While some fondled Play-Doh in anticipation of the long night, three states held referendums that passed without national controversy. They legalized drugs.
Oregon became the first state to decriminalize small amounts of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs. And in New Jersey and Arizona voters decisively passed laws legalizing recreational marijuana. Cannabis is now legal across a large bloc of states in the West — from Washington down to the Mexican border — and well beyond.
And there may yet be more.
Cannabis was also on the ballot in Montana, Mississippi and South Dakota. If all of the marijuana measures pass, marijuana will be legal for medical use in three dozen states and recreational use will be allowed in 15.
What makes it noteworthy is that these referendums not only pass, but pass without dire cries of catastrophe, is that we’re coming off the “high” of a 50 year war on drugs. It gave us mass incarceration. It destroyed lives and families. It devastated communities in ways outsiders can’t understand. By that, I mean drugs as well as the war.
I know a lot of drug dealers. I know people who sold weed and crack, powdered coke and heroin. And I know the people who bought it and used it, who were addicted to it and were owned by their dealers. I know why people got into dealing drugs, from those who were just businessmen trying to make money to those who had delusions of being Tony Montana. I knew the pathetic addicts, and watched their bodies waste away until one day they disappeared.
Having spent decades decrying the Draconian, and ever-upward-ratcheting, punishments for drug possession and sale, this shift is shocking, to say the least. From the Rockefeller Drug Laws to the federal Sentencing Guidelines, there was one true belief as to the “plague” of drugs, that if the first couple decades of prison weren’t enough to win the war, one more decade of prison would certainly do the trick. It never did. It was a spectacular failure.
The legislative and judicial grasp of the war on drugs was far more ideological than rational. It led the Supreme Court to authorize dog hits as probable cause, even though everyone knew it was no better than flipping a coin. It gave us the automobile and good faith exceptions to the Warrant Requirement. It gave us pretext stops. It gave us federal in rem asset forfeiture. In another world, a rational world, these would never have happened, but the War on Drugs was never guided by reason, but ideology and emotion. It was evil. It was an inherent evil.
And now, it’s not.
So guys like me, people whose careers were spent defending those accused of drugs, must be applauding this seismic shift in the legal paradigm that would finally vindicate my clients, my friends (yes, friends) as merely business people trying to achieve some success in a nation where their options were highly limited rather than nefarious criminals bent on destruction. And, indeed, the decriminalization piece of this puzzle, to the limited extent it’s happening, is a good thing, although most of these propositions engage in the odd voodoo of taking the street-corner weed business and turning it over to agro-corps. My guys are still left out in the cold, if at least not in prison.
And while possession of small amounts of drugs may no longer be criminalized, where do you think that coke or meth comes from? Hint, it’s not Walmart. So people can buy it, use it, but nobody can sell it without facing life plus cancer. It’s reminiscent of the push to legalize sex work, but still holding the customers in custody or disgust. The nature of a transaction is that it takes two, and as long as one remains evil, the problem hasn’t been fixed.
But unlike advocates for legalization, I am deeply ambivalent about it. It’s not that smoking a little weed is the end of the world. After all, I enjoy a Bowmore 18 on occasion, and some say liquor is quicker. But are there recreational junkies? Have you been up close and personal with a meth addict? Have you ever seen what someone will do to get the money to pay for a fix?
The simplistic reaction is that addiction is a health problem, not a legal problem, and so all these concerns can be addressed by making drug treatment readily available. This ignores a few salient problems, not the least of which is that not all addicts want to deal with their addiction. Many just want more drugs, and if someone doesn’t want treatment, they’ll neither seek it nor be helped by it. Most drug treatment facilities are shams and don’t help anyway, formed to get that sweet drug treatment money the government offers with the never-ending parade of defendants forced into treatment until they can return to the streets and get back to business.
And then there’s the harder problem, that the person in the car next to you is high as a kite. Or the guy running the machine at your job. Or the person caring for your child. They can be drunk, and just as dangerous, but we all recognize that’s bad, and yet we’re adding more opportunity to the thing we agree is bad.
Will making drugs legal change all this? It will certainly cure many problems caused by the misguided War on Drugs, though it may take decades for the courts to let go of their ideology and catch up with the public recognition that neither drug users nor dealers are the worst scum of society. On the whole, it’s better than where we were by far. Yet, problems persist and are being ignored or covered over in the zeal to end the War on Drugs. If we don’t face these problems, the pendulum will swing again and we will be back to prisons filled with drug defendants, and an adoring nation pushing to lock them up forever.
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Meth? I swear, these pols could fuck up a cast iron basketball.
PS: After 2 million+ miles behind the wheel (and handlebars), the idiot who can’t turn their phone off scares me way more than your garden variety stoner. Just sayin’…
More than a decade ago, I was critical of people who use cellphones while driving. All the Texas guys lost their shit over it, but then, they can’t drive worth a damn in the first place, so talking on their cellphones didn’t make their driving any worse.
I voted against the decriminalization initiative. While legalizing Marijuana has worked OK, I consider meth far too destructive both directly to users and indirectly through crimes by addicts and the hazmat issues of meth labs and lab explosions.
Wow. Interesting comment thread…I think it should be in a text book under the heading, “The Art and Stupidity of Doubling Down”
It appears you were a bit more, shall we say, tolerant back then…
Oh, and one other thing…Instigator!
I learned from my mistakes.
As a person that once had a serious addiction I wish I had something profound to say. The truth is I got lucky. I changed, can’t give a convincing reason I just did. But I’ve seen many that have not been lucky_ and they deserved to be as much as anyone. And not because they didn’t try.
For those that think legalization would solve many issues , much of the current opiate crisis is because of prescribed opiates and those have been legal.
Ending the punishment is one thing. But romanticizing addiction is deadly.
Oh, pish. Legalization of use for one purpose does not mean legalization for all purposes — as both the existence of bars and DWI enforcement demonstrate.
You need proof? In Colorado, which has decriminalized marijuana possession, the state Supreme Court has ruled that employers can forbid employees from using weed on the job and can fire employees who test positive for weed (even though the body expels THC for several months after consumption). Moreover, even though existing law allows one to consume legally prescribed narcotics for a medical condition, the law still doesn’t allow operation of a vehicle in an intoxicated state. And employers still can forbid employees who are taking those legally prescribed narcotics from operating machinery or business-owned vehicles.
The jurisdictions who have decriminalized possession will navigate the line between simple possession and intoxication. And those of us who defend the accused still will have plenty of work.
First, pish, then the most unpersuasive argument anyone could muster, because if we can’t trust recreational meth users and the government to make our world work safely, who can we trust?
It’s not that I find your argument entirely unconvincing or, dare I say it, disingenuous for a man of your intellect and experience with the subject matter. But if we, as a society, were really concerned with protecting the health and safety of the public there are far more dangerous killers needing legislative attention but for being members of a favored class in agriculture. Most Americans kill themselves with a knife and fork.
So you’re fine with meth but would criminalize food? Smart.
No, that’s not what I meant. Some things humans consume are far more dangerous to our health than meth. Cholesterol, sugar, alcohol, and tobacco kill hundreds of thousands of people in the US every year.
If your logic is this type of thing we put in our body is bad because it kills people but those types of things that we put in our body, which kill many more people, are good -then your logic is flawed.
May god have mercy on your soul.
I don’t believe in God, because my family was destroyed by drug addiction.
Is this whataboutism, or would this fall under “but both sides”? I’m just trying to determine your level of hypocrisy here. If the issue is drugs, maybe the focus should be drugs rather than this other thing that’s also bad.
May Tequila have mercy on your liver?
Your first statement does not follow from your second. I’m sure more people die from choking on popcorn than by plutonium poisoning, that doesn’t mean that plutonium is less dangerous than popcorn.
Jake and logic have a dubious relationship.
I’ll keep that in mind if/when people start ingesting plutonium.
You’re not getting any better at this, Jake.
Solutions only exist in math and science. Real life is a series of trade offs. Those jurisdictions have realized that the current policies’ total costs exceed benefits. You cannot and will not “solve” everything. There are things the law (and government) cannot do.
You can minimize cost, both to individuals and society.
The libertarian in me says that your addiction is your business until it becomes my problem. So go pump yourself full of stuff until you make a choice not to. If you break the law, expect to get arrested. Pay the consequences yourself. Do not expect others to. Yes, the familial and other costs are sad and enormous, but not illegal.
Prohibition left us with a continuing, organized, criminal infrastructure that has lasted to this day. It has been greatly diminished but is still present. The War on Drugs has left us with several narco-states south of our border. We also have state actors actively selling or condoning the sale of drugs to the U.S. and the West in general. The bad actors not only make and ship the classical drugs, but actively pursues the invention\repurposing of others (there was a really nifty SF series that featured the drug “Stardust” as a part of the background. It was 100% addictive on the first dose and 100% fatal if withdrawn from).
I agree with you on the addiction industry. The whole compassion industry needs cold, hard, eye turned on it. I had an alcoholic relative go to rehab several times over. She drank for 50 years until she died of it. A friend of a relative was a meth addict and walked away from it. Still clean as far as we know. Go figure.
The parking lot at the Dentzel Antique Carousel at Highland Park in Mississippi is long overdue to become the epicenter of the universe bellow the Mason-Dixon line.
“It led the Supreme Court to authorize dog hits as probable cause, even though everyone knew it was no better than flipping a coin. It gave us the automobile and good faith exceptions to the Warrant Requirement. It gave us pretext stops. It gave us federal in rem asset forfeiture.”
Does all the associated legislation get reversed too?? or will it be like Covid emergency law world-wide where Govts have taken amazing emergency powers and never get repealed?
Laws remain on the books until repealed. We sometimes call them orphan laws, since they remain unused but they’re still there.
I prefer the term “zombie laws” because it’s more exciting. Also, when they get resurrected, it can be reasonably argued that there’s a distinct absence of “braaaaaiiins”
Consider this – legalization not because ending the war on drugs is the goal but revenues for the states as long term we have made promises we can’t afford (medicare, free state college tuition, expensive increase in prisons, etc) due to the end of the post WWII boom. So, legalize gambling, MJ and other drugs (TAXES!). Here in Colorado the legalization has posed an interesting paradox. Genetics = stunningly powerful product and branded product of known quality, but the high taxes means that the cartel product is much cheaper. And the social/medical fallout from much increased use by teens, etc. is not trivial. Not catastrophic, but the end result has produced Glocca Morra. What a surprise. Once again we learn there is no free lunch.
PS – Auto exception to 4th amendment invented by Supremes in the Carroll case, I think in the mid 1920’s – it was the war on booze (Prohibition) that did the trick.
Yeah, Carroll was a bootlegger case, but it didn’t become an rubric until drugs.