What do you think would happen if someone created a site where users post videos like this one:
My name is blah blah. I live in blah and I think its time for a change in the the war on drugs.
Then they can bitch for a bit about their personal reasons why putting American citizens in jail for their benign hobbies is a crock of shit and they close with:
When some number of people post a pledge to some site, I will procure and grow a marijuana plant on my private property in a place inaccessible to children.
If anyone taking this pledge is is arrested for acting reasonably in their own home, I will go to the prison where they are being held, confess my crime and sit in front of the gate until I am imprisoned with them.
When someone adds their video, they put in the number they said and whenever there’s that number of pledges, they get an e-mail giving them the go ahead. There could also be a way for them to let their friends notify the other protestors in case the cops drag them away in the middle of the night.
For me, the number was 3000 people. How would the images of thousands of folks sitting in rows in front of the prison gates play out on the news? The government has to convincingly argue that all of these people were doing something wrong by growing a plant in their private homes that millions of adults, including our last three Presidents, have used responsibly.
The issue is close to tipping already and I think this could push it over the edge. If the government was bright enough to not to step into this tar pit, it would at least save a few thousand people from having to find a drug dealer.
“Some days it feels like I’m watching a house on fire. And one idiot wants to put it out with a machine gun. The other one wants to use grenades. And I’m standing there with a bucket of water and they look at me like I’m crazy.”
or
“When a government uses military personnel, equipment, and tactics against its own citizens, is it time to call it a Civil War rather than a Drug War?”
People know from the drugs that they can get their hands on, alcohol and pharmaceuticals if nothing else, that getting fucked up can be entertaining and relatively safe. This creates demand. Prohibitionist drug policies attempt to stifle this demand through authoritarian control (arresting people who operate in the drug economy).
It’s sadly ironic that the same conservatives so blindly certain of the creativeness of the market in solving all our economic woes somehow think those markets are going to get stupid and uncreative when meeting demands that they don’t think should exist.
There are potentially responsible use patterns for a variety of substances. No quantity of propaganda is somehow going to reach into the heads of the millions of consenting Americans who have first-hand experience with this fact and somehow erase it. The War on Drugs can achieve short-term market depressions, but they can’t remove the fundamental driving force of the system.
(Source: Jack E. Henningfield, Ph.D. for NIDA, Reported by Philip J. Hilts, New York Times, Aug. 2, 1994 “Is Nicotine Addictive? It Depends on Whose Criteria You Use.”)
What we have now, is bunches of people who don’t trust the government to tell them what is safe and what is not and, since many aren’t very good at researching the long-term effects of their actions, they’re just going to find convenient ways to get the state they want.
We really need to be putting our time and money into how to encourage responsible drug use. So long as people need to get away from their problems or are simply curious about the nature of consciousness, this market is not going to dry up.
