| | | >> Obama wants to legalize more than just marijuana, and he wants to raise the threshold between possession and distribution.
I really think legalization of other drugs besides marijuana is a bad idea at this time. Most of these drugs are very dangerous, but the real problem is there is not any reasonable framework for legalizing them. If you legalize, e.g., cocaine, what is the sense is selling Oxycodone via highly controlled prescriptions.
I take Ambien to sleep, the smallest dosage available, and if I request a refill a couple days early you'd think I was ordering an ounce of Meth. How does this make sense in the context of legal cocaine or, as some libertarians propose, heroin?
Our country is suffering badly today from a lot of policy that has not been thought through, or even given reasonable consideration (okay, I'm thinking of the ACA, but there are others).
There is a very odd connection, if you will, between the War on Drugs and Obamacare. Neither was given a reasonable degree of thought before the fact. In fact, both were outgrowths of purely political objectives smattered with a tad of good intention: "It'll look good, and who knows, it might help someone."
Before the War on Drugs was formally turned loose on the public, AG Kleindeinst created a task force which decided to test some of the concepts. In Phoenix, they arrested, simultaneously, every known street dealer who had ever been arrested before or that they knew they could. They flooded the city with "buy money", more than had ever been deployed before. It amounted to 76 dealers arrested at once, which was a lot for the time. For one week it was impossible to buy drugs in Phoenix. Within 30 days, Phoenix drug sales were back to normal.
In San Diego, they did something similar limiting it to heroin only. Same result: A week later, things started returning to normal, and ultimately, within a month, no one could tell anything happened.
They did the same things in other cities, same result. The obvious conclusion: You cannot kill drugs on the supply side. Yet, knowing this, the drug war has been pursued with counterproductive results for decades, having locked up thousands of people, spent billions, confiscated billions, and developed an entire bureaucracy around it.
That last paragraph could be used to describe the Obamacare law almost without change. |
|
