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Sparkle (1)
Given recent news about California's move to legalize marijuana and a new study that shows alcohol to be more harmful than heroin, I have been giving my personal history with drugs and alcohol some thought, especially as it relates to the impact of social influence on my choices, and by choices, I mean my colorful past with regard to getting high.
I have done enough LSD that you might be surprised at how well I keep in touch with reality. I used to smoke pot as a matter of course every day. I gave crystal meth a shot, because I knew the chemist, and, hell, why not? I smoked cigarettes enthusiastically for twenty-one years. Once upon a time until about two-and-a-half months ago when I admitted publicly to my alcoholism and embraced sobriety, I drank so much on a regular basis that I blacked out two or three times a week and couldn't remember how I came home. So, what I am about to reveal here with regard to my thoughts on drugs, accessibility, and legalization might surprise you:
I support the legalization of all drugs, or, at the very least, the decriminalization of possession and personal use.
This is a contentious stance to take. Whenever it comes up in conversation, people invariably turn to talk of addiction in general or mention someone that they lost to addiction or talk about their own negative experience with one drug or another. I get that. I lost a friend to heroin. I have watched the mannerisms of someone I know slowly devolve into a twitchy mash, symptoms of a brain damaged by long-term alcohol abuse. I am battling alcoholism myself. Addiction to drugs and alcohol can destroy individuals and families in startlingly sad ways, but the issue of addiction and the issue of legalization are not necessarily bound together in the ways that our society's messages about them seem to dictate. Your brother's crack addiction lost him his job and my friend's love of the needle killed him, and both of those things happened despite the fact that the drugs they were taking were illegal.
Drug prohibition doesn't work.
America's history with the prohibition of alcohol is a good example of what happens when you don't follow the old wisdom to keep your friends close but your enemies closer. When the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol was banned during Prohibition, also known as The Noble Experiment, in the United States between 1920 and 1933, people did not stop selling, manufacturing, and transporting alcohol. They just did it illegally. What had been an above board industry beforehand was now pushed underground, spawning covert, organized, and widespread criminal activity with extremely violent side effects.
Just as making alcohol illegal directly created a vicious underground criminal industry during Prohibition, so it works now with marijuana, heroin, and other illicit drugs. The same kind of black market industry birthed by The Noble Experiment is now being fostered and supported by drug prohibition.
Marijuana grows, quite literally, like a weed all over the world, poppies will not be eradicated from the earth, the coca plant is an important aspect of the culture in some areas of South America, and salvia divinorum runs rampant in ditches without a thought for its effect on the minds of high school students. Drugs are accessible and will remain accessible simply because we live on a planet that continues to create what we need to get high, with or without our rules to the contrary. This means that, law or no law, drug prohibition can only fail to stop the flow of the substances it purports to prohibit in the first place. The ingredients exist to be dealt with, and if we won't manufacture and distribute the product, someone else will.
Cocaine is the well-known drug of choice for restaurant and bar employees. Meth is cheap as borscht and as easy to come by. Marijuana's so common that, while we are surprised that Zach Galifianakis pulled out a joint on television, we are not surprised that he was even able to find some at all.
If we want the drugs, we can have them, whether they are legal or not. If our attempt to keep certain drugs illegal is born out of a desire to decrease criminal activity and the toll of addiction on our society, then we are doing a terrible job of it, and the thriving criminal industry and desperate face
