Prohibition causes a number of problems too. That’s just the nature of that beast. When we have a drug like marijuana that is not particularly harmful compared to alcohol and that is used by a large portion of our society, we really need to strongly consider whether all the problems prohibition causes are worth it. If you analyze the statistics you will see that more than half of all adults under 60 have tried marijuana. More than 100 million Americans have used it. More marijuana is consumed in this country than all other illegal drugs combined. According to our government Mexican organized crime make the lion’s share of their profits from marijuana sales even though they bring in and distribute most all the cocaine, meth and heroin consumed in this country. Marijuana is easily available everywhere in this country and not particularly expensive on a per use basis. Usually it is cheaper than beer. We aren’t really stopping anything trying in vain to keep up the ban on marijuana. The prohibition on marijuana causes all the same problems alcohol prohibition caused and then some. We should legalize it and regulate it like alcohol.
The prohibition of other drugs causes us problems too and always will, but most of the other drugs are extremely harmful to users and innocent people and so few use these drugs anyway that it makes little sense to legalize them. We don’t want to legalize a drug like heroin, for instance, because only a tiny percentage of our population will even try that drug. In many parts of the country you probably wouldn’t be able to find it. Legalizing a drug like heroin would make it much more available and since so few use it now it wouldn’t take that many new users to double or triple or quadruple the number of heroin addicts we have causing all sorts of problems.
Most of the black market for illegal drugs is really just a black market for marijuana. If we legalized it we would eliminate most of the black market for illegal drugs and a corresponding amount of the problems it causes us. We’d still have problems from what remains of the black market but a much smaller black market with far less money driving it would be preferable to what we have now. It would be easier to contain. Drug trafficking organizations with many billions of dollars (the lion’s share of their income) less to work with every year would be smaller, less powerful, and easier to contain.
We should not legalize all drugs, but we should strongly consider legalizing marijuana and regulating it similar to alcohol. Marijuana prohibition does far more harm than good.
