CRIMINAL JUSTICE
Time to Legalize Pot
Why legalizing drugs can make things safer
This article is in my “Policy Opinions” section of “The Cynical Report.”
When people think of legalizing marijuana, they seem to think of the population becoming dumber from smoking the joint along with lazy, pleasure-seeking people who don’t understand that society needs rules to function properly. If we legalize (or decriminalize) drugs, people argue, more people will become druggies, we’ll have more crime, and society will regress.
Well, I have to be honest with you, criminalizing drug use (a.k.a. the War on Drugs) has been a complete failure.
One of the intended goals of the War on Drugs was to purge drug use. We should have seen drops in drug usage, right?
Nope.
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in 1999 the drug-overdose death-rate was 6.1 people per 100,000. Since then, it’s consistently increased and is now at 21.7 deaths per 100,000.
Now, don’t get it twisted. The problem is not that the government is failing to crack down on drug use. In federal prisons (which admittedly only house 9.6% of the US prison population), the proportion of prisoners that are nonviolent drug offenders has steadily risen…
