Everyone knows that history repeats itself, but we still find it difficult to learn from experience. In this case, the experience is alcohol prohibition, poppy prohibition, and coca prohibition. I know I’ve written these things before, and other people have as well, but they bear repeating.

Subject: drug legalization
Name: LAuren
Comment: to say that the world would be a better place if not only marijuana, but other more bodily toxic substances were legalized is a bit unrealistic. who is to say that if coke, crack, heroin and crystal meth were legalized, that there would begin a mass production of these substances, further killing the environment, causing people to further hurt themselves and others to satisfy this habit or that children would be able to get their hands on it sooner, becoming addicted at an early age increasing the cycle by increasing the amount of users. instead of getting one crack rock for $20, you would be able to get three or four. how does that help the community. I believe marijuana should be legalized due to its medicinal benefits, what does coke do for you body other that deteriorate it? fuck everything else.

Everybody likes their own drug, and everybody likes to scapegoat somebody else’s. But there are a lot of myths that need constant opposition if we are to encourage a better, safer, and freer world.

who is to say that if coke, crack, heroin and crystal meth were legalized, that there would begin a mass production of these substances, further killing the environment,

There is already a mass production of these substances, but it’s uncontrolled. The reason that the manufacture of these drugs produces excessive amounts of toxins is because they are illegal. This means that those who manufacture them must use products that contain far more than the ingredients they need; if these drugs were not illegal, no one would go to the supermarket to buy dozens of bottles of cold medicine just for the one or two ingredients the cold medicine contains, dumping the rest into the ecosystem.

Further, legal drug manufacturers have a strong incentive to follow environmental laws. Illegal drug manufacturers have little such incentive. They are already breaking the law making an illegal product. Breaking more laws doesn’t scare them.

So, if the environment is a concern, these drugs should be re-legalized so that any environmental toxins created in their manufacture can be tightly controlled.

causing people to further hurt themselves and others to satisfy this habit or that children would be able to get their hands on it sooner, becoming addicted at an early age increasing the cycle by increasing the amount of users.

Is this an argument against coca and poppies, or against alcohol and no-doz?

The evidence in places that re-legalize these products, whether for users or just for addicts, is that dangerous consumption drops; this may be because addicts who want to seek assistance can do so when it is legal, without fear of being put into jail or having their lives taken away from them. It may be because the drug dealer’s most regular customers, addicts, no longer support drug dealers when they can acquire their drugs legally. It may be because consumers are empowered to make choices, instead of having to take what the drug dealer is selling.

There can be many reasons, but the fact remains: prohibition always seems to result in more dangerous use of the prohibited product.

We learned this the hard way during our alcohol prohibition years, but we keep trying to pretend that our experience with alcohol somehow doesn’t apply to the coca leaf or the poppy.

instead of getting one crack rock for $20, you would be able to get three or four. how does that help the community.

The obvious benefit is that addicts will no longer have to steal to get their drugs. That’s a direct benefit to the community. Addicts will no longer have to be a part of the black market, and they will no longer feed the black market. That, also, is a benefit to the community. Without drug profits, the black market’s violence will wane just as the violence of alcohol prohibition waned following the re-legalization of alcohol.

However, you are operating under the assumption that crack is the form of cocaine that people prefer. If you lived during alcohol prohibition, you might have made the argument that “instead of getting one jug of bathtub gin for $20, you would be able to get three or four”. And it’s true, they could have. The price of bathtub gin dropped precipitously after prohibition ended. But nobody wanted bathtub gin. They wanted beer, wine, and other far safer forms of alcohol.

The natural form of cocaine is the coca leaf, not crack. Crack’s existence is the result of prohibition. Without prohibition, crack would not have developed, because there would have been no need for it. A black market needs concentrated products that can be transported easily and hidden easily; safety is not a concern. During alcohol prohibition any form of pure alcohol was in demand, whether it was safe for humans or not. Denatured alcohol and wood alcohol both contributed to the alcohol supply that people actually drank, despite being poisonous. The “ginger jake” disease was a major concern, due solely to the lack of safeguards on alcohol production. From The Medical Post’s Ginger Jake blues:

It demonstrated that illicit products are not subject to quality control inspection. Its makers are not subject to manufacturing review, and much of it is adulterated or contaminated.

When we re-legalized alcohol, the rate of diseases caused by adulterated alcohol did not go up; it plummetted. Sales of wood alcohol did not skyrocket. People went back to drinking beer and wine and mixed drinks. Those who did choose to continue drinking hard liquor did not fund the mafia; they bought it from their local grocery or government store. Few people wanted alcohol in concentrations as high as, say, everclear. You can hardly find that stuff nowadays. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in liquor stores.

Likewise, if cocaine were re-legalized, people could go back to drinking coca tea, chewing coca gum, and generally enjoying a stimulant that in its natural form is probably safer than coffee. Even those who continued to use cocaine would be buying it from a reputable source rather than feeding the violence of the black market. And few, if any, would continue to use crack cocaine, because why would they want to?

If coffee were made illegal, we would see the same progression: first, caffeine would become a major black market item; you’d see home chemists extracting caffeine from any available source, dumping the rest of the stuff into the environment. Someone would come up with a form of crack caffeine that pushed the concentration even higher. But none of the dangers caused by prohibition justifies the prohibition of caffeine. It is crazy to make something dangerous by prohibiting it, and then claim that the dangers justify the prohibition.

I believe marijuana should be legalized due to its medicinal benefits, what does coke do for you body other that deteriorate it?

Oddly enough, the federal government and most state governments disagree with you: both cocaine and opium are schedule II drugs, ones that have medical use, where marijuana is not. Yes, marijuana should be re-legalized for its medicinal benefits. However, cocaine is already legal for its medical benefits.

Yet again, however, this is comparing a plant (marijuana) with a concentrated extract of a plant (cocaine). The correct comparison is between marijuana and the coca leaf.

In one sense, marijuana users are lucky compared to beer users during prohibition or coca and poppy users today. Marijuana’s active ingredients are not as easily extracted into highly-concentrated forms like alcohol, opium, and cocaine are. Partially this is because its active ingredients are not water soluble. This makes them impossible to inject, and probably more difficult to extract into a powdered form.

Because of this, marijuana has not succumbed as quickly to the black market forces that make it easy to unthinkingly condemn the coca leaf, the poppy, and fermented liquids. Imagine for a moment the horrors that would result from tobacco prohibition, with injectable and snortable nicotine filling the black market drug channels! But where the prohibition of most recreational drugs results in dangerous, highly-concentrated forms that allow us to demonize them, marijuana remains, after seventy years of prohibition, a plant that you smoke.

That should not blind us to the fact, however, that for those other plants it is their illegality that makes them dangerous. Re-legalize them and they’ll follow the same path that alcohol did, back towards their more natural or otherwise safer forms.