Legalize Victimless Crimes #1: Drug Use

Before I start, let me make clear: I have never injested an illegal substance, not once. I have gotten drunk on legal alcohol. I have not once inhaled marijuana nor anything stronger.

I'm sick of the police being wasted and my tax dollars being wasted and the courts being tied up to prosecute victimless crimes. Besides, are we or are we not supposed to be the freest nation on the planet. Well, we're not, and I'm sick of that too.

#1 example: drug use.

The Drug War. Yeah. How's that working out? $60 billion a year and we've destabilized how many countries and have how many people in jail? And for what? Has drug use gone down?

No.

In fact, as you can see here, criminalizing drugs actually likely creates MORE drug use, not less. That's not just true in the Netherlands, it's been proven in Portugal, Switzerland, and at least a half-dozen other countries.

In the US, our number of people incarcerated for drug related offenses is more than the ENTIRE number of people incarcerated by the European Union for ALL offenses. And they have a higher population total than we do. And it exceeds it by 100,000. Not by a few.

Besides, it didn't work with alcohol, did it? Prohibition back in the 1930s created MORE crime, because a legal activity was criminalized and attracted a criminal element. Today's drug importer cannot take someone who cheats him to court for fraud, he has to live and die by the gun. This creates violence and crime where before, there wasn't any. Furthermore, the addict cannot go to a doctor or hospital for treatment as his addiction is treated as a crime, not as a medical problem. I know of at least one man that refused to get treated for diabetes because he was terrified that doctors or hospitals will be required to report the fact that he does crystal meth.

Drug money also funds international terrorism. It also destabilizes our borders. Over 2,000 people in Mexico alone have been murdered in drug trafficking related violence in 2006, many of them complete innocents. That alone sickens me.

Making hypodermically injected drugs illegal also leads to a scarcity of needles which causes an increase in HIV infections.

Libertarian Party opponents to the drug war have stated that if the US government legalized only marijuana, US taxes could be reduced by one third. I doubt that, but it's certainly true that state and federal agencies are blowing $60 billion a year on the Drug War. And that doesn't include the increased revenue through taxation.

The drug war is killing more people, getting more people addicted, and destroying more lives than just letting people have drugs and putting them into rehab.


What about people driving a car while high?
Same laws as drunk driving I think should apply, but that's a local issue, not federal.

What about all these drug addicts?
Treatment, not incarceration. Putting them in jail is not helping them. These people are addicted and it may have been their choice and they may be scum regardless, but warehousing them is not the solution.

What about kids?
No consumption of drugs under the age of 18. Just like tobacco or alcohol.

But tobacco and alcohol consumption is legal at 21.
Well, true, but that's asinine. Anyone who is old enough to be a soldier and to vote is old enough to make adult decisions about alcohol and drugs. I think 18 year olds should also be able to drink and smoke. By the way, if a city has outlawed public indoor tobacco smoking, smoking anything else should be included. I've been to Amsterdam, and they have about sixteen murders a year. You feel safe walking through the worst areas. A similarly sized city in the United States probably has about 200 or more murders a year. I am not kidding.

If the feds wouldn't be stopping drug cartels, what would they be doing?
Oh, I don't know...here's a thought: stopping terrorists? Breaking up organized crime? Tracking murderers and the like? You know, solving actual crimes perhaps?

But drug use is immoral.
So? So is adultery. So is gluttony. Big deal. You cannot legislate morality. It isn't going to work and it hasn't. We've spent 30 years fighting the drug war and we've lost.

And the sad thing is that only a handful of politicians are talking about this because they fear that they will alienate a large percentage of the electorate who are so moribund, so rigid in their thinking, and so reality-challenged, that they will never agree to legalizing any victimless crimes at all.