Let's End Drug Prohibition!
POSTED BY: CrevanReaver
UPDATED: Friday, October 24, 2025 16:59
VIEWED: 5604
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Today (December 5, 2008) is the 75th anniversary the 21st Amendment was passed, thereby ending alcohol prohibition.
Ethan Nadelmann over at the Wall Street Journal makes the case that today is a day that the American people should be thinking about ending the socialist drug prohibition.
Quote:
It's already shaping up as a day of celebration, with parties planned, bars prepping for recession-defying rounds of drinks, and newspapers set to publish cocktail recipes concocted especially for the day.
But let's hope it also serves as a day of reflection. We should consider why our forebears rejoiced at the relegalization of a powerful drug long associated with bountiful pleasure and pain, and consider too the lessons for our time.
The Americans who voted in 1933 to repeal prohibition differed greatly in their reasons for overturning the system. But almost all agreed that the evils of failed suppression far outweighed the evils of alcohol consumption.
The change from just 15 years earlier, when most Americans saw alcohol as the root of the problem and voted to ban it, was dramatic. Prohibition's failure to create an Alcohol Free Society sank in quickly. Booze flowed as readily as before, but now it was illicit, filling criminal coffers at taxpayer expense.
Some opponents of prohibition pointed to Al Capone and increasing crime, violence and corruption. Others were troubled by the labeling of tens of millions of Americans as criminals, overflowing prisons, and the consequent broadening of disrespect for the law. Americans were disquieted by dangerous expansions of federal police powers, encroachments on individual liberties, increasing government expenditure devoted to enforcing the prohibition laws, and the billions in forgone tax revenues. And still others were disturbed by the specter of so many citizens blinded, paralyzed and killed by poisonous moonshine and industrial alcohol.
Supporters of prohibition blamed the consumers, and some went so far as to argue that those who violated the laws deserved whatever ills befell them. But by 1933, most Americans blamed prohibition itself.
When repeal came, it was not just with the support of those with a taste for alcohol, but also those who disliked and even hated it but could no longer ignore the dreadful consequences of a failed prohibition. They saw what most Americans still fail to see today: That a failed drug prohibition can cause greater harm than the drug it was intended to banish.
Consider the consequences of drug prohibition today: 500,000 people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails for nonviolent drug-law violations; 1.8 million drug arrests last year; tens of billions of taxpayer dollars expended annually to fund a drug war that 76% of Americans say has failed; millions now marked for life as former drug felons; many thousands dying each year from drug overdoses that have more to do with prohibitionist policies than the drugs themselves, and tens of thousands more needlessly infected with AIDS and Hepatitis C because those same policies undermine and block responsible public-health policies.
And look abroad. At Afghanistan, where a third or more of the national economy is both beneficiary and victim of the failed global drug prohibition regime. At Mexico, which makes Chicago under Al Capone look like a day in the park. And elsewhere in Latin America, where prohibition-related crime, violence and corruption undermine civil authority and public safety, and mindless drug eradication campaigns wreak environmental havoc.
All this, and much more, are the consequences not of drugs per se but of prohibitionist policies that have failed for too long and that can never succeed in an open society, given the lessons of history. Perhaps a totalitarian American could do better, but at what cost to our most fundamental values?
Why did our forebears wise up so quickly while Americans today still struggle with sorting out the consequences of drug misuse from those of drug prohibition?
It's not because alcohol is any less dangerous than theNOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I'd be happy to see a change in drug policy.
---
Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, "Where have I gone wrong?" Then a voice says to me, "This is going to take more than one night."
-- Charlie Brown
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Me, too. I don't know that across the board decriminalization is nessesarily the best route, but the current system does not work. There has to be a better middle ground.
"I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him."
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Quote:
Originally posted by CrevanReaver:
.......Marijuana, by comparison, is relatively harmless: little association with violent behavior, no chance of dying from an overdose, and not nearly as dangerous as alcohol if one misuses it or becomes addicted.
As a long time member of MPP (Marijuana Policy Project) http://www.mpp.org/ - I agree that we need to re-evaluate the archaic laws pertaining to the prohibition of this harmless plant.. (it is just a plant, you know...)
a video from MPP here:
http://tv.mpp.org/news/prohibition-still-doesnt-work/
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...in a related story, medical marijuana is now legal in Michigan.. sorta kind of......
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/04/medical-marijuana-now-leg_n_1
48583.html
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I only have one thing to say:
REPEAL DRUG LAWS TODAY
The greatest model for drug management is in the netherlands. For drugs like pot or shrooms, head shops abound. It's like Vince said in Pulp Fiction:
"They don't want you to to roll up a joint on the street and start puffing away, you have to do it in certain designated places"
Why does this not happen in the USA, a nation founded on liberty? For gods sake, our own president-elect admitted to doing lines of coke as a teen. Conservative operatives actually found the hot dog stand in Hawaii where he made his purchases. Does he seem craked-out out to you? Answer: No. Did the american people even care? Answer: No.
The best solution is this.
Step 1. Repeal all federal drug laws, this will then allow states to determine for themselves what they want.
Step 2. On the state level, campaign to allow certain processes for certain drugs. Pot and shooms should be available in designated places away from children. An age limit for purchase should be established. Allow citizens to pursue freedom in either these places or in the privacy of their homes.
Step 3. For harder destructive drugs, the netherlands handles things with certain places (like parks) where drug use of hard drugs is legal ONLY there. This keeps addicts coralled. Strict enforcement of prohabition of hard drugs occurs outside these places to protect a society that wants to exist away from it. Hard destructive drugs are heroin, crack, meth, ect.
Step 4. Provide free education to schoolchildren about the dangers of drugs. Also provide free rehab to anyone serious who wants to clean up.
Some states will make drugs legal. Cali, vermont, and flordia come to mind. Others will never do this, like Oklahoma. This is just fine.
Anyone disagree?
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Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
"I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him."
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Never understood why folk feel the need to misuse the legal system as a venue to try and force their morality on everyone else.
Don't care for that, never have.
-F
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Or just treat drugs the same way alchohol is treated. 21 and over...you are responsible for your behavior..
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Quote:
Originally posted by Wulfenstar:
Or just treat drugs the same way alchohol is treated. 21 and over...you are responsible for your behavior..
Yes and you can take it further. Just like getting popped for a DUI, driving high should have consequences. Some people can drive stoned, some can't. If you choose to partake and then go out into society and do something stupid, that's your fault. This already exists today for public intox. If you get picked up drunk, you dry out in a holding cell. Same should hold true for drugs.
Just like bars exist, so should legal head shops. They can operate just like cigar shops, where people:
1. Choose to enter
2. Choose to purchase something
3. Choose to sometimes smoke there if available, or take something home, or both.
And just like a bar, if you can't handle your smoke, get a designated driver.
I also take things further with booze, some people disagree with me. I think the legal age to drink should be 19. I just watched a Dateline about this. College campuses are awash with booze and the 21 age limit is today serving as a quasi-prohibition all by itself...with it's own verson of negative consequences. I drank underage at Purdue and turned out fine. The legal age should be 19 because I don't think it's wise to allow HS kids access. College however is just simply uncontrollable. I also don't have a problem with anyone drinking that has a valid military ID, since its a part of that culture. So the result on booze for me is "19 or valid military ID, or both"
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