Fireworks Offer A Bit Of Insight In Legalizing Marijuana

For the next week or so you’ll be serenaded with rogue fireworks bursting in air.

It is more than irritating given the fact Manteca allows safe and sane fireworks sales and discharge for a full 168 hours from noon today until midnight on Monday.

Critics of the 2006 Manteca City Council decision to allow non-profits to sell fireworks said something like this would happen. There were right – to a degree.

While there hasn’t been a big bump in fireworks-related fires and injuries, there has been an uptick in illegal fireworks. The skies over East Manteca in the Cowell School have lit up like the Fourth of July for the past several years as June comes to a close from someone launching aerial fireworks. That’s just one example.

The big difference today as opposed to 10 years ago is the city isn’t making criminals out of people who use safe and sane fireworks.

Manteca’s fireworks experience provides some lessons to those who embrace the outright legalization of drugs such as marijuana that they contend are essentially the “safe and sane” version of controlled substances.

Legalizing marijuana will not result in a drop-off in the use of more dangerous drugs such as meth. It might even increase their consumption. That would mean the attendant impacts such as health care costs and putting strains on the safety net when drug use diverts needed money from food and such will go up somewhat. It also would likely mean they’d be an increase in property crime as more people finance their habit.

As for marijuana itself, about the only benefit to society that can be measured for sure would be the fact it would stop making a criminal out of people who might otherwise be law-abiding citizens. It would free up law enforcement resources to try to keep more dangerous drugs in check.

There are other issues with marijuana that can’t be ignored that are in the same category as alcohol abuse. If they were treated the same as alcohol, it means those who use them would be subject to a wide variety of penalties much like those who abuse alcohol. If you test positive for marijuana at work an employer should have the absolute right to terminate you without penalty just like if it were alcohol. Sorry, but there can be no margins for being a “little buzzed.”

Having said that, technology can be developed that distinguishes between marijuana being in your system for 30 days versus two days.

If you are under the influence while driving you get the full treatment as if you were consuming alcohol when you were tested.

Adults who supply marijuana to anyone under 21 should be subjected to the same criminal prosecution and fines – as well as liability – as someone who serves or sells alcohol to a minor. And if someone is high, relaxed or whatever when they cause an accident after someone gave them more marijuana when they were already under the influence, then they can be sued for damages by victims.

As for arguments that making all controlled substances legal will somehow lower the price and reduce crime, good luck proving that one.

Do you think if those shooting off illegal fireworks spending $100 to buy four mortar-style rockets would still get only four if the price was cut to $50? The odds are they’d still spend $100 and have double the thrill.

Human nature being what it is it would probably work the same in most cases with the hardcore drugs.

Prohibition per se rarely works nor does lifting prohibition cure you of your ills. If you doubt that just consider what has happened in this country since alcohol was again made legal. A lot of the crime generated by criminal gangs has gone to the wayside but alcohol-related deaths from intoxicated driving and domestic violence induced by alcohol abuse haven’t exactly retreated. Nor have health-related issues that cost society tons of money.

Legalizing isn’t a panacea whether it is with safe and sane fireworks or marijuana.

In both cases they do end the criminalization of behavior that has relatively low risk compared to the more potent abuse of hardcore illegal fireworks and hardcore illegal drugs.

Wake Up Call To Prohibitionists, Your Policy Has Failed!

At last, many ex-heads of state, ex-Government ministers, academics and celebrities seem to be coming together to reveal the total disaster of the prohibition of drugs policies.

Since the prohibition of drugs experiment was started back in the 1920′s and particularly since the adoption of the world-wide UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961, which led to the Misuse of drugs Act in the UK in 1971, we have seen disaster after disaster.

Whilst criminal gangs have made huge un-taxable or laundered profits and their victims have suffered from both ignorance (lack of credible advice and legal protection) through some drugs, the hypocritical law-makers have favoured the use of other and often more harmful substances like alcohol and tobacco, and Governments have taxed users heavily.

Lack of advice and quality control has led to countless deaths, untold crime, gang-warfare and an almost endless list or problems mostly brought on by the prohibition policy itself – a policy that has left the supply of what are clearly commercially viable, if not universally desirable, consumables.

Whilst police spend massive amounts of taxpayers’ money – many billions of pounds each year in the UK alone, the result has been simply atrocious – to the point that it is hard to justify the policy on any level.   The law often punishes the people it ought to protect – the “victimless” users; it enables criminal profits and creates addicts often driven to crimes of acquisition to pay the high prices for dubious quality drugs of unknown strength – whether cannabis, cocaine, heroin, LSD or whatever.  Strangely enough, in the UK and many countries, alcohol and tobacco are the exception, as well as being the biggest killers.

Now a group of ex-Government leaders and academics, as well as celebrities, have come together to demand that the UK Government end the failed policy of drug prohibition and take control; this comes at a time when a  well-respected international body (The Global Commission on Drug Policy) has declared the “war on drugs” a total failure.

The 19-member commission includes former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan and former US official George P Schultz, who held cabinet posts under US presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. Others include former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker,Mexico’s former President Ernesto Zedillo, Brazil’s ex-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria, as well as the current Prime Minister of Greece George Papandreou. The panel also features prominent Latin American writers Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, the EU’s former foreign policy chief Javier Solana.

The list of those that have written to the UK Government demanding an end to prohibition includes Dame Judi Dench, Julie Christie, singer Sting, entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson and former Home Office minister Bob Ainsworth..  It is also supported by Film director Mike Leigh, actress Kathy Burke, three former chief constables and leading lawyers.

The open letter to the UK  Government, which was published by the campaign group Release, reads: “We call on the Coalition Government to undertake a swift and transparent review of the effectiveness of current drug policies. “

It concludes: “The failure of the current UK system of criminalisation is clear. It is time for the UK to review its policy and adopt a health focused, evidence based approach to drug use.”

The UK Home Office was quick to respond, with a standard letter: “The immediate reaction from the Home Office last night was to rule out any such move: “We have no intention of liberalising our drugs laws. Drugs are illegal because they are harmful – they destroy lives and cause untold misery to families and communities.”

Strangely enough, almost the same words as used by the last Labour Government when Bob Ainsworth MP was himself a Home Office minister.  Mr Ainsworth seems to have changed both his job and his tune – but NOW maybe he is speaking more honestly and sincerely than previously, who know?

Either way, to see this report from the The Global Commission on Drug Policy and letter to the Government is somewhat refreshing, even though the initial response remains as boringly thoughtless and hypocritical as ever.

When will the prohibitionists wake up to the FACT that their failed and costly policy is doing far more harm than good?  Or maybe it is them that makes the biggest profits all along?

Mick Jagger Calls For Marijuana Legalization Trial on a British island

 

Rolling Stones rocker Mick Jagger is calling for government officials to legalize marijuana on a British island – to see if it prevents drug-related violence.

The singer, who was convicted of possessing narcotics in the 1960s, insists youngsters will always experiment with substances, despite the risk of negative side effects. He is now urging officials to legalize cannabis on the Isle of Man – a British Crown dependency in the Irish Sea – for a limited time to test the consequences of an end to drug prohibition.

Jagger tells Larry King, “The whole question of legalizing drugs is fraught… You usually try these things out in very small places… You know, like you try a new product out in a small kind of society or an island somewhere. And in England they always try out new mobile phones (cell phones) in (the) Isle of Man. They’ve got a captive society. So I said, you should try – you should try the legalization of all drugs on the Isle of Man and see what happens. Human beings seem to have a propensity to want to take drugs in some form… It seems to be the propensity of human beings to want to use them… I think you have to take that as read, you know.”

“But then what do you do when it affects so many people’s lives, and not in a good way. And then also you get a lot of violence at both ends of the scope. So you get violence in some countries… which, like, we have in Mexico now, and you get violence at the other end of people trying to obtain drugs. That’s the part that speaks to some sort of legalization. Because that, you would hope, would help the violence from both ends of the supply line.”