Let me begin by saying that marijuana is unequivocally safer than alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, taurine, nasal decongestant, or high fructose corn syrup. Anyone who says otherwise is an idiot. There, that was easy enough. Only hurts for a second, right? Now we can move on to the real issue...
Hard drugs, and alcohol must be included in this, have the ability to destroy lives, disrupt families, fracture communities, and turn our borders and parts of our urban landscape into perpetual battle zones. They don't ruin everyone they touch, but enough of them that it would be callous to take no action. That said, everything is wrong about the global, national, state, and local response to drug abuse; prohibition is worse than the disease, as we found out quite painfully when alcohol was banned by the 18th Amendment, which is precisely why it was the only Amendment to be repealed. Yet we cannot even bring sanity to a war on drugs that treats the sick and the casual user alike as criminals, leaves countless people dead or maimed, and costs us tens of billions of dollars each year.
If that weren't bad enough, it has led to drugs wreaking havoc on our culture. In case this was not public knowledge, artists of all types do drugs at a rate substantially higher than the population as a whole; they also tend to be more functional addicts, but our goal is to help our culture, not enable self-destructive habits. The quality of mainstream culture has descended quite rapidly over the past several decades, and it doesn't take a genius to connect the dots here: a lot of people in entertainment (the heart of a culture) are on drugs and in the closet, because addiction has been criminalized and stigmatized. It's not a good thing to be a wanton addict, but it's not wrong to have a problem, just very, very human.
If everyone who had committed fraud on a loan application were in jail, and $100,000+ frauds are a serious felony on both the federal and state level, our nation's prison population would quintuple overnight, and we already incarcerate at several times the rate of any other industrialized nation. We would rather put those desperate enough to abuse or sell drugs and foolish or unlucky enough to get caught doing so in prison instead, then we go out and spend beyond our means, addicted to consumption and unashamed, and act indignant when our economy falls on its face.
We have a problem here, folks. A big problem, and it isn't just the United States. Our disinclination to self-control has combined with our desire for hasty, arbitrary punishment to cost us the war in Afghanistan and our influence across much of Latin America, but that is a topic unto itself. Another day, perhaps.
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