Time to Decriminalize?

I’ve believed for a long time that marijuana should be decriminalized. I’ve partaken in the weed, and am not ashamed to admit that I’ve inhaled. I enjoy its relaxing effect and the “deep” or silly conversations that result. Better yet, I like that I don’t wake up with a hangover the next day, or smelling like cigarette smoke.

I find it hard to believe that pot is still viewed as worse than alcohol and tobacco. Besides a glass of red wine a day being good for one’s heart, or its disinfecting properties, are there any other health or medicinal benefits to drinking alcohol? Are there any benefits at all to smoking tobacco? Yet research has found many medicinal benefits of marijuana—relief of glaucoma pressure, nausea, and chronic pain, to mention a few.

How many people have been killed by drivers high on ganja? How many fights or other acts of violence have occurred under the influence of grass? I’m not saying that there aren’t people who react poorly to the drug, but I wonder why we allow only alcohol and tobacco to be legal, when they are far more detrimental to us as individuals and communities? I don’t think Mary Jane is any more a catalyst to harder drug use as is Jim Beam or Captain Morgan—I think that’s an easy excuse. No, I suspect that it’s a pretty simple answer: the booze and cigarette purveyors can afford armies of lobbyists who keep the law working in their favor. If marijuana is legalized, the alcohol producers especially will see their profits fall. And those interests have done a good job of proliferating the “War on Drugs” and keeping the public under the influence of their own selfish concerns.

I know it’s a scary prospect, but perhaps it’s time we make concerted efforts to change the way we think about these substances, drug law, and how to deal with people who have tendencies toward addiction.

Portugal took this leap recently, decriminalizing drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Glenn Greenwald has written about “the success of drug decriminalization in Portugal,” which, “from an empirical perspective… has been an unquestionable success.” Furthermore, he learned through his research that “decriminalization is what enabled them to manage drug-related problems far more effectively than ever before, and the nightmare scenarios warned of by decriminalization opponents have, quite plainly, never materialized.”

That is not to say that it is an easy process without its own breed of complications, but perhaps it’s the “least bad” approach (see “How to stop the drug wars,” from the Economist, also linked from Greenwald’s article).

So maybe California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano is on the right track with his recently introduced bill to legalize marijuana. The state would collect much-needed revenue, our courts would be less bottlenecked with petty possession cases, police would have more time to combat violence, and I’m betting that the snacking industry would happily see a rise in sales.