Barrett Garese

Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.

Jimmy Carter calls for an end to the War on Drugs (via maxistentialist)

Just legalize the lot of them already. You’re never going to legislate away poor decision-making, nor should you try. Legalize everything, put a sin tax on it, and remove a massive amount of problems inherent to the current system.

(via spytap)

I’m gonna reblog myself here because I have more to say on this issue. Apologies for the upcoming stream-of-consciousness.

At some point we’re going to have to acknowledge that the entire United States has an incredibly hypocritical viewpoint of drugs, and it’s a massive drag on our entire societal structure. We let alcohol advertise itself as a fuckfest of a party in a bottle and encourage kids to look up to the sporting event that fills in the gaps between commercials, or buy chemically-laden soda in cups so large they’d rent for 1000 a month in NYC, but then shout “won’t someone think about the children?!” when the mere idea of legalization of marijuana comes up.

Let’s be brutally honest here: right now there is nothing stopping your kids from obtaining and partaking in any substance, be it alcohol, weed, or meth. The only thing standing in the way now or if they were all 100% legal is parenting - but nobody wants to admit that they may be a subpar (let alone a bad) parent. Don’t want your kids using drugs? Maybe parent (it’s a verb too, you know) a little better. Don’t want your kids spending all day in front of the television? Maybe parent. Don’t want your kids stealing cars and going on three-state joyrides? Parent. But when they’re adults they get to make their own decisions – good or bad – and that’s the ultimate reflection on your parenting.

Here’s the real kicker that so many people hate to hear: You cannot legislate away someone’s bad decisions. You just can’t. People make poor decisions every day, from staying at a shitty job they hate, to not kicking their abusive significant other to the curb, to eating 4000 calories of brownies before bed - but they’re perfectly allowed to do so. That’s their right. People are allowed to make bad decisions because it would be ludicrous to suggest otherwise.

A non-nuclear family member of mine was an alcoholic, but that wasn’t because of alcohol, that was because of my family member. Alcohol didn’t make him an alcoholic any more than meth makes someone a meth addict. He chose to use, chose to repeat the actions, and chose not to seek help. At some point it’s arguable that it was out of his control, but that doesn’t change the fact that the onus was still on him.

If weed is legal then yes, some people will smoke and drive. That’s not a reflection on weed, that’s a reflection on some people’s inherent ability to make very poor decisions. It already happens, in fact. If they hurt someone else in the process, that’s still not a reflection on weed, but on their continued ability to make poor decisions. And we have laws in place that cover you hurting someone else regardless of the reasoning behind what lead you to make a left hand turn on green into oncoming traffic - drunk, high, distracted, or stone-cold sober.

What bothers me the most is that we already know all this. We know this because we drink a coffee, a beer, a milkshake, or smoke a cigarette knowing that it has a physiological effect on our bodies; in some cases *because* it has a physiological effect on our bodies. Each of these has negative effects, and in some cases the only positive effect is “it makes me feel good.” But these are considered the “okay” drugs. The other drugs though, those are the bad ones. Not the 3500 calorie Baskin-Robbins “food item” or the “kids meal” with enough chemicals in it to outweigh the actual food ingredients; those are just good-old American convenience commerce. But if we don’t break down some doors and throw people in jail, someone’s gonna grow, dry, and smoke a plant indigenous to half the Eastern Seaboard just to feel better – no, I meant the other plant with the exact same general description.

So joking aside, are some drugs really bad news? Sure. So is BASE jumping, but we’re not outlawing quick-open parachutes. Rock climbing is dangerous as hell. Boxing and football cause massive trauma to the brain - arguably far more than almost any drug - but we’ll happily cheer on both a local and national version of those regardless. In every single one of these cases, you’re absolutely willing to say “well, that’s their decision, and if they get hurt or die then they get hurt or die.” So what’s the fucking difference?

If you BASE jump or even jump out of enough planes you’ll eventually die. There is no way to make skydiving 100% safe. If you drive enough, you’ll eventually get into an accident - and that would be the case if everyone were 100% sober 100% of the time. People have ruined their lives over drugs, alcohol, food, or video games - in every case that is not a reflection of the item to which their obsession attached, but of their inability to properly deal with the obsession. Life has inherent risks to everything that we do and don’t do, and yet in most cases, we’re given absolute freedom to make stupid decisions regardless of whether or not they’ll have an effect on someone else and only punished if that negative effect comes to pass.

Fine, you want to get controversial: guns kill people. Defensively, or offensively, guns exist for a singular purpose: to kill. There is simply no other use for a gun. And I’ll even go so far as to claim that target shooting is simply the emulation of killing using a target as a stand-in for flesh. Should we outlaw guns? They have nefarious possibilities, after all.

So all it really comes down to is an arbitrary notion that these are good drugs and these are bad drugs. And we must do everything possible, and ruin whatever lives necessary to keep these drugs from being ingested, while doing everything possible to push the ingestion of these other drugs. It sounds really stupid when I write it out, right? That’s because it is.

Look, if you want to eat a Big Mac, or eat ten Big Macs, or have a beer, or smoke a joint, or shoot up heroin, or huff paint, there’s nothing that should stop you from using or abusing your own body. It’s yours to do with as you see fit so long as you don’t bother or hurt other people - and as stated above, we already have laws that cover that.

So aside from puritanical hypocrisy, can anyone give me a logically valid reason why we shouldn’t simply legalize all drugs, tax them, and acknowledge that the system up until this point is a complete and total 100% utter failure at everything aside from self-perpetuation?

Honestly, I’d love to hear a single logical counter-argument because even though I don’t even smoke weed let alone do anything harder, I can’t fathom why someone else shouldn’t be able to make that same decision for themselves. Feel free to either email me or use the ask feature.

(via spytap)

Source: maxistentialist