The Seattle PD responds to marijuana legalization. pOp you MUST read this, it is the single funniest statement to the public evar by any PD. The tone, the tone.
A friend who’s otherwise entirely left wing doesn’t support legal marijuana on facebook. I disagreed with him, but not by taking issue with one substance.
My response:
Legalize everything.
The problem with marijuana legalization is that the state removes a tariff (essentially) and the profit from a wildly lucrative trade. It is lucrative for those who build prisons and put disproportionate numbers of POC in them, lucrative for bad people with automatic weapons, and lucrative for state sponsored terrorists from foreign climes.
When you pull insane amounts of profit from the hands of bad (mostly) men, their response is not to roll over and play dead, it’s to find something else to profit from. In this case it would be refined opiates and meth that they would now be trying to extract value from. Or they’ll push human trafficking instead, since the demand by men for teenaged girls seems to be entirely limitless. I will be fascinated to see if the rates of meth use and reported human trafficking bump up, along with intergang carnage, in the places marijuana has been legalized. It may be the revenge of unintended consequences all over again.
The Portuguese model of across the board treatment of drugs as a HEALTH issue has been running for 10 years and their HIV rates have plummeted, their societal costs for drug use are minimal, they’ve unclogged the courts and drug use across the board has been reduced especially in young people, and what sane human being doesn’t want to see drug use rates in teenagers fall. I would be willing to hazard a guess that human trafficking is worse though, although I have no proof of that.
(That’s what I put on facebook – I could have said MUCH MORE).
Interesting reading. The police have always been in a bit of a quandry about enforcing laws that they know are stupid. When I was a kid, if the police caught you drinking underage they would kick your ass and dump the booze. The problem with adopting Portugal’s solution is that we live next door to the retarded americans. As long as their drug laws are insane, ours will have to be at least stupid. Imagine the Vancouver hockey riot if everybody had been smoking pot instead of swilling alcohol. Right – no riot!
Yes, it was definitely an alcohol fueled shitstorm that day. As for the stupid Americans, the Mexican government has already had various branches openly state that until the US pulls its head out of its ass on drug policy, they can’t reform their own laws, so I feel you on that one.