...just the thought of it makes me want to bust out a chorus of God Bless the U.S.A. - but I won't.
Luminous Animal's recent post about the decrease in drug use and cost in Portugal after a decade of just saying no to the WoD (War on Drugs),
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=439&topic_id=1422483&mesg_id=1422483 , included this information:
The number of addicts considered "problematic" -- those who repeatedly use "hard" drugs and intravenous users -- had fallen by half since the early 1990s, when the figure was estimated at around 100,000 people, Goulao said.Another reason for this positive health benefit from an end to illegal drugs is also a strategy of harm reduction, which means availability and affordability of drug treatment programs. Public spending on public health in order to reduce overall costs to society and to the taxpayer.
(Jeff Mirons, an economics prof. at Harvard has already studied the savings of an end to the WoD and states that legalizing drugs would save roughly $41.3 billion per year in government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition. Of these savings, $25.7 billion would accrue to state and local governments, while $15.6 billion would accrue to the federal government...a lot of savings to state and local govts.)
This must seem like cognitive dissonance for Americans who have been fed the WoD and thought it made sense to treat drug users and abusers as criminal issues, cause, they're criminals... (because the war on drugs makes them criminals: wash, rinse, repeat, fail.) It must be hard for drug warriors to accept this information; facts (once again) contradict the call for a Hobbesian Americana with nasty, brutish and short-sighted social policy.
And this moment reminds me of another lesson in the WoD: Ronald Reagan may have claimed that evolution is only a theory, but evolutionary genetics and the Reagan-ramped WoD created the new American cannabis and made the cannabis market more lucrative and professionally organized than would have seemed possible before the conservative mindset decided to "fix" it.
Life is full of ironies.
From Michael Pollan in The New York Times magazine, 1996:
...in little more than a decade, marijuana growing in America had evolved from a hobby of aging hippies into a burgeoning high-tech industry with earnings that are estimated at $32 billion a year. That makes it easily the nation’s biggest cash crop. Unlike corn ($14 billion) or soybeans ($11 billion), however, modern marijuana farming depends less on soil and sunlight than technology, allowing it to thrive not only in the fields of the farm belt but in downtown apartments and lofts, in suburban basements and attics, even in closets.
Fewer than 20 years ago, virtually all the marijuana consumed in America was imported. “Home grown” was a term of opprobrium—”something you only smoked in an emergency,” as one grower old enough to remember put it. Today, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the people assembled in this hall—as well as to the Federal war on drugs, which gave the domestic industry a leg up by protecting it from foreign imports and providing a spur to innovation—American marijuana cultivation has developed to the point where the potency, quality and consistency of the domestic product are considered as good as, if not better than, any in the world.
In an era of global competition, the rise of a made-in-America marijuana industry is one of the more striking—if perhaps least welcome—economic success stories of the 1980′s and 90′s. Domestic growers now dominate the high end of a market consisting of at least 12 million occasional users; on Wall Street, in Hollywood, on colleges campuses, consumers pay $300 to $500 an ounce for the re-engineered home-grown product, and even more for the “connoisseur”‘ varieties grown by the kind of small, sophisticated growers on hand for the Cannabis Cup. Peering through the haze at the conventioneers milling in the Pax Party House, Brian R. declared in a tone of deep reverence, “There are a lot of true pioneers in this room.”
http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/how-pot-has-grown/plus ça change...
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