The Real Reefer Madness

Booze and cigarettes are legal. Pot is not. Try as I might I can’t get my brain around this.

I would understand if Booze, Cigarettes and pot were all illegal, but the current state of affairs is one of extreme hypocrisy.

Pot is classified as a schedule I drug, which is the same classification the government gives to LSD.

In the description of why pot is schedule I the government claims it has “high abuse potential.”

OK, I get that. High abuse potential, you don’t want everyone toking up twenty times a day, stepping outside in the middle of work, stinking up the world with smoke, constantly puffing away freaking out if they run out of something to smoke. Oh, wait, that’s what happens with cigarettes, the product that you buy for seven bucks that could easily be renamed high abuse potential, such a high abuse potential that 96 percent of people who try and quit fail on any given attempt. . .

Here’s where my comprehension breaks down.

I can go to the package store and buy a pack of cigarettes even though it is a scientific certainty that cigarettes kill. They don’t always kill, but the reason so many people have lung cancer is because they smoke cigarettes. Lung cancer isn’t like pancreatic cancer, it doesn’t simply happen for reasons we don’t understand, it happens because people are smoking.

But cigarettes are legal.

Alcohol is legal. Legally I can go buy a bottle of bourbon and sit in my house and drink so much I black out. If during this black out I called a police station and told them I’d drank a bottle of bourbon and was sitting in my kitchen, they’d say, “why are you calling us?”

But if I had a single hit of marijuana and called the cops to tell them I was high they’d send a car out to write me a ticket.

I live in Connecticut. Connecticut recently past a bill making possession of up to a half an ounce of pot a ticketing offense.

But this is even worse than if pot was completely illegal because what the law says these days is that its ok to have half an ounce of pot, but if your the guy selling pot by the half ounce, and thus logically you must at any one time have more than a half an ounce, we’ll still prosecute you and punish you like a criminal. But little guys, go ahead, toke up even though logically we know your getting pot from people we’re gunna prosecute.

Murder outside of self-defense  is wrong, and our laws reflect that. Even if you punch some guy in the nose and despite what you intended you shove his nose bone up into his brain and he dies you’ll probably go to jail at least for a few years.

But in the first world where pot is illegal, the message we’re sent isn’t all that clear.

Because  alcohol is legal, which is mind altering, and cigarettes are legal and are addictive, and pot is mind altering, far less addictive than cigarettes, and illegal.

Further, it isn’t as though alcohol doesn’t have abuse potential, people get hung over, drink until they vomit, drink until they sleep with someone ugly, drink and drive, drink until they black out,  some people become addicted and drink daily. Alcohol has such high abuse potential that there’s even a group people have to join to try and quit. You might have heard of it.

Some of these alcohol related patterns we consider to be ok, getting tipsy or drunk as long as you remain convivial,  and some of them we don’t. Getting drunk and running someone over.  If you drink you’ve been drunk at least once. That’s what the odds say. But its not like anyone you know considers this to be a problem. As long as your not knocking back a bottle of Jack before work every morning or having a two marteeny lunch, your probably alright. This is sarcasm, you may not be alright, but the point is that no one worth knowing judges themselves or anyone else for moderate alcohol use.

But we do judge you when you drink and drive, because that’s dangerous to other people, so we arrest you. This, however, is different from how we judge you if you drink and don’t drive where from a legal perspective, generally we don’t care.

See, our attitude towards booze is pretty sensible. Drink to your hearts content and your livers detriment. Our litmus test for the drinking issue is  if you aren’t hurting other people or endangering them or drunkenly screaming at them in public, go ahead. That’s our attitude with smoking cigarettes as well. Its slow suicide that tastes really fucking good, but that doesn’t make it any less of a slow suicide. My grandmothers eighty-four and she’s smoked a pack a day for over fifty years. Your grandfather smoked and died of lung cancer at seventy. That’s because even if some people beat the odds, most people don’t, which is why we call them the odds, those people  get emphysema or have a heart attack at sixty or get lung cancer and die.

But our attitude towards smoking is, do it outside and we don’t care. Go ahead if that’s what you want to do. Similarly, being an alcoholic is something we all recognize as a bad thing, no one goes, “I know this super great alcoholic,” but we also understand it as something that’s a choice. That is to say its not illegal to be an alcoholic or a cigarette smoker. Even though we as a society think those choices are bad, we don’t stop people from going to that place.  But pots illegal because of its high abuse potential. And I try as hard as I can to square this with logic, and I can’t.

Lets backtrack for a moment. A drug is something that alters chemicals in your body or brain. Some drugs are used as medicines, some have only recreational application. If you drink coffee, your a drug user. “I’m not a drug user,” your bitching, “That’s just my coffee. Coffee’s not a drug man, its not like I’m smoking cigarettes or shooting up or popping pills.”

Let me explain something to you. There was a time in the distant past when people woke up at first light and were tired and said, “ah, I’m exhausted.” much like in the modern world, they got out of bed and rubbed there eyes and left the house because much like you, they had important crap to do. But they couldn’t drink coffee, they just had to deal with  being tired until like an hour later they were no longer tired. What a world. Then Europeans discovered coffee in the New  World, brought it back to civilization and all the sudden one dude in a frock coat was telling some other dude in a bowler hat about this stuff you put in a pot and boil with water and strain. “it tastes like ass but you get all peppy and full of vim for three or so hours.”

Because coffee’s a drug, and at one time it was a brand new drug,  and at some point five hundred years ago it was imported into meaningful society. Like coke in the eighties. I mean, that’s the comparison. It was new, it was a stimulant, and it emerged on the scene at a time when Europeans only drug of choice was alcohol. If you’ve experienced a long night of drinking and a nice morning waking up with a few cups of coffee you know they are vastly  dissimilar experiences.

The anxiety medication you take is a drug, if your on an anti-depressant your on a drug, if you take Nodoze or Aderol to stay up and study your using drugs, if you take an aspirin for a fever your taking a drug, if you go clubbing on E your taking a drug, if your smoking cigarettes or cigars your on a drug, if you do coke your on a drug, if you smoke crack your on a drug, if you like chocolate your on a drug if you have a glass of wine in the evening your on a drug. This should make my point for me. Drug is too broad of a term to  mean anything except  its definition. So when you say, “drug user,” your talking out your ass.

What you should say is “recreational drug user,” and at that point your still including smokers of cigarettes and drinkers of booze and coffee  in that definition.

But what people think of when they think of “drug user” is those people who use drugs that are illegal.

The problem with lumping all those people together in one group is that recreational drugs are like zoo animals. One has nothing to do with another. Take a hit of pot, yeah, the worlds a little different. You laugh more, music means more, sometimes you feel like you and your friends are all natural born philosophers.

But the world isn’t all that different your senses are still functioning in a normal way. Unlike if someone slipped caffeine into your water, something you might never realize, pots stronger than that, if someone gave you pot instead of a cigarette you’d figure it out, the effects are noticeable but not to the point where your so fucked up you can’t function. In short the world your used to when sober is still the world you see and experience when high off pot, your just thinking about it differently.

It isn’t like you look up at the sky and see huge wings blotting out the son and casting huge serpentine shadows  in your yard as dragons fly low over your house.

But smoke some DMT or some salvia and you might see a dragon because under the influence of those drugs the world changes a lot.  DMT is a chemical your body releases when you die. When its smoked or injected people experience intense auditory and visual hallucinations which are generally so strong those living through them lose awareness of there bodies. These people often experience ego loss, and come into contact with godlike entities who speak to them.

Snort some coke your amped. Pop a pill your chill. But the world isn’t crazily fucked up. Take a blotter of acid, it is, the trees will roar and your couch will try and eat you. For eight or twelve hours. People tell scientists in clinical studies that taking mushrooms counts among their five most significant life experiences, and report that the experience is still influential months and years later. Snorting a line of coke is probably not a meaningful experience unless it gets you addicted.

The take away, again, is that drug A is not drug B, and its pure unadulterated ignorance to assume because a drug is illegal its the same as another drug which is illegal.

If someone wants to smoke pot and can’t he’ll be upset. If someone wants to smoke crack and can’t he’s going to break into your house and steal your TV. This is an important difference.

Now anyone with common sense would if pressed most likely admit that a world without tobacco would probably be a better world. I do. I’ve been smoking for five years and periodically I try and quit. I can’t. If forced to go with no cigarettes for a month, like because I was trapped in Utah or something, I would, but as long as a pack of cigarettes is an eight minute walk away, I eventually decide I want one and I go get twenty.

Now I made this point earlier, but cigarettes kill four hundred thousand people a year. That’s eighty percent of our active duty army. Every year.

Coke and heroin don’t kill as many people a year, booze, which can kill if abused chronically, doesn’t kill that many people a year. Our homicide rate isn’t four hundred thousand a year.

So when you think about it, if we were going to make one drug illegal, logic says it should be nicotine. We can test for it, and it would do more to save lives then if we had a  country where the murder rate was zero. Cigarettes kill more people than people.

But we don’t make cigarettes illegal and the single reason we don’t is because we know people would go fucking crazy. Everyone who smoked would flip there shit and start rallies and we also know people would continue to smoke cigarettes, the difference is they’d do it  at home with the doors and windows shut. Basically if we outlawed cigarettes two things would happen. The price would be gouged, more than it already is, like I want to support children’s health insurance with every pack of cigarettes

I buy, and people wouldn’t smoke in public anymore.

Here is the reality of the situation. The war on drugs is a war we’re not exactly losing, because you can always find anyone on any drug you decide you don’t like and throw him in jail. But for every person you arrest, there are five hundred you wont, and for every dealer who goes to jail, there are five that won’t. The United States is conducting a gorilla war on drugs. The idea is never that we’re going to catch every drug dealer ever, because that’s patently impossible, the idea is we’ll make drug dealers so tired of all the risks involved they’ll stop dealing, and that’s patently stupid because the moneys too good.

Pots been illegal for about fifty years, and the proportional amount of people who smoke pot is higher then it was when the drug was made illegal.

If you want to go get pot today, this minute, you can. It isn’t hard. You know someone who knows someone, or you just know someone. If someone kidnapped your kid or your dog or your jewelry, and there ransom was an eighth of weed, you’d have it in six hours.

And pots illegal. But its not super illegal.

This is what gets me so mad that I literally want to go take a shit in the president of the DEA’s office. Here’s my thing.

Either a drugs a real societal problem or it isn’t. Heroin and cigarettes for example are problems. Why, because once you use a little your addicted, and withdrawal includes real physical symptoms and in the case of heroin can kill you. And using both drugs will lead to death, cigarettes if used exactly as intended, heroin in case of overdose. I’m not saying that either of these things should be made, or should continue to stay, illegal, what I’m saying is in an ideal world we would make that question moot because no one would be using them.

Instead of looking at pot first, lets look at an even more clear cut example of a drug which should be legal.

LSD.

What? Why? That sounds crazy.

Let me explain. If the two largest reasons drugs are bad are addictive potential and health effects, LSD is the safest drug around.

No one gets hooked on acid. For two reasons. The first is you don’t trip balls and instantly decide  you want to do it again, and second if you do decide this the tolerance you develop to LSD develops fast so that you can’t trip chronically.

Now, LSD is some crazy shit. I’ve never done it because I’ve heard peoples stories about bad trips and they scare the shit out of me. But I’m super curious and have read everything I can get my hands on.

When people get hurt on LSD, it isn’t from the LSD itself, its because they decide they’re superman and hop off a roof or want to hug a car or fuck a lion or climb a latter that isn’t there or whatever. In short they get captivated by delusions, act on them, and suffer the consequences.

But this isn’t a problem with the drug, this is a problem with stupid people. If we let fat people run,  risking heart attacks, we should let people trip out.

When LSD and all other drugs that alter ones day to day experience  were made illegal, what that law said is “we do not think experiencing any altered state of consciousness should be allowed. Except for being drunk because that’s different.” And here is the gigantic problem. Its perfectly valid to never want to experience anything except the average day to day consciousness. But our laws tell us that experiencing anything else is bad   and there is no  meaningful” because.”

LSD is not addictive, and it is not illegal because it is unsafe. if what we wanted to ensure was peoples safety, we’d legalize LSD and create acid cafe’s with trained medical professionals on hand. We would then have mandatory life sentences for those who sold LSD without an LSD permit.  But we don’t do this, and as we don’t we understand this is not actually doing anything at all to curb LSD use.

Now I’m not saying people should use LSD lightly, its some serious shit, but lightly and illegally are two totally different things.

I don’t want to do LSD. You probably don’t want to do LSD. And that’s cool. The problem is that what our laws say is no one can do LSD when all of the scientific literature available says that LSD isn’t inherently harmful.

The reality is that people are doing LSD, but because it isn’t legal those people don’t know what they are in jesting. The FDA doesn’t regulate tabs of acid, because its illegal. If you smoked a cigarette and it was laced with LSD you could sue Phillip Morris, but if you do LSD and its laced with something else that isn’t LSD, you can’t sue your drug dealer, your only recourse would be to find him and beat his ass, there bye creating crimes everyone agrees are bad. Violent ones.

Now lets talk about something that isn’t serious shit.

Pot.

I’ve smoked pot and I’ve smoked cigarettes. There was a point a while ago where I was smoking what people who don’t smoke pot would call a lot of pot. I’ve quit smoking one of the two things, and it isn’t cigarettes.

That’s because pot isn’t physically addictive. Being high’s great, so pot can be psychologically addictive, but so can a double cheeseburger, that’s why half the country has a goddamned belly and love handles and has to keep buying larger belts.

When I stopped smoking weed I was angry. Because I wanted to smoke weed.

There is a key difference here you might not understand if you’ve never smoked cigarettes  something with a physically addictive quality, meaning your brain actually tells you it needs whatever substance you are detoxing from. Quitting cigarettes is awful. Its probably worse than breaking up with someone.

I mean, it starts out bad and gets worse and worse. You feel like you need a cigarette. You feel like life blows because your not standing outside lighting tobacco on fire and breathing it in. Coffee sucks, you can’t drink because you know if you do you’ll smoke, going outside is awful because you used to smoke outside and now you aren’t.

Finding a lighter makes you feel you must go buy cigarettes. You start acting like a dick to everyone an even though you know, “shut the fuck up bitch I’m busy!” is not a socially acceptable response screaming at someone feels so good somehow you do it all the time. Eventually you end up being quiet and not speaking much because anything you do say is going to be snide because you can’t smoke a cigarette and that makes the world an awful place.

In the 1950’s before people had scientific data that showed smoking kills they smoked, and at that point it made sense because smoking a cigarette feels so good, and they got to do it guilt free.

The thing is that everyone smoking today knows its killing him or her and they don’t stop. Everyone who smokes knows the risks, and they keep puffing away, day by day, week by week, and when people ask they say, “I know I might get lung cancer but I can’t quit or I don’t care.”

Stopping pot isn’t like that, its like giving up soda or skiddles or waffles. Or steak.

My favorite thing to eat for dinner is a rare steak. But  I haven’t eaten a steak for a month. I dunno why. I’ll eat steak again, probably soon, but I  forgot to buy it the last two times I bought groceries and I don’t want steak badly enough to make a special trip to the grocery store.

pots like this. The first few days are unpleasant. Not stopping cigarettes unpleasant, but its like, I’d like to smoke, oh, I quit, damn. But then it gets to a point where everything’s fine. If you think about it you want to smoke but you don’t. Or you do, but then you go back to not smoking again, unlike with cigarettes where you say you’ll just have one more and then its eight months later and the little tumors on your lungs are slightly larger.

In short, pot is less addictive than cigarettes, there’s no physical dependency yet pot is the drug which is illegal.

Now you might want to point out that studies have also shown pot to be more carcinogenic than cigarettes. This is true, but is beside the point.

A person who smokes cigarettes, on average, has a cigarette every two hours to keep his nicotine levels high. Two hours is the amount of time it takes for the first withdrawal symptoms to begin and is thus the time at which a person smokes cigarette number two of the day.

Now if one joint has more carcinogens then one cigarette, that’s fine, because first only the most dedicated pot smokers are smoking every day, and even someone as dedicated as Snoop Dogg isn’t going to smoke twenty joints every day.

Here’s the second thing to understand. Pot and booze are almost equivalents.

Why do I say almost?

Well, because I believe that its safe for a dude whose taken one hit to drive a car, just like it is if he’s had two or three beers.

However, a dude whose smoked a joint or a chick whose had six beers should not be driving because they are both so impaired they should sit home and chill rather than endanger other people by getting into a car and driving around with slowed reaction times. .

but that is where the similarities end.

Getting high and getting drunk are experiences equal in intensity, stronger than a cigarette or coffee, weaker than DMT or LSD, but in no other way related.

Drunk people get stupid, violent, and uninhibited. Bars where people go to drink, not to sip, are loud and sloppy places after midnight. Pot isn’t like that.

If you haven’t smoked marijuana its a hard feeling to explain.

The thing people don’t get is it doesn’t make you stupid like getting drunk does. I don’t mean it instead makes you smart, but it isn’t as though you have two joints and become a slurring nonsensical mess I want to punch in the face. You don’t become angry or violent or sanctimonious or an ass hole. You don’t decide to fuck a stranger, (probably,) you don’t get into a bar fight, you don’t piss in some guys yard, you don’t puke your guts out.

You ever have one of those days where you lie in the sun and have two beers? Your all relaxed and its good to be in nature and you start thinking about something and you look up at the sky and its glorious and you smell the fresh cut grass and the neighbors cooking on the grill and a rock song comes to you faintly from across the street and you know its summer? Its like that feeling plus you think differently. Ideas you have and then dismiss get contemplated more. Music sounds far more interesting and is something that’s focused on. Details you overlook become worthwhile. Humor is enhanced.

I love pot, alright? I’m not saying its everybody’s wonder drug, but for five years I assumed the only fun high was being drunk. When I smoked pot I realized that getting drunk is retarded by comparison. I still do it from time to time, but I don’t value the state of mind at all.

My point here is that as far as the intensity of he experience is concerned  pot and alcohol are about the same but if you ask anyone whose done both if they feel the same there answer is going to be no and thus what the law is penalizing a pot smoker for is not wanting to drink but wanting to get, to use the idiom, fucked up in a different way.

It is impossible to make the argument that pot is a better drug to people who have never smoked, but I would make the argument its a safer drug.

People do lots of stupid crap while drunk they’d never do while high. Because pot acts a lot like a downer. Not that it necessarily is one, but  pot doesn’t make you want to beat the shit out of the guy who was giving you a look ten minutes ago. It isn’t that kind of experience.

Our laws say things about what we condemn. When rape is made illegal, to simplify, what that law  says about us as a people is, “we don’t like rape. We think its wrong. If you do it we don’t like you so we’ll put you in jail where you’ll get raped.” When we make theft illegal, what that law is saying to society is, “Hey, stealing’s wrong. Steal ten bucks we’ll make you pick up trash. Steal ten thousand we’re throwing you in jail.” Most people, myself included, agree both the laws on rape and the laws on stealing are there because they make society a better place. I don’t want to get raped, and I don’t want to get stolen from, so I’m glad people who steal and rape go to jail.

Now, what pot being illegal says is, “we do not think you should be allowed to alter your consciousness. You can’t handle it, if you feel you need to get fucked up, drink instead.”

This is what the law says. The law doesn’t say, you can’t alter your consciousness, because booze is legal. So first the law is illogical. Second as you know, the law is ineffective, as pot use is rising, not falling.

I’d understand the drug laws if drugs were all  illegal. No coffee, no booze, no cigarettes, no cigars, no pipes, no pot, no shrooms for religious bullshit. No chocolate.

That’d be ok. I’d hate it but at least it would hold up to logic.

Instead we have a world where your allowed to drink and smoke but where you can’t do any other drug, even the soft drugs.

And I have so many   problems with that.

Because I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a victimless  crime, but I do believe in a thing called crime with a victim.

And here’s where I’m at with all drugs.

If someone decides what he wants is to do the drug he wants to do, he’s going to do it. The cops aren’t going to stop him. Don’t misunderstand me, the cops will stop a few of the people every once in a while, but by no means will they stop anything like enough of them for the stopping to make a bit of difference to the people they don’t stop. For every fifty people I know who have smoked pot I know like two or three that have gotten into trouble for it.

If what some guy wants to do is pills or heroin or coke or shrooms or pot or LSD or crack, he’s going to go out and get that drug and do that drug. The cops aren’t actually stopping him. Because people who do drugs don’t respect the drug laws.

Before I smoked pot I always had a contempt for people who were disparaging towards cops. I didn’t understand it at all, aside from corrupt cops, I didn’t get why people were so hostile.

Now I get it. If I ever get busted for smoking pot, the contempt I’ll feel for that specific cop will be total. It would be to the point where if I didn’t think he had any legal recourse I’d spit in his face. Why? Because he’s wasting my time, but more importantly he’s wasting his time!

A cop shouldn’t spend any time finding people who are toking up or doing coke when across town some chicks just been sodomized and beaten and is calling the cops but the dispatcher tells her its going to be fifteen minutes because bacon bits has to finish writing my joint ticket. I think spitting in his face would get that idea across more than words ever could. I won’t ever do this because if I’m ever busted for smoking weed I’ll be shitting myself instead.

Calling a cop bacon bits is unkind, and I don’t care.  Why? Because there is more  important shit that pig should be doing. Namely everything. Anything and everything crime related is more important than stopping people from doing things to themselves. It is true that rape should be illegal because you don’t want to be raped, but my smoking pot doesn’t mean suddenly you wake up high!

And this is where my fury comes in. This is why I’m so angry. Rape  and murder are real. Assault and battery is real, carjacking, bank robbing,  ponzi schemes, home invasions, all that happens. People on Wall Street with no ethics perpetrate theft on such a massive scale that if they were old fashioned thieves what they would be doing would involve raiding fort Knox with a bulldozer.  Sex trafficking, illegal immigration, all that shit needs to be stopped.

And there’s some fat pig wandering around trying to find the dude supplying me my dope. Or your dope, I quit.

And that’s a waste of everyone’s time. because when the person who wants drugs gets drugs, he doesn’t go rape your four year old, he goes and gets high, ok, that’s what he does.

I want murder to remain illegal with the harshest conceivable penalties because I never want to be murdered nor do I ever want to learn someone I know has been murdered. However, whether or not someone goes and does his or her drug of choice doesn’t matter. It doesn’t effect me! Its not like I have to trip when you do shrooms! I don’t have to do coke because you want to do coke, it doesn’t have any impact on me!

The reason pots  sixty bucks an eighth is it has to  be  smuggled here from wherever the hell. The reason coke costs whatever coke costs is because its illegal.

If heroin was a dollar a bag or snort or whatever, people wouldn’t steal shit to buy it because they could afford it.

Which brings me to you, the non drug user.

I have a theory. My theory is this. If your someone who thinks pot should be illegal, I believe you’ve never smoked it.

My first advice in all seriousness is go try it. Then tell me it should be illegal.

I’m not kidding at all. If you’ve never  smoked pot and think it should be illegal your position is untenable. I respect you if you’ve tried it and think it should be illegal, because you know  what your talking about. This is different from people who have never done heroin talking about it because heroin is addictive, we know this to be true because people commit all sorts of crimes to get the next fix.

Pot isn’t addictive. That’s proven. If you smoke it once you won’t need more to be happy tomorrow. To get a joints worth costs you like ten or fifteen bucks, and that’s it.

If you think pot should be illegal you should smoke it and then come back to me. Because otherwise your talking about an experience smokers will tell you is about the  intensity of anywhere from three to thirty beers depending on how high you get but utterly different in its character.

The law doesn’t say you can’t drink to the point of  sloppiness and if it does no one listens to that part of it.

If you’ve gotten drunk, and have never gotten high and think pot should be illegal your position on the issue doesn’t make sense. You can’t tell me anything about being high, because you’ve never been high. But I can tell you all the reasons it sucks to be a drunk or to drink. Now I’m not saying booze should be made illegal, we tried that and it was a mess, in fact almost the same mess we currently have with people buying billions of dollars in illegal pot, I’m only clarifying that it isn’t like booze is great compared to all other drugs, that’s not the reason its legal. Its legal because its popular.

So here’s my final statement on drugs. If some guy feels what he needs is heroin he’s already doing it. He’s not hurting anyone except for himself, and we should let him snort all the h he wants. Because that’s his choice. He’s an idiot. Just like every cigarette smoker, myself included. But he doesn’t belong in jail with violent criminals for doing a drug. It makes no sense.

The thing about morality is this. You might think the only moral people are those who have no sex before marriage, never drink, dance, play cards or smoke, and its your right to think that, and if that’s what you think that’s how you should live.

But in this country its life,  liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It isn’t life, my conception of liberty and my conception of the pursuit of happiness. And because the constitution is so broad on the moral issue it offers  each individual a lot of moral leeway. I think good people are good because of how they treat other people, not how they treat themselves.

Every time a fat dude eats a chili cheese dog or some chicken wings, he’s not helping his figure. But I don’t go, “hey fatty, put down the hotdog, your gunna have a coronary!” And the cops don’t arrest him for eating his hotdog. They let him eat it.  Because so many people over eat we’ve decided that its ok to make that choice.

And that’s the thing. All choices which don’t hurt other people are valid choices. You may disagree with those choices, you may disagree with them strongly, which is why we call them choices! ~ And we have divisions of police departments who are trying to stop people from doing drugs, when they should be stopping murders.

But there is drug related crime!

No.

What there is  is crime related to illegal drug use. The reason some meth head steals your TV is because he can’t go into a convenience store and buy two dollars of meth, because the street price has been artificially inflated by its illegality. The reason there are drug dealers and drug cartels isn’t because we’ve all watched too many movies like Blow, but because drugs are illegal. Its why we had gangsters running booze during prohibition

Look at California, a state where pot is now  almost legal. You go to the weed store and buy your weed. If the Bloods used to make money from selling pot, they now make way less money because people can just go to the fucking weed store with there fake medical problem flash the card they got from a sympathetic doctor and then they go home and smoke.

What bothers people about drugs isn’t that some guys sitting in his house getting high, what bothers them is they see the Hispanic gentleman in the green van handing baggies out the window. If drugs were legal, you wouldn’t have to see that, the dude handing bags out the window would be handing the FDA regulated bags of drugs out from behind a counter, and gang related crime would fall because there’d be no bootleg market for drugs.

Its 2012. Can we please all get our heads out of our asses? Wait, sorry, can all of you get your heads out of your asses so that we can start dealing with important shit?

2012

05/01

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jasonpolaski

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