On the Brighter Side of Recession

The last time our economy was this bad, our nation was undergoing an experiment. It was hailed in papers as “The Noble Experiment,” but it has gone down in history as one of the biggest blunders in American history: alcohol prohibition.

Prohibition didn’t end in 1933, however. And since Richard Nixon declared that America was engaged in a “War on Drugs,” over 40 million people have been thrown in jail at taxpayer expense. Meanwhile, billions of dollars have flowed into the hands of drug cartels, terrorists, and worst of all, hippies.

Be honest, wouldn’t it be nice to buy your weed from someone who has showered in the past 24 hours? Ugh, and no more awful Phish music playing in the background. When did stoners stop listening to real rock music?

But I digress.

We’re in the middle of a “recession” that will soon be a depression (if not a desperation or downright desolation). One thing that helped pull us out of the Great Depression (besides WWII) was the 21st amendment and the instatement of a tax on alcohol.

Legalizing drugs, even if it’s just marijuana, would provide several benefits:

- tax revenues from the legal sale
- decrease in public spending on law enforcement
- decrease in public spending on incarceration
- removal of major source of funding for organized crime

While I support legalizing every drug (and I make this from a position of having studied pharmacology, addiction, and treatment), I know this is a tough sell. It might be necessary to ease people into drug legalization, and weed is, coincidentally, a great gateway drug towards this end.

So, I’ll set aside the argument for legalizing all drugs in favor of focusing on marijuana (as tough as it can be to focus on cannabis, I’ll give it a shot…).

More people die from being arrested with weed, raped in prison, and contracting AIDS than from smoking weed itself. When looking at successful people, it’s almost harder to find someone who hasn’t smoked weed than someone who has:

Barack Obama
George W. Bush
Clarence Thomas
Al and Tipper Gore
Newt Gingrich
Dan Quayle
Arnold Scharzenegger
John F. Kennedy
Michael Bloomberg
George Pataki
Pierre Elliot Trudeau (former Canadian Prime Minister, for all the Canuck stoners)
John Kerry
Bill Clinton

… and those are just politicians. I defy you to listen to music made by pot-virgins for more than a week without shoving screwdrivers in your ears. On the other hand, if you have to be high to enjoy the music, then your music is like someone who is ugly and only gets laid when the other person is drunk.

Wow, it’s hard to stay focused…

Perhaps the most important but least talked about issue in the drug war is the little problem of selective enforcement. A cop can’t arrest someone for being black, but if they have a little weed on them, that’s enough to drag them in and ruin their life. Whoops, did that person who looked black turn out to be a really tan college student? Well, I guess a warning will scare them straight…

But the worst abuses are often political. It is very well documented that Nixon kept close tabs on his “enemies,” from John Lennon to Jackie Gleason. Really any of those liberal pinko fags who spoke out against unpopular wars or government policies could expect to be watched like hawks, and files full of their illicit drug use were kept in the event they had to be “silenced.”

By making something that is nearly ubiquitous illegal, the government has the potential for arresting nearly anyone they want. And they don’t have to let a pesky little thing like “the truth” get in the way, because planting a bag on someone and putting an officer’s word against that of a suspect in court is usually enough.

So legalize it, and I promise: we’ll forget why we even banned it in the first place.