mar1juana Arrests at All-Time High, Far Exceed Violent Crime Arrests

Actually, he used exactly the same logic that you did.

And every study done in the last century has found that use of mar1juana should not be a crime. Again, what we are arguing here is whether mar1juana possession should even qualify as a crime in the first place, so your exhortations that mar1juana is illegal are wasted here. Everyone knows that it is illegal, just as virtually everyone knows that it SHOULD NOT be.

Again, he used exactly the same kind of logic that you did, and this example uses the same kind of logic that your original post did.

You cannot separate prohibition and race when you see that (for example) blacks make up 13% of drug users and yet make up 55% of those arrested for drug offenses.

Nobody is "whining," we are debating the efficacy of a law that should not be on the books given the facts.

That is exactly what I do.

If you look at facts, you will see that mar1juana users are actually less likely than the average American to commit a violent crime. Every study done in the last century has found that mar1juana should not be prohibited as it is simply not a very dangerous substance.

Actually, more and more law enforcement personnel are also starting to see the truth that seems to escape you.

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There are plenty of arguments that can be made that the right to privacy in the Alaskan constitution that made Ravin possible also apply in the US Constitution. Of course, I am not a constitutional lawyer, so I could be wrong.

Besides, if this was about ME being able to smoke, I had a job offer in Amsterdam that I turned down because, despite the legality of mar1juana in Holland, I love my country. I just disagree that prohibition is a rational or effective way to deal with the issue of drug use and abuse in our society.

 

Have you ever considered how many violent crimes go unpunished as a result of law enforcement's concentration on drug crimes?

Are you aware of how many people, people convicted of things like rape, assault, robbery, and even child molestation get out of jail early in order to make space for drug crimes?

You are not getting it. mar1juana users are less likely than your average American to commit violent crime. They are not less violent because they have been busted, in fact people who go to jail for mar1juana offenses invariably emerge from jail far worse off, far more likely to commit crimes, and far more likely to be violent. I would rather that people who commit the offenses I listed above stay in jail for their entire term. Rapists and robbers deserve to serve the sentence that has been set out for them, mar1juana users absolutely do NOT.

Nobody should be punished for choosing the intoxicant that suits them, particularly if they are otherwise responsible, law abiding members of society, which by far the VAST majority of mar1juana users are.

How could you possibly say this given the evidence that prohibition simply does not work?

How do you reconcile this with the fact that over half of our young people use illegal drugs before they leave high school and report that illegal drugs are easier to acquire than alcohol?

But with prohibition, selective enforcement is the rule, not the exception. If the police tried to use some of the tactics they reserve for poor and minority areas, there would be a MASSIVE backlash. The drug war has been prosecuted primarily on minorities and will continue to be as long as this is our strategy. It cannot be any other way because if the law was enforced consistently, there is no way that middle and upper class whites would stand for it.

Ummm, if we regulate the sales of currently illegal drugs, we will cripple the crime syndicates that you are talking about here. We would take $60 billion per year from organized criminals in this country alone and at that point, the people who control access to drugs would be legitimate businesspeople and the government.

With this type of system, we could reduce the access that kids have to drugs, we could track and treat addiction more effectively, we would reduce expenditures on enforcement and incarceration, and we would raise massive amounts of tax revenue. The only price we would pay is in allowing adults to choose their own intoxicants once they are properly educated. That choice belongs to the individual, not some politician pandering for votes or trolling for campaign contributions.