Time to walk away

I don’t use drugs or drink alcohol. I haven’t since the end of the last century, Nov 04, 1997 to be exact. I don’t use because I chose not to. If you chose to use, as long as your using doesn’t affect me and my family, knock yourself out.

Growing up, alcohol and marijuana were the two main recreational drugs available. Of course cocaine, heroin and LSD was also around but you’d want to be a nuts to even contemplate the use of those drugs. People I knew did, and just like those who drank alcohol to excess, some have lived and some have died. Their actions determined the outcome.

The war on hashish and marijuana is a waste of time, tax payer money and resources.

Recreational drugs are demand driven - by the user. They are supplied to fill a vacuum of demand. There is no such thing as a pusher. There are dealers certainly but there’s no-one sneaking around slipping it to us with the offer of a good time. It is a cash crop for many farmers around the world, without which they starve and at a time, not too long ago, it was Hawaii’s largest export. It could be said that smoking a dube is good for the world economy.

The U.S spends an estimated $50 billion annually on a “drug war” in South America. Here in the U.S. drug law violators - most of whom are non-violent and many of whom are first time offenders - are the fastest growing segment of incarcerated Americans. Hundred of thousands of people are incarcerated because of drug prohibition. Prohibition does not work: we learned that lesson during the early part of the last century with alcohol. If only serves to make a few people very wealthy and more people very dead caught in the mechanics of illegal growth and distribution. It is criminalizing of the drugs that causes violent deaths - not the use.

Drug abuse is a self cleaning oven. If you abuse drugs they’ll kill you, drive you insane or you’ll end up a guest of the State. I’m for the legalization of marijuana as long as alcohol is legal. Tobacco however, available in any store or strangely enough, drug store, kills tens of thousand more people annually than those who die from car accidents, alcohol, murder, drug use, and suicide combined – 400,000 deaths annually. That tobacco is still legal negates and ridicules the entire argument for marijuana prohibition.

Think about it, by legalizing the lower end of the drug market police are freed up to chase down real criminals. I’d even legalize the hard stuff. I don’t see a line of people running into the pharmacy to load up on crack if it was legal. And why shouldn’t the tax payer benefit from the sale of narcotics for which there is a demand?