The mile-high city now can really be “mile high” – or can it?
Just a few days ago Denver voters approved a change in city law making consumption and possession of marijuana, in amounts up to one ounce, legal.
Of course this does not change
state or
federal law, which makes for an interesting confluence of situations when it comes to these matters.
But it does underline that attitudes are changing about this issue, and, frankly, it’s about damn time.
We spend, on average, $50 billion a year on direct drug war costs. We arrest about 1.6 million people annually for drug offenses, and imprison over 10,000.
And this ignores property crimes driven by the high price of illicit drugs, and violence caused by “turf disputes” and gang warfare – all fueled by drug money.
We tried prohibiting recreational substance use by the population in this nation once. It was called Prohibition, and it spawned organized crime gangs that continue to this day. When prohibition was repealed, the gangs shifted over to the “new” prohibition – the drugs that were left illegal and continued to be made illegal in the years to come.
When was the last time you heard of someone being shot over a bottle of whiskey? Not over some dispute by a couple of drunks – but over the booze itself? Yet every day you can find someone killed over a drug dispute in our major cities, and the sad part is that stoned people don’t shoot very straight, so often it is an innocent, uninvolved bystander who gets killed in the crossfire.
We’ve been at this for close to 100 years, and have we stopped the drugs? No. All we’ve done is increase the number of violent offenders, radically increase the amount of property crime in the nation, and incarcerate hundreds of thousands of people for participating in a consensual adult transaction. And we’ve killed – literally – thousands who have contacted HIV and Hepatitis through IV drug abuse due to reusing syringes, because we consider this material “contraband” rather than a matter of public health.
There is a public debate that needs to be held on the wisdom if spending tens of billions of dollars on a failed policy, not to mention the underground economy that pays no taxes and yet consumes a significant part of our public services budget and the enormous cost in death and disease.
Perhaps Denver isn’t so “high” after all……
