The War on Drugs is a mess. Preventing harm cannot be achieved while some drugs are legal and others are not – it is a conceptual muddle and hypocritical. Many smart people have been saying for decades that drugs have positive aspects as well as negative. Educate people and let them choose what substances they want to use and the world will be a safer, healthier, and potentially better place.
Peace
“The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world. “- Carl Sagan
Ecological
“The fact that Richard Nixon saw Timothy Leary [proponent of LSD] as ‘the most dangerous man in America’ is an indication of just how threatening the values of the ‘counter-culture’ were deemed to be. However, few people in ’straight’ society had even glimpsed the extraordinary power of the revolutionary tool which Leary and others were propagating. As Jay Stevens observes in his seminal study of the drug, even the activists of the New Left had overlooked ‘the role LSD was playing in redefining the Counter-culture’s thrust’. For the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, ‘technology had produced a chemical which catalyzes a consciousness which finds the entire civilisation leading up to that pill absurd’” – Rory Spowers, A History of the Environmental Revolution and Visions for an Ecological Age.
We no longer live in a world of straight versus counter culture and yet we continue to fail to calculate the social good (in the Spowers’ example above the context is ecological awareness) against the potential social harm from the drug. In terms of ecological awareness there has never been a more pressing need for an awakening pill.
A tiny percentage of all those trillions so far spent on the War on Drugs would have been better spent on education (including educating the medical profession) and treating side effects. All drugs have benefits, not least social benefits and yet ’social harm’ always seems to come up as an argument for prohibition. Let’s try an intelligent approach instead.
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