Another depression, another end to prohibition?
Coffee-pot still and lard can confiscated by St. Louis Police during prohibition.
Today marks the 75th anniversary of the end to prohibition, and one of my old law partners sent me over a piece from the Wall Street Journal arguing for a reform of national drug laws.
The money quote:
When repeal came, it was not just with the support of those with a taste for alcohol, but also those who disliked and even hated it but could no longer ignore the dreadful consequences of a failed prohibition. They saw what most Americans still fail to see today: That a failed drug prohibition can cause greater harm than the drug it was intended to banish.
Consider the consequences of drug prohibition today: 500,000 people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails for nonviolent drug-law violations; 1.8 million drug arrests last year; tens of billions of taxpayer dollars expended annually to fund a drug war that 76% of Americans say has failed; millions now marked for life as former drug felons; many thousands dying each year from drug overdoses that have more to do with prohibitionist policies than the drugs themselves, and tens of thousands more needlessly infected with AIDS and Hepatitis C because those same policies undermine and block responsible public-health policies.
Eddie Roth writes about education, social justice, public safety, transportation, legal affairs and historic preservation. He joined the Post-Dispatch editorial page in 2008 after six years as an editorial writer with the Dayton Daily News. But he is not new to St. Louis. Eddie grew up in Webster Groves and south St. Louis County. He's a lawyer who for many years practiced with a downtown firm, and was active in civic affairs, including serving a term on the St. Louis Police Board. He and his wife, Jeanne, and their three daughters, Emily, Julia and Alice, live in the Shaw Neighborhood.
When it comes to community organizing, he endorses Quentin Crisp's advice: Rather than keeping up with the Joneses, it's better to pull them down to your level. 
I could not agree more. While I am more hesitant about decriminalizing harder drugs, e.g., heroin, I feel there are many, which may safely be introduced lawfully into the marketplace. The problems presented in the above excerpt will most certainly be assuaged. Moreover, decriminalized narcotics are a fertile tax base for which both States and the Federal government are in desperate need.
Bring on the dope!
Marijuana should be made completely legal. Not just decriminalized. Not just “medical use.” Retail sale should be regulated in a manner comparable to alcohol and tobacco. Cultivation for personal use should also be legal. Perhaps President Obama could push this … after all, unlike President Clinton, Obama doesn’t deny that he inhaled.
On the other hand, it seems to me that other drugs such as meth and heroin are too harmful to legalize.
Nah, if you’re gonna start decriminalizing drugs, no sense in getting squeamish about which one is worse than the other. There’s probably a few thousand meth users that would want to argue that point, and here we would go again. So, let everyone have at it, says I….frankly, I don’t care if you legalize smoking the fur straight off of a yak’s butt, as long as you decriminalize me smoking cigarettes at Busch Stadium again as part of the bargain.
Tim - I hate baseball, and am not really bothered by cigarette smoke … so light ‘em up!
Nick, if everyone was as tolerant as you, this would be a better world. Now, just got to get you into those Cardinals….
Happy Holidays, amigo.
Since Illinois casinos are down nearly 20 percent due to the smoking ban as Tom Swoik predicted, and East St. Louis especially needs money, perhaps the Illinois indoor smoking prohibition can be lifted and the Casino Queen be allowed to once again employ the great air filtration system it spent millions for just to deal with the smoke.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-casino-revenuesdec04,0,1201776.story
Illinois bars would love to see the indoor smoking prohibition gone too. This week the Illinois Licensed Beverage Association told me that bar business across Illinois is down, and Illinois bars along the Missouri border are down as much as 60 percent or more.
Illinois could solve its smoking ban problem by instituting the Chicago air filtration exemption statewide: Any venue can allow smoking that through air filtration makes its air cleaner than the air outdoors.
http://egov.cityofchicago.org/webportal/COCWebPortal/COC_ATTACH/MunicipalCode7-32_1.html#7_32_080
We don’t have to legalize all drugs. Let’s legalize the ones the make the most sense. Consider that each year the number of those arrested for marijuana is more than the entire population of the state of South Dakota (pop. 754,844). This is terrible, given that marijuana is not a dangerous drug (less dangerous than tobacco or alcohol).
Meth appears to be much more dangerous. Let’s start with legalizing marijuana–let the powers to be tax the hell out of it like they do to alcohol and cigarettes and sell it in drugs stores. I’m not suggesting we PROMOTE it. Just make it available, so that fewer otherwise peaceful people spend time in the criminal justice system. Wrap each package in an informative packet regarding legitimate health risks.
And by all means, make medical use of marijuana legal. Our current national policy is sadistic.
http://dangerousintersection.org/2008/07/05/take-a-couple-of-deep-breaths-and-then-read-this-closely-it-isn%E2%80%99t-dangerous-to-use-marijuana/#comment-31354