Drugs are by no means new to our society. The Bible teaches man to avoid their use. Drugs have been a part of society for millenia. Drugs have been used recreationally, and formally in religious rituals.

Of course, drugs have been used in humane ways to relieve pain and to cure ills. There are two basic kinds of drugs – those which are sanctioned such as approved pharmaceuticals, and those which are stigmatized either by society through social norms or through actual law enforcement.

The line seems to get blurred between recreational and therapeutic. Opiods being one of the most common to be blurred, have been used for the purpose of sedating people for surgical procedures as well as reliving pain. The euphoria attached to their use has also become desireable for some to relax and escape some of life’s harsh realities. Heroin would be one of those best exemplifying escape.

Heroin, of course, is the best known painkiller to man, but it is easily produced outside the corporate/pharmaceutical world. Therefore, heroin has been made illegal to make, sell or use. Possession of it, at least until very recently, carried with it long mandatory prison sentences. Additionally, it was associated with poverty, underground societies and criminal enterprises.

The purpose of this writing is to consider the benefits and/or detriments to the legal status of recreational drugs. The abuse of most anything that man can take into his body has the potential for causing harm or outright death. Food and gluttony can do that as well as heroin, cocaine or methamphetamines. 

Therefore, for sake of arguement, we will avoid the health and life threatening aspects of drugs. Let’s instead concentrate on the legal aspects which would amount to legal, illegal, and decriminalized.

When drugs are made legal, then the state has an interest in their regulation and taxation. This writer witnessed the legalization of marijuana (later psilocyben), up close and personal, in the state of Colorado. Once the law was passed to legalize marijuana, the law included all sorts of caveats, proscriptions and regulations. 

There had to be people to monitor the licensing process (permission to do business and generate revenue for the state as well as the affected party), quality control (a large number of employees to establish the aproval, analyses, growing, processing and distribution of the product), taxation (the fee paid to government to buy and sell the product), and adjudication (the process to set up courts, regulations, sanctions and punishments for violators of the state approved processes or misue and abuse), and lastly the counseling and treatment services which also encompasses decreased productivity by citizens along with family break ups.

Then, there’s the illegality of recreational drug use. Again, the state has a vested interest. There needs to be assessing of what’s illegal and how it’s defined and analysed. Then there’s law enforcement including drug task forces. Incorporated in that sphere would include the breakdown of the family and family violence. After that, there is the court and prison system which would include judges, prosecutors, prisons, guards and administrators. Also, under the law enforcement aegis, there is often a violation of privacy through state spying on people i.e. phone taps, searching out bank records, monitoring contacts, illegal searches and seizures (violations of the 4th Amendment). Let’s not forget the criminal relations with foreign government that must be established when it’s illegal etc.

So, the bottom line is that if drugs are illegal, then the state has great expense in administering the illegality of it. This would include the manifestation of criminal enterprises which seek to profit from the illegality in order to supply a demand that is often motivated by a simple fact that people don’t like to be told what they can’t do or have when it comes to their own bodies and personal pleasures.

With legality or illegality, we are confronted with great expenses to the citizen’s pocket books, and their personal privacy. But, and this is something that never gets discussed by politicians or the mainstream media, or for anyone with a vested interest, and that is that there is a third alternative. The alternative of decriminalization. 

This, of course, leaves the state out of it, and therefore, it has no vested interest. Not only that, but it is then incumbent upon society in general to police itself through the stigmatization (social unacceptability) of recreational drug use. Will that eliminate its use? No, it won’t! But, it may marginalize it to a smaller segment of society that by being stigmatized will be hurt by the nature of work and social activity in which they are excluded, and therefore punished without any formal state involvement. Of course that eliminates all sorts of state maldies such as bribery, corrupt politicians, corrupt law enforcement, corrupt judges, corrupt D.A.’s, corrupt customs officials, corrupt border patrolmen, corrupt bankers, corrupt business fronts etc.

This writer found that the U.S. spends about $43 billion on drug enforcement annually. According CNBC (not a conservative news outlet), the “cost” of fighting drugs in America is $1 trillion! There seems to be a rather large disparity between that which is budgeted by the U.S. government, and the assessed cost according to establishment news sources. $1 Trillion means that it costs about $10,000.00 per year for every man woman and child in America! That’s a pretty good chunk of change even for people in the upper middle class!

So, why won’t the government consider this option? The answer should be obvious, illicit drugs are big money for governments and dealers. Of course unknown to most people is the history of the British East India Company which started the opium trade worldwide. That’s for another time – if this writer gets motivated. 

In the meantime, you can read about it, if you can get a 4th edition copy of it that hasn’t been adulterated, The Committee of 300 or HERE or HERE or HERE or HERE, or HERE free from CIA, but may be adulterated or HERE, or HERE? You will note that stock is difficult to find and expensive. They, the establishment, do not want you reading this book.

Pensiamento Peligroso