Legalize Pot

Let's just do it.

Does anyone think that the War on Drugs, which is now in its 40th year (since Nixon declared it) is winnable? Does anyone seriously think that it ever will be?

40 years ago, the most common drug was pot. Cocaine was hugely expensive. Heroin was the drug of hard-core losers; if you knew someone who was using smack, you pretty much knew that you'd hear in a year or two that they were dead. LSD was in use as speed.

Now, 40 years later, cops have converted from six shot Smith & Wesson Model 10s to Glocks and Sigs. SWAT teams have become common and the SWAT goons roll out on everything beyond writing parking tickets. Civil liberties have taken a huge hit, especially among minority populations. The incarceration rate has gone from one person in a thousand in 1970 (which was roughly the incarceration rate for the previous fifty years) to five times that.

(Edit: New image added much later as the old link failed)

States and the Federal government have gone on a prison-building spree. Soulless bottom-feeding corporations have sprung up to both imprison people under appalling conditions and otherwise suck money from the families of those in prison.[1] And for all that, drugs are as plentiful, if not moreso, than they were in 1970.

The so-called "War on Drugs" is where the GI Generation, the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers have proven themselves to be utter imbeciles compared to the generations before. When the Missionary Generation brought in Prohibition to try to stop the rampant abuse of alcohol, it proved to be an utter failure. Prohibition brought an astonishing rise in the amount of organized crime. Fourteen years later, the Missionary and Lost generations realized that Prohibition was a failure and ended it.[2]

We are now 40 years into Nixon's War on Drugs. Collectively, across this nation, we have probably spent trillions of dollars on drug enforcement, adding police, giving them new shit to play with, building prisons and locking up people.

What good has this done? What utility has been gained trying to use the hammer of law enforcement to stop people from using drugs?

The game is not worth the cost.

Let's legalize pot, first. If we legalize pot, than all of the criminal distribution network, from the growers who are making battlefields out of our wilderness parks to the goofball on the street who sell it, will be cut out of the game. Let's grow it, distribute it and sell it, legally. There is no reason why we can't tax pot the way we tax alcohol and cigarettes.

Sure, there will be social costs to legalizing pot. There will be stoners who would rather scrape together crap-ass work and stay high all the time, but they are already out there. There probably will still be some illegal distribution of legally grown pot, just as there is with cigarettes. Those who abuse pot and hurt people an be handled the same way that such is handled for alcohol use.

But trying to stamp out drug use by outlawing drug use has not worked. It is time that we, as a nation, realize that.[3]

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[1] Look into what it costs to make a collect call from a prison. It is very high. States get a cut of that, which amounts to a hell of a tax on the families of convicts.
[2] Though they did try to stamp out drug use, sowing the seed for our current mess.
[3] I don't use drugs. I don't smoke. My alcohol consumption rate is about two drinks per month. Thanks for wondering.