Well folks, the fact is that when a society
prohibits the use or possession of something that is in demand, the
distribution system changes and costs go up. Way up! The reality is, when you
prohibit something you’re saying, “No one can have this. No one can sell it or
produce it etc., without the threat of criminal penalties.” You’re giving up
any real control.
Under prohibition, demand won’t disappear and users will have
to pay more to continue buying and using. Eventually they’ll pay a lot more.
They’ll have to, because the manufacturing is risky, the distribution is risky,
and sales are risky. Everyone in the loop is now a criminal and subject to serious
penalties. Everyone in the chain must make enough of money to balance their
risks of being arrested and jailed, or robbed and beaten, or worse. The prices
go way up. With high profits at stake criminal organizations stand to make a
lot of money providing parts or all of these services. Their profits probably
won’t be used to build new schools in your neighborhood or fund neighborhood
healthcare. Legal sales of regulated and taxed substances could fund these
types of things.
When the criminal justice system (which is now at a much
higher risk of corruption from these impressive profits made by people willing
to work outside the law) manages to incarcerate these new entrepreneurs,
they’re replaced the next day with others who see the opportunity worth taking
the risk. Meanwhile we pay for the jail time, and court time, and support for
his or her family now that they’ve lost a bread winner. It doesn’t seem like any
of this prohibition has helped us out in the least! A thoughtful person can
easily make a good case that this series of ill-advised laws passed over the years
have done little except exacerbate the situation. More drugs being used, more
arrests, more spent on prisons enforcement, eradication, gang problems, corruption,
etc. have been the result.
These “entrepreneurs” (drug dealers) can be quite clever
when it comes to protecting themselves from the law. It’s common for a mid
level dealer (that means there is a lot of them) to work with local kids under
18 to “help” with his sales/distribution business. Since the advent of the zero
tolerance laws passed in school settings, these students risk much more than
they realize. Who do you think these local kids will contact to expand their
sales? Their friends, your kid’s school chums.
So what do we do?
·
Educate, educate, educate. Real information,
honest discussions. Join a group like FLCAN
and educate yourself, your friends and family.
· Change our laws to regulate these banned
substances. Then we gain control. Control over quality, strength, storage,
distribution (we card folks for beer, right?) and more.
·
Reconsider
our drug testing policies in schools. The results of the testing have prompted
the use of “harder” drugs that pass through the body more quickly than cannabis.
Drug testing may keep “at risk” kids out of band, or football or any other extracurricular, the exact activities that help kids stay away from drugs.
Let’s see if what we’re doing is working or not.
L Learn from history. We’ve been here before with
alcohol prohibition. We saw the results of prohibition as we looked back at alcohol
laws' consequences in our history. Prohibition bred the gangs, the drive by shootings, the
turf wars, the corruption of government and police, the increasing production
of whiskey instead of beer and much more.
This doesn’t look like a drug war. It looks like
a gift to those who are willing take a little risk to make a lot of money and
not pay taxes on it. It looks like a gift to private prisons. It looks like a
way to control people of color who are arrested far more than white people who
actually use more drugs per capita. It works to disenfranchise certain aspects
of society when they lose their voting rights.
Now we’re seeing the unintended
consequences of our generation’s prohibition, “The War on Drugs”. What is sad, is we never saw the results we
were trying to achieve.
· It’s up
to us to say, “Enough, this isn’t working, it’s costing us a fortune, it’s
risking our kids and our future!” What else needs to be said?
