Any of you who grew up with state schooling in America will remember the Anti-Drug propaganda. "Pot cookies could lead to date rape". K2 makes the block appear "to be a street of zombies". "Cocaine Negro Fiends are a new southern menace"(an oldie, but as amusing as ever). "Weed Is a Gateway Drug to Meth, California out of control".
There is so much blind hysteria out there that it is hard to sort out the facts from misinformation. The government would have you believe that taking even a small hit of an illegal substance is likely to kill you. In reality, so long as you do your research and have a sober person on hand incase of emergencies, you can take most anything in moderation without much risk. At the same time the government sanctions, and even encourages, the prescription of powerful psychoactive compounds to children with horrific side effects. While there are undoubtedly many who suffer from addiction, the way to solve this problem is not through state prohibition imposed on millions of responsible users, but rather outreach by friends, family, and medical professionals within our communities. There are a myriad of ways in which society would benefit from drug legalization, so I boiled it down these five indisputable arguments:
1. Violence in America
When substances are as heavily criminalized as drugs are in America, the risk involved in peddling them pushes the price through the roof. All too often the organizations involved in this trade are territorial and extremely violent. Drug revenue makes up most of the income for domestic gangs, responsible for much of the violence in America's urban centers. Poverty in these areas (caused by over intrusive leftist governance, but that ought to be its own post) pushes the youth towards violent crime. When you hear of "out of control black on black murder", most of it can be attributed to gang violence or its collateral damage. If drugs were legalized, peaceful business would immediately crowd the violent groups out of the market. That's exactly what happened to the mafia when alcohol prohibition was repealed in 1933.
Above is the murder rate per 100,000 people. Notice how it drops off after prohibition is repealed, then shoots back up soon after the UN's Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961.
2. Latin America is Fucked
While violent gangs are a problem in the U.S., cartels in Latin America are out of control. Latin America has some of the highest murder rates in the world, which is extraordinary when you consider that "the world" includes sub-saharan Africa and the Mid East. Violence on such a scale leads to economic stagnation, creating a vicious cycle in which more and more of the youth are driven towards violent crime, or to flee from their homeland altogether. Society cannot progress without new entrepreneurs and other productive workers; while the current conditions continue such people will continue to flee in large numbers. The vast sum of money accumulated by criminal elements leads to rampant corruption of state officials. This whole clusterfuck creates a situation in which Latin America remains poor and underdeveloped.
From this standpoint, I would argue that the drug war is the costliest foreign policy catastrophe in U.S. history (Well, maybe not Loss of China catastrophic, but it still ranks way up there as pretty fucking bad). Consider the current problem of poor illegal immigrants depressing American wages. Now imagine the situation if they weren't poor and most of them never migrated anywhere. Not only would this eliminate any economic rationale for statist limitations on freedom of movement, it would also create a healthy, prosperous, and growing Latin America. If the War on Drugs had never happened, Latin America would likely have become one of the most prosperous regions in the world, perhaps on par or exceeding Western Europe or the United States. Latin America has huge mineral deposits and fossil fuel reserves; given the freedom to associate and conduct business voluntarily, Latin America could become the most prosperous society in the history of the Earth. Increased trade and commerce between the United States, Latin America, and the rest of the world would mean that everyone everywhere would be better off.
This isn't to put all the blame on the United States. Latin American governments didn't have to go along with the drug war. They could easily have avoided this if they refused to criminalize the sale and production of narcotics within their own borders.
3. Research Chemicals
What if I told you I know where to get some legal pot? Only it isn't pot, it's a highly pure, laboratory grade synthetic cannabinoid. And it's not the well studied cannabinoid THC. Ya know, the subsistence that's actually known to the medical community? That would be illegal! Instead, it's an entirely new substance, invented by Chinese chemists just weeks previously, in order to stay ahead of the regulators. And it's not just cannabinoids! You can buy completely legal, completely untested substances in any class of drugs! You see, any substance that is not expressly forbidden can be produced and sold "for research purposes". These Research Chemicals can be easily found with a simple google search, and anyone with a credit card can have them shipped straight to their door.
As the situation currently stands, the drugs that are banned are the drugs that are known to medical science. If you OD on heroin, every first year medical student knows to give you Naloxone. If you OD on 4-Fluoromethylphenidate HCl, you're pretty much fucked. No one on earth knows how to save you. By the time someone figures it out, 4-Fluoromethylphenidate HCl will be scheduled. I'm not going to tell you that opioid use is safe, or that cocaine is without harmful side effects. But at least the effects are known! We've created a situation in which recreational drug users resort to the most dangerous, untested drugs, if they wish to remain within the law.
4. Overdose Deaths
You will never prevent overdose deaths by banning drugs. As long as there is a demand for drugs, people will get ahold of drugs, and as long as people take drugs, some will die of overdose. You can however reduce overdose deaths drastically by ensuring product quality, giving accurate dosing information, and ensuring the users have access to medical care and supervision. Each of these reasonable precautions are seriously confounded by drug prohibition. By the time product hits the streets, it is usually heavily adulterated. Purity can vary wildly which drastically increases the chance of overdose. If drugs were legal, manufacturers and retailers would operate in the open. Their practices would be known, the constituents of their products would be known, and exact dosing information would be known. When people overdose, there would be absolutely no hesitation to get them the medical attention they need. And when you speak to doctors, you can easily show them exactly what what you took and exactly how much.
In 2014 alone, 47,055 people are reported to have died of an overdose in the United States. That is an astounding figure. By comparison, 33,651 Americans died in combat during more than 3 years of total war in Korea. Most of those deaths could have been easily prevented. As long as drug prohibition remains in place, this catastrophic loss of human life will continue.
5. Self Ownership
The final argument is, at least to my mind, the most important. Disregarding all of my other arguments, let's say that the fantasy world of pot cookie date rape and cocaine negro fiends is real, and drug prohibition is proven to prevent most of these horrific societal ills without much collateral damage. Well, even in this nonsense fever dream invented by the state school system, drug prohibition is still evil. One of the most basic tenets of a truly free society is that a person ought to be able to decide for himself what to do and what not to do with his own body.
When your government is sending armed goons onto private property, in order to imprison people whose only crime was to posses a substance that poses "a hazard to the public safety ", it's clear that the only real hazard is the government itself.