I understand that for some unknown reason, many of my subscribers didn’t get this post published on 11/10. I am, therefore sending it our again and since I have no way of knowing who got it and who didn’t I’m sending it to everone. If you already received it, my apologies. If you didn’t… enjoy.
Bill
It has been written that those who fail to learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat those mistakes again.
We are currently awash in such a great mistake. Early in the last century, America, led by an accumulation of religious fanatics, socially correct fools and a nutty group of frustrated females that called itself the Women’s Temperance Movement coerced he government into outlawing the sale of alcoholic beverages. The goal was to turn America, which had its share of serious drunks into a sober country. Did it work? Do rhinos fly? What were the results of Prohibition?
Well, a lot of people went blind or died from drinking bathtub gin and other improperly prepared libations. The Mafia, which was still a small organization, located mostly in New York and Chicago and existing on extortion and numbers went big time and grew into a major menace thanks to the money made running whiskey. A goodly number of people went to jail for selling or imbibing the devil’s drink. Sound familiar?
Someplace along the line American’s came to their senses and repealed Prohibition and contrary to the temperance type’s predictions the world did not come to an end. Who’d a thought?
But right about the same time we were getting our cocktails back we were losing another form of escape. Drugs. Up until the time they were banned by the Federal Government drugs were sold in most pharmacies sometimes even without a prescription. I have a box of old bottles in my garage with labels that indicate they once held, morphine, cocaine and heroin concoctions, conjured mostly for female problems. Explanation: If the old lady gets horny and you ain’t up to it, just get her stoned.
Now I’m not going to bore you with the history of drug use in different societies around the world or their recreational and therapeutic uses throughout history. Those who are into drugs already know far more about these subjects than I do and those who are against drug use will only think I’m lying. What I am going to do is discuss current drug use and laws in this country and the huge contributions they make to the problems of our society. Before you get the idea that I have a dog in this fight let me state unequivocally that I am and always have been a drinker not a doper.
We are currently in an economic regression that has put our country behind the financial eight ball but we still spend approximately $8.7 billion a year for atrociously ineffectual drug enforcement. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Last year there were approximately 750,000 juvenile arrests for drug offenses of either sale or possession of marijuana. Now all those kids didn’t go to jail but a significant percentage did some time and that cost the taxpayers $216,000.00 per kid per year of incarceration. Numbers like that add up fast.
Then, of course, there’s the fact that illegal drug dealers don’t charge or pay taxes. Estimates run to almost $9 billion in sales taxes lost because drugs are illegal and there is no structure available to collect taxes. So between lost sales taxes and enforcement costs the country is losing almost $18 billion a year and that doesn’t even take into account the cost of user and seller incarceration. For what?
Illegal drugs are the scourge of our communities, not just the ghettos but all over society. Most of the street gangs exist on the proceeds of the sale of illegal drugs. A good portion of the problems that have the Governor of Arizona in an uproar, are due to drug wars that have spilled across the Mexican border. Why? Because there is a hell of a lot of money to be made selling illegal drugs. Just like there was selling illegal alcohol. How come we wised up about alcohol and at about the same time got brute stupid about drugs?
Sure drugs aren’t good for you, at least most drugs but, neither is alcohol, gambling, driving cars, skydiving or smoking but none of them are illegal. Once again the country is strangling itself based on some puritan concept of morality, because don’t kid yourself people, that’s what it’s all about. There isn’t a politician in the world that can stand up to a fire breathing Evangelist screaming the praises of God and the evils of drugs, just so he can bilk his flock.
Suppose we eliminated all drug laws tomorrow. What would happen? Would we still have drug addicts? Sure. We have them now with the anti-drug laws. Don’t think they’re going to quit because we repealed them? Will we have more addicts? Who knows? Did we have more drunks after Prohibition was repealed than we did during it? I don’t know but it doesn’t seem like we did. When I was a teenager everybody drank, whether or not they were legally old enough to do it. Then we went through a long phase where very few people drank but more took drugs. Now young people seem to be drinking again. A lot of both consumptions have to do with the romance of illegality. When I was a kid it was booze that was illegal where I lived so I became a drinker and drugs never held much appeal.
I grew up in Bergen County, NJ where the legal age to drink was 21 but only a short ride north across the border into Rockland County, NY it was 18. So instead of drinking in a neighborhood bar from which we could safely walk home we all drove north and some of us didn’t drive back, at least not all the way. Was that the law’s fault? No. Most of the young people I knew didn’t even like booze but they drank to be rebellious which is the natural state of the young. It was the same when I ran a club in the Village in the 60’s. Only then it was drugs. Most of the kids didn’t really like them but they did them because everybody else did them and again it was a form of rebellion. You make them legal and half the motivation to use them goes out the window.
In NYC it currently costs about $425 to buy an ounce of good grass but legal online marijuana companies sell an ounce for $47. That’s a hell of a discount even if you have to get a prescription. It just shows you the difference in cost when you don’t have to buy the stuff illegally. Imagine taking all that income away from the crooks who make it now. Imagine adding $18 billion a year plus the cost of incarcerating God knows how many kids to the plus side of the national ledger. Why the hell are we continuing the madness of keeping drugs illegal? We have not made smoking, which is far more harmful to the national health, illegal. It makes absolutely no sense. The only people who are being helped by keeping drugs illegal are the crooks. We learned that with Prohibition, it’s a shame that we’re too stupid to have absorbed the message.