Would States Rather Melt Down Financially Than Legalize Drugs?
2010 June 19
Time Magazine Letters
Time & Life Bldg.
New York NY 10020
letters@time.com
I wonder how many of your readers were able to connect the dots among half a dozen articles in your June 28 issue to detect the underlying pattern.
Article #1 showed how legalizing one drug (marijuana) for one limited purpose (medical treatment) has provided new jobs and economic hope in unemployment-ravaged Michigan. Articles #2 and #3 spoke of decapitation bowling among the drug lords of Mexico and the US’s increasingly futile war against the drug-funded Taliban in Afghanistan. Left unmentioned in both cases is the rock-solid fact that the US is financing both sides in these conflicts; yes, we’re paying the bad guys, too.
Article #4, your cover story, spoke of anguished hand-wringing among the states over their massive budget deficits. Of course, the answer to their problems is staring them straight in the face: Legalize recreational drugs, then regulate and tax them. This increases revenues. Then release all non-violent drug offenders from prison and cut back on the cops, DAs, courts, judges, juries, prisons, wardens, guards, and probation agents that we’ve been using to persecute them for their victimless “crimes”. This reduces expenses. (To maintain our standing as the most incarcerated society in the history of the planet, our states spend more each year on prisons than they do on higher education.) Presto! Balanced budgets.
Plus which, legitimate merchants will avoid like the plague selling drugs to minors (just as they currently do with alcohol and tobacco), thereby keeping our kids safer from drugs than they are now, when it pays the dealers to recruit them young and use them as runners and lookouts in addition to getting them hooked.
It’s been said that one indicator of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So it is with America’s literally insane war on its drug-using citizens. It’s like picking your favorite car crash and re-enacting it every day, except with different vehicles and victims. It doesn’t work. It’s never worked. It never will work. All it’s doing is piling up more corpses. You’d think we would have learned from the Old Prohibition, but no, we just keep on trucking with the New Prohibition, expecting that someday, somehow, we can make recreational drugs so expensive, illegal, hard to get, and dangerous that Americans will voluntarily surrender their cravings for them. But the final grade is in: Fail!
Is the fiscal crisis in the states so catastrophic that some brave state legislature, somewhere among the 46 searching frantically for answers, will finally face reality and set a good example by legalizing recreational drugs? The answer may be found in Articles #5 and #6, on professional poker and online penny auctions: Don’t bet on it. Our national supply of stupidity and delusional thinking seems endless. If only there were a reliable source of sound information that would “favor ideas that make sense, that challenge us to rethink customary ways of doing business”.
Sound vaguely familiar? It should. Those words are from Article #7, in which Managing Editor Richard Stengel dislocates his shoulder patting Time itself on the back. “We don’t just cover the news,” he claims, “we put it in context and explain its larger meaning.” The very issue in which those words appear suggests otherwise. You give us stories and pictures of individual trees, when the nation as a whole (and your readers in particular) would have been better served had you taken a few steps back and said “Hey, know what? Turns out there’s a forest here.”.
Don’t just draw the dots: connect them!
= = = = = =
Repeal Prohibition. Again. For all the same reasons. -- bumper sticker
Time Magazine Letters
Time & Life Bldg.
New York NY 10020
letters@time.com
I wonder how many of your readers were able to connect the dots among half a dozen articles in your June 28 issue to detect the underlying pattern.
Article #1 showed how legalizing one drug (marijuana) for one limited purpose (medical treatment) has provided new jobs and economic hope in unemployment-ravaged Michigan. Articles #2 and #3 spoke of decapitation bowling among the drug lords of Mexico and the US’s increasingly futile war against the drug-funded Taliban in Afghanistan. Left unmentioned in both cases is the rock-solid fact that the US is financing both sides in these conflicts; yes, we’re paying the bad guys, too.
Article #4, your cover story, spoke of anguished hand-wringing among the states over their massive budget deficits. Of course, the answer to their problems is staring them straight in the face: Legalize recreational drugs, then regulate and tax them. This increases revenues. Then release all non-violent drug offenders from prison and cut back on the cops, DAs, courts, judges, juries, prisons, wardens, guards, and probation agents that we’ve been using to persecute them for their victimless “crimes”. This reduces expenses. (To maintain our standing as the most incarcerated society in the history of the planet, our states spend more each year on prisons than they do on higher education.) Presto! Balanced budgets.
Plus which, legitimate merchants will avoid like the plague selling drugs to minors (just as they currently do with alcohol and tobacco), thereby keeping our kids safer from drugs than they are now, when it pays the dealers to recruit them young and use them as runners and lookouts in addition to getting them hooked.
It’s been said that one indicator of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So it is with America’s literally insane war on its drug-using citizens. It’s like picking your favorite car crash and re-enacting it every day, except with different vehicles and victims. It doesn’t work. It’s never worked. It never will work. All it’s doing is piling up more corpses. You’d think we would have learned from the Old Prohibition, but no, we just keep on trucking with the New Prohibition, expecting that someday, somehow, we can make recreational drugs so expensive, illegal, hard to get, and dangerous that Americans will voluntarily surrender their cravings for them. But the final grade is in: Fail!
Is the fiscal crisis in the states so catastrophic that some brave state legislature, somewhere among the 46 searching frantically for answers, will finally face reality and set a good example by legalizing recreational drugs? The answer may be found in Articles #5 and #6, on professional poker and online penny auctions: Don’t bet on it. Our national supply of stupidity and delusional thinking seems endless. If only there were a reliable source of sound information that would “favor ideas that make sense, that challenge us to rethink customary ways of doing business”.
Sound vaguely familiar? It should. Those words are from Article #7, in which Managing Editor Richard Stengel dislocates his shoulder patting Time itself on the back. “We don’t just cover the news,” he claims, “we put it in context and explain its larger meaning.” The very issue in which those words appear suggests otherwise. You give us stories and pictures of individual trees, when the nation as a whole (and your readers in particular) would have been better served had you taken a few steps back and said “Hey, know what? Turns out there’s a forest here.”.
Don’t just draw the dots: connect them!
= = = = = =
Repeal Prohibition. Again. For all the same reasons. -- bumper sticker
posted by Richard S. Russell | 3:03 PM
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