Quote:
Originally Posted by Ayatollahgondola
In legalizing alcohol, we may have removed the crime syndicate from the mix, but the initial problems associated with it remained and grew. Alcoholism remains a big problem in America, and many people who don't use it are injured and killed by those who do each year. The way I see it, we negotiated with the users and got the bad end of the deal. The jails are now full of wife and child beaters, DUI arrestees, Drunk and disorderly arrests, Manslaughter, and many other manifestations of crime born out of the use and abuse of alcohol that when taken in aggregate, dwarf the magnitude of fighting the underworld.
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But you are assuming that during the prohibition of alcohol that these problems went away. They didn't. And also you assume that just because alcohol was involved in a crime means that alcohol caused the criminal behavior. Furthermore, marijuana nowhere aggrevates behavior like alcohol does. Criminal activity follows marijuana only because of the criminal activity surrounding its black market distribution. Unless you have a "medical" license, the more you smoke, the more likely you are to be close to other criminal activity.
Again, remember the dispensaries. The "medical marijuana" dispensaries are nothing more than a place to sell pot to people with a license to get stoned. Does anyone dispute this? The "medical marijuana" dispensaries have been around for a long time now and we have a fixed population of regular pot smokers who buy as much as they want, any time they want and smoke as much as they want any time they want. If smoking marijuana was such a social hazard like alcohol, then we would be seeing a plague of problems that could easily be traced to the dispensary customers. If anything, the dispensaries have served to isolate users from criminal activity, even when their money goes into the pockets of organzed crime.
Think of countries in the world who have outlawed alcohol, mostly Muslim countries. Would anyone describe these countries as temperate countries, where people live peacably and morally advanced lives. If anything the state has assumed the role of a gangster, imposing cruel and sick punishment on people for the most trivial of crimes.
But even acknowledging that alcohol is a hazardous drug does not impune marijuana. Marijuana is a relatively safe drug compared to alcohol, this is indisputable. If anything we should legalize marijuana,
while at the same time further restrict the distributiion of alcohol. I would support this. In many ways, the end of the prohibition of alcohol is incomplete. We need a comprehensive reorganization of our whole strategy of combating all of the socially hazardous vices like alcohol, marijuana and tobacco too.