Overdosing on Morality
Popular support for legalized recreational drugs has been widespread for decades now. As the costs for the tax payers get bigger and the support for the federal government dwindles, fewer and fewer politicians are supporting it.
By: Craig Bergquist
Popular support for legalized recreational drugs has been widespread for decades now. As the costs for the tax payers get bigger and the support for the federal government dwindles, fewer and fewer politicians are supporting it. It can no longer be addressed as a fight for morality as has been commonly upheld in the past. Over the past two years, my viewpoint has changed radically to join that of many others. Legalize it—all of it.
I am from a small, sheltered, coastal town in the northeast. To over generalize, the residents are white, own sailboats and go to the bay club every week. While I never bought into the whole sailing culture, that WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) mentality soaked into everyone around me. It wasn't so much that drugs were immoral; it was that they were illegal and that was the bottom line.
My senior year of high school, I spent a lot more of my time in the cities, and it was there that the widely accepted viewpoint changed. It was Thoreau who said that “it is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.” I share the opinion of Thoreau and of my city friends who believe that it is worse to uphold an unjust law, than to break it.
What is inherently evil about heroin? That it kills people? Cigarettes have been proven to increase your chances of lung cancer. Red meat will increase your risk of heart disease. What is the difference, where is that line? Is it because the illegal substances will kill you faster? Life is full of experiences that are going to shorten your life expectancy. I think that if an adult can go buy a pack of smokes, or a six pack, or choose to eat that fatty steak, that he should have that same choice when it comes to shooting up.
Too much of the argument against drugs is focused upon where the money is going. They say that you are supporting Drug Lords, and they are right. Just this past Sunday Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera, a Mexican drug lord worth over a billion dollars, said that he owed his entire empire to the American drug policies. Under the current system, I think that you would be hard pressed to find someone who actually does not think that the money is going to drug lords.
But drugs do not have to be synonymous with crime. Without the crime built around it, someone doing heroin in their home does not hurt me in any way. Our current drug policy is often compared to the age of prohibition. Why not solve the drug problem in the same way? Legalize the substances and undercut the crime bosses.
So tap into this market and put the products on drug store shelves. Label them with the effects in bold and put a skull and cross bones on the packages. If someone is that determined to commit suicide then they are going to do it regardless of legality. And I do not think that the argument that “the availability will lure in people who would otherwise not try it” is valid. As a teenager, I can tell you that marijuana is a hell of a lot easier to get than alcohol. You can put an age restriction on all of them and maybe even reclaim some of those tax dollars.
The War on Drugs has cost the American people much more than tax money. The absolute worst part about it is that it has undermined our confidence in our federal government. We as a country need to find direction, because I am tired of this half-assed morality. Either take the next step towards a puritan country and bring back prohibition and stop selling cigarettes, or back down. The man that hates all of those junkies but goes out and gets drunk every night is of the worst kind, and America is chock full of them.
So don't buy into their hypocrisy. More and more people are realizing that we do not need the government to baby sit our behavior. I don't do heroin because I enjoy life without it. However, it is not my place to tell other people what to do with theirs. Read, watch the news, ask people that you respect what they think and why. Get as full of a picture as you can. Who knows, in a year or two, maybe you and I will have more in common than you think.
