Do you like Politics?

Here it is - time to be back in Tallahassee and that means, in part, the discipline of letting supporters know what we’re doing while we are here.

In preparation for the legislative session, I went to the local department store back home for a makeover. Coming from the school of thought "if the barn needs painting, paint it," we went for the full package.

During the barbershop style conversation, Tunde, the Hungarian cosmetician asked the usual questions. When I tried to explain what I do- she asked a pretty important question, “Do you like this politics?”

Do I like politics? No, what I like is the results of successful politics.

This year, as we head into legislative session, the battle cry is no surrender, no retreat.

Our medical cannabis bill is not perfect. We’ll need stakeholders to help us create the best – patient friendly law the country has seen. With the help of states like Washington and Colorado, we can help Florida lawmakers see that regulating and controlling cannabis has always been the right approach.

This is an uphill battle – but our cause is just….

We may not like politics; we may not always believe that these efforts are worthwhile; but, when we are here in Tallahassee, I know we are on the right path…. keep the faith, it may be darkest before the dawn but this is the Sunshine State – when we win – it will be dazzling.

Why the Drug War Puts Drug Dealers in our Middle Schools

Survey after survey, from schools across the country are telling us the same story, echoing what our own children are telling us; it’s easier to get some illegal drugs than alcohol or cigarettes. Often students will assert that they can get marijuana within 15 minutes to an hour. How did we get to this point? It’s not from a lack of effort, or funding. We were willing to fund what ever the never ending drug war seemed to require (asked for). 

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?