America’s latest financial woes have seen many proponents of marijuana suggesting it be legalized. It was well publicised earlier that Obama has tried it, plus with the economy the way it is, taxing the sale of Mary J could generate a billion dollars in revenue yearly. I suppose lobbies have to push their causes, but I’m not sure that they have the strongest case.
When you rest your case on economic reasons, the other side will always accuse you of selling out your values. Then you have to give other reasons why it should be legalized. Sure, it would be nice to bring it into the open and generate more revenue, but this is not the reason why.
What we should be combating in society is the open hypocrisy and bias that drug laws create and enforce. Either we support people choosing to alter their perception or we don’t. We allow people to drink, to meditate, to even sit on their sofas all day watching TV and stuffing their faces with junk food. Yet altering your perceptions in other ways is illegal. This list of what’s legal and what’s not is arbitrary, not based on an empirical scale of danger.
There are various substances out there, all with different ways of altering people’s perceptions. Some are relatively benign, others are quite dangerous. Now here is the basis of drug laws. With a couple of notable exceptions, legislation is based on preventing pleasure instead of ensuring safety. This is a notable distinction because it is the source of the problems with drugs today.
If drugs are illegal, people must break the law to sell them. This raises the price due to the increased risk involved with getting the drugs to market. As such, organized crime, with it’s large networks, are the only groups with the power to pull this off. And, due to the dangers involved, the financial benefits of success are highly inflated. High street prices equals addicts with less money, which encourages crime. The secretive nature of drug transactions lowers the quality and safety of the product, putting users at far greater risk than if they were to buy a prescription drug. When alcohol was prohibited in the 1930s, these very conditions arose.
The way you drink a glass of wine is the same way a marijuana user wants to enjoy his or her joint. If we were able to research safer delivery systems for a wider range of drugs, people may be able to alter their perceptions in a relatively safe way and do less damage to their bodies than that wine is doing to your liver. In addition, many users feel different areas of their brain stimulated while smoking pot, as opposed to the feeling that your brain is being dulled when drinking alcohol.
However that argument is following the same mistake of arguing for a negative. When saying MJ is safer than alcohol or relatively benign, you are still promoting escapism, which is negative. As alcohol is already established in our cultures, we accept it. However if someone were pleading the case for alcohol they might sound as equally desperate as pot heads claiming MJ is safer than junk food.
The fundamental question we have to decide as a society is, are we going to allow people to responsibly choose whatever kind of pleasurable activities they so desire? Just because we disagree with other people’s lifestyle choices, doesn’t mean we can’t allow them to enjoy their own choices. This idea, that other people are free to live and control their own lives is essential to freedom. We must promote this idea from it’s opposite, the enforcement of a way of life through false claims of protection. For when they say that they want to keep society safe, they are actually saying that they want everyone else to share their personal choices. This ugly attitude is at the basis of homophobia, racism and religious intolerance as well.
America was built on the ideals of freedom from oppression. It’s really about time that someone pointed out to them what this actually means.
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‘Mental Block’ by Elif Ozkoc