We all have our private biases so let me confess mine: I loathe the smell of marijuana. It makes me gag. I also have grave doubts about the effect of weed on the human brain, particularly kids in high school and college who are ingesting this stuff at record rates. Adults too turned to it during lockdowns and now every American city I’ve visited smells of the stuff, while dispensaries are everywhere.
I’ve personally seen so many lives nearly ruined by weed—ruined in a slow and often indiscernible way. It does what it is intended to do: blunts emotional range but then also retrains the brain and the personality. It is as addictive as any narcotic.
I have a hard time believing that in replacing tobacco with weed, we made any progress at all. Sorry if that opinion shocks you. As a thirty-year smoker who now cannot even think of puffing on one, I still find tobacco a far less menacing product overall despite its terrible effects on health.
That said, I’m glad that it is mostly decriminalized. That’s because the only alternative choice is to make it illegal and with that comes compulsion, jails, empowerment of cops and judges, and no real solution. And so long as the demand is there, to make it illegal results in creating drug lords big and small, bad guys who care nothing about the law but a great deal about making money. They feed the demand and get rich. Crack down on them and reduce the supply, you only create opportunities for even more ruthless people to enter the market.
And when the drug is illegal, quality control disappears and ever more dangerous drugs replace the milder ones. So long as nothing is done about the demand side, this will always be the logic of the drug war. In sum, I personally avoid all narcotics, weed, and all these mind-altering substances (yes I make an exception for liquor). But my rational human brain and many decades of experience help me reach another conclusion: they should not be illegal. Making them illegal creates more problems than they solve.
The country now faces a crisis far worse than weed. It is killer opioids, mostly FDA-approved prescription drugs now manufactured in this country and around the world. They are very illegal apart from prescription but extremely available. This is a very different problem from opium, meth, cocaine, and the like because they are prescription meds, easily manufactured and widely distributed. They are hugely in demand and hence making suppliers very rich.
It appears that the drug cartels have turned to them now that weed production and distribution has lost its luster. With the price of marijuana moving more toward a market equilibrium, the bad guys are moving toward drugs that are extremely illicit and thus far more profitable. The only solution I’m hearing about these days is a big war on the cartels at the border. Some politicians like Ron DeSantis (I’m a fan but we seriously disagree on this matter) even take it further to imagine violating Mexico’s sovereignty with bombings of cartel production facilities and the like.
At the Republican debate in Milwaukee, DeSantis was asked the following: “So, as president, would you support sending U.S. Special Forces over the border into Mexico to take out fentanyl labs, to take out drug cartel operations? Would you support that kind of American military use?”
DeSantis said: “Yes, and I will do it I’m day one.”
Unless he misspoke and did not entirely understand the question, it seems like President DeSantis will start a massive shooting war in Mexico immediately upon the swearing-in. That’s a very incredible promise. Congress is supposed to be in charge of wars according to the U.S. Constitution. Further, the so-called cartels are far too powerful for an easy take-out. It would be an impossible war. Success would only mean driving operations elsewhere. Indeed, I truly shutter at the implications of something like this.
He further argues that “the vast majority of seized fentanyl is smuggled by American citizens through legal ports of entry.”
Instead of militarized fantasies of blasting away drug smugglers, we might as well admit: there is no winning the war on drugs. The very reason for the power and wealth of the illicit industry including the drug cartels is the U.S. drug war itself. It is what granted so much influence to the cartels, same as bootleggers that thrived during Prohibition. The logic is exactly the same. So long as there is widespread demand and the consumers don’t perceive themselves as doing something particularly evil, there will be producers around to provide product. It has always been this way.
U.S. foreign policy has been corrupted by the drug war for many decades, variously making deals with cartels and then breaking them. We’ve seen this in Afghanistan, Panama, Nicaragua, Colombia, and many other parts of the world. The CIA is a well-documented partner in all these operations, a plain fact that no one somehow mentions. That’s because in many countries, the drug industry is more powerful than the government.
One might observe that this is true in the United States but with a big difference: the industry in the U.S. is fully legal, blessed by the FDA, protected by patent laws, and indemnified against liability from harms. What’s more, the American drug cartels are powerful enough to enlist the media, major tech companies, and governments at all levels to force their products on unwilling consumers. Not even the Medellin Cartel enjoyed the privileges that have made companies like Pfizer and Moderna filthy rich.
If American politicians want to talk about a war on drugs, it could make far more progress by eliminating the subsidies and legal protections the U.S. government grants Big Pharma, which is mostly responsible for feeding the astonishing U.S. addiction to prescription drugs. That is a war that can be won without bullets, without coercion, and without taking away human liberty. It is simply a matter of dealing with problems at home by repealing unjust legal privileges and gutting the massive problem of captured regulators.
DeSantis knows all about this from his own Surgeon General Joe Lapapo. It is a much more important problem than drug smuggling at the border. The border crisis is born of awful, confused, and contradictory immigration law. This is fixed by enforcement, reform, and work permits. The U.S. drug problem is one that needs to be settled at home, not by sending in the Marines to Mexico.
One development we’ve seen with the decriminalization of weed is that the “forbidden fruit” effect has been taken away. That means that, yes, there are more users now but it is far less exciting and enticing now. I personally know many people who are working daily to kick the habit. Many can and will succeed. In the end, this is the only way to deal with the problem: not with compulsion but with one individual life choice at a time.
