My attention has been focused on finishing some work over the last couple of days and it's likely to keep me preoccupied for a while longer but I'd like to interject a couple of observations into this thread if I may.
Prohibition exists on the supply and use of a range of consumables which are either addictive or psychoactive. The cost of that prohibition is a black market in those goods. Suppliers and users are criminalized. The jail population is higher than it would be were these activities not legislated against.
Prohibition does not exist on two specific consumables which are both addictive and psychoactive. Their supply and use are not criminalized. These are alcohol and tobacco.
To take tobacco first, there's a CDC webpage at
http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/factsheets/T ... tsheet.htm on mortality associated with its use. Key phrases include: "Cigarette smoking causes ... about 1 of every 5 deaths, each year", "More deaths are caused each year by tobacco use than by all deaths from human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), illegal drug use, alcohol use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides, and murders combined", "On average, adults who smoke cigarettes die 13–14 years earlier than nonsmokers".
The second CDC paper, to fill the picture out a bit, is at
http://wonder.cdc.gov/wonder/sci_data/n ... tality.pdf and indicates that "in 2003, a total of 20,687 persons died of alcohol-induced causes in the United States" - that figure excludes accidents in which alcohol consumption played a part. In the same period "28,723 persons died of drug-induced causes, a figure which includes not only deaths from dependent and nondependent use of drugs (legal and illegal use), but also poisoning from medically prescribed and other drugs". Those figures can at least be compared in magnitude with the 440,000 deaths each year from tobacco use.
We seem to have developed two vocabularies to perpetuate the acceptability of legal discrimination against the minority problem. Low-life scum who should die rather than be a charge on taxes would be a typical phrase employed where the supply is illegal, but doesn't seem to be used often about the management of R J Reynolds. We jail people who grow cannabis plants for personal use, criminalizing them by the existence of the laws which define criminality, while sat at our keyboards with an ashtray in plain view. Smoking cigarettes isn't illegal. It's just a damn sight more dangerous than using cannabis. The choice of which one is criminalized, which is acceptable, is societal, but it has nothing to do with harm or lethality. "Low-life scum" isn't applied to the membership here while getting progressively less capable of coherent thought as the evening progresses and glass after glass of intoxicant is fetched from the fridge. We choose whom we target with hatred. We choose to criminalize and build more jails rather than allow the adult population to make an informed decision. The next time someone's offered a free rock of crack by a street dealer who's lying, in his own interest, that there's no clean cocaine to be had, consider how much healthier the trade would be if the punter had been able to buy his cocaine from the branded drug section of the local BevMo.
Why isn't cocaine or cannabis available at BevMo? Because it's illegal to sell it there. There's no other reason. They sell alcohol, and alcohol already kills more people than cocaine or cannabis ever could, it's a lethal poison unlike the other two. They sell tobacco, for which multiply by twenty.
The problem is societal willingness - or need, even - to hate outsiders. If you have an issue with low-life scum who ought to be dead, that's the issue to address first. It seems far more addictive than any mere chemical.
knucklehead..
But that is my opinion.
