Recently, the Charleston City Council passed a bill to reduce the penalties for the possession of marijuana for personal use. This started me thinking about marijuana and its long intertwining with my generation. I first became aware of marijuana in my early teenage years, more than sixty years ago. At that time, possession of marijuana for personal use was a crime, as it still is in much of the country now, and it remains a federal crime. Soon after I became conscious of the whole thing, marijuana was incorporated into President Nixon’s war on drugs.
This is a war which sadly we continue to lose. This doesn’t stop us from pouring resources into a part of that war that doesn’t need to be fought. For as long as I can remember, we have continued to prosecute and imprison people who possess marijuana for their own use. I’m not going to discuss possession of marijuana for distribution, that’s a separate problem, one I think will take care of itself if we properly address marijuana for personal use.
Laws against personal use of marijuana remind me much of the failed experiment of prohibition. If people want something enough, they will find it regardless of what the law says. Most of the people imprisoned for personal possession of marijuana represented little or no threat to society as a whole and no one benefited from their imprisonment.
I know the arguments for and against. The health arguments on the pro side say it relieves glaucoma, chronic pain and anxiety. On the con side, there are arguments saying that it is addictive, it can cause cognitive delay and accelerate the development of psychosis. There have been many arguments surrounding marijuana as a gateway drug. I haven’t seen any convincing evidence that restricting personal use of marijuana makes any difference in use of other drugs. The only exception may be those cases where people become hooked on fentanyl or heroin that has been used to lace their marijuana.
My argument against laws criminalizing personal use is that they don’t work. We have spent millions, perhaps billions, of dollars and hundreds of thousands of law enforcement hours to enforce laws that in the long run have no real benefit.
I think it would make better sense to legalize marijuana for personal use. That way, like the alcohol and tobacco industries, it can be regulated with inspections and oversight activities. Customers would know it had not been contaminated with other dangerous drugs. It could also be taxed and distributed through businesses that would benefit from legitimate sale. The tax revenue could be used to fund drug treatment plans for our serious opioid crisis. That is the one war on drugs that we must win but in which we continue to fall further behind. Redirecting funds from marijuana enforcement to opioid treatment and enforcement will help save lives.
If personal use of marijuana is legalized, criminal distribution will rapidly fall away as there will be no profit. The street corner pot dealer will become a historical footnote, much like the prohibition era bootlegger.
I know some of you are thinking I must be an old hippie sitting around my living room smoking a joint and listening to the Grateful Dead. Even though I came of age in the Age of Aquarius, I’ve never tried marijuana and have no plans to do so whether it’s legalized or not. I have no objection to it, it’s just that as a younger man I preferred beer, as I got older, I migrated to wine and martinis, and now I’m too old to change.
The bottom line is this: we live in an age of limited resources, and we need to decide how we are going to utilize those resources. I would like to see us take those financial and human resources and utilize them to address the opioid and methamphetamine crises. We are currently wasting too many of these precious resources trying to enforce unnecessary and ultimately unenforceable laws against personal possession and use of marijuana. If we legalize personal possession, we will reduce crime and all but eliminate the illegal trafficking in marijuana.
That is my grumpy opinion.
Leigh Shepherd
Colorado which has opted to legalize recreational pot, has found by taxing it, that they have actually forced a lot of people to the black market since it is cheaper.