is. If my friend has a beverage containing THC and doesn’t finish it they are still ingesting a drug. Your mom is ingesting a drug even if she’s not getting *twisted* and alcohol is always enjoyed as a drug too bc water and other beverages…exist 🫠
You clearly don't know what a drug is.
a drug is defined as “a medicine or other substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body.” so advil is a drug as much as heroin as much as viagra as much as alcohol as much as nicotine as much as ketamine. commonly used in contexts like “the war on drugs” to indicate “a substance taken that affects mood or behavior that is taken for its physiological effects (sophoriphic, stimulant, analgesic, etc.)”. alcohol meets this definition, as does mdma, as does heroin, as does oxycodone, as does prozac. thanks for your input 😊 big statement, really glad you didn’t try to back it up.
Ah, so that's what you're talking about. I thought we were talking about beer and weed.
The house isn't on fire. Get a grip.
No one has claimed that the house is on fire. Pot is correctly identified as yet another slippery slope.
it is telling the author never bothers to attempt to explain *how* re-criminalization would be enforced as a practical matter.
further, this polemic contains some other major fallacies (perhaps by design).
for example: it is conventional wisdom that today's cannabis is much stronger than cannabis of yesterday. this is true -- and what was it that happened in the intervening decades? it was prohibition. it is also conventional wisdom, at least among cannabis experts, that the potency spike was a result of prohibition. thus the author's neat conclusion that prohibition equals weaker product is ill-informed speculative fiction.
further, to claim cannabis's effect on the criminal justice system begins and ends at marijuana arrests is to admit at best a superficial understanding of the criminal justice system. for starters: 1/4 of the prison population is incarcerated for parole violations. a common parole violation is a positive drug test. cannabis is the most readily detected drug. what is cannabis's effect on parole violations? this does not even appear to enter the author's thinking. what's more, he fails to consider (perhaps deliberately) marijuana criminalization as an entry into the criminal justice system. a drug arrest can lead to many downstream negative consequences, including reduced employment opportunities, which in turn can lead to (wait for it) more serious crimes.
as for the rest: I see cherry-picking studies that support his thesis and ignoring the many more that detract from it; I see hoary tropes and I see bias in search of intellectual foundation. at least he didn't trot out the gateway drug fallacy?
No one is advocating for re-criminalization. Fines and requirements to consume cannabis on private property would suffice.
You are an expert at setting up straw men and knocking them down. The substitute isnt opiates - its alcohol.
Its not just pain and MS - its also ADHD and Autism. The arrests even if they don’t lead to prison can result in taking away of kids, denial of student loans, and losing of jobs.
I am ASD and ADHD. I am 40. Time and time again, when I quit THC/CBD, my life gets worse. My job performance actually suffers. I gain weight. I drink more alcohol.
You would vote to keep me away from it. It is hard for me to accept people like you.
I did quit again last year because my source was also dealing fentanyl.
Result? My life is objectively worse.
I can vape THC/CBD and it affects me very differently. Stimulants calm me down - I can drink coffee and go to sleep.
If I went to a doctor, theyd give me amphetamines or Xanax. Compared to those, pot is like water.
Here because the times columnist cited you in his pitiful op-ed "Legalizing Marijuana is a Big Mistake". As was already mentioned in the comments, arguing about the "costs of marijuana use" without comparing them to the costs of perfectly legal alternatives such as alcohol is misleading at best. For instance, alcohol is the fourth leading preventable cause of death, killing an estimated 140,000 people annually. Marijuana, on the other hand, is linked to about 350.
Further, trying to draw a connection between an increase in opioid related deaths and legalized marijuana is tenuous at best. It could just as easily be argued that the increase in opioid mortality is linked to the concurrent proliferation of Fentanyl in the American drug market as well as the fact that "street" dealers, due to a reduction of marijuana related profits, are pushing their harder products more, cutting it to boost profits, etc.
As for arrests generally increasing, it's also quite possible that law enforcement, not pre-occupied with marijuana related offenses (which tend to be attention grabbing due to the smell and possible indiscretion of marijuana users when buying off the street), are actually able to focus on more pressing issues.
However, I think my biggest qualm here is your dismissing something being recreationally enjoyable as a viable reason for legalization. Why is alcohol legal? Why are cigarettes legal? Its arguable that they cause far more harm than good, and cigarettes especially tax the American health care system extensively. These, however, are available primarily because people enjoy them (and of course, because there is profit to be made). Personally, I don't even believe that a reduction in arrests or opioid deaths is necessary in the argument for legalization. Instead, given that a large portion of the population enjoys it, and the overall costs are minimal and tend to be related to personal issues (self-degradation or potentially some mental health issues) as opposed to societal issues, I see any reasoning beyond it being popularly enjoyed as extremely superfluous.
If you don't want to smoke, then don't smoke. If you don't want your kids to smoke, well, even legal marijuana isn't available to minors. However, stop trying to hide behind useless, unrelated statistics and instead look at the fact that that cannabis prohibition in and of itself only came into being in 1937 and, generally speaking, is a very recent thing considering the history of cannabis use stretching back to ancient civilization. Is marijuana legalization really the hill to die on when people are being gunned down by legal firearms on a regular basis?
If you can use killer alcohol, I can use far safer weed. Period. The damage done by alcohol supremacist thug bigotry over the last 100+ years is infinite and much of it is irreparable. Lives destroyed and blighted by this POS law.
Reductionist and paints an outdated, fragmented, and thus incomplete picture, all the while vacillating between passive language and a sort of pseudo-intellectual, authoritative "I..." statements.
Never a mention of ethanol, which would seem to check the exact same checkboxes that this author says merit criminalization. Inconsistency and blatant dishonesty(lie by omission) sticks out to any honest reader, instantly negating any authority might have been established.
Bulk of article is just boilerplate filler. With the exception of providing data charts, the author has put forward zero original thought, nor brought anything new to the table. Outdated: Not a peep about the Hemp(thca) Industry, 2018 Farm Bill, or other recent developments. Boilerplate: Never attempted to tie multiple ideas together(easiest way to have an original thought) that didnt already come prepackaged that way.
Not sure what the point of the libertarian rant was about. The "look where I was intellectually and see how much I've grown"-story betrays the genuine, underlying heart of, "look and see how smart I am." So you essentially went from having conservative values but not wanting to force others to confrom.....to having those same conservative values and now feeling a need to force others to conform.
Tl;dr: Your introspection is miles wide, yet barely skin deep.
Somebody definitely did & that's who I was responding too.
Ah, the slippery slope argument. You do realize that to make that work you have to explain why this particular slope is slippery, don't you? There's plenty of slopes I've managed to climb. Both literally & figuratively. And I stayed on top as long as I wanted to. No slipping.
No one has the liberty to use weed (smoked or otherwise) and no one has the liberty to use alcohol? Why not and who decides? What about the solemn pledge of liberty and justice to all? What else do you claim the right to ban cause you don't like it?
Guns are cool, though?
True, you said that you had on more than one occasion ridden in a car driven by a drunk person. In response I said you were stupid. Which I still believe. Whether I'm stoned or not.
Not much commentary on what I believed was utter nonsense: That tax revenue from legal pot sales were going to be a game changer for state government. Any poll in NJ would find a major public concern is out of control property taxes and local government budgets. Yet Gov Murphy hasn't even suggested this supposed windfall of revenue as a cure for these issues.
Additionally, as a heavy user for 2 decades I can certainly attest to the the drugs inhibition of productivity and creator of other social ills.
Yes, alcohol creates similar, if not worse, affects. I agree 100%. But does that mean we should just throw the baby out with the bath water?
california nets more than $1 billion per year from cannabis taxes, more than double cigarette and alcohol taxes combined. it is not funding the pentagon by itself by any means but any argument that tax revenue is insignificant is deeply unserious.
The baby in your analogy is the people who prefer weed to booze and we've been wantonly throwing them out with the bathwater for many generations, needlessly and most bitterly dividing and weakening ourselves in the process
Alcohol is a major killer of Americans and cannabis is no such thing. You really need to focus on the science of alcohol vs. cannabis and stop trying to rip rights away from your fellow citizens..
No one has the "right" to smoke pot nor to drink alcohol.
One other way that drugs and crime relate is that illegal drug markets are a massive funding source for criminal groups. The estimates I saw were billions of dollars in illegal revenue in California alone. Other evils like prison gangs are also amplified by drug revenues. Even if making marijuana legal doesn't keep people out of jail directly, perhaps it defunds crime?
It's also possible that, at least with recent legalization, we are in this awkward middle where the legal supply system is still too crippled to compete the drug gangs out of business. Or perhaps fentanyl and the other harder drugs are a larger source of revenue anyway. I don't know for sure.
We're in this awkward middle where prohib states are providing a market for weed being grown illegally in free states. Excessive taxes and regulation play into the hands of the black market as well, California has been a prime example of that.
i don’t think that’s necessarily accurate. i agree that differing legalization status by state is allowing criminal groups to still find a market, but if 2/3 of colorado citizens are buying legal in just 9-10 years that’s promising. this cited i think 1/3 of respondents in a study saying they’d buy whatever’s cheapest, but that doesn’t account for convenience and availability. people believe themselves to be frugal and we generally are, but that doesn’t always translate the way we say it’s going to- ie you’ll get what’s cheapest until your dealer isn’t answering, or until you’re on your way to a friends house and just wanna stop real quick even though it’s maybe 10% more. i live in CA and i disagree that regulatory costs have driven up price so significantly that it props up illicit, you can get legal weed plenty cheap and know the THC content is high, i really think it’s more of an issue failing to crack down on illicit production and protecting the legal market.
One problem is that the market demand remains so high in the states with criminalization that the legal states like CA and CO (and the Feds) are faced with the challenge- and expense- of sorting out the unlicensed growing operations and busting them. That was never even an effective mission in the days when the states had criminalization statutes. Now they're being tasked to continue massive enforcement efforts in order to curb supplies for other US states that won't face the reality of their own demand.
I support the effort to shut down large-scale bootleg growing operations, the same way I support shutting down moonshine liquor operations. (Large indoor operations especially rub me the wrong way. Including the legal ones.) But as long as cannabis remains Federally illegal and interstate transport is outlawed, the illicit suppliers are going to find marked advantages cultivating their sources of supply from within the US rather than dodging interdiction at the national borders. Twistedly enough, many of the large bootleg growing operations in California are now vertically integrated operations funded, staffed, and run by Mexican cartels!
The answer should be obvious- Federal legalization, and the ability to lawfully trans-ship cannabis across state lines. (If a given state is bound and determined to keep cannabis criminalized, so be it...not much different than the way Prohibition played out with alcohol, although even Utah eventually gave up on distilled alcohol Prohibition a few years back.) But the risk-averse political class of our national leadership in Congress and the White House needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the present day on this matter.
i 100% agree - although to your point about utah, i’m originally from arkansas which still has i think the majority of the remaining “dry counties” (not to mention a ban on alcohol sales on sundays. because jesus) but of course there are still plenty of alcohol users and abusers in those counties. i definitely agree with you on the enforcement issues of a mixed status system, but i sort of think about the issues of protecting a legal market and cutting off violent production organizations separately from like the efficacy of taxes/regulation costs and how they affect price and consumer behavior. drugs are often talked about as though they are the same as any other commodity, but there’s a lot of evidence that demand is driven by different factors. i support federal legalization but i also support strict regulation and a more comprehensive overhaul of drug policy. all our current information indicates hallucinogens and MDMA are way way way less addictive than alcohol or nicotine, and might have treatment potential for some mental health issues including…alcoholism. also they’re fun. so ayahuasca is illegal but oxycodone isn’t? there’s just no logic to it except profitability and european cultural history with certain drugs versus others, and when mental health is involved, when you have highly addictive legal drugs and hardly addictive illegal drugs listed schedule 1, you’re making policy based on ideology and not medical science, letting people get hooked and destroy their family’s lives and often die of their addictions to legal drugs and locking up people doing… just different drugs. i’m dying for a little consistency here that centers medicine and physiology and the fact that the illicit drug trade has been made so powerful BECAUSE people want drugs and self-medicate, they aren’t exactly pushing drugs on communities that have zero demand for them. evidenced in part by the fact that a majority of americans already regularly do a drug that has been made widely available, cheap, and socially acceptable.
It isn't just alcohol.
There are at least as many long-term prescription SSRI users as regular cannabis users. And the SSRIs have much more seriously addictive properties- although the withdrawal is referred to by the euphemism "discontinuance syndrome."
https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2021/11/07/americas-epidemic-of-antidepressants/
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/one-6-americans-take-antidepressants-other-psychiatric-drugs-n695141
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-concerns-emerge-about-long-term-antidepressant-use-11567004771
Same with amphetamines: https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/news/20230331/adhd-drug-prescriptions-went-up-during-pandemic-study
ADHD drugs are prescribed as a regular regimen, to be taken every day, according to accepted medical practice. Otherwise, you're doing it wrong.
At least as many Americans use benzodiazepines: https://www.benzoinfo.com/prescribing-statistics/
Benzodiazepine tranquilizers are most commonly prescribed for occasional use, not regular use. But millions of people do use them habitually, or admit to overusing or abusing them. They're much more of an overdose liability than SSRIs or psychostimulants. They mix particularly poorly with alcohol, but also often show up in conjunction with opioid overdoses. The most lethal combination is of course alcohol, benzos, and opioids.
Oh yeah, opioid painkillers: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/rxrate-maps/index.html
So who are we fooling? Tens of millions of Americans are on habit-forming drugs. They have legal drug habits. That might not be optimal from a health standpoint, but it doesn't appear to have led to mass behavioral dysfunction or societal chaos. Certainly not in comparison with the deleterious effects of social media- especially when used by the young and unwary, and people who haven't developed antibodies to unsupported speculations, logical fallacies, and unkind suggestions from anonymous participants.
Tens of millions of Americans seem to be maintaining their prescription drug habits without undue issues. As long as they have them.
Do I think that cannabis is "addictive"? Using the neologized definition that's become mainstreamed by the APA, for some people, yes, it is.
Does cannabis have as much addictive potential as any of the prescription drugs listed above? No.
so well put. americans already regularly using habit forming drugs might like feeling morally superior to americans who regularly use… different habit forming drugs?… but applying arbitrary standards of morality to human bodies has pretty much always been bad policy. maybe it’s not anyone’s job to tell anybody else what they SHOULD be ingesting to physically and psychologically manage their life and enjoy their time here…maybe it’s our job to keep each other from getting hurt and support each other in our various mental illnesses. which include addiction. AA is supposed to be a safe place for alcoholics, a community to help remain abstinent from an addictive drug that has negatively impacted our lives. recently at a meeting a girl who admitted to being on SSRIs tried to force another girl to leave because she takes stimulants. this was not a meeting for people whose lives have been negatively impacted by stimulants. she felt those stimulants improved her quality of life- but the first girl insisted she wasn’t REALLY sober…despite the fact ALL of us were having a cigarette outside 5 mins previously. superiority complexes about certain drugs have literally no place in addiction treatment, it only helps the people trying to feel better about themselves and feeds into the idea addiction is a moral deficiency and not a chemical response and mental health issue. it’s supremely frustrating and i so appreciate everything you said here about it.
Nice to see such serious, reasonable comments.
Cannabis is nowhere near as effective as opiates for pain, but it's nowhere near as dangerous either. It has value as pain medicine and the idea that opiates (schedule II) can be prescribed for pain but cannabis (schedule I) can't be is both ludicrous and criminally insane. Why so much of the medical profession supports this nonsense is beyond me. History is going to judge them severely.
My main issue is that I want pot to be lower status. I don't necessarily think pot should be regulated differently than alcohol, but I think pot heads should be viewed much like alcoholics.
Furthermore, we need to stop blaming the War on Drugs for crime. Crime happens because low IQ young men think they can get away with crime. That's it. Drugs lower IQ and inhibition, leading to crime. Most people in on drug charges are in because they pled down to it or it's what the DA could nail them on, but they are actual criminals. Anyone whose been on a inner city jury can see this.
When 'potheads' start to murder and rape and torment people the way alcoholics do, we can start viewing the two groups the same.
thank you. I should have known this comments section would degenerate into discussions about gangs 🙄 ah, but the gangs of coked up boozehound executives continue to roam free, the blood(thirsty capitalist)s and the crip(pling the economy and robbing us all blind)s if you will…
If we're going to talk about the effects of the Drug War, we have to talk about gangs. And money laundering banks, Delaware Corporation real estate tax shelters, and corrupt law enforcement, of course.
uh huh… if you’re talking about distribution networks in the illicit market you do, but if you’re bringing up how “low IQ” people form gangs because they enjoy or gravitate towards violence, as that person was, it’s pretty unnecessary and not really based in reality to my knowledge. gangs might do the heavy lifting of buying from cartels, turning coke into crack, producing (mostly biker gangs with meth), and stepping on product, but studies have pretty consistently shown over the last 20 years that substance abuse is significantly higher in suburbs than inner cities (not a lot of gang activity in suburbs) and rural areas also have higher rates then cities, high rates of alcohol as drug of choice, and substance abuse begins earlier in life. it sounds like you’re talking about looking at the illicit drug trade from a purely economic standpoint, as far as who benefits and how the supply chain operates/persists, and that’s cool, but i tend to focus more on how drug abuse manifests in communities, health outcomes and the societal aspects. gangs and cartels in the drug trade profit off the high demand for drugs in this country, so i think looking at that demand and being real about it makes a lot of sense.
It's imperative to include the social impacts of fueling a massive criminal economy, and the political economy and social milieu of gangland is an integral part of that problem. Declining to address the situation only allows the Drug Warriors who fixate on "how “low IQ” people form gangs because they enjoy or gravitate towards violence" to supply their narrative without contradiction.
You aren't going to oppose that narrative by ignoring it, hand-waving it, or by simply responding with accusatory retorts at the people propounding it. You need to talk about the situation and its ramifications. The Drug Warriors built the Pleasure Island that lures the unwary into the drugs trade and gang life as minors, and then snaps the trap shut once they turn 18. That construction has to be investigated and unpacked. Although personally, I've done enough investigation and unpacking, and I'm long past ready to get on with the dismantling.
There are a lot of twists and turns in the narrative, but the reality is that the Drug War is criminogenic and corrupting. Across the board, low and high. It's as dishonest to view the illicit drugs economy through a lens of accusation as primarily the responsibility of decadent affluent suburbanite consumers as it is to view it as some corrupting influence mysteriously emanating exclusively from "the inner city", etc etc. That just leads to finger pointing and people chasing their tails, and nothing gets accomplished. It's also intolerable to have a criminalization policy in place that for all practical purposes ordains a de facto criminal monopoly over the illicit drugs trade, and then decline to enforce the laws against open retail street dealing, because Social Justice. That's fake policy.
just to be clear, it’s not accusatory to say i’m unsurprised at the trajectory some people will take an honest debate about drug policy, and it’s not my job to make persuasive arguments to every tom dick and harry with an ignorant take. there are plenty of examples of gangs doing horrific things. there are also examples of gangs doing things that are demonstrably positive for the community. does that counteract their overwhelmingly negative actions that endanger and hurt the community? of course not. but that dichotomy is so much of the history organized crime, is the godfather to the sopranos to scarface, is why policy should not carve out space for bad actors and criminal organizations to then exploit their communities and connections for profit. if you really think that legal drug manufacturers have the same responsibility as organized crime affiliates, i disagree. i think resources matter, social acceptance matters, generational wealth matters, risk of violence matters, and in all these nuanced elements that absolutely do impact culpability, there is greater understanding of the economic arguments about drugs. the thing big pharma shares the most with illicit drug trade organizations is the ability to meet a demand for drugs that exists. did cartels in mexico grow to dominate the country by selling drugs to mexican people? no. no they didn’t. that is not even close to where a majority of profits came from. and where did they get the weapons they rely on for social political and economic dominance? oh. that’s right. the us. we give big pharma tools to inflict death and damage too, and these days the cartels ARE moving drugs in mexico - mostly meth, because workers can work longer when they’re on it. i guess i just don’t know why you’re under the impression that suburbanite consumers are responsible for anything except a high demand for drugs, or why you think… that it’s necessary or possible to attribute “blame” to any one geographic group or any other type of group of people when it comes to demand. this is a policy and public health issue, full stop. medicine and drugs are issues that affect humans, human bodies, every society in history. i agree with you on some things but like i said you seem to see policy responses as being primarily driven by economic factors whereas i see policy responses as needing to be driven by public health factors. big pharma isn’t fucked up because drugs are their product nearly as much as they are fucked up because of their political power, their practices, their lack of accountability, the corporatism, the wealth hoarding… like i just see industry issues with big pharma as not entirely sector specific. it’s insurance as well, and it’s deregulated capitalism ultimately. i don’t see gangs as being their street equivalent. i see gangs as a lot of things, but that would be a conversation about societal violence, weak states, community justice and “savage order” types of things (a good book about violence). i used to be the drug dealer for pretty much my whole high school, and i wasn’t in a gang and neither was my plug and neither was his plug. it’s only part of the story and given the complexities of gang violence, the variety of organizations, the factors that have to do with masculinity and lack of opportunity and seeking fraternity, the…idea that selling drugs is “criminal” but murder is CRIMINAL and people are acting like you can talk about both at the same time in a real, ethics centered way… idk man. i just don’t think i’m the person for any convo of the kind you’ve outlined for “deconstructing” when i see the construction pretty differently.
Crime also happens because people with high IQs think they can get away with it and usually do. This has less to do with IQ and more to do with economic status. Rich kids don’t get sent to jail. Poor kids do. You sound like a white man over the age of 70.
According to the drug laws of this country, over 50% of Americans have committed a crime. Whether they've ever been apprehended or not is a different matter. The US is a criminalized society. It's also a society that affords minors considerable protection for criminal acts, compared to adults. Considering that the retail end of the illicit drugs trade is handled by minors, that situation adds up to a considerable amount of influence within youth culture and peer group society, and that influence continues into adulthood. Its extent is influenced considerably by household economic status, educational achievement, and occupational success in adult world. But criminal influence has become pervasive in American society and culture, to some degree or another. Not just in the "inner city."
Not that you've given any evidence of having any familiarity with either drug users or developmental psychology measurements, but there's no direct correlation between illicit drug use and "IQ." The occupations with the highest rate of illicit drugs use include medical students, medical professionals, legal professionals- and police.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6149012/
https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/drug-addiction/professions-highest-rate-abuse/
You really don't see a connection between the war on drugs and crime?
That's hard to believe. Are you familiar with the deeds of drug cartels and gangs?
The idea that drug laws cause crime doesn't fit the evidence very well.
You have many polities with harsh drug laws and enforcement with little crime, and many polities with loose drug laws and enforcement with lots of crime.
When a drug is legalized, like say marijuana, you don't see any drop-off in crime or arrests. Many people who were getting busted on marijuana charges end up getting busted on something else (often the whole reason they were busted on a drug charge is because its easier to prove or a plea bargain, but they are violent criminals).
Young low IQ men form gangs and like to participate in violent tournaments. They need little excuse to do this, and where you legalize one drug they can choose another, or hoes, or dice, or protection rackets, or who dissed who at a party or on social media. It's enlightening to actually witness trials related to why people kill each other in the ghetto. If you removed drug illegality as an excuse, which many jurisdiction have de sure or de facto, they just use some other excuse.
The main issue with drugs is that it lower IQ and inhibition in users and especially addicts. Such people are a lot more likely to commit crimes under the influence. If you legalize drugs you will get more users and more addicts, which isn't a good for crime.
The simplest way to stop crime is to demonstrate clearly to young low IQ men that:
1) They will be caught with a high degree of certainty every time they commit a crime of any kind.
2) The punishment will be very harsh and thus not worth the risk of getting caught.
If you can demonstrate this effectively then through a mixture of deterrence and incarceration you can eliminate crime, even in terrible demographic circumstances. The question is whether the stakeholders in the state of the willpower to do this.
Can we please apply your theory to high IQ white-collar criminals too?
There are high-IQ street criminals, too- and illicit drugs dealing makes for a particularly attractive place for them to employ their intelligence, notwithstanding the recklessness of the decision, which is typically made by immature young people who haven't made a serious appraisal of the long-term consequences. Yes, smart people can still make bad choices and wrong decisions. (But it's like Disney's Pinocchio: Pleasure Island. You're 15. You're poor. Wouldn't you?)
That undercuts @fp123's argument, but it's obvious that he prefers to view the situation as cut and dried. And, perhaps, using the categorical "low IQ" as a euphemism, rather than just coming right out and saying what he really means. Although even if his labeling is sincerely intended, it's a huge error to exploit IQ measurements as a criterion for public policy initiatives.
It hasn't quite become fashionable yet to question the validity of IQ scores as a measurement of "general intelligence", but I'll get out in front on that by asserting that given what's recently been learned about the limitations of the univariate model of neurotypicality, we should know better. When a sizeable number of individuals on the autistic spectrum perform two standard deviations better on the RPM test than the WISC test- and both of those tests allegedly measure the same "Spearman's g", aka "general intelligence"- that ought to tell us something.
Much of the material on IQ tests like the Weschler is more accurately tests of academic skill sets; RPM is more focused on specific proficiencies at detecting patterns using abstract spatial logic. There are no IQ tests for the acute sensitivity required to proficiently read and respond to interpersonal social cues. And a "high IQ" scoring group of Western academics would probably die before they could pick out a path through a rain forest that an indigenous child could read by the age of nine, using real-world spatial logic. Practice makes perfect, particularly under the neuroplastic conditions associated with early childhood development.
That said, to return to the topic of cannabis: I think it has a strong tendency to get in the way of learning practically any skill, particularly in the initial stages. Pot use by elementary school age and high school age kids is a bad thing, and it needs to be discouraged and prevented. Cannabis can provide creative inspiration and hone performance for (some) people who are already proficient at an intellectual, artistic, or athletic skill- but it's practically always the case that they've already achieved competence without the influence of pot. If someone gets involved with using weed regularly early on, they may never even get as far as learning the basics. This is particularly important in the case of the scholastic skills- literacy and numeracy. It has to be emphasized that without basic competence in those skills, the modern world is a very unfriendly place. And if someone is showing up in class high all the time from an early age, it isn't the fault of the school if they're unable to learn to read, write, and figure.
That's a primary reason why I think cannabis should be legalized- in order to put the market into a realm where age restrictions can be effectively enforced. Under illicit conditions, the retail trade is in the hands of members of the teenage peer group! This is the case everywhere- "gang-related" has nothing to do with it. It's a bad situation when adults find that the best way to score marijuana in a strange town is to ask a teenager.
Cannabis definitely has some drawbacks, and the harm reduction and education situation is something that needs to be worked out in conjunction with legalization. In particular, regular use at an early age gets in the way of acquiring all sorts of skills at the stage when they're most effectively learned. The SAMHSA statistics- which I trust, mostly- indicate that the group that most often uses marijuana the most frequently are males in their teen to mid-twenties years. Sometimes even younger. The vast majority of marijuana users begin in their teens, and by and large their attitudes toward it are adolescent attitudes. That's the wrong way to get acquainted with the substance. Teenagers are a population that needs to have their use reduced to the experimental or occasional basis, at most. I don't hold with the folklore that pot is harmless, just because it doesn't cause the physical impairment of alcohol. The fact that someone can be high on pot without being sloppy does not mean that their learning skills aren't impaired.
You sound like you're talking through your hat.
I've recently been reading literature on gangs and crime going back to the 19th century, through the early 20th century, the Alcohol Prohibition era, the mid-20th century, late 20th century, and up to today. The role of gangs in American crime- and their power, their financial influence- surged during Alcohol Prohibition, and then in the 1980s, with the street retail trade in crack cocaine.
In particular, there' no comparison between the numbers of gang members in the 1960s and 1970s and what's happened since then.
In 2011, the FBI estimated that there are 33,000 gang chapters, and 1.4 million gang members. https://www.cnn.com/2011/10/21/justice/gang-membership-increase/index.html
"...The 100-page 2011 “National Gang Threat Assessment” claimed criminal gangs pose a growing threat in communities throughout the United States.
“The most notable trends for 2011 have been the overall increase in gang membership and the expansion of criminal street gangs’ control of street-level drug sales and collaboration with rival gangs and other criminal organizations,” according to the report.
While there was no data related to how the economy might factor into growth in gangs, more aggressive recruiting and cultural and ethnic factors may have contributed to the increase in gang membership.
Although overall crime in the United States has continued to decline over the past three years, the relative amount of crime inflicted by gang members appears to have increased. The new FBI report claims that gangs are responsible for 48% of violent crime, on average, in most jurisdictions..."
Not just in "the ghetto", either. There are gangs in small towns across America, these days.
There 200,000 gang members in prison alone. https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/using-restrictive-housing-manage-gangs-us-prisons
Many drugs have been made either outright legal or de facto legal (you can do business un-harassed in many open air drug markets today, and people wander the streets obviously high and nobody does anything). Yet gangs persist, in fact they are more common in those districts with lax laws and enforcement.
By contrast Singapore puts people to death for carrying too much pot and its got no crime at all.
An interesting thing with prohibition is it didn't spring into existence in 1920. Most of New England and NY and the Upper Midwest banned alcohol in the 1850s (it was repealed during the Civil War to raise money for the war effort).
Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s many states, counties, and localities passed various prohibition legislation long before prohibition. If you looked at a map of the US in 1905 huge swaths of the country were effectively already under prohibition, but the crime rate was low, and it was lower in the dry areas then the wet areas. Most gangs were in the big cities amongst immigrant communities, that were thoroughly "wet". Gang and criminal activity was on the rise from 1900-1920, before prohibition, and mostly in the wet areas. The murder rate increased by a factor of 600% from 1900-1920, and only 66% or so during prohibition.
I generally think that prohibition was a net negative:
1) It tried to ban a "soft" drug with deep roots in the culture
2) The ban itself was harsher then many of its supporters expected (most people thought prohibition would ban alcohol content above 3.0%, light beer level, and that it was mainly supposed to prevent binge drinking of hard liquor).
3) The enforcement was basically non-existent. There was no plan for enforcement and few resources applied to it. Local governments, especially those in the cities where people voted wet and didn't want prohibition anyway, did basically nothing. The federal response was more or less stillborn from the start for a wide variety of reasons you can read about.
4) There was a rise in crime associated with prohibition, but there was a bigger rise in crime before prohibition. In a way the prohibition era is just a continuation of the trends of immigration (both from Europe and blacks from the south) and urbanization which you would expect to increase crime rates. Before prohibition Sicilian mobsters were finding other ways to commit crime. And places with prohibition but without Sicilian mobsters seemed to go along peacefully enough.
In short, while I wouldn't endorse prohibition, I don't really consider the be all explanation for crime trends in America at the time, and one quick fix to solve it all. Nor do I think that meth or crack being illegal is the primary driver of crime today.
You want to make the US into Singapore? How about you move there, instead of implying that you find its system superior to the US?
Setting aside the totalitarian implications of that endorsement, consider the practical differences. Singapore has 280 square miles of land area. The US has 2,959,064 square miles of land area, just in the lower 48 states.
Singapore imposes its panopticon surveillance state on a population of roughly 6 million people. The US has 335 million. Around 100 million US citizens are armed. That's a lot heavier lift than policing a postage stamp sized area of docile residents offering a social consensus of consent to a regimented existence out of the pages of A Wrinkle In Time, because Low Taxes.
"Many drugs have been made either outright legal or de facto legal (you can do business un-harassed in many open air drug markets today, and people wander the streets obviously high and nobody does anything)."
That is not "legal."
Legal doesn't mean "we have criminalization statutes, but they're unenforceable, which means that we've handed over a de facto monopoly to career criminals while reserving enforcement to local whims, political posturing, and corruption."
Legal means "we have regulated the supply and marketing of the commodity for purity and safety, and the trade is in the hands of licensed and accountable taxpayers" and "we are allowing medical professionals to do their jobs as they see fit, including allowing the prescription of controlled substances for addiction maintenance while maintaining centralized supervision of the practice in order to prevent diversion through patient abuses like doctor shopping and physician abuses like prescription profiteering." You know, the dereliction of enforcement that allowed the legal opioid problem to get out of hand so badly in the 1990s, because the Federal government had no central database of prescriptions and providers of DEA Schedule II "controlled substances." (I don't blame the DEA for that particular problem, incidentally; they tried to get the funding for an effective centralized Federal prescription drug monitoring program, but the request was shot down in Congressional committee hearings.)
"Yet gangs persist"
The present-day drugs market is similar to the failed experiment of Federal alcohol Prohibition, only exponentially worse. Criminal gangs have been provided a de facto monopoly over the supply chain for the vast majority of the forbidden substances in the country. Americans were spending more on illicit drugs than they spent on food 40 years ago, and if that situation has changed, it's only because food has become more expensive, while the forbidden substances have become cheaper. The illicit drugs industry became a cornerstone of the economy in many parts of the country- not just in the inner city neighborhoods, but in rust belt towns and rural regions from coast to coast.
"they [the gangs] are more common in those districts with lax laws and enforcement."
You are talking through your hat with unsupported- and unsupportable- claims. Ignoring the history of gang expansion in the US, which began in the 1980s, not just with "the cartels" in the 2010s. "The gangs" are the reason that the state of California expanded its prison system to hold a 300% increase in the prison population in the late 1980s and 1990s. It didn't put out the fire. It dumped gasoline on it.
And now, 40 years later- unlike alcohol Prohibition, which only required 14 years to get called off- Gangland has gone dynastic. Children who grew up with their fathers in prison, recruited into gang life. And the children of those children. Recruited into gang life, fueled by the de facto monopoly over a trade that runs to the tens of billions of dollars. Meanwhile, the West Coast and Sun Belt are swamped with addict populations that are 2nd and 3rd-order impacts of an opioid epidemic that began 30 years ago in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. And while in the 1960s, gangs were confined to a half-dozen US cities, now there are chapters from coast to coast, in places like Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Omaha, Nebraska.
https://www.pennlive.com/news/2020/03/not-just-a-city-problem-gang-activity-increases-in-harrisburgs-suburbs.html
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/03/us/us-marshals-anti-gang-operation-omaha-arrests-nebraska/index.html
Are those gangs going to go away, as long as they've been granted a de facto monopoly over the illegal drugs trade? Did they go away during alcohol Prohibition? Of course not. They go into prison, they get more organized, and they go back on the streets.
I have a hunch about the final solution you have in mind to take care of that problem. You already alluded to it with your praise for "crime-free" (unless you count money laundering) Singapore. I prefer a more modest set of legal reforms.
Your potted history of the alcohol Prohibition era is ludicrous. Alcohol Prohibition produced a windfall for organized crime that protection rackets and gambling could never match. And you go on to post wooden-headed nonsense like this, with your bare face hanging out:
"...places with prohibition but without Sicilian mobsters seemed to go along peacefully enough."
That statement right there shows that you have no idea what you're talking about. Shotgun dry law enforcement killed more than 1200 people in raids across the country over the course of the mid-1920s. One of the main paramilitary enforcement auxiliaries of the Prohibition effort in rural areas was the Ku Klux Klan. Until the Grand Dragon of Indiana was convicted of the rape and murder of a young girl, that is, and the Klan lost its social clout and respectability as purity crusaders.
https://www.history.com/news/kkk-terror-during-prohibition
https://www.alcoholproblemsandsolutions.org/the-kkk-supported-prohibition/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/murder-wasnt-very-pretty-the-rise-and-fall-of-dc-stephenson-18935042/
You've also ignored that elephant in the room, Corruption. The topic that takes up so many pages in Okrent's book Last Call, and McGirr's book The War On Alcohol. The corruption that's persisted and spiraled out of control during the Drug War, as well:
https://stopthedrugwar.org/topics/drug_war_issues/criminal_justice/policing/police_corrupti
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-secret-service-agent-sentenced-scheme-related-silk-road-investigation
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-dea-agent-sentenced-extortion-money-laundering-and-obstruction-related-silk-road
https://apnews.com/article/soccer-sports-la-liga-money-laundering-puerto-rico-38aed2da8cd0ac237aca28aa39321105
I wouldn't be surprised if you ignored any mention of those links in any reply you might offer. After all, they're so inconvenient to your argument.
But the facts are the facts. The enormous amount of easy money in the all-cash business of illegal drugs is an attractive nuisance of staggering proportions that has ensnared top-ranking officers and entire units of the country's most elite law enforcement divisions. How are poor people supposed to behave any better?
"How about you move there, instead of implying that you find its system superior to the US?"
1) Because there is more to Singapore then crime.
2) Because it's on the other side of the planet and I'm not a citizen, nor are any in my family. Because it's not clear we could get jobs there.
"Setting aside the totalitarian implications of that endorsement"
Yes, people who visit Singapore routinely refer to it as a totalitarian hellhole. It's like they are in North Korea.
Myself, I enjoyed my visit. You should get out more.
"Singapore has 280 square miles of land area."
Singapore is a city. The appropriate comparison for Singapore would be large American cities. However, we could basically substitute any Asian country including big ones like Japan. Tough drug laws and criminal justice systems, lack of crime.
"you know, the dereliction of enforcement that allowed the legal opioid problem to get out of hand so badly in the 1990s,"
You are all over the place here dude. Opioids were legal and regulated like you want and they became a total mess. Is the problem legality or illegality? You can't seem to make up your mind here. Except that somehow an exactly perfect system should have done exactly the right thing, and you call me utopian.
What we learned is that doctors will push drugs that are bad for people if they have an incentive and that they can create their own demand (just like drug dealers). In fact it was worse because lots of people with better sense then to deal with drug dealers would trust their doctors.
If you think legal opioids were a mess I don't see how legal meth is going to go down any easier for you. The same dynamic will go down.
I expect basically every attempt to legalize drugs to go down the way opioids did, but worse the worse the drug is.
"Shotgun dry law enforcement killed more than 1200 people in raids across the country over the course of the mid-1920s."
Like police killings today, this is dramatically less then the # of people being murdered during the same time.
Total spending on prohibition enforcement in 1923 amounted under $9,000,000 in 2023 adjusted dollars. This amounted to $0.08 per person in 2023 dollars using the 1923 population. 0.0006% of GDP. This was not a serious attempt.
But more importantly I'm asking a simple question. Given that the period from the late 1800s until 1920 saw some parts of the country go dry and some stay wet, shouldn't we see a difference in crime rates between them? Shouldn't the dry areas have seen a huge increase in crime during this era? Shouldn't the crime in wet areas outperform them? This is as closed to a randomized trial as we can get.
I don't like prohibition because I think it was the wrong law and it failed most in the places that never wanted it in the first place. But I don't think drug prohibition is the reason for crime, and if you legalized every drug I would still expect to see crime (perhaps worse since addicts are more prone to criminality).
For something called The CAUSAL Fallacy, you sure play fast and loose with stats. You admit that the stats are weak, and that people deserve to be left alone if not harming others (a libertarian ember still glowing?) but then you propose that we empower the state to mitigate risks that are very poorly characterized. Except for prohibition, which has well characterized negative effects on many things beyond prison (holding a job, joining the military, etc) but not on decreasing use.
What is currently happening in most of the world is exactly what should happen. Let states and countries experiment, to reduce the scale of damage done by mistakes on both ends of the prohibition/legalization spectrum. Watch carefully with true curiosity, pretend that you are not smarter than everyone else, and see what happens. Be slow to accept the "evidence" offered by those with a strong POV. Most of it can't be reproduced. And always fight that internal urge to tell other people what to do with their lives.
I know, right? The silence is deafening. Meanwhile, American drowns in the bottom of a bottle and pays a heavy price for it. Ironically, because alcohol, especially hard liquor, is at a record low in terms of inflation-adjusted price up front.
There is really NO credible reason why cannabis should be treated any more stringently than alcohol or tobacco. NONE. And half-assed quasi-legalization seems to be the real problem here, not legalization per se. Just saying.