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The Cyler Series: What would you do if you woke up one day as a member of the opposite sex? For Jill McTeague, this is no hypothetical question. It’s real life!
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In the past, my brilliant posters and I have veered into the terrain of drug legalization. So today, I thought I’d just go ahead and devote an entire entry to it. This week the FDA asserted their exclusive authority in matters pertaining to doobage by officially pissing on the notion that states have the right to legalize marijuana for medical use. Personally, I don’t find the debate about states’ rights versus federal law all that interesting, so I’m not going to go there. Those of you lawyers out there with opinions on the subject, feel free to enlighten at will. Let me, however, just state the following: Marijuana works. I have had three types of pain in my life that no other medication alleviated: 1) lower back spasms For all three occasional maladies, I tried an assortment of medications. Nothing ever worked. Not even a little bit. Not even enough to take the edge off so that I could go about my normal routine. Because, however, I was a recreational pot smoker (which I no longer am, by the way, Mom) I decided to use myself as a guinea pig to see if pot had any medicinal effects. Lord god almighty, it did. This was about five years ago, which means that I suffered needlessly for decades because of soft-headed drug policy which keeps perhaps the world’s best painkiller out of the hands of people in pain. My question is this: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHY??????? Pain hurts. If there’s something out there that neutralizes that unpleasant fact, why on earth aren’t we exploiting it? Yes, smoking pot makes you high. Codeine makes you foggy and valium sends you to sleep. What’s the big deal? Sure, you can use pot for kicks instead of pain-killing. You can do this with almost any prescription pain killer. Just ask Rush Limbaugh. But to single out a substance that helps AIDS patients, cancer victims, people with eating disorders and endometriosis because one of the side effects is excessive happiness is just plain mean. By now, anyone reading this blog knows my feelings on the subject of drug legalization and civil liberties. I like small government and big freedom for individuals. If people want to jack themselves up on pot, cocaine, prozac or HBO, that’s their business. The law is a clumsy way of trying to improve people. But for the purposes of this post, I don’t even want to get into that larger question. I just want to know why we should outlaw an effective pain killer for people who are in pain. 28 Responses to “Legalize”Leave a Reply |
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You mean legalize as in have available on prescription or as in next to the Marlboro lights?
Generally speaking, I’d treat marijuana like booze. Over 18, buy it at will. But for the purposes of this post, I’m only concerned with legalizing it for medical purposes. One should at the very least be able to get a prescription for marijuana from a doctor.
In that case I agree
I would support the legalization for medicial purposes. That’s an easy one.
But I think you’d push for the legalization of pot for recreational purposes, no?
Evil David, in this post, I was merely concerned with medicinal marijuana because to me it’s mean and stupid to outlaw an effective pain killer. But I would absolutely legalize pot period. No one has yet made a reasonable case for prohibiting it. The high from pot is no stronger than what you can get from tequila. And unlike booze and cigarettes, marijuana is not chemically addictive.
I have been waiting for someone to make a case for outlawing pot, perhaps you could bring your legal expertise to bear on the subject.
I don’t feel strongly one way or the other about legalizing pot; I do think that it compares favorably with alcohol in terms of its addictiveness and effect.
I think the case against legalization goes something like this: the law is about drawing lines, oftentimes lines that don’t necessarily make perfect sense. Society (through its legislative bodies) determined that we’re better off as a country if we don’t foster and sanction addiction to chemical substances that could result in a violent or doped-up population. They tried taking a logically consistent approach by prohibiting the consumption of all such substances, including alcohol, and it didn’t work. Faced with the reality that people were commonly drinking anyway, the legislature decided to draw an artificial line, legalizing only one such substance, alcohol (no doubt due to its Biblical roots).
While I’m on the fence with respect to marijuana (yes, the line could be logically drawn to legalize only alcohol and pot), I certainly would be opposed to legalization of other recreational drugs, e.g., cocaine, heroine, PCP, etc. As it is, with one legal drug we’re faced with the huge societal problem of alcoholism and drunk driving. I believe that sanctioning other drugs through their legalization would only increase addiction and drug use. You have to realize, many people are deterred from taking drugs simply because they don’t want to break the law. If cocaine became legal tomorrow, you’d have a large number of people giving it a shot. I’d hypothesize that the problems that would flow from this would be on par with (if not worse than) the problems that have arisen from alcohol use. (As it is, we have a smaller segment of the population who doesn’t care cocaine is illegal and uses it anyway.) Do we need this?
Drug use is not a question of personal freedom in my view because of its effect on everyone surrounding the drug-user. Again, even with alcohol as the one legally sanctioned, mind-altering drug, we have plenty of problems with alcoholism and drunk-drivers mowing down innocents with their vehicles. Imagine a society where the drunken bum in the crowd is accompanied by the crazed PCP user and the dazed cokehead. (Actually, I’ve been contemplating for a while a short story about a futuristic drug-oriented society….)
Those are my two cents. (Are you joining us for drinks after work today?:))
Evil David, you make some very interesting points. I agree that drug use and abuse would increase if all narcotics were legalized. But I’m not convinced we would see epidemic levels of this. The reason being that there are plenty of disincentives to using and abusing any drugs (i.e, losing your job, your friends, your family, your life). Moreover, when weighed against the benefits of legalization, the dangers seem slim indeed. Legalizing drugs eliminates in one fell swoop the blackmarket for drugs and all of the violence that goes with it.
Moreover, I believe that a certain percentage of the population will seek mind-altering substances no matter what the legalities. Consider how many people are on anti-depressants. These are mind-altering drugs, drugs that change your personality. Soma, basically. Don’t you think the prevalence of these drugs is having an impact on society? I sure do. The pharmaceutical industry will find ways to provide the mind-altering people desire and by slapping a phony medical justification onto it, they do so legally.
I agree that outlawing cocaine, meth, etc. does stigmatize these dangerous drugs. However, by drawing what I consider an aribtrary distinction between “pharmaceutical” mind-altering drugs like Prozac and “receational” mind-altering drugs like cocaine, we implicitly legitimize the former while stigmatizing the latter.
Personally, I think Prozac is the most dangerous drug ever invented. Why? Because everything is not okay. And any drug which allows you to believe that it is, should be avoided.
Sorry I missed the post-work cocktails, you raging alcoholic
I’ve been mid-move and somewhat out of commission. CU Tuesday.
Do you ever notice how children sometimes spin round and round, making themselves feel dizzy? It feels good. And they’ll keep doing it over and over until an annoyed parent yells at them to stop.
I believe that society needs drug regulation–someone making them stop– or there will be inevitable widespread abuses. The disincentives you mention haven’t helped with alcoholism, and I doubt they would deter folks from the pleasures of legalized Ecstasy and cocaine.
While I’m also against the too-casual prescription of Prozac and other such mind-altering pharmaceuticals, I don’t think think the distinction between those drugs and “receational†mind-altering drugs like cocaine is by any means “arbitrary.” Sometimes there’s a legitimate medical reason why the former might be prescribed to a patient. On the other hand, I can’t imagine any medical basis for prescribing, e.g., heroin and ecstasy.
Btw, your arguments in favor of drug legalization sound eerily similar to the arguments commonly made in favor of free gun distribution (gun regulations create a black market, people will find a way to use them anyway, we should champion personal responsibility, etc.). Hmm. (Maybe we should save THAT topic for a different blog post.)
See you Tuesday. Great to hear that you’re moving so close to our AlteredFluid meeting location.
Lauren, you asked — “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHY???????”
I think the answer is primarily economic. It does not matter whether you view marijuana as a potent medicine, or as a really fun recreational substance. It’s an open-source, easily-growable, inexpensive herb with a potentially huge economic impact.
Imagine if you could grow endless Tylenol pills from one store-bought bottle.
Or if you could grow multiple bottles of Black Label scotch from one store-bought bottle. You could even improve it, make custom blends, and share with friends. Capitalists and their lobbyists can’t have that!
btw, I discovered your page by way of ‘The Perfect Man’. ( Loved it! And sent links to friends. )
Very insightful, Ashwin. Wherever there is a stinking pile of corruption, money is usually at the bottom of it. Glad you liked “Perfect Man.”
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Just legalize it…and then tax the hell out of it like they do everything else
The arguement of increasing addiction/use/abuse has been proven to be somewhat inacurate. Berkley professor, Robert MacCoun states, “The Dutch depenalization and subsequent de facto legalization of cannabis since 1976 is used here to highlight the strengths and limitations of reasoning by analogy as a guide for projecting the effects of relaxing drug prohibitions. While the Dutch case and other analogies have flaws, they appear to converge in suggesting that reductions in criminal penalties have limited effects on drug use–at least for marijuana–but that commercial access is associated with growth in the drug-using population.”
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