Pubdate: Wed, 07 Aug 2013
Source: State-Journal (KY)

MARIJUANA LEGALIZATION WILL NOT CURE AMERICA'S DRUG PROBLEM

The citizens of America have decided that marijuana should be legal.
Finally their Legislators are starting to listen to them. Twenty
states have legalized the cultivation, use and sale of medical
marijuana and two states, Washington and Colorado have legalized it
for medical, industrial and recreational uses. Eventually the Federal
Government will come around and the long nightmare of marijuana
prohibition will be over.

The ending of marijuana prohibition has been a long time coming. While
America will no longer have a marijuana prohibition problem, it will
still have the original policy of prohibition it uses to deal with
drug use and abuse. The policy of drug prohibition started in 1914
with the Harrison Act which made opium and other drugs illegal and
finally provided oversight of the drug market. This prohibition of
some drugs and not others has fueled, as alcohol prohibition did in
the thirties, a rise in criminal activity to supply the needs of a
population of addicts who were suddenly cut off from the help of their
doctors, and made criminals simply by the fact of their addiction.

Prohibition was the basis of the Harrison Act in 1914 and it is today
the basis of all of America's drug policies. America spends upwards of
51 billion dollars a year to enforce a policy that has never, in it's
almost 100 years of trying, had a year that could be called a success.
One point 3 percent of the population was the addiction rate in 1914
and it is the same today.

Other countries have tried other policies, most recently in Portugal
where eleven years ago they adopted a policy of harm reduction and
eliminated the crime of criminal possession. The result has been a
huge drop in the harms associated with drug use.

It is truly wonderful that the failed policy of marijuana prohibition
is ending, but as long as prohibition is the focus of our efforts in
dealing with drug use and abuse we will never come anywhere near
successfully treating America's drug problem.
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