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• Monday, November 6, 2006 06:59 AM

  People who don't like marijuana

  don't have to smoke it. It is as simple as that.

  Same with drinking alchohol.

  Same with smoking crack.

  Why does it have to be illegal?

  All of the anti-weeds posters here say they have no problem dealing with reality. Why can't you handle a reality where people are allowed to smoke dope if they like?

  We tolerate a regime of drug prohibition that gives rise to an illegal distribution system that ruins whole neighborhoods. We have a system that garuntees employment to angry, violent aggressive kids who only need to hook up with a trafficker to become a dealer. We have created a system that rewards a willingness to risk jail time with substantial financial rewards. Thus we have incentivized anti-social behavior. When this anti-social behavior results in urban crime we say, "What is wrong with 'those people'? Thank God we live in a nice neighborhood!"

  I could care less about some suburban pot-head who wants cheaper, more reliable drugs, but I worry over people who live in places on the front line of our little War on Drugs. Good people, not using drugs, not selling drugs, whose lives are ruined by the system we have put in place.

  People who live in urban ghettos, people in the countries where our favorite drugs come from, these are the people who's lives would be changed for the better if we legalized drugs.

  I am sure most of the posters could care less about those folks. A not too wise man once said "George Bush doesn't care about black people." The truth is most of us really don't. If we did then we would not turn so many of their neighborhoods into war zones so that fewer of "us" run the risk of addiction.

  Whatever fallout of greater addiction would follow legalization, it would be mostly consenting adults ruining their own lives. Arguably most of the addiction prone are already strung out on illegal drugs or alchohol, so their lives wouldn't get much worse anyway. Even if more adults made bad choices that ruined their lives, so what? We decided long ago that such behavior was no justification for the massive costs of a prohibition regime with booze, why do we think such fears justify our current prohibition of drugs? I believe its because minorities suffer the consequences most with the War on Drugs and we don't give a damn about them.

  Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

  —neilpaul Read neilpaul's other letters
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