Federal agents last week raided almost a dozen medical marijuana clinics in Los Angeles in the most recent attempt to enforce the 70-year-old federal ban on pot. The clinics, legalized a decade ago by California law, provide medical weed for people suffering from AIDS, cancer, and other illnesses.
Feds say that recreational users are availing themselves of the decriminalized marijuana, a flimsy cover for stupid federal policy. Louisiana has three -- count 'em, three -- medical marijuana laws on the books, passed by three different Louisiana legislatures and signed into law by three different Louisiana governors. Despite this, nothing has ever been done to follow through and enact these laws, as has been done in California.
Meanwhile, the illicit trade steams along, generating millions of dollars in street-level cash and producing a steady stream of mostly young black men flowing into Orleans Parish Prison, courtesy of a perfect storm of poverty, undereducation, lack of meaningful employment, and a structurally racist judicial system that can't seem to spend enough money trashing the futures of young African-American men.
Of course, no matter how aggressive law enforcement interdiction is, the bottom line, written in bloody scrawl, is that so long as prohibition exists, so will exist the wildly profitable drug trade, and all the violence arising therefrom. Seventy years of federal stupidity (and, lots of people like myself might say, seventy years of racially skewed enforcement) has only made the trade stronger and more embedded. One has to question the intelligence of every person in the chain of law enforcement when one realizes that a) cops, lawyers, judges, and feds see first-hand every day the futility of their efforts at controlling the trade, and b) these same people see, at least in New Orleans, that murderers go free while hundreds of unfortunate souls languish behind bars for foolishly trying to make a buck from a dangerous game.
If Louisiana was smart enough to decriminalize marijuana, the boost to the state's economy would be tremendous. People pay to get high -- the market is already established. Ignoring this facet of entrepreneurialism is is just plain stupid. The fact that this stupidity engenders mayhem in the streets and dead ends for young people is criminal, and is far more harmful to society than a consumer market of spaced-out stoners could ever be.
To hell with puritanical laws, people are going to get high no matter what the cops and judges say. Cops and judges routinely use and abuse intoxicants that were once illegal, but the country at least had the sense to end alcohol prohibition -- albeit after making a literal killing for organized crime during its decade-and-a-half-long reign of error.
As a Southerner who understands the historical paradox of the phrase "state's rights" -- a phrase that, for most of the 20th century, was thrown around by powerful whites in an effort to keep the feds from doing anything to improve the lives of blacks -- I appreciate that there are two sides to every political story. But federal prohibition of marijuana keeps American states powerless to find new ways to combat abuse and spark local economies.
Farmers all over the nation are looking for profitable new crops, but federal law keeps them from growing industrial hemp -- a resource so indispensible in the pre-synthetic-fabric world that the US all but mandated farmers grow it for military use during World War II (and made a somewhat famous film urging farmers to raise Cannabis, a film called "Hemp for Victory"). It keeps sick people from getting a natural medicine to ease their pain. And yes, resource-squandering drug warriors, it keeps average American joes from getting high. Is there any reason, based on fact and not on emotionally manipulated anecdote or spurious argumentation, why people shouldn't be able to put into their bodies whatever they wish? Legal tobacco kills, while illegal weed makes people goofy. Where's the sense in that?
Economic, medical, and social nonsense. That makes three strikes against prohibition. Word to the drug czar: YER OUT!
