A group of US representatives plan to introduce legislation that will legalize marijuana and allow states to legislate its use, pro-marijuana groups said Wednesday.
The legislation would limit the federal government's role in marijuana enforcement to cross-border or inter-state smuggling, and allow people to legally grow, use or sell marijuana in states where it is legal.
The bill, which is expected to be introduced on Thursday by Republican Representative Ron Paul and Democratic Representative Barney Frank, would be the first ever legislation designed to end the federal ban on marijuana.
Prohibition, er, the "Drug War" has been a dismal failure. We have not stopped drug use. We have not "reduced the harm" from drugs. We have:
Imprisoned a huge number of people for consensual adult behavior. Yes, drugs are bad for you. Yes, they can destroy your life. Nonetheless, it's your life to destroy as you wish. Sending someone to prison for deciding to consume a substance in the privacy of their own home is idiotic.
Justified ridiculous and unconstituional invasions of persons and property. The Constitution prohibits warrantless searches and seizures, yet they're conducted all the time. The police themselves conduct violent "no-knock" raids thousands of times a year and in many of those cases they "hit" the wrong house, leaving lives and property in shambles and on occasion injuring or killing completely innocent parties. The "justification" for these policies is found in the claim that a suspect might flush evidence otherwise. What's never asked is why we're so damned concerned with what consenting adults do behind the closed door of their home in the first place!
Fueled ridiculously violent criminal gangs worldwide along with banksters who have laundered hundreds of billions of their drug profit dollars, and we don't even bother to indict the banksters! Guns, bullets and similar things are all expensive. We fuel a violent international trade specifically because these drugs are against the law. Marijuana is a literal weed that will and does grow anywhere. There's no "obscene" profit to be made cultivating and selling it unless it's illegal - then it suddenly goes up in price by a factor of 100 and makes violent criminal gangs possible. We learned this during prohibition and immediate forgot it when prohibition was repealed! When prohibition was repealed the rum-runners with their tommy guns disappeared and did not come back until we started the "war on drugs."
We have fueled street violence and thousands of innocent citizens - including children - are the victims not of drugs but of our idiotic policies. I don't care if drug dealers want to have a duel every day at high noon over territorial disputes or whatever else they'd like to fight over. I do very much care that they tend to be terrible marksmen and shoot innocent bystanders on accident as they appear to be incapable of accurately aiming their shots! The gangsters will not stop this crap and as long as an unskilled "hood" resident can make $1,000 or more a day peddling "awful and illegal drugs" they will. This will only end one way - when the drug war is ended.
If there was reasonable evidence that the "drug war" could or did work I might be convinced to support it. But there isn't. We've spent fifty years attempting to change human behavior with prison and fines and all we've done is fuel violent criminal gangs, destroyed the 4th Amendment to our Constitution, and the drugs are still here.
It's time to change course and stop wasting tens of billions of dollars on imprisonment, prosecution and jackbooted enforcement techniques that do nothing other than provide a profitable and fertile environment for criminal gangsters to operate in.