Another Facebook Rant: Reforming Marijuana Legislation

Here, in the post-election days of November 2012, politics are still front and center for many of us. Republicans are afraid the sky will fall under Obama's second term (I think we've thoroughly debunked the Mayans agreement with this, although they weren't concerned with the election results). Obama supporters are still reveling in their post-win after-glow. And those supporting the reform of marijuana laws are wondering what the hell is going to come next, now that Colorado and Washington voters have legalized marijuana for personal use (note, not "medical" use, but outright "personal use") in their respective states.

Personally, I don't care what you choose to do -- smoke pot, don't smoke pot -- that's none of my business. However, I do care that my government doesn't infringe upon the personal rights of its citizens, and I think that's at the heart of this issue.

So with no further adieu, I give you my Sunday morning rant on legalizing marijuana:

I can find very few (if any) issues where the government has gotten an issue so wrong for so long. I also think that we're just getting to the point where the combination of a new generation of voters and a desperate need for reduced costs and new revenue streams at all layers of government gives marijuana re-legalization a fighting chance. I'm also a strong advocate of personal freedoms, and I see marijuana consumption as the ultimate victimless crime. In fact, the only "crime" in the marijuana industry today is the crime that the government facilitates by continuing to treat it as a Schedule 1 narcotic and thereby necessitating that an organized crime structure form around its growth/distribution.

The US proved during the Prohibition years (1920-1933) that you cannot preclude a substance from being made available if the demand is great enough. Prohibition also proved that if you create that scenario, you also create the perfect breeding ground for things like today's mafia. Some historians have also made the case that alcohol consumption, per capita, didn't change at all during the Prohibition years. Prohibition was also largely considered to be an attempt by rural Protestants to limit the freedoms of Catholics and urbanites. And ultimately, Prohibition was repealed because it never really had broad support and while everybody was still drinking, it was only the working-class poor who were being arrested for it. Estimates at the time say that 80% of the legislators that passed the Prohibition amendment were still avid drinkers during the Prohibition years. I cannot begin to describe the number of parallels between the failures of Prohibition and the current failures of the insane "War on Drugs" and current marijuana legislation.

Early anti-marijuana laws were fueled heavily by racism against Mexicans in the west and against blacks in the east. Compare that now to who is getting arrested for marijuana use today. I may be cynical here, but rarely do we see laws made for the general good of the public -- more typically, we see new laws made because they are financially beneficial to someone or some group, and only then do they get "spun" as being in the best interest of the general public. Along the way to marijuana criminalization, the forestry industry (who wanted hemp out of the way of their new-found lock on the paper industry), Dupont Chemical (who had patents on creating plastics out of oil/petroleum, but not hemp), the oil industry (in league with Dupont), the cotton industry (out of fear of having competition from a 'better' fiber), and pharmaceutical companies (who have little control and far lower margins on organic-based drugs) have provided significant funding (read: lobbying dollars and campaign contributions) to keep hemp illegal. Note: hemp is the male of the "cannabis" genus and has only trace amounts of the psycho-active element (THC) that's found in abundance in the female plants. Merely by having the marijuana laws be non-specific about the sex of the plants, lawmakers and lobbyists have been able to outlaw hemp and protect their financial interests along the way.

So we outlaw marijuana while we continue to support tobacco (which kills 443,000 in the US every year) and alcohol (responsible for over 40,000 deaths per year in the US, EXCLUDING traffic-related fatalities). One must also note that marijuana has no known deaths related to cannabis consumption. That's ZERO. So we legally control and regulate two known substances that kill almost half a million people a year while another -- with no effective means of killing anyone -- we spend BILLIONS to keep illegal, arresting those who choose to use it, and incarcerating others for growing/possessing/selling this Schedule 1 narcotic. At this point, I'm going to avoid a seething rant on Reagan's minimum-mandatory sentencing policies/legislation and their associated costs/limited benefits for fear of digressing from my main point...

There's not much in this whole history of marijuana criminalization that we can be proud of:

• racism started public support for anti-marijuana laws
• Crony-ism made the anti-marijuana laws federal (a disgusting story in itself)
• big money funded the expansion and maintenance of anti-marijuana laws
• these insane laws are enforced in ways that adversely impact minorities
• farmers are prevented from growing a crop with numerous industrial uses, yet encouraged and subsidized to grow corn (do we really need more corn?!?!?)
• people who could benefit from the medical uses of marijuana are forced to suffer without it (or must turn to alternatives which are less effective or have significant side effects)

Inevitably, the "marijuana is a gateway drug" argument comes up as well. And in fairness, this is a reasonable argument, and would be even more reasonable if there were solid scientific studies to prove it. In fact, there are none. There have been plenty of studies done, including the massively-flawed and largely-discredited one that Nancy Reagan hung her hat on. At best, the studies suggest there is correlation and that there COULD BE causation, but most of them suggest that the "gateway" effect has more to do with the willingness to try something that's illegal. One study in Amsterdam showed that less than a fourth (22%) of those who had smoked marijuana had ever even tried anything harder, while in the US the percentage is greater than 33%. So even if there are any "gateway" effects, are they related to marijuana itself or our criminalization of marijuana? It certainly seems like the latter.

Don't get me wrong here -- I'm not advocating that everybody should run out and light up, even if it were a legal option. Rather, I'm a big fan of personal freedoms -- the personal freedoms that marijuana growers (and probable smokers) like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had in mind for us. I think we should have the right to do what we want -- to worship how we want, to behave how we want, to love how we want, to raise our kids how we want, to treat our bodies how we want, to read what we want, to listen to what we want, and ultimately to consume what we want -- so long as it doesn't preclude others from enjoying those same freedoms or cause us to inflict some undue burden on the rest of society. I don't believe that legalizing marijuana violates either of those conditions.

So finally, I'd like to see my government focused on protecting my rights and getting its financial house in order. I believe that legalizing marijuana with controls, regulation, and taxation not only serves both of those goals, but it renounces a sketchy history by which those laws came to be -- and it just makes sense.