There are many people who don't think legalization of anymore drugs is a good thing. As the Daily Record once stated, they believe, "Do we really want another legalized danger in the form as a soft drug?" (26 March 1997)
You would have to be a pin head to not know that alcohol and tobacco are harmful to your body. First off, how was tobacco and alcohol chosen as what our country allows us to consume/intoxicate ourselves with while spends billions ( on criminalizing and destroying the rest?
Okay stirring the pot here.
Still not on board? So who is the victim to the crime of drugs?
No one.
The victim could be considered directly to the user as it is affecting their health. But I wouldn't bank on most drug users considering themselves as a "victim". Many debates on just this issue surly will bring up all the crimes committed by users of drugs or those under the influence of drugs. So the crime in question is not actually that drugs were consumed, but that the individual committed a separate crime, which in itself has its own set of rules. The consumption of the said drugs is irrelevant and should be, under law, excluded from any defense to escape punishment of committed crime (unless prescribed under medical advice). Okay take example when a mother is addicted to heroin and instead of buying enough formula for her child, she uses some of the money to buy her drugs. If the child ends up with malnutrition due to her mother's drug use, the crime punished would be child endangerment and other child abuse related crimes. No one is saying that the situation couldn't have been avoided if the mother wasn't taking heroin; but the fact remains that she is. Hundreds of thousands of mothers worldwide (0.19% mothers in US) (data from http://www.drugabuse.gov/drugs-abuse/heroin, http://www.infoplease.com/spot/momcensus1.html, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html) have heroin/opiate addiction and it would be a safe assumption on my part that in most cases it affects the family in some manner. In the above mother's case of not having enough money for her infants formula and to get her heroin she skimmed some away from her child. If prices weren't exuberantly high due to harsh drug laws, fluctuated by supply levels or by gang activity, but if controlled and grown on more than just the 1000 acre farmland world wide, perhaps we could lower the price to just a few dollars, instead of hundreds.
Woah woah Michael… are you suggesting to legalize heroin?
The folks I am beginning to interview about drugs (to be detailed out at a later date) I find most of them will place heroin as the worst drug possible. Addiction and the very prominent death threat from its potency bring many to the conclusion it holds the place as most harmful drug.
Before we go into the drug user and the harms she inflicts upon herself, we have to ask ourselves is anyone in society being harmed by someone elses heroin use? Most answers included: family, friends, children, innocent bystanders and even pets.
Family.
In the current system family usually finds out about heroin use when it is too late. Due to the stigma placed upon the drug, users will almost always hide their addiction from their loved ones. So even when the user wants to stop, she has no way to seek help and only when it became a problem is she offered treatment for her addiction. Friends could be labeled under the same description, but at the end of the day why should it be a law if it is just breaking up a friendship? I don't mean to sound harsh but what if we made cheating on your girlfriend with her best friend a crime?
So from probably now until the end of this blog (if there ever will be an end..) I will be making these sort of "risk" comparisons. To win over any argument of drugs you need to start using real-life, unregulated risk we are allowed to do legally. This is removing the hypocrisy and hopefully a huge stigma away from drugs.
Earlier I referenced an example of children of drug-addict parents, exhibiting that the laws broken were child welfare, not actual drug use. Society as a whole should not be punished for recreational drug use, while these woman are breaking far different and far more heinous crimes such as child endangerment. Alcohol is legal for adults to drink and even with kids. They have to understand and live with the risk of drinking too much to then get in a car and drive those kids. The fact he consumed the alcohol is not the crime here, the fact he got into a car and endangered the lives of those children and anyone else on the road is the crime. He thus should be punished accordingly.
Innocent bystanders round the corner here and now I'll take a quick pause.
Bystanders are shoot at, murdered, kidnapped, robbed, and victimized due to drugs. In Glasgow it is calculated that £500 million worth of crimes need be committed every year to feed the 8,500 heroin addicts there (Scotland on Sunday, 7 Jan 1996). If compared with the alcohol prohibition, crime due to gang activity, price fixing, price inflation, and unknown ingredients, the majority of which would not exist if the drugs were legalized and controlled.
These innocent bystanders are children caught in gun fire with Mexican drug lords over some dispute. Or it could be a woman on some New York side street getting mugged by a junkie to get some extra cash to "score" some more. Heroin on the street (According to the United Nations Office of Drug Control, in 2005 heroin cost between $40 and $350 per gram retail in the United States, while the price in the United Kingdom was much lower at about $27 per gram) is exuberantly higher than it's controlled pharmaceutical synthetic form that I could buy at CVS Pharmacy on my insurance for 7 dollars for a monthly supply. The significant decrease in price would allow users to not need to resort to crime for all their needs. Now there will still be those who could never get enough, but at that point many could push that towards suicide. The risks of heroin are not unknown and if someone chooses to constantly use dangerously high amounts they need intense treatment, not criminal action for just the drug use. Not to shed any humor on such a dark subject, but you have to be willing, if you want to make this an argument, that anything in excess known to be dangerous is reckless. Now you can think of plenty of things that are dangerous in our world in excess that are completely legal. In this instance lets consider one who is at extreme obesity because she only eats Cheeseburgers. She is at a high risk of early death and should seek help with her body and diet. No one would ever take her freedom away from eating cheeseburgers, even if she is putting herself at harm while also hurting emotionally her family and friends. She is in a place of extreme personal risk, just as the heroin addict from above was also in. We live in a free society where we have the freedom "to take risk with our own health and our own body so long as it doesn't put anyone else at risk" (Williamson)
Anyone who chooses to use "risk" as an argument for drug prohibition needs to remember the risks surrounding a human's daily life and stop being hypocritical about drugs. There a risk walking outside your house, there is a risk when you go through a green traffic light, there is a risk when you walk on a college campus. What about dangerous sports such as football? What about even more extreme sports as mountaineering, paragliding, sky diving, motor racing, horse riding, or skiing? All these sports injuries cost a lot of money but no one thinks twice about paying for them and certainly no one would outlaw a sport such as football although the many known risks involved. Comparisons like these are one of the only ways to be able to really break drugs from the taboo level and to what the bottom line issue really is.
Ecstasy is cited as a dangerous and powerfully harmful drug that kills or seriously injures. Yet the number of ecstasy-related deaths in the UK topped 7 in 1996 (which does not cite the death occurred directly from the ecstasy but could have been over hydration). To put the risk data more openly we look at risk of death data from Drugs and The Party Line
Taking 1 tablet of ecstasy- 1 in 3.7 million
Five rides at a fairground- 1 in 3.2
Holiday skiing in Switzerland- 1 in 600,000
Parachuting- 1 in every 85,000 jumps
Attempting to climb K2- 1 in 4
It is awesome that we have the freedom to do these sports or activities even when there might be great risk while doing so. There is a great thrill in doing something like sky diving. Your body releases chemicals that is almost impossible to find while on earth. But just suggesting to do sky diving or mountain climbing already excludes many people who would't be able to spend tens of thousands of dollars on such an activity. The same high and adrenaline released when sky diving could be obtained much cheaper on the street. The subject of race and the orders of class certainly do come up quite a bit in the drug conversation.