Society, the world, is currently plagued with two entirely distinct and separate – and separable – drug problems: Trafficking and Addiction.
Of those, by far, Trafficking is the most invasive, devastating, and dangerous. For it – Trafficking and the vast profits from Trafficking – causes smuggling, violence, murder, drug cartels, corruption, and the expenditure of vast amounts of public resources to field an army of undercover agents, police personnel, court systems, and jails to maintain a purported “drug war”.
In addition, terrorism and terrorists – the reemerging heroin trade fed by Afghanistani poppies – are directly supported by drug trafficking, keeping the United States involved in wars on foreign soil to fight that terrorism.
At the outset, please note: Legalization is ONLY intended to eliminate the profits of trafficking and, therefore, trafficking itself. It shall not, and is not intended to, at first, eliminate addiction. But once the vast trafficking profits are eliminated through legalization, at one and the same time, the attendant violence, murder, drug cartels, and terrorism that go hand-in-hand with trafficking shall disappear.
At that point, with trafficking eliminated, society shall be able to deal with addiction and addicts as medical problems in hospitals and clinics, not in the street with machine guns and SWAT teams.
To answer in advance those who suggest that drug legalization and the availability of drugs shall cause new waves of addiction, please note that alcohol is readily available everywhere now, but that fact doesn’t tempt most citizens to slither into a vodka bottle. Those who might gravitate in that direction, however, would be openly able to seek medical aid for their compulsive tendencies. Significantly, one phenomenon that occurred after the legalization of alcohol: some who had found drinking exciting and adventurous, ceased drinking. Without the sin of illegality, drinking wasn’t as much fun.
It bears repetition: Legalization of drugs shall eliminate Drug Trafficking overnight!
Why?
Because legalization shall eliminate profits! Drug cartels are not made up of religious zealots. Their members traffic in drugs for only one reason – the vast cash profits that result from the clandestine efforts necessary to provide illegal drugs.
Does anyone, can anyone, seriously doubt that drug traffickers are driven only and solely by profit and greed?
Further, is there anyone who doubts that the elimination of these illegal profits shall cause the traffickers to cease and desist their around-the-clock growing, packaging, smuggling, bribing, and killing?
No profit = no trafficking! It’s as simple as that.
The current laws making drugs illegal, the lavishing of resources on policing those illegal drugs, actually spawn and feed the vast network of illegal drugs and drug traffickers.
Once legalized, with drugs dispensed by and through controlled and strictly regulated legitimate business enterprises, companies that pay taxes, employ workers who, likewise, pay income taxes, all the illegal cash that is now finding its way into the hands of cartel leaders and terrorists shall be funneled into the public treasuries, with none of the attendant violence or criminality of drug traffickers.
Once trafficking is eliminated through legalization – which would happen as it did with the repeal of Prohibition [of alcohol] in 1932 – the vast amount of resources now wasted on the woefully failed “war on drugs” could be spent helping to eliminate addiction – in an environment of hospitals, doctors, and clinics – not in streets and alleys. This is a win-win situation.
Remember, chaos almost exactly the same as that endured by society today because of drugs – murder, violence, and crime syndicates – existed side by side with the manufacture and sale of illegal alcohol.
Through legalization of alcohol, the repeal of Prohibition, overnight, illegal alcohol was no longer trafficked. The attendant crime and violence related to illegal alcohol virtually disappeared as well – overnight!
Looking back from today’s vantage point, illegal alcohol, Prohibition, and speakeasies seem ridiculously quaint and foolish, a self-perpetuating, unnecessary problem. In reality, it wasn’t then, not when machine guns and rot-gut alcohol were plied by gun-totting gangsters! The laws creating Prohibition of alcohol actually created that illegal criminal underworld.
The laws prohibiting drugs today have created a far vaster, more dangerous criminal underworld, for a far longer period of time than alcohol did, one that has infected and apparently overtaken sovereign nations, i.e. Mexico.
In the United States today, half the jail population of more than a million individuals, is comprised mainly of lowly drug users or drug mules – not the traffickers who are well insulated in their mansions and retreats. In addition, half our police forces, half our court systems, half our Correction systems – new jails are being built to house the over-flow – are all driven by the useless and unnecessary attempt to stem the flow of drugs.
Why are the words “useless” and “unnecessary” used in connection with the war on drugs? Because the simple act of legalization shall accomplish immediately what billions of dollars, thousands of law enforcement agents, years of looking back over shoulders for stealthy muggers, war between nations have not been able to accomplish over decades: eliminate the trafficking of drugs and the people who traffic them.
In this day and age of economic hardship, empty public treasuries, the resources spent on undercover cops, planes, and boats attempting to interdict drugs are a cruel joke – totally unnecessary when there is a far more effective, economic way of eliminating trafficking: Legalization.
Again, please note, legalization shall not eliminate addiction – not overnight. But it puts society on the road to recovery rather than deeper and deeper into circles of trafficking hell!
People might ask, will legalization really stop trafficking? And, if so, can drugs really be controlled? Would such controls really work?
The first question has already been answered. No illegal cash profits, no trafficking!
As to the efficacy of controlling legal drugs, every person can answer any question concerning the efficacy of controlling legalized drugs very simply. Drugs shall be controlled in the very same way alcohol is now controlled! How is alcohol sold? Where? Who can have access to it? Under what conditions? At what age? All these questions are already answered in the methods of controlling the sale and distribution of alcohol.
As to whether those controls have been effective in regulating illegal alcohol, ask yourself: are there syndicates involved in trafficking in illegal alcohol today? Anywhere in the world? Are there speakeasies? Are bootleggers being prosecuted? The answer to every one of those questions is an emphatic NO! Why? Because alcohol was legalized and is controlled and is available without reverting to crime..
Should all drugs be legalized – or only some?
All drugs, of every kind and description.
If any drugs remain illegal, traffickers will continue to have a reason to exist and shall continue to plague society. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, total legalization of drugs equals total liberation from the scourges of drug trafficking.
Not only shall trafficking be eliminated, but there is another desirable result; the vast income that is now feeding criminals and terrorists will be re-directed from the cartels to legitimate, regulated businesses employing thousands of people, all – both businesses and workers – paying taxes. Think of how many people are employed in the distribution and sale of alcohol, from wholesalers, to retailers, to restaurants, grills, cocktail waitresses, etc. An astronomical amount; a vast change from the hordes of cash being smuggled out of the United States on a daily basis.
Society is poised at a moment when vast, wasted expenses fighting the losing battle against drugs can be replaced by vast tax revenues and the elimination of drug trafficking to boot.
As to addiction and addicts, this and these can be dealt with as medical, psychological problems – which they are.
Drug habits, while a great blight, can be dealt with in the more peaceful aftermath – when trafficking is completely eliminated – in hospital and medical settings, just as alcoholism is treated today. Addicts are not looking for confrontation; far from it, they seek an out, the elimination of confrontation and reality. Yes, there is some violence when an addict needs funds to buy exorbitantly priced illegal drugs. However, when drugs are as available as medicines in hospitals, under supervision, without the need to mug people to obtain funds to buy drugs, that violence, too, will disappear.
Does anyone fear being mugged by a wino who needs money for drink? Hardly. Why? Because wine or drink is readily available without resorting to alcohol traffickers.
Has anyone been prosecuted for illegal alcohol trafficking within recent memory? No! Why? Because there is no profit in illegal alcohol. The manufacturers of clean, legal alcohol products have totally eliminated crimes related to beer and alcohol.
Sure there are still alcohol addicts; and sure, there shall still be drug addicts. But those who are addicted are not the ones responsible for the cartels, murders, and violence so rampant today.
Saroyan counseled, “those who fail to remember the past, are condemned to repeat it”. Let us remember the past plague of alcohol trafficking and stop repeating the foolish mistakes of Prohibition!
By the stroke of a pen, legalizing drugs, shall, unquestionably, overnight, eliminate drug trafficking. Should we not throw off the shackles of outmoded and clearly hopeless ghosts of the past?
Write, call, text, email your local and national legislators, governors, mayors, friends. Start a trend. It is time to throw off the shackles of foolish laws which, in fact, are enslaving society. Tell the public officials you can reach and contact that drugs should be legalized.
Frankly, politicians and legislators, are, in the main, opportunists who will do and act only as they think it pleases their voters – so they can be re-elected, keep their hold on the public teat!. They will move in any direction the public – the voters who elect and, therefore, control them – demands. Insist that they begin thinking and acting rationally, reasonably.
The time has come for the public to react, to say we’re as mad as hell and we don’t want this drug trafficking any more.
Drug Legalization = Drug liberation.