I was on a panel discussion yesterday on "Jordan melee--one year later" (for a City Pages article) and Tim Dolan stated that most of the busts they do for drugs in the city are for marijuana--MARIJUANA! I could not believe my ears--not crack, not heroine, not crystal meth--MARIJUANA!
Personally I've never used it but I know plenty who have (and do) and in my mind marijuana is on the same level as alcohol, except I've never seen someone act mean on marijuana but I've seen some very mean drunks. And just as no one is spouting that consuming alcohol will lead you down the path of "harder" drugs, there is little to no proof that marijuana use leads people to use other drugs.
If marijuana sales and use were decriminalized, it would sure deflate the financial base of some of the criminal element and would keep people from coming into impacted areas to buy their recreational drugs. Folks would just go down to their local Walgreens, liquor store or whatever. We'd need laws to prevent driving while impaired, etc. but overall this would really reduce some of the activity associated with the criminalization of this low level drug and allow police to focus on bigger issues in those impacted areas.
Michelle Gross Bryn Mawr
At 03:41 AM 8/8/03 -0500, Jim Mork wrote:
Drugs
It was suggested that legalizing drugs would have no beneficial effect on crime. Two points: First, go and look at the graphs on national trends in violent crime. Note how the escalation of the War on Drugs coincides nicely with a ballistic takeoff in violent crime rates. Then answer this question: Has the "get tough on drugs" policy had ANY beneficial effect? What other nation on the face of this globe spends as many dollars and man-hours chasing a chimera like this? And why do facts like that have NO effect on the religious who believe anti-drug campaigns are somehow handed down from God? I believe there are people who would DIE for that belief (in fact, they do have a chance of doing exactly that if a stray bullet comes into their house, and there's nothing preventing it from being a POLICE bullet, either). I'm not saying drug use is a great thing. I think the use of prescription drugs in this country is SCANDALOUS. And the pharmaceutical industry has society by the throat because, much as we hate PROHIBITED drugs, we are equally in love with LEGAL drugs. And we think somehow there's a big difference between the two. Whereas the only REAL difference is that illegal drug sales happen on our street corners whereas the legal ones happen inside the drugstores that dot our landscape. In a way, it is one of our biggest self-deceptions. And our tendency to indulge such deceptions is why we can seldom have what I would call a rational discussion. It is really about religion and denial.
TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.)
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