Two Dozen Reasons to Legalize Drugs
— Society Suffers From America’s War on Drugs!
If the underground economy which supports the illicit drug trade were eliminated and drug users were either left alone or treated as patients rather than criminals, we’d cure so many of society’s major ills.
Please consider the following:
1) Whether legal or not, anyone who wants drugs today can get them. Wasted decades of invoking criminal sanctions on people has proven demand for drugs will never decrease.
2) We can’t keep drugs out of prisons. How can we keep them out of free society?
3) We endanger our police due to forcing them to enforce what’s unenforceable. It’s an impossible objective proven only to fail.
4) Profits resulting from marketing illicit drugs enriches only the mob and thus has created an obscenely large underground economy.
5) Because of enormous profits from drugs, corruption impacts enforcement, the courts and policy makers.
6) Many of the deaths which result from illicit drugs are a consequence of a ‘cut’ placed into the drug in order to increase its quantity for sale. Street chemists who place this ‘cut’ into the drug are under no quality control and they create the product your teenage children consume.
7) Drug smuggling routes are also weapons smuggling routes. Think how many third-world dictators are propped up with power from well-organized drug gangs — Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador as prime examples. Perpetual wars in places like Vietnam, Colombia and Afghanistan are common. Narco politics are perhaps the most pitiful politics on the planet!
8) The impact on third world nations is debilitating. For example, the Nicaraguan Contras sold drugs in exchange for weapons. Both the CIA and terrorists make money from the drug trade in order to support black op, off-the-books kinds of operations or acts of terrorism.
9) The drug war has caused overcrowding in prisons. America now imprisons more people than any other nation on earth. Unacceptable for a nation that prides itself on freedom!
10) Our courts systems are clogged with drug cases and this limits the quality of time which can be applied to more important cases before the courts.
11) The ‘druggies’ who end up in jail only end up making better drug connections from their time spent in jail, thus their drug-related activities are likely to widen for when they become released.
12) Career-hardened criminals have an easier time in jail due to easy access of illicit drugs. Why help to enhance a prison stay that should be difficult? This makes no sense!
13) The cost of waging the Drug War is staggering and drains money that could be better spent elsewhere.
14) Gang warfare and turf disputes have spawned from the Drug War. The cost of loyalty is debilitating and images of hatred against mainstream society becomes amplified beyond the gangs.
15) Property crime, incidents of rape, robberies and car thefts would markedly decrease. Our streets, our homes would be safer. An addict will do anything — committing a crime is not an issue — to get money for drugs!
16) Drug forfeiture laws have become oppressive and draconian as police hold an incentive to make arrests and confiscate property which beefs up respective police departments and helps to guarantee their positions, standing and salaries on the force.
17) The politician will always play the popular card and pretend they are genuinely concerned about drug problems. So they enact stiffer measures and penalties which only make the politician look good but does absolutely nothing to solve drug problems.
18) Drug testing has become a for-profit industry where insiders rake in obscene amounts of money. Probation departments in some states have become privatized. These private companies are usually connected to politicians. It’s like payola!
19) Many of America’s prisons have become for-profit prisons. They trade publicly on the stock market, thus a conflict of interest. They also hire out their prison populations to corporations at slave labor rates!
20) It’s best to have drug people above ground, not underground, participating within a public health system. This would have a positive impact by helping to slow the spread of diseases like AIDS, hepatitis and even Covid-19.
21) The Drug War, more than anything, has contributed to serious erosion of civil liberties and a degradation of our constitutional rights.
22) Think of all the obscene amount of money, untaxed and laundered into offshore tax haven accounts, money taken out of the American economy.
23) The illegality creates numerous profiteering opportunities from drug sales. The smaller the product and its transportability, easier becomes the sale. This poses an intense lure for young people as some will use their connections and access to money to impress members within their respective peer groupings.
24) A juvenile, if arrested and convicted, gets no public arrest record, no felony conviction. This creates an incentive for those aged 18 to 25 to get their younger brothers, sisters or cousins to sell drugs for them. Why? Because if the younger teen is caught little to nothing will happen. This creates a deeper and stronger ‘push’ to get younger people involved in drugs and at a time when they are most vulnerable. As often has happened, their lives become ruined forever.
