Legalizing marijuana has not ended the black market
Marijuana remains illegal at the federal level—legalize the drug everywhere, advocates suggest, and the black market will go away. But California’s experience suggests otherwise. The state’s pot market has struggled because illegal growers are undercutting the price of legal weed, which must account for the cost of a license, taxes on sales, and the financial burdens of complying with state health regulations. As a result, legal growers want the state to step up enforcement against illegal operations. “We are the taxpayers. No one else should be operating,” one licensed grower told the New York Times. A big problem, officials note, is that growers who are reluctant to go legal, with all the attendant costs and procedures, don’t disappear—they just continue doing business the old way. As a result, production of illegal pot is increasing.
The law of unintended consequences seems to be at work.
And there’s a reason it’s hard for authorities in California to crack down on the illegal pot industry—yes, you guessed it; it’s SJWs, Jake:
Complicating the issue is that legalization was sold to voters as a social-justice imperative, to stop the war on drugs in minority communities. California officials say that they’re reluctant to crack down on the black market because that would represent a return to heightened enforcement in minority communities.
Toldja so.
Huh. Criminals just don’t want to give up their criminal ways. Who woulda thunk it?
Liberals think people are naturally good and society is to blame for their uncivil behavior; conservatives think people are flawed and civil society rules of conduct evolved to counter this.
Thus, be not surprised when dreams meet up with hard reality.
Liberals don’t think people are naturally good. Liberals think people are juveniles who have to be supervised by people with credentials, i.e. themselves. See the later work of Christopher Lasch.
Of course California is not the only state which has legalized marijuana and California is known for some of the highest taxes in the country. Plus California is crazy, as pretty much we all agree. A more honest argument would have considered the issue nationwide.
The plan was to make it legal for people to buy marijuana. A secondary argument, of far less concern to American consumers, was to reduce the black market, though I don’t remember anyone claiming it would reduce it to zero. There is still black market liquor for sale — moonshine. Likewise black market tobacco depending on state taxes.
I imagine legalization has reduced the black market. I would be curious to know how much and how much where. Colorado has lower legal prices than California so logically, I’d bet Colorado has less of a black market than California.
To the extent I cared about this argument, I was more interested in how much legalization affected the Mexican cartels. Word on the street was that many of the lawmakers most opposed to legalization were in the pocket of the cartels.
neo and most commenters here are against marijuana period, so I don’t get the concern other than the opportunity for another grumpy harrumph.
Grump away!
“Liberals don’t think people are naturally good.” Art Deco
In my experience, most liberals tell themselves that most people are naturally good. They often mistake law abiding behavior with inherent goodness.
Hard core leftists think people are juveniles who have to be supervised by the more ‘woke’, i.e. themselves.
Liberal/leftists are the gullible, “useful idiots” who enable the Left.
But there are inherently good people and inherently evil people and, on both sides of the political divide and among every race and ethnicity.
Everyone is flawed and civil society’s rules of conduct did indeed evolve to counter mankind’s essential condition.
The Left’s insistence that a culture evolving toward perfection (ever more ‘woke’) will produce ever more perfect people rests upon a willful denial of reality. That willful denial of reality rests upon a refusal to face a core reality; a body cannot erase its genetic defects.
Whatever genetic defects/disorders may be erased from the human genome, it will be through outside intervention.
The Left’s insistence that a culture evolving toward perfection (ever more ‘woke’) will produce ever more perfect people rests upon a willful denial of reality. That willful denial of reality rests upon a refusal to face a core reality; a body cannot erase its genetic defects.
Geoffrey Britain: I say that human progress is indisputable. The rates of starvation, deaths from disease and violence, poverty have all improved substantially in just the past two hundred years, much less since the neolithic. Not to mention our astonishing progress in science and technology.
How much farther we can progress is another question.
I’d agree that conservatives tend to be more pessimistic and liberals more optimistic on that score. But the constant bleating of conservatives about human nature being unchangeable is simply wrong IMO. Human nature doesn’t change quickly or at will but everything changes, including human nature. We were tree shrews sixty-million-odd years ago.
Which is not to say humanity is on the verge of some leftist utopia like William Morris’s “News from Nowhere” or the money-less future of “Star Trek.”
Not “unforeseen consequences” to me. I never saw a debate about legalization that answered questions I had, such as: how can you eliminate illegal dealing when legal pot will cost more, and legal stores will have some kind of vetting process in place before you can buy? How hard will it be to get to authorized stores? Maybe I want to buy from the guy in my apartment complex who makes it easy and asks no questions. And what about all those who want to use but who are under the age of 21?
I’ve forgotten the name. A young large black man was being arrested on the east coast and died in the process. The media outrage that ensued ignored the fact that the whole operation was being supervised by a black female police Lt.
His crime? Repeatedly selling untaxed cigarettes.
Don’t mess with the man’s revenue stream. Unless you live in Humboldt county CA and have a hundred gun slingers to back you up.
Hard core leftists think people are juveniles who have to be supervised by the more ‘woke’, i.e. themselves. Liberal/leftists are the gullible, “useful idiots” who enable the Left.
Nope. Quite ordinary Democratic voters think that way, especially if they’re in certain professions. It’s the attitude at the source of every ‘landmark ruling’ you hear handed down by an appellate court and every court filing of a sort which generates such rulings. If my own exposure to faculty members and mental health tradesmen is representative, I’d say the overwhelming majority of the former (at least in the arts and sciences) and about half the latter have this attitude. Here’s a suggestion: corral a random sample of wage-earners supervising intact families and ask them to open up about the teachers and school administrators they’ve dealt with over the years.
Look at some of the scandals you hear about in academe, which in turn remind you of the implications of anti-discrimination law, when some flyspeck working for the dean of students informs a student club that they may only organize along lines of which the dean approves. Who gets this treatment? (1) all male associations and (2) evangelical associations.
I’m sure you can find ‘hard core leftists’ in these loci and I’ve come across a few. Most in my experience are much less colorful than that (and not reflective at all).
I’ve forgotten the name. A young large black man was being arrested on the east coast and died in the process. The media outrage that ensued ignored the fact that the whole operation was being supervised by a black female police Lt.
He wasn’t young. He was (IIRC) about 44 years old, diabetic and morbidly obese. Don’t recall any black women on site. He wasn’t manhandled, just subjected to an ordinary police tackle when he proved noncompliant. An ambulance was called for him when he complained of trouble breathing, but he died en route to the hospital. A very unhealthy man who had an unexpected reaction to a small amount of stress. I think there was some issue with the medical examiner making an absurd claim that a homicide had taken place, a claim which the district attorney disregarded.
Don’t mess with the man’s revenue stream.
His name was Eric Garner, it happened in Staten Island, and police were responding to a complaint from local merchants. Tax laws have to be enforced to be fair. (And the man was more of a public order nuisance than a tax evader; he wasn’t tackled for evading taxes; he was tackled for being noncompliant).
This is why I never bought into the idea that the best way to win the drug war is to legalize all drugs and tax them out of existence. This should be obvious. The Mafia has been illegal cigarettes for years in places where their are high cigarette taxes.
Frankly, we need to figure out what is the lesser evil the problems having illegal drugs vs. the problems of having legal ones.
Frankly, we need to figure out what is the lesser evil the problems having illegal drugs vs. the problems of having legal ones.
Oh, you mean we have to think about trade-offs? See Thomas Sowell on the Anointed. They don’t do that.
huxley,
I agree that human material progress is indisputable. Rates of starvation, deaths from disease and violence, poverty and progress in science and technology are all… material progress.
“the constant bleating of conservatives about human nature being unchangeable is simply wrong IMO. Human nature doesn’t change quickly or at will but everything changes, including human nature.”
Culture’s morality can/has/may change but Man’s inhumanity to Man remains unchanged. Even something as simple as “bearing false witness” remains, as the Kavenaugh Senate hearings demonstrated.
As for everything changing, not quite. The universal constants (“the speed of light in vacuum c, the gravitational constant G, the Planck constant h, the electric constant ?0, and the elementary charge e.”) apparently have not since the creation of this universe.
The high taxes on Pot in CA make it much more expensive than illegal Pot. So it is a no brainer where to buy your Pot. Here in CO taxes are not so bad and the state is raking in the money. I have not heard of too much Black (can we still say Black) Market Pot. But then I have not tuned in and dropped out.
Side note. I attend a Bluegrass festival near Boulder every yr. It seems to me that the usage of Pot has actually gone down now that is it legal. Use to be that the haze from Pot was so thick you could cut it with a knife.
They never “legalized” it. Truly legal marijuana could be bought and sold at a market like any other agricultural product, subject only to food safety laws. Given the layers of regulations and taxes, of course there’s a black market.
There would be a black market in potatoes if they tried to regulate and tax potatoes this way.
They never “legalized” it. Truly legal marijuana could be bought and sold at a market like any other agricultural product, subject only to food safety laws.
That’s the logic of it. Which is why it should never happen.
Culture’s morality can/has/may change but Man’s inhumanity to Man remains unchanged. Even something as simple as “bearing false witness” remains, as the Kavenaugh Senate hearings demonstrated.
Geoffrey Britain: If your claim is humanity will never be perfect. Sure. If your claim is humanity will never be sinless. Sure.
But that’s a long way from saying humanity is unimproveable and unchangeable. We humans — God bless every imperfect bastard and bitch of us — are downright remarkable and resourceful. We have walked on the moon. We have irrigated deserts. We have transformed the world, not to perfection but to a much better place, with Christ’s unlikely message, whoever he was.
Jonah Goldberg’s book, “Suicide of the West,” paints a vivid picture of what Goldberg calls the “Miracle” — the happy, astoundingly potent combination of liberalism and capitalism which in a few centuries created a civilization unrecognizable compared to the world of hunter-gatherers which was the human condition for hundreds of thousands of years.
Who knows what comes next? I don’t. But I’d say there’s a decent chance it will be even better.
huxley,
I’m saying that human nature is unchangeable by our own hands.
Morally, culturally, humanity can certainly change its behavior for the better and did so by embracing Judeo tenets, Christ’s message and example and the enlightenment principles.
However, remove or severely degrade that morally superior culture and humanity starts to revert to its baser instincts. Demonstrated by the Left’s inroads into American culture since the 50s. Civilization is a thin overlay upon human nature, which is a mix of good and bad.
Walking on the moon, irrigating deserts, transforming the world, to a much better place (as far as standards of living apply) are all examples of material progress.
Geoffrey Britain: I don’t see how you can know any of your claims above.
I’ll settle for progress, however it comes about. If humans are killing each other less often, thumbs up!
I won’t write off Christ’s message and its effect on humanity to what you italicize as “material progress.”
Here in CO taxes are not so bad and the state is raking in the money.
LYNN HARGROVE: I have noticed the border towns in CO are looking a lot more healthy these days.
I am so glad they improved Raton Pass to a four-lane highway. My sisters and I used to drive through there to visit my uncle in Woodland Park for Christmas and it was treacherous!
One of the main reasons, if not *the* main reason, that moral progress is so difficult and so slow is because *every single one of us* enters this world at Point 0.
huxley, Geoffrey Britain,
Since the Neolithic, I think you can argue that humans everywhere have gradually increased the number of people they are willing to consider to be Us (not Them). We’ve gone from considering our 150-member hunter-gatherer band to be Us (and everyone else not really human), to considering nation-states in the hundreds of millions to be Us (and everyone else sorta human, I guess, if you insist).
At this rate, we should be able to consider the entire world population to be Us in about 1500 years.
This is not about marijuana. This is about black market.
Black markets are common in Latin-American countries. Since California is becoming a Latin-American country, this was kind of predictable.
Markets have some inertia, but being Marijuana a new one, it’s just evolving quicker to what seems to be the future normality. This is just the canary in the coal mine.
However, remove or severely degrade that morally superior culture and humanity starts to revert to its baser instincts. Demonstrated by the Left’s inroads into American culture since the 50s. Civilization is a thin overlay upon human nature, which is a mix of good and bad.
Agreed. Culture has a history. Technology has a history. Human nature has no history.
huxley,
I don’t see how you can know any of the claims you have made. As you can see, that works both ways.
I not claiming to ‘know’. I’m basing an opinion on history and current observations. The examples you provided; are all objectively and demonstrably… examples of material progress.
“If humans are killing each other less often, thumbs up!”
I’m all for less killing and give that a thumb’s up too. Tragically, in the 20th century, human beings killed each other at a historically, new high. There’s no doubt in my mind that if China or Iran/Islam thought they could win a nuclear war with the West, billions would die.
I didn’t and haven’t ‘written off’ Christ’s message and its effect on humanity. I fully acknowledged its positive affect upon Western civilization’s cultural morality.
IMO, you’re mistaking cultural and material progress as evidence that human nature has changed. I wish it were true but see no direct evidence of it and plenty of circumstantial evidence otherwise.
dang it! no review, no corrective edit function…
>Geoffrey Britain: I don’t see how you can know any of your claims above.
Seriously?
It’s quite easy, Huxley. Walking on the moon has nothing to do with morality. Nor does irrigating deserts. Or even “transforming the world into a better place” (whatever that entails). It’s been observed that as a culture becomes more technologically and medically advanced, as Geoff states, “humanity starts to revert to its baser instincts.” This is, more or less, a sociological observation.
But then again I shoot back to your own quote – how do you know the claims that you make? The Pill has wreaked havoc on sexual mores. Abortion has too. The internet gives us free porn at our fingertips. I can open a new browser and search the internet for any debased sexual fantasy that comes into my mind – the difference is I can do it without anyone knowing, and after I’ve done the deed and have cleaned up, walk out of my place of residence like a good, ‘moral’ citizen of the States as I like to think I am and go to the local Walgreens to purchase my favorite brand of ice cream. What we deem as a civilized society, homocide should be an all time low compared to our barbarian days, but we find ways to kill ourselves other than swinging an axe through our enemies abdomen. We either pick up a Glock and shoot our rival gang member with crossfire deaths or we kill out of rage and jealousy. We don’t need to have others hunt us down through sophisticated means (war); we can eat ourselves to death or we can ask medical doctors to assist us in killing ourselves. As stated earlier, we can also kill our babies if we see them as unwanted because we’d rather be childless to live the Sex & the City lifestyle. Deaths occur it’s just they’re more cleaner and justification is usually based on a rationale that lends itself towards relativism.
Is the decrease of poverty mainly a product of advanced morals? I don’t believe so. See Africa’s aid from the US. People see capitalism as evil and selfish, but that’s what made my family not poor or nervous about their annual spendings.
>I’ll settle for progress, however it comes about. If humans are killing each other less often, thumbs up!
Ends justify the means? Define progress. Let’s move pass “less humans kill each other … Awesome!” because that’s like Level 1 basic morality. It’s like a secularist saying, “Well, as long as my child doesn’t kill and is nice to others then I’ve done my job.”
Legalizing pot to end the black market was a dumb goal, because all favor at least cigarette level restrictions on minors buying — so there was always going to be some black market.
The big crime reduction idea was to legalize it, making it cheaper (no “crime security cost added”), so that folks could buy and use it legally. So users were no longer automatically criminals, and dosages could be better standardized. The gov’t chose to ignore the “making it cheaper” part.
The political path for legalization was to add taxes, so the gov’t tax revenue eats up the “consumer surplus”, rather than the Mafia. But the buyer gets little street price reduction.
The income-tax based Laffer Curve works with all taxes: at some point higher rates of taxes result in less revenue due to less taxes being paid. In CA, they would get more total taxes with a lower rate, but higher volume bought legally.
I favor pot use as safe, legal, and rare. But understand that cheaper pot with legalization means more use. This is one area my wife and I disagree on — she opposes legalization because of the personal problems.
I’m sure that, for a majority of users, long term pot use (abuse) will degrade their lives more than long term alcohol abuse, tho there will be a huge amount of overlap for years. The liver cleans out alcohol. THC stays in the blood longer.
The way to get rid of the black market, if that’s the goal, is to make sure it’s as cheap to make anonymous purchases legally as it is to buy illegally from unregistered, non-tax paying neighbors.
In Slovakia, there continues to be a big amount of home-brewed alcohol, especially Slivovica from plums. Usually stronger and less smooth than that bought in the store, but home-made is not considered a big problem.
I favor pot use as safe, legal, and rare.
I favor cheap air fares, achieved by the suspension of gravity.
I subscribe to a Food Safety newsletter, just to see what’s being recalled each day (sometime it is surprising — mostly very repetitive) and this showed up yesterday.
It talks about both California and Colorado cannabis customs and, umm, customs duties (as they used to call import taxes). Includes information Lynn alluded to above on tax collections, and some on black markets.
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2019/06/letter-from-the-editor-the-marijuana-challenge/
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thesixthmoon on June 15, 2019 at 9:13 pm said:
…
There would be a black market in potatoes if they tried to regulate and tax potatoes this way.
* * *
Almost every government has tried to regulate behavior through taxes.
One of the tragedies of Britain was when the Enlightened Elites tried to decrease brandy consumption by prohibitively taxing the French Import during the conflict between Britain and France between 1689 and 1697– so most folks started drinking lesser-taxed gin and other hard liquors instead of beer, which was more regulated and required a license. Then they had an even greater problem of alcoholism than before.
That one was real – others, maybe — maybe not.
We have bagels (boiled before baking) because (according to one story) there were high taxes on regular bread. NYC, as is its usual fashion, may have recently succeeded in raising taxes on sliced bagels.
That we have wardrobes because closets were taxed as separate rooms is apparently a myth, but it illustrates how quickly we jumpt to that conclusion about the 19th-century houses, which had no huge walk-ins like we enjoy today, just relatively small spaces we would call cupboards.
https://www.history.org/Foundation/journal/winter08/stuff.cfm
Here are some more real taxes — I wonder what, if anything, they accomplished?
https://www.daveramsey.com/blog/6-strange-but-true-taxes
PS Potatoes in America were taxed in 1929, in order to control agricultural products. That doesn’t seem to have decreased their popularity, though, just like high gas taxes haven’t caused us to quit driving.
Almost every government has tried to regulate behavior through taxes.
Governments regulate behavior through a variety of means. Taxation is one and often more efficient than command and control. You want an absence of government regulation, Somalia beckons.
just like high gas taxes haven’t caused us to quit driving.
It’s not meant to cause you to quit driving. It’s meant to cause you to rebalance your consumption bundle and make less use of car travel.
Could it be that the actual intent of taxes is for the state to increase its income?
Taxes are levied on things or behaviors people will not readily abandon: gasoline, diesel (if you have it it has been in a truck), tobacco, alcohol, telecommunication, and now weed. Legalization was going nowhere until a structure for taxing was developed.
CA charges sales tax on gasoline in addition to the “gas tax”, causing the state’s revenue to rise when the cost of oil goes up, thus the reluctance to do anything to increase production and let prices seek a lower level.
If people stopped using any of these, or even seriously curtailed use, the state would have financial woes. Until another behavior that cannot be eliminated is identified for taxing.
With almost missionary zeal, those who grow and sell and use marijuana are portraying it as an almost benign substance, and the legalization of marijuana is conquering all before it, as it triumphs in state after state; states which sees its regulation and sale as a new source of revenue.
The problem is that marijuana is not a benign substance at all, and that lawmakers who are legalizing it have been sold a bill of goods.
I’ve written a couple of other times here, about what I see as the dangers of marijuana use, particularly as revealed in serous long term research projects like the New Zealand Dunedin study.
The 25 year long Denedin, New Zealand Longitudinal Multi-disciplinary Health and Development Study, published in 2012 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, made a big impression on me.
Intended to follow 1,037 participants from ages 13 to 38, with periodic, very intensive, and meticulous day-long checkups, which assessed all aspects of their mental and physical development, and every few years along the way compared those results to their initial baseline results, it identified some incidental information on those in the study group who happened to be heavy marijuana users.
What they found was this; those in the study who were heavy marijuana users who started in their teenage years (the younger they started smoking, the worse the effects), when their brains were still developing, suffered an average of an 8 point drop in IQ. This loss was sufficient to drop someone with an average I.Q of 100 from the 50th percentile down to the 29th.
Moreover tests indicated that this loss of I.Q was permanent, and even if you stopped marijuana use after years of heavy smoking in your teenage years, you could not regain that lost intelligence.
The Study also found that if you started your heavy use at a later stage in your life, say, at college age, when your brain had essentially stopped developing and had matured, you could—if you stopped marijuana use—regain some of that I.Q. loss.
Not only did young heavy smokers suffer, on average, an irreversible loss of 8 I.Q. points, they also displayed symptoms of “neuropsychological decline”—things like apparently permanent deficits in learning, memory, and executive agency. They also had a higher incidence of violent behavior, and earlier onset of serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia.
Then, there is this brand new 2019 study in Lancet, the British medical journal, which reports the results of a large-scale study, conducted in a number of European countries and cities, studying more than a thousand people who presented to mental health facilities with their first psychosis, to investigate the relationship between marijuana use—particularly the daily use of new, high potency marijuana—and the incidence of psychotic disorders, like schizophrenia.
Bottom line?
Overall, those who used high potency marijuana on a daily basis had a four times greater chance of having a psychotic disorder than those who did not use marijuana at all.
In two cities where the use of the available especially high potency marijuana was high—in London, and in Amsterdam—the incidence of psychosis among study participants vs. that of those who did not smoke Marijuana was dramatically increased—to five times greater in London, and to nine times greater in Amsterdam.**
Additional commentary by an MD, a medical expert on FOX tonight indicated that some of those who had what were apparently marijuana precipitated psychoses could be treated successfully and brought back to health, and that some could not, their psychoses were apparently permanent .
** See https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(19)30048-3/fulltext
Now comes an Editorial by two health professionals, in the New York Times, of all places, titled
“Marijuana Damages Young Brains,”
see https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/16/opinion/marijuana-brain-effects.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
If people stopped using any of these, or even seriously curtailed use, the state would have financial woes.
No, legislators would whine a great deal, but that’s all. The U.S. Congress during the period running from September 1945 and July 1947 made provision for a massive demoblization and balanced the federal budget. The culture of legislatures was quite different back then.
Excises on particular commodities are a small slice of total revenue streams. Property taxes, general sales taxes, and income taxes are what’s important.
Mike on June 17, 2019 at 3:26 am said:
…
CA charges sales tax on gasoline in addition to the “gas tax”, causing the state’s revenue to rise when the cost of oil goes up, thus the reluctance to do anything to increase production and let prices seek a lower level.
* * *
Conflict of interest looms large in most government activities.
The first person I saw change their human nature and upgrade their quantum DNA was me. And that wasn’t all that many come it all.
“Marijuana Damages Young Brains,”
That’s something I told Huxley years ago. Human prejudices and refusal to look at Maya the illusion as anything other than reality, blocks perception of the truth. Thus they have not been set free and “salvation” is but a mere dream in a fantasy.
Popular science usually lags behind me as what I look at is the cutting edge and the edge beyond that, whereas the popular science merely reviews currently published work rather than the future potentially published works in the works.
Of course DNA wise, anything can damage “young” bodies and minds, including vaccines. That’s not something the Doctor Orthodoxy priestly class wants to talk about however. Gonna have to get youtube to get rid of those unorthodox views, same with anti globalwarmers.
Moreover tests indicated that this loss of I.Q was permanent, and even if you stopped marijuana use after years of heavy smoking in your teenage years, you could not regain that lost intelligence.
Same thing I noticed in high IQ “geniuses” who used the stuff back in their high school and college days.
Emotional retardation, the level of a 13 year old in terms of emotional control while at the bio age of 33. These weren’t hippies or underachievers. If anything, they were over achievers in the current education/indoctrination “System”.
Drugs like aya something ascha, is a crutch for spiritual awakening. But overuse and abuse is easily susceptible for those that seek out these things to begin with. It’s a matter of Ketu.
Not to mention our astonishing progress in science and technology.
The ancients had better tech than today’s civilization. The evidence is in the pyramids and megaliths.
Much of human history is a de-evolution rather than an evolution. Something else scientists with their paid grants and research checks don’t want to talk about.
neo and most commenters here are against marijuana period, so I don’t get the concern other than the opportunity for another grumpy harrumph.
The Deep State would love to legalize substances that make the sheep less aware, less awake, and less antsy to get revenge on all the Deep State child molestors and traitors. It’s part of the Strategy.
As for Star Trek, cryptocurrency!
Let’s see, until very recently we had one legal intoxicant–that society had to deal with–alcohol (when it was first introduced, some centuries ago in England, coffee was also, at first, considered an “intoxicant,” and I wonder if we might also want to put tobacco in the “intoxicant” category as well) and, as everyone acknowledges, both individuals and our society have had a lot of problems dealing with alcohol’s effects.
Now we’re quickly adding one more legal intoxicant–marijuana, and the start of legalization of another one, if you count the recent legalization of psilocybins i.e. “magic mushrooms” in Denver.
Thus, adding one and likely two more legal intoxicants, with more likely to come. (I’m sure that chemists in criminal and/or government run laboratories, all over the world, are busily trying to invent new and more powerful intoxicants.)
Can anyone seriously argue that legalizing more and more intoxicants is not going to add to the problems that we already have in dealing with just alcohol alone?
Making more and more intoxicants legal is just asking for trouble; an unforced error.
I can see no valid or beneficial public policy argument for the addition of other intoxicants to alcohol.
You may say that the argument is that, “individuals ought to have the freedom to do what they want, to ingest whatever substances–intoxicants or not–they please.”
The problem here is that it isn’t just the “individual” who is involved, its one of collateral damage to others, and to society, society which ends up having to try to pick up the pieces and try to fit them more or less together again, to repair the damage that a person’s addiction leaves in it’s wake.
Snow on Pine:
It’s true that drug abuse affects us all and costs us all. However, that sort of reasoning is used to justify all sorts of restrictions on liberty. And that’s okay, because otherwise society wouldn’t work out. But where to draw the line? It’s been used, for example, to more and more restrict the rights of people to smoke. It is one of the reasons people justified the tax/penalty for not buying Obamacare. It can be used in ways that are even more restrictive.
Neo–I agree that you can use the idea of the “public good” to justify all sorts of restrictive laws and policies but, as you’ve acknowledged above, we do need some minimal number of restrictions “otherwise society wouldn’t work out.”
It appears that people in every civilization that we know of have known of and used some sort of intoxicant or the other.
I’m sure that Ugg the caveman experimented with chewing, sniffing, smoking, or somehow ingesting parts of the plants, minerals, and animals around him, until he found one or more substance that would give him a “buzz” and/or some type of “transcendental” experience.
So, realistically speaking, we’re never going to banish intoxicants completely.
The trick, of course, is to be wise enough to preserve individual’s liberty by placing such restrictions on the fewest things possible, and to limit such restrictions to those which are absolutely necessary.
My argument above is that given the very evident pain, destruction, and damage to those taking intoxicants/drugs, and to their ability to function as members of society and also to their families, to their relationships, to society, and to our social cohesion, plus the costs involved–social costs, medical costs, legal, and law enforcement costs–in trying to remediate and react to these destructive effects that result from the manufacture, distribution, sale, and use, of marijuana and other similar intoxicants, these are substances that should have some restrictions placed upon them.
It just seems to me that our often crooked, faint, and stony path through this life is difficult enough as it is, so why deliberately add yet another temptation along the path, one that can lead people off the main path, and toward pain, reduced capabilities, and destruction, down a cul de sac that many can never get out of?
The supposedly realistic depictions of the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas—and especially the Aztecs I’ve seen lately—show them using a lot of hallucinogens in their religious rituals and bloody “ceremonies,” and this has made me wonder if their apparently wide-spread use of what appear to be very powerful hallucinogenic substances has something to do with the extremely cruel, violent, sadistic, and bloody nature of their sacrificial rituals i.e. first, they see and experience such violence, cruelty, and bloodshed in hallucinogenic “trips” and, thus, they are prone to think them legitimate and, then, to recreate them in reality.