Pubdate: Sun, 21 Jul 2013
Source: Anchorage Daily News (AK)
Copyright: 2013 The Anchorage Daily News
Contact: http://www.adn.com/help/letters/
Website: http://www.adn.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/18
Author: John Havelock
Note: This is the first of two columns by John Havelock about the war
on drugs. The second, which focuses on the relationship of the drug
war to the criminal justice system, will run Tuesday. Havelock is a
former Alaska Attorney General and, later, while director of
University Legal Studies, directed the state's criminal code revision 
project.

TAKE MARIJUANA OUT OF DRUG WAR

Americans like wars: the war on poverty -- we lost that one when a
bigger war came along.

In 1971, while losing the war in Vietnam, President Nixon declared a
war on drugs.

The two wars got mixed together in some unpleasant ways. American
soldiers began using drugs in Vietnam as a way of deadening the fear
and loathing in fighting a war where civilians were indistinguishable
from enemy soldiers.

Back home, a youthful revolution developed: a rejection not just of
the war and the draft that was taking so many young men to death or
injury but of the humbug that had preceded it. The revolution rejected
apple pie, stars-and-stripes morality with its undertones of bigotry
and overtones of hypocrisy and embraced the emerging marijuana plant
as a principal source of recreational pleasure.

The increased solidarity among young blacks and whites, many of whom
had been part of the racial rebelliousness that brought about the
civil rights acts of the sixties did not sit comfortably with the
older ruling class still, particularly in the South, resisting the
civil rights movement.

Exaggerated proclamations regarding the dangers of drugs, marijuana in
particular, which did not match youthful experience, opened the
generational split further.

Birth control pills, newly invented and now widely distributed brought
a new sense of sexual freedom to American youth leaving parents aghast.

The new youth expressed itself through radically new musical
preferences, incomprehensible or appalling to their parents.

All this was accompanied by the expansion of marijuana use. The new
wave of young men wearing long hair as a signal of alienation from the
expectations of the adult world was the last straw.

The Establishment struck back, a counterrevolution against uppity
youth, spotting marijuana use as a point of special vulnerability.
They had a point.

Marijuana is not good for you. Yes, cigarettes are much more likely to
kill you. Alcohol is far worse.

It can get you in all kinds of trouble as well as shortening your
life. Alcohol and cigarettes are both more addictive but if you have
been around, you know someone who has spent too much time in a
marijuana haze. That cigarettes and alcohol, which are distributed
with minor controls, are much worse does not make marijuana healthy.

Still, tens of millions used it, often as a substitute for alcohol,
largely without ill effect.

Widespread marijuana use was harmful but it also provided the
temporary mind-altering sense of good feeling, relaxation and pleasure
that alcohol could provide, without equivalent dangerous side effects.

Establishment anger makes for bad policy.

Marijuana was scooped up in the reaction to much more dangerous
substances, particularly heroin and other opiates.

Draconian laws and enforcement policies were soon sending hundreds of
thousands of marijuana users to prison.

Still, a majority of Americans see marijuana use as relatively
harmless.

Half of America is making war against the other half with disastrous
consequences. After nearly half a century of this failed war, isn't it
time we declared the one on marijuana over -- won, lost or a draw?

Of course we can't just throw in the towel.

Drug use is a serious problem. We should continue to use the criminal
justice system for narcotics, controlled pharmaceuticals and similar
substances. However, we need to ease marijuana out of the criminal
code and into medical models of attention.

A petition for an initiative to "legalize" marijuana is being
circulated in Alaska, following movements under way in other states,
but the issues involved in wrapping up the war on drugs are broad and
require thoughtful consideration. The Legislature should take up the
issue either directly or through the establishment of a commission
with a short turnaround. In the meantime, lives are being ruined or
damaged, marriages broken, parental care destroyed, lifetime creative
employment capacities are being ruined, not so much by drugs as by the
war on drugs.

Continuing with the war on marijuana now is like staying in
Afghanistan for another decade in the hope that we can declare victory.
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MAP posted-by: Matt