Legalizing Pot: A Non-User’s Perspective

Let me preface this by saying that I don’t use marijuana, or any other illegal drug. In fact, I likely wouldn’t use marijuana if it was perfectly legal and they were handing it out free on street corners. I don’t even use alcohol or tobacco. But I’m still strongly in favor of making pot legal (possibly other drugs, as well), for several reasons.

1. Severity. Marijuana is about as harmful, to both users and those around them, as alcohol. In fact, it could be argued that alcohol is more harmful, since it is hard to get a lethal overdose of marijuana, and stoned people are seldom violent. Alcohol is perfectly legal. I believe drugs with similar qualities should be treated equivalently by the law. While it may be the case that, at present, there are proportionately fewer very casual pot users than there are very casual drinkers, I believe this is almost entirely due to the fact that alcohol is legal and marijuana is not. The kind of people who use drugs casually or socially are more likely to be deterred by the legality aspect than heavy users.
2. Waste. Every dollar spent arresting, prosecuting, or punishing a pot user or pot dealer is a dollar that could have gone to improving our schools, cracking down on actual violent crime, feeding the hungry, supporting and improving the military, or any of the hundreds of other legitimate things that government does. Also, many moderate pot users are productive citizens who are being kept from useful jobs by arrest or imprisonment.
3. Revenue. If marijuana is legal, then we can tax it like we tax alcohol. Instead of being a drain on government coffers, it can be a source of income.
4. Quality control. If marijuana is legal, we can impose regulations to make sure that dealers aren’t spiking the product with other drugs, or selling pot that is much stronger or weaker than a customer expects. Currently, pot users have no such protections.
5. Other uses. Marijuana has shown promise in several medical applications, such as cancer and AIDS. Hemp, which is a very useful crop, both for fiber and for the oil-rich seeds, is the same species as drug-grade marijuana, and thus laws currently prohibit growing it in the US. Obviously, if marijuana is legal as a recreational drug, then we can both prescribe it, and grow it industrially.
6. Associated crime. This may be less the case for pot than for other presently illegal drugs, but drugs are a source of income for gangs and the like, with the associated violent crime one might expect. As with alcohol during Prohibition, making something that people want to use illegal makes it a prime target for control by criminal organizations. If we made these drugs legal, their use as a source of illicit income would dry up. Also, if prices are driven up by the fact that dealers and growers need to dodge the law, as I suspect that they are, heavy users are more likely to commit theft and other crimes in order to afford their fixes.

This is not to say that I think marijuana should be entirely free of regulation. I think we should treat it about how we treat alcohol. Dealers should be licensed, sales to minors should be prohibited, it should be illegal to drive under the influence or otherwise become a public nuisance, and so forth. I might add laws stating that child care by someone who is chemically impaired is roughly equivalent to leaving a child alone.

Some of these arguments hold true for other drugs, to a greater or lesser degree, and some do not. Obviously, something like, say, PCP is more of a threat to those around a user than marijuana or alcohol. And something like heroin is more addictive and debilitating. However, at least a change of focus in law enforcement seems warranted. Even if we do not make “hard” drugs legal, it makes sense to focus on those who are causing problems–using in public, driving while high, and the like–rather than on those who are using them more or less “invisibly”. And I think we should make a general effort to evaluate currently illegal substances, and handle their legality proportionate to how addictive, mind-altering, and harmful they are rather than purely on historical patterns.