Legalization will not stop problems addiction cause

It seems that after the heyday of the anti-drug Reagan and Bush
administrations, America is starting to rebel against the War on
Drugs.

The change, if real, has been influenced in no small part by our
own “free love, free pot” president, who, when asked by
an MTV audience member in 1992, “If you had to do it over
again, would you inhale?” replied boastfully, “Sure, if
I could. I tried before.” (“Choose or Lose
Special,” MTV, June 16, 1992). This supposed discontent is
summed up by one pundit’s sound bite, “We’re not
in a war against drugs, we’re in a war against our own
people!”

Unfortunately, as is the case with most revisionist thought,
such an idea is a gross simplification.

The main objection to our current drug laws is the large amount
of “non-violent” prisoners who clog our court and penal
system. One statistic bandied about is that one out of every three
black men in America is currently in some stage of the correctional
system ““ the presumption being that “unjust” drug
laws put most of them there. True or not, details of the crimes
that place “one out of three” in the penal system are
never presented in this argument.

Apparently, everyone has forgotten just why drug offenders are
in prison ““ and moreover, why we as a society choose to make
drugs illegal. Look behind most serious, violent offenses, and
guess what cause turns up time and again, like the proverbial bad
penny? Yes, those pesky, “non-violent” drugs seem to be
the cause for many a stabbing, shooting, robbery and child abuse
case. But why let that sort of realization cloud your indignation
of America’s “war on its people?” Ponder the
issue a while and you’ll realize that we have gone to war
against drug users because drugs have gone to war on our
people.

In all likelihood, our justice system does send minorities to
prison for drug offenses more often and for longer terms.
It’s inequality at its worst. But here’s the solution:
Don’t use drugs. Yes, it’s as simple as that! The Man
won’t have any cause to lock you up.

But perhaps that’s too simple for “community
activists” ““ they’d rather spend time tilting at
windmills, trying to legalize drugs and pursuing other hare-brained
schemes. If a community feels it is being targeted by drug laws,
the one sure way to avoid being mistreated by our
“unjust” criminal system is to obey the law.

Drug laws don’t require you to do anything. They simply
require that you not do something. Tough-on-crime laws would no
longer be a problem if minority communities chose to avoid drugs
and the violence that comes with them. But that’s a difficult
idea for activists, because it requires thinking of people as
independent beings, capable of avoiding what a higher power has
deemed illegal.

There is an especially damaging counterpoint to this
simplification: many people who are in prison for drug offenses are
in fact innocent. The police corruption which leads to such
undeserved imprisonment is the real “war on our
people.”

There is no punishment too harsh for corrupt police officers.
But if being shot in the leg and stripped naked was considered
appropriate punishment for Sierra Leone rebel leader Johnny Paul
Koroma, then it’s a good start for officers who abuse their
privilege. Not only have allegedly corrupt officers in Los Angeles
tainted themselves, their city and civilized society with their
actions, but their actions have given every social critic license
to question the very foundations of our society. Perhaps it’s
social utopianism to imagine honest police forces, but trustworthy
cops seem much more plausible than winning the war on poverty or
creating total social equity.

Moreover, a drug-free society will by nature create greater
social equity than any other change within our means. But the
question still remains: Why do we as a society choose to fight
drugs?

We do so not only because they are so often the cause of violent
crime, but because their effect on all humans, not just users, is
documented in voluminous detail. Drugs really do have serious
mental and physical effects. No, we’re not talking about
marijuana here ““ we’re talking about speed, coke and
heroin.

These are not harmless substances that provide a temporary high;
they are a debilitating force on users and the user’s
community alike. One rhetorical question posed about drugs is that
high-fat foods contribute to more deaths than all drugs combined,
yet we don’t outlaw high-fat foods. It is a tantalizing
question, tailored to those who don’t think.

The crucial difference between drugs and fatty foods is that
fatty foods only affect the consumer of Twinkies and Ho-Hos. But
can you say with a straight face that crack cocaine is a
“personal lifestyle choice” that affects nobody else?
We’ve seen the images of pestilent inner-city apartments
holding neglected children abandoned by their drug-addled mothers
(or, less often, their parents). The effects are felt nationwide,
in all social classes ““ the crank epidemic currently
devastating Native American reservations is just one example.

Such cases are not wild aberrations; they are textbook examples
of just how quickly and completely drugs destroy any semblance of
normal life, and how they eat away at the foundations of a
community. A good deal of drug use, mostly marijuana, does occur in
private, with no real effects on anyone else. But our law
enforcement for the most part turns a blind eye to such innocuous
consumption. Most police officers, off the record, will acknowledge
that when they discover a small baggie of pot in a car, they will
simply dump it out and give its owner a stern lecture. When was the
last time you heard of someone being sentenced to hard time for
marijuana possession?

Even if a person does have the hard luck to be given a prison
sentence for simple possession, sympathy for them is misplaced. We
as a society have been warned, and those who choose to disobey must
stand ready to face the consequences, unlikely as they may be.

In truth, marijuana enjoys this special status in law
enforcement because it is generally acknowledged to be benign.
Smoke it long enough and you’ll become an idiot, as well as
experience the same negative consequences that tobacco users do,
only quicker and in greater force. But on balance, marijuana will
only decrease your quality of life, instead of taking it
altogether.

The logistics of a drug-legalized America are mind-boggling.
Only the Netherlands currently runs such a system, and those who
know acknowledge that the system there is deeply flawed.

Visualizing just how hard drugs would be distributed to
Americans is rather creepy. It’s bizarre enough to see
tobacco companies grudgingly running anti-youth-smoking
commercials. But the reality of this “legalized
paradise” is a neighborhood pharmacist dispensing a vial of
cocaine to a beaming 21-year-old. Drugs are a problem, no doubt,
but pie-in-the-sky legalization is not the answer.