Has anyone ever asked George what he thought of Dock Ellis's no-hitter on LSD?
Quick, George, distract America with some scary column about legal cocaine and heroin!
Washington Post’s George Will has briefly turned his attention away from baseball’s season opening to opine on the growing calls for marijuana legalization in America. In his latest column, “The drug legalization dilemma” (which I think he originally titled: “Would drug legalization do more harm than good” based on the URL), he regurgitates the prohibitionist talking point that, yeah, the drug war really sucks and doesn’t work, but legalization would be much worse!
The costs — human, financial and social — of combating (most) drugs are prompting calls for decriminalization or legalization. America should, however, learn from the psychoactive drug used by a majority of American adults — alcohol.
Prohibition resembled what is today called decriminalization: It did not make drinking illegal; it criminalized the making, importing, transporting or selling of alcohol. Drinking remained legal, so oceans of it were made, imported, transported and sold.
Another legal drug, nicotine, kills more people than do alcohol and all illegal drugs — combined. For decades, government has aggressively publicized the health risks of smoking and made it unfashionable, stigmatized, expensive and inconvenient. Yet 20 percent of every rising American generation becomes addicted to nicotine.
So, suppose cocaine or heroin were legalized and marketed as cigarettes and alcohol are. And suppose the level of addiction were to replicate the 7 percent of adults suffering from alcohol abuse or dependency. That would be a public health disaster. As the late James Q. Wilson said, nicotine shortens life, cocaine debases it.
Here's the chance a first-time user will become "dependent". Kicking heroin, cocaine, or alcohol dependence can kill you. Quitting tobacco is notoriously difficult. Stopping caffeine or cannabis use results in irritability, mild headache, and sleeplessness.
Suppose cocaine or heroin were legalized and included in the rations of all our fighting men and women in uniform! No, wait, that was cigarettes in World War II. Suppose cocaine or heroin were legalized and were the primary sponsors of most major sporting events and music festivals! No, wait, that’s beer today. Suppose cocaine or heroin were legalized and commercials with middle aged people in bathtubs promised it would invigorate your sex life. No, wait, that’s the boner pills.
Prohibitionists can’t have a straight discussion about legalizing marijuana; the topic must always jump to cocaine and heroin (and sometimes meth). Yes, if cocaine or heroin were legalized and sold over the counter in convenience stores to 18-year-olds like tobacco and to 21-year-olds like alcohol, and if they were marketed heavily in sports and music and movies, sure, that would be a public health disaster. That’s why nobody in drug policy reform advocates for legalizing cocaine or heroin in that manner!
Can you imagine the public health disaster if we legalized something as addictive as caffeine?
People like Will can’t recognize that “legalized drugs” is a spectrum that ranges from aspirin to morphine. Were we to legalize cocaine or heroin, I’d propose that it be somewhere closer to the morphine side of the spectrum. Safe injection sites like those in Britain, Switzerland, and Vancouver BC have reduced the overdoses and HIV and Hep C infections that are the public health nightmare. Addicts with clean needles and a safe source of unadulterated drugs don’t commit the crimes to get their fix, either.
It’s a tough thing to imagine, especially for someone morally opposed to injection drug use, but the results from harm reduction measures for these drug users are undeniable. Regardless, the population of cocaine and especially heroin users we’re talking about is a very small market. Even now, as prohibition has made cocaine and heroin much cheaper and more pure, there were only an estimated 244 thousand monthly heroin users and 1.4 million monthly cocaine users (just 363 thousand crack users). Just who is it out there who’s not shooting heroin now thinking, “Dang it, I sure wish shooting smack was legal, I’d go buy a syringe and tie off right now!”
Teen Alcohol and Tobacco use has declined dramatically over the past thirty years
Now, while Will supposes that “legalization would mean drugs of reliable quality would be conveniently available from clean stores for customers not risking the stigma of breaking the law in furtive transactions with unsavory people” and therefore addiction and public harm would rise, he ignores the evidence for one of the legalized drugs he demonized, tobacco. ”[G]overnment has aggressively publicized the health risks of smoking and made it unfashionable, stigmatized, expensive and inconvenient,” Will tells us, without ever noting that government strategy has worked in bringing down cigarette smoking to its lowest levels ever. Even though it is available at “clean stores”, it is locked up away from kids and clerks ask for ID from purchasers. And for years, I haven’t seen a cigarette ad on TV, it’s use is seen less and less in TV and movies, and NASCAR gave up the Winston Cup a long time ago.
But we’re not here to talk about legalizing all drugs, we’re here to talk about legalizing marijuana. To that specific subject, Will devotes just one sentence: “Legalized marijuana could be produced for much less than a tenth of its current price as an illegal commodity.” He means that to be a bad thing, by the way. While Will is lamenting the “balloon effect” that occurs when law enforcement tries to squash cocaine or heroin production in the few places on Earth where it grows – squeeze production in Colombia and it just pops up in Bolivia – he ignores that there is no “balloon effect” for marijuana because we can all grow it pretty much everywhere.
How "safe" a drug is has very little to do with its legality. The green ones are legal without prescription, yellows and oranges require prescription, and reds are illegal drugs, period.
This is where the drug legalization debate must acknowledge that it is a different issue to legalize marijuana than to legalize other drugs. The demand for marijuana and the support for its legalization are far greater than all other illegal drugs. Most of the 17.4 million monthly marijuana users are not dependent, they are savvy consumers of medicine and mind-altering substances who are making the safest choice among those products. They are not addicts with a physiological compulsion to use a product that a marketer can exploit.
We must also assure the George Wills of the world that legalization of marijuana is not likely to be the “7-Eleven Model”. Why can’t legal marijuana be subject to the same advertising restrictions, government admonishment, and public segregation that legal tobacco is subject to? Why do prohibitionists assume it would have to be just like alcohol with clever Super Bowl commercials, sexy spokesmodels, celebrity endorsements, and a thinly-veiled agenda to market to youngsters? (Oh, yeah, because we keep saying “treat it like alcohol”…)
Contact your elected representatives and urge them to 'Stop Arresting Marijuana Smokers'. 
Can anyone take George Will seriously? Every column I’ve read, he comes accross as an extreme right wing gasbag. Cannabis has been used for thousands of years to benefit mankind. Notice how the right vs left politicos have merged much farther right (wrong). We have no rights, indicated freely by the police state war on drugs and the provisions of NDAA, which makes all of us potential enemies of the state in our own country.
George will looks and kinda sounds like my older brother,
status quo, don’t rock my money boat.
change is bad if it doesn’t put more money in my pocket.
I am trying to keep my job long enough to get my retirement money.
I know what your thinking,,
he just needs to smoke a joint of nice fresh-from-the-garden 100% natural cannabis herb,, then he will change his uneducated tune.
This movement needs a mantra. I think that we should turn to the quote from Francis Young every time we are challenged over any aspect of involvement with cannabis. Our admittedly monstrously large mantra can never be challenged while simultaneously having the power of challenging every objection they can come up with.”Marijuana, in its natural form, is the safest therapeutically active substance known to man.”That should be our first response to every challenge made against our position.It also re-enforces the idea that we started this conversation with WEED and THEY dragged it off to the heroin and crack corner.This way we have a way to drag it back to cannabis, where it started.
When I typed “For nearly a quarter of a decade…” I meant to type: “For nearly a quarter of a century…”
The bottom line is that there will be people who become addicted to things. Whether it’s lottery tickets, buying Hummel figurines, over using booze and/or other drugs. The responsibility of good government should be honest education and personal responsibility, and to help people in need. But somehow government has itself become addicted to making laws in order to solve problems by throwing people in cages.
Our ally Richard Lee put our preferred regime in the simplest possible terms: MJ should be “legal like budweiser, not legal like tomatoes.”
Let’s have age restrictions, quality control (e.g., labeling percentages of THC and CBD), and restrictions on advertising.
We can let adults enjoy themselves
Thanks for picking apart Will’s arguments piece by piece. Why is it we always have to use facts and statistics when we make our arguments and prohibition-happy people get by on emotional generalities. This double-standard stinks.
One of the points I have issue with in Will’s article is his imprecise and incorrect assertion that “nicotine” is the drug in tobacco that kills. For nearly a quarter of a decade, smokers quitting smoking have been used alternate forms of nicotine administration (like gum) to curb cravings. Studies have fairly conclusively shown that nicotine by itself doesn’t increase cancer risks. Nicotine is not even recognized as carcinogenic by the state of California (remember, they recognize grilled foods as cancer causing!). Smoking cigarettes kills because of cancer-causing gasses like 1,3 butadiene released from combustion of tobacco – not due to nicotine.
My point in calling out this fallacy in Will’s argument is to demonstrate that he doesn’t even need to use fact to sensationalize the dangers of drug legalization. What George Will is doing is what we call FUD in the computer industry (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). This is a common tactic of propagandists and one prohibitionists get away with over and over!
I think you misunderstand me. I don’t advocate for the criminalization of any drugs. Portuguese-style decrim for heroin, cocaine, and meth is something else I advocate. I was trying to point out that none of us advocate for over-the-counter cocaine or heroin available at the 7-Eleven to anyone over 18 or 21.
“That’s why nobody in drug policy reform advocates for legalizing cocaine or heroin in that manner!”
This isn’t true, Russ – many of us believe that “hard drugs” should also be a personal choice. I don’t believe the U.S. is ready for this, and I wouldn’t hold up cannabis legalization to push for full legalization of all drugs, but I firmly believe that full decriminalization of all drugs should be done as was done in Portugal. It should not be a crime to use a drug no matter how much damage is perceived to be done by that use, because the fact of the matter is, I don’t want the government making that choice for me. Giving them that power is what leads to softer drugs being criminalized.
As Ron Paul put it, just because heroin were to be legalized wouldn’t mean everybody would suddenly go out and use it.
Put another way, these drugs are in demand and always will be. The more limits we put in place, the more the black market takes control. Recreational drug use should not be condoned, but it’s costly and ultimately ineffective to try to build rules around who gets what, when, how much, etc.