Legalizing Pot
To the Editor:
Everything Joel McNally wrote about legalizing pot is absolutely true, and here's one more thing that he forgot.
Making recreational drugs illegal has always been marketed on the premise that we have to do it to "keep the kids off drugs". The irony is that it does exactly the opposite.
Suppose you're a teenager and you want to buy beer or cigarettes. Who sells them? Only legitimate stores which can be fined or lose their licenses if they sell to underage customers. Why would they do that? Well, they wouldn't, which is why it's a challenge for kids to get their hands on those LEGAL drugs.
Contrast that with illegal substances. There's a huge market for them, since customers range all the way from 12 to 92, the sellers are taking the same risk no matter what age their customers are, and a 10-spot from a teenager spends just as well as the same sawbuck from the kid's grandpa. The question here is why WOULDN'T they sell to an underage customer? As, of course, they're more than happy to do.
One more thing. It's way easier to recruit pre-adults as mules, runners, and lookouts because they only face juvenile justice if caught, not serious hard time, so there's an added incentive for drug dealers to lure them in.
Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insane. And that pretty well sums up the grossly expensive, socially destructive, epically catastrophic failure that is the War on Drug-Using Americans.
= = = = = =
Repeal Prohibition. Again. For all the same reasons.
-- bumper sticker
Everything Joel McNally wrote about legalizing pot is absolutely true, and here's one more thing that he forgot.
Making recreational drugs illegal has always been marketed on the premise that we have to do it to "keep the kids off drugs". The irony is that it does exactly the opposite.
Suppose you're a teenager and you want to buy beer or cigarettes. Who sells them? Only legitimate stores which can be fined or lose their licenses if they sell to underage customers. Why would they do that? Well, they wouldn't, which is why it's a challenge for kids to get their hands on those LEGAL drugs.
Contrast that with illegal substances. There's a huge market for them, since customers range all the way from 12 to 92, the sellers are taking the same risk no matter what age their customers are, and a 10-spot from a teenager spends just as well as the same sawbuck from the kid's grandpa. The question here is why WOULDN'T they sell to an underage customer? As, of course, they're more than happy to do.
One more thing. It's way easier to recruit pre-adults as mules, runners, and lookouts because they only face juvenile justice if caught, not serious hard time, so there's an added incentive for drug dealers to lure them in.
Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insane. And that pretty well sums up the grossly expensive, socially destructive, epically catastrophic failure that is the War on Drug-Using Americans.
= = = = = =
Repeal Prohibition. Again. For all the same reasons.
-- bumper sticker
posted by Richard S. Russell | 11:51 AM
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