Despite the need for the projected revenue, opponents say legalizing pot would only add to social woes. “The last thing we need is yet another mind-altering substance to be legalized,” says John Lovell, lobbyist for the California Peace Officers’ Association. “We have enough problems with alcohol and abuse of pharmaceutical products. Do we really need to add yet another mind-altering substance to the array?” Lovell says the easy availability of the drug would lead to a surge in its use, much as happened when alcohol was allowed to be sold in venues other than liquor stores in some states.
via – Time “Can Marijuana Help Rescue California’s Economy?”
Several points need to be made here; the first is that we’re adding nothing. The vast majority of people that want to ingest marijuana in whatever form they prefer already do. I’m quite sure there would be a fair number of people that will want to try out the government’s ‘evil weed’ when (not if) it is made legal. The same thing happened in the Netherlands when their policy of tolerance was introduced. The people who had lived under Prohibition wanted to try it and usage increased. Now, a generation later, marijuana usage in the Netherlands is less than half that of the United States.
The second point is there would not be a huge surge of potheads any more than there would be huge surge of smack addicts if heroin were legalized. While the government lies like a rug when giving information about cannabis, they’re pretty spot on with regard to heroin. If heroin were legal tomorrow, I’d stay the hell away from it as I assume nearly everyone that doesn’t already use it would.
Joel W. Hay, professor of pharmaceutical economics at USC, also foresees harm if the bill passes. “Marijuana is a drug that clouds people’s judgment. It affects their ability to concentrate and react, and it certainly has impacts on third parties,” says Hay, who has written on the societal costs of drug abuse. “It’s one more drug that will add to the toll on society. All we have to do is look at the two legalized drugs, tobacco and alcohol, and look at the carnage that they’ve caused. [Marijuana] is a dangerous drug, and it causes bad outcomes for both the people who use it and for the people who are in their way at work or other activities.” He adds, “There are probably some responsible people who can handle marijuana, but there are lots of people who can’t, and it has an enormous negative impact on them, their family and loved ones.”
via – Time “Can Marijuana Help Rescue California’s Economy?”
Two legal drugs? It’s strange that a professor of pharmaceutical economics at USC would fail to mention non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as aspirin which kills 180 – 1,000+ US citizens per year or adverse reactions to prescription drugs which kill 32,000 US citizens per year. Well, not strange; just self-serving considering his profession.
Ironically, Professor Hay applauds the work that some of his students did to help get the dangerous (and FDA approved!) drug Vioxx taken off the market; in other contexts he has written about the enormous economic benefits of preventative care, occupational therapy, etc.
When it comes to marijuana, however, it appears that he is — for whatever reason — an unrepentant ideologue with only one thing to say.
Read his poorly constructed anti-pot diatribe in the New York Times Freakonomics blog from May 2009 and you’ll see what he’s all about where pot is concerned.
Considering he’s a professor of “pharmaceutical economics”, I’d say Big Pharma paid him quite a bit for that blasphemy of economic BS.
Throwing “pharmaceutical” in front of any word tends to lose any credibility in my eyes though.
How much money do you think he got for writing that?