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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I could barely finish your bullshit piece on marijuana in the NY times. What world do you live in. Do you understand what addiction is. For over 60 years I have used and studied marijuana and I could find much truth or science in your words. Next time cite any real studies that support your claims. Next time pick a topic that you have some actual knowledge of the topic. Bob Goldman
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
"and conclude that opioids are a good substitute for opioids."
did you mean, "and conclude that Marijuana is a good substitute for opioids"?
I could barely finish your bullshit piece on marijuana in the NY times. What world do you live in. Do you understand what addiction is. For over 60 years I have used and studied marijuana and I could find much truth or science in your words. Next time cite any real studies that support your claims. Next time pick a topic that you have some actual knowledge of the topic. Bob Goldman
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.