Introduction

I'd like for you, for the duration of this blog post, this one set of words strung together by yours truly, to forget your political and economic allegiances. This is not about capitalism or socialism, this isn't anarchy vs. slavery, or right against left.

No matter who you are, a libertarian, a socialist, a conservative, an alien, a Wham! fan, someone who thinks pro wrestling is real, one of the four people who purchased a Nintendo Wii, or even the Zombie Pirate LeChuck himself, I want you to read this and ponder on what I attempt to convey to you.

The crux of the matter is that drugs, of every kind, type, shape and form, should be legal. Everywhere. Not just cannabis, marijuana, hashish, bhang, hemp, kef, kif, charas, ganja, sinsemilla.. All drugs. No matter what type of a society we live in, a free one, a socialist one, a mixture of the two.

Right now, the country in which you live as we speak, all drugs should be legalized.

Legalizing drugs means that the usage of, possession of, purchasing of and selling of drugs should be legal and allowed.

The Moral Argument

Way back when I was first introduces to the idea of legalizing drugs, it was presented to me with the moral argument of "People should be free to put whatever they want into their own bodies, since no one owns their bodies but themselves".

It's a convincing argument, but not one that's not met with a steady stream of counter arguments.

Even I was rather skeptical, at first, prior to further inspection.

After all, no man is an island, right? Even if we make decisions regarding ourselves, they tend to have effects on the people around us. This is actually true, I do co-sign the idea that no man is an island, but let's look at our society a bit.

When we say "drugs", we usually think of illegal narcotics. Whether it's marijuana, LSD, MDMA, cocaine, heroin, whatever. But what exactly does constitute a drug? What is the common denominator between them?

Merriam-Webster has the following to say:

Definition of drug
1 a obsolete : a substance used in dyeing or chemical operations
b : a substance used as a medication or in the preparation of medication
c according to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (1) : a substance recognized in an official pharmacopoeia or formulary (2) : a substance intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease (3) : a substance other than food intended to affect the structure or function of the body (4) : a substance intended for use as a component of a medicine but not a device or a component, part, or accessory of a device
2
: a commodity that is not salable or for which there is no demand —used in the phrase drug on the market
3
: something and often an illegal substance that causes addiction, habituation, or a marked change in consciousness

And damn it, @cheetah, it's a quote, so shut up.

So, what we can learn here is that the definition of a "drug" is rather iffy. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what it even is that we mean by a drug. "A substance used as a medication or in the preparation of medication"? Plenty of those are legal, and even pushed on people.

This, however might be the most popular definition in everyday use: "a substance other than food intended to affect the structure or function of the body".

A substance "other than food" intended to affect ourselves physiologically, you say? Why do we even draw the line at "food"? In today day and age, when people in the west are killing themselves by consuming too much food, rather than not being able to consume enough of it, it seems rather odd to draw an arbitrary line at food, in regards to what is considered to be a harmful way to affect one's body. After all, it's not just the hunger that we're preventing when consuming food, not at all.

Foods, especially the food produced by big junk food chains, are specifically designed to alter our brains, as well as our bodies. It's not a lucky accident that people find junk food addictive, it's supposed to do that. People are suffering from being overweight, yet they can't help themselves and still drive to Burger King for a tasty hamburger.

This not action from a rational human being, it's behavior of an addict.

Where am I going with all this? Well, let's go back to the moral argument.

If it is morally justified to criminalize the use of drugs, and punish people who alter their bodies and minds with such narcotics, why draw the line at food? The exact same logic of "We must protect people from harming themselves with addictive substances" can be applied to unhealthy food. Unhealthy, tasty, high calorie food.

And let's say that we do. Let's say that we are now, from this moment on, dead set on protecting our fellow citizens from the harms of junk food. The best way to achieve this?

Let's throw everyone who eats at Wendy's to jail.

No?

You see, when you remove the negative connotation of "drugs" from the equation, it becomes easier to see that it's messed up to punish people for their addictions. An addict may be suffering, he may need help, but throwing such a person in jail to punish them is hardly an ethical way to go about it. Especially since the crime in question is one where there are no direct victims, other than the addict himself.

No man is an island, but when a person close to us needs help, what do you feel is a better course of action: attempting to help them through voluntary means, or sending in the government? Let's throw him in jail, destroy his credibility, his career, his reputation, his records, his life, everything, let's tear it all to shreds because he became addicted to something he shouldn't have, and was suffering. Sound reasonable? Not me, it doesn't.

I currently smoke again, because I'm a loser, but I did once quit for two years. Cold turkey, done. After a cigarette, I decided that it's my last one. And it was. I didn't chew gum, I didn't gain 50 pounds, I just quit. Do you know how I did it? Because at that particular moment in time, I wanted to.

Had I been forced to quit by a police officer and been made to get personal with Bubba in a prison cell for a few months, I would have lighted a cigarette at the first possible moment after getting out of prison. Because I would not have wanted to quit. I would have been incentivized to do it in secret, and hide my tracks, but I would not have quit. You know, us people are pretty good at being sure about our abilities, including our abilities to keep stuff a secret. This is also a big reason why the drug war is a bust.

I have since started to smoke again, because the original motivation that I had to stop vanished, but the point still stands.

But my question is as follows:

So, if we are, from a moral standpoint, to ban people from consuming potentially harmful substances, where can we draw the line and remain intellectually honest?

Like Bob here. Or he can by anybody, but let's call him Bob. Bob here has this to say:

"Well, I think these pot smokers and drug users lack self control and should be punished for being weak people!"

Thing is, Bobby boy, you happen to weigh at exactly 420 pounds, which, unless you're a pro wrestler, means that you're morbidly obese. Which in turn means that you're in no position to be critical of anybody's self control.

Bobs are pretty common, more common than you think.

How many of you, in the past 24 hours, have not consumed a simple substance that can be potentially harmful for your health?

Except Great Teacher Pervading Gainer of Law, he's a monk, so he doesn't count.

Thanks, Buddhist Name Generator. By the way, do you realize how high the person was who came up with "The Buddhist Name Generator"?

If you have consumed a burger, sugar, cigarettes, alcohol, or anything that could potentially have a negative effect on your health, what exactly gives you the right to ban certain other substances from others?

A plethora of these completely legal substances can harm you, cause addiction, pain, loss of money, even death.. but when you look at what we generally consider "drugs", you'll notice that they are not at all similar with each other. Yes, they alter your mind, but that's often where the common denominators end.

A lot of the negative attitudes towards drugs and in particular drug users comes from the fact that we've created this idea that illegal drugs are "like alcohol but worse". And since a lot of people have problems with alcohol, drugs are seen as this horrifying Pandora's Box of even bigger problems, just waiting to be unleashed on people.

This, of course, is not the case, and substances like alcohol and sugar can be argued to be harmful than a number of narcotics currently on the banned list. Everything is subjective, of course, but sugar addiction, for instance, is a real thing.

Oh, and by the way, did you know that Obama, GW and the male (term used loosely) Clinton have all acted against the drug policies that they themselves enforced while in office, when they were young? Yeah, think about it: had they been the victims of the same exact drug policies that they themselves enforced while in office, they would not have been president of the United States. Just let it sink in, let the hypocrisy sink in. They wouldn't have the nice lives that they enjoy, they would not have had the career in politics that they enjoyed, and they sure as heck would not have been President of the United States. This still did not stop them from enforcing these policies.

The Pragmatic Argument

"Sure thing, @schattenjaeger, I hear you: drug criminalization" is unethical and hypocritical, but it's still necessary to keep people safe."

Okay, so a common thing to hear is that even though the drug law is generally very hypocritical, it's required since it keeps people in line and works to scare people from doing drugs - and therefore leads to a better world where people don't do drugs, or at least not as many people.

There's something a friend told me once that's stuck with me: "Whenever the government does something, it usually does a bad job doing it, and therefore it's preferred that government does as little as possible."

Or something to that effect, we were high at the time.

What my friend was getting at is that even though the government may sometimes have the best interests of its citizens in kind, it tends to fail at everything it does, making problems worse. The drug laws are no different. A government is simply never big enough or strong enough or qualified enough to keep drugs from a country. The resources for drug laws have gotten bigger and bigger, yet the use of drugs has increased.

So, instead of having a problem with drug users, governments with strict drug laws now have an added problem of even its otherwise peaceful citizens becoming criminals - even those without victims.

Accurate data on drugs can be hard to find, due to the their illegal status, but where data is available, it clearly shows a failure in the intentions of the drug war.

Prices of drugs have gone down and their purity has gone up. So, it has steadily become cheaper to find more pure drugs at lower costs. All this despite the fact that governments have pumped more and more money into fighting the drug war.

As a sidenote, have you noticed how every time the government declares a war on something, we get more of that said something? War on drugs creates more drugs, the war on poverty creates more poverty, and so on. Whenever the next election rolls around, vote for the candidate who promises a war on jobs and prosperity. You can thank me later.

At the core of a government's anti drug policies is the domestic enforcement. This is what is intended to deter and discourage drug use by making it scary. In the west, the US has to be considered the most aggressive when it comes to its domestic drug policies. The US holds a heavy emphasis on incarceration, and it is what 3/4 of the drug law budget is being used for. So, not even treatment or helping, straight up jailing and punishing.

There are more people in the US in prison for drug use than there are criminals of any kind in jail in any other western nation. And this is not a new thing, it's been like this for ages. The only thing that has changed is the fact that the number of people in jail for drug related crimes has skyrocketed exponentially over the years.

In 1980, less than 50 thousand people were in jail for a drug offense - the same number in 2007 was bigger than 500 thousand.

This goes to show that the drug war has failed in its attempts to keep people from doing drugs. While accurate data is very hard to gather, these numbers can be used to surmise that people have still been drawn to drug use, and have still found ways to consume narcotics, despite it being heavily banned.

Also, keeping drug offenders in prison is being done with your money: drug offenders cost between $12 to $15 billion a year to keep in jail.

This is your money, people. Used to keep addicts in prison.

On estimate, drug trade covers as much as 1% of all global trade. It is among the world's three biggest economies.

"Okay, okay, fine. But what about all those people who don't do drugs right now because they're illegal? The drug war saves them, right? You have to look at the bigger picture."

Drugs are very easy to acquire, and the birth of cryptocurrencies has made it even easier. Whoever has a slight interest in getting drugs, can get them. There was a time I hadn't used drugs, but wanted to, and in 15 minutes I knew how to get them.

But even if we accept the fact that drug criminalization keeps a big portion of the population from doing drugs, does it make it acceptable? This kinda goes back to the moral argument, so bear with me for a moment as we go to the sidetracks.

Does the government doing what should be done by parents justify the suffrage of the people who do fall for drugs? The jailing, the violence, the destruction of lives. Do we just abandon those who make the mistake of becoming an addict, just to save little Timmy from bad choices? I think Timmy can make his own choices, and I think Timmy's parents should be the ones educating him on drugs, not the government.

I'd also like to point that the biggest thing keeping people from doing drugs is the same thing that's keeping people from seeking help, outside of the legality factors: the propaganda.

The anti-drug propaganda that makes sure that you know that whoever does drugs is a bad, immoral person is something that we find acceptable to have at schools, because it keeps kids from doing drugs, but completely screws everything up for those who make the the wrong choices.

How about responsible parenting? How's that for a "program" to "help kids"? We don't have enough of that these days anyway.

So, we have access to a huge chunk of data that shows that the punitive drug policies have failed at defeating drug related problems. So, how about a more liberal approach? Could it actually work?

A famous example of a positive drug policy is considered to be Portugal.

Portugal decriminalized the personal possession of all drugs in 2001. This means that, while it is no longer a criminal offence to possess drugs for personal use, it is still an administrative violation, punishable by penalties such as fines or community service.

And before we move on, I'd like to point out that the following is extremely counter-intuitive, and yes, I still have hard time figuring out the causes and effects.

But every negative drug related problem that Portugal faced prior to the decriminalization has gotten less severe.

Image Source

Portugal still doesn't consider drug use to be "legal", per se, but the decriminalization shows that despite what traditional logic would dictate, a more liberal approach to drug use lessened the problems by a huge margin.

Some of the reasons, I'm sure, are things like the negative stigma of drug use lessening, and through that, it becoming easier to seek help if needed.

Drug users are not treated like murderers and rapists, they are recognized as people who do drugs - which is its own thing, and by no means should they be labeled "criminals", grouped together with violent offenders, for instance.

There's also something to be said about the legality of drugs making them less cool for kids. We can see this in a lot of young people: whatever is banned is exciting. I was the same way when I was a kid, myself. Stuff that is allowed is boring and dull, and since it's allowed, it means that there must not be anything interesting about them.

The very reason I got interested in drugs in the first place back in the day was because they were banned. I was curious to find out why that was. I was curious as to why people are allowed to get blind drunk and throw up, but a different type of drug use was criminalized.

A more open approach allows for more objectivity, more studying and better understanding of the drugs and their exact functions and effects on users.

Because drugs are banned, the entire drug cartel business is a direct creation of the government. There are a lot of drug dealers who don't care about you, and if you run into trouble, it's difficult for you to seek any sort of assistance, and the dealers know this. Granted, a lot of dealers obviously do care about their customers, who are their source of income, but there are a bunch of no good people in the drug business who know damn well that you're on your own when dealing with them.

The drug market is hugely skewed by the drug laws, and it creates a platform for abusive people to get in the business, since it all takes place "in the dark".

A free approach would open the drug trade to the markets, allowing the markets to sort it out. When there's nothing to hide, from the buyer and the seller, it become easy to make complaints about bad service when making deals - just like in any other legal business in the world.

When under open market scrutiny, it would become encouraged for businesses to keep their customers happy and loyal, and to avoid complaints.

Currently, you buy heroin that's been mixed in with rat poison. What are you going to do? In a legal market, would a store owner ever even consider doing that?

Drug use can be a big problem, being a drug addict can be a huge problem, but what exactly do you honestly believe is being achieved by making these troubled people criminals, on top of all of their other problems?

If the drug war was effective, drug use would not have steadily gone up during all the time since it was initiated in 1971 by Richard Nixon.

We've seen a more open and liberal approach to the use of cannabis recently, which is good, but we need to not forget about the other banned substances, either.

Every argument against the war on marijuana use can be used for other drugs, as well.

• According to the Drug Policy Alliance, the drug war has cost US alone over $1 trillion dollars in the past 40 years - and has still failed to stop drug use. Over a million people are behind bars for drug crimes.

• Liberal approaches to drug use in countries like Portugal and Netherlands have actually, counter-intuitive as it may be, resulted in less drug use and drug problems.

• The drug was has made it extremely profitable to become a criminal.

• The so called "Dutch disease": when so much drug money enters an economy, it causes the currency to appreciate, which then decreases exports and results in a much less competitive economy. Especially in smaller countries - like the countries where drug problems are serious usually are - this is a big problem, even if it's not that often talked about.

• Criminalizing drugs pushes the drugs underground, where they are less safe and more dangerous than they otherwise would be.

• Stigmatized drug use makes it tougher for people to seek help. It also often prevents objective conversation regarding them.

• The drug war ruins more lives than the drugs themselves. The drugs may not ruin your life, but getting caught doing them by the cops most certainly will.

In General and in Closing

I personally don't do drugs. Anymore. I don't even drink, I just smoke. That's my vice. That and coffee. Also Pokémon. But other than them, I'm drug free.

If drugs were legalized tomorrow, the effects on my life would probably be pretty minimal. So, I don't have have "a horse in the race" with this one.

So, why am I so passionate about this stuff?

Because I just do this thing called giving a fuck. I don't know why, I've done it ever since I was little. It's just something I do, alright?

Not only is the drug war harmful for the aforementioned reasons, but I'd argue that it's also harmful because it keeps alive this idea that abusing alcohol, for instance, is okay, as long as one doesn't do drugs.

I live in Finland, and run into this a lot. A person is a pathetic loser junkie for shooting up heroin, but an abusive husband who beats his wife while drunk is the topic of a funny joke.

I do not promote the use of narcotics, legal or illegal. I've had my experiences with them, both positive and negative, but I'll leave it you to decide whether it's a good thing or a bad thing to do stuff. I'll even go as far saying that drugs can absolutely screw up your life. It's entirely possible that it's a mistake to do drugs. So, keep that in mind. Not all the bad stuff you hear about them is baseless propaganda, they do do bad stuff.

But so does alcohol. So do cigarettes. And man it can be hard to quit those. Very hard.

I'd even argue that drug prohibition was somehow an effective policy in an alternate universe, and I cared about nothing but protecting people from harmful drugs, I'd probably ban alcohol before I banned anything else.

The amount of violent crimes and stupid decisions made under the influence of alcohol is something we should all be familiar with. I'm not preaching to you about how you should quit drinking, it's entirely possible to use alcohol and be responsible, and enjoy the positive effects that it provides, such as making it easier to be social, etc.

But for people to sit there, with their drinks, condemning other people simply because their drug of choice differs from theirs is something I find very rage inducing.

And then the use of this attitude as a way to kick these people in the head by advocating for a policy that makes criminals out of them, even if they are completely victimless, is something that every thinking and feeling person should find repulsive.

This also goes for pot smokers who are against other drugs: it wasn't that long when you were in the same position with your preferred drug, so knock it off and have some sympathy.

The drug war has to end to save not only trillions of dollars, but most importantly it has to end to save lives.

Remember this, kiddos:

Drugs can be bad for your health, but the drug war is even worse.

You wouldn't throw a sugar addict in jail. You wouldn't fine a junk food addict. You wouldn't send the government to raid the apartment of an alcoholic. You wouldn't treat cigarette addiction with a prison camp.

Let's stop doing this to our drug addicts, who are as much a part of this society as you are.

And by the way, yes I will put this pro-drug legalization post on the internet with my face on it because I have the balls to do so, because I'm a rebel like that. I also stand behind everything I've just said.