Alchohol, Tobacco and other Drugs

War versus acknowledgment of reality.

General

     As long as there have been societies,adults have used drugs in the normal exercise of their lives. Any drug available is incorporated in the live of a community. Commonly available drugs were used by everyone. Cocoa leaves were chewed to increase physical endurance, caffeine was used to enhance mental acuity. Hallucinogenics and other rare drugs were oftentimes reserved for use by the priests and doctors. They used them to get in touch with their higher power and assist in treating illness that their citizens were suffering, both physical and mental/spiritual.

Historic

     War on drugs is a losing war. There are several drugs that are widely legally available: Alcohol, tobacco products, caffeine, mood enhancers, pain killers, and cocoa (yes, it is a mild drug). Not surprising is the fact that these are produced by corporations and heavily regulated and taxed by the government. Prohibition was a war on drugs. If alcohol prohibition in 1920-1933 demonstrated anything, it was the attempting to eradicate any particular drug's use was worse than the effects of that drug on the general public. During Prohibition, alcohol was never not available. It was prescribed by doctors, given as free refreshment with an over-priced entertainment or product or made at home with a commercial product that said on its label words to the effect that you should not put this in a container with water and leave it in a cool cupboard for 21 days or it would turn into illegal wine (wink, wink). Only commerce in alcohol was illegal. A visiting mayor from a German city in the 1930's asked a local official when Prohibition was going to be implemented...

Selling alcohol was made illegal. This attempt to make alcohol unavailable was worse than useless. The business that had been legal and profitable and taxed, were shut down. The business world took a hit. Not just the distillers, but all the support industries were impacted. Where the expected result was that people would spend their beer money on clothes, housing, household goods and entertainment. That did not happen. It was just more expensive to buy alcohol and required more time to do. The legal supply chains were replaced on an ad hoc basis with cottage industries (moonshiners and rum runners), and organized crime (the Mafia international trade in rum from the Caribbean, Canadian whiskey, Mexican tequila and European spirits). Prohibition did not stop people from drinking alcohol. It only made a large portion of the population criminals, and alcohol more expensive, formalized criminal structures which continue to this day and made alcohol-related crime so much more profitable. And the loss to the government was in the form of $11 billion taxes not collected and $300 million in enforcement costs. This had the effect of causing the government to seek funds (taxes) elsewhere. At this point the government was forced to increase taxes on income to compensate for the lost alcohol tax. Police succumbed to bribes on a large enough scale to taint all law enforcement in the public's eyes. And the US government was implicated in the deaths of drinkers by the addition of deadly chemicals into commercial alcohol.

Current War on Drugs

Tally the costs of the war. Imprisonment, crime, enforcement, lost taxes. Jailing in the USA for drug offenses is $20 billion per year. Lost tax revenue in the USA is $46 billion per year. Enforcement in the USA is $41 billion per year. These costs or losses total $100 billion per year in the USA. International crime earns 320 billion per year on drug trade.

The human losses are likewise large. Not only is there a cost in the damage to society due to the unequal enforcement of laws, but the almost permanent disenfranchisement is creating an underclass of people that cannot escape their plight because a possession charge can be a felony and that functionally makes a person unemployable for the rest of their lives. 1.2 million are incarcerated for simple possession. Along with the cost of imprisonment, lost productivity and the loss of employability are all factors in the cost of the war on drugs. That number of prisoners, even at minimum wage represents a loss of wages in the range of and additional $20 billion, even if you factor this as minimum wage jobs.

Compare various drugs Other

                            Tobacco                             Alcohol                         Marijuana                  Illegal Drugs                       Legal Drugs

deaths per year    480,000                             50,000                         0                                17,000                                33,000

tax                        $17 billion                          $9 billion                      -$107 billion for all illegal drugs                             ?

                                                                                                          (Colorado collected $200 million so far)

                                                                                                          (Oregon collected $75 million, California projected $1 billion)

The historic example of the failure of Prohibition is a concrete indication that mind altering drugs will always be with us. Many of the most popular “heros” in media are drinkers “of a fine single malt”, a “fruity girly drink” or an “amusing little wine”. Drugs are a perfectly acceptable in society in general. Only the most fervent religious adherents disavow drug use in total. Another indicator of the failure of current attempts to stop drug trafficking can be seen by looking at the cost of cocaine and heroin. Both prices have fallen – cocaine prices are 16% less than in 2001 methamphetamine and heroin changes are similar. Drug use has been stable. If less drugs were smuggled or it was more costly to do, the prices would rise, but prices have fallen. Statistics on the presence of THC in the bloodstream in of accident victims is inconclusive as there is no measure of how intoxicated a person is.

Corporate versus primitive/artisanal product. 

There are legal drugs that are immensely more deadly than the street drugs equivalents. There is an opioid epidemic in this country that is due partly to the freely prescribed opiates. One can argue that part of the problem is that the medical system is unable to “treat the whole patient” instead of treating the symptoms. Anecdotal evidence (I know that is an oxymoron) say that patients are seen, diagnosed and then prescribed more drugs to treat more symptoms. Patients are then taking more and more drugs – some highly addictive – until some of the drugs are treating symptoms from other drugs. I know a man who took shopping bags full of medicine, so much that when the interactions caused their own symptoms, he had to be hospitalized for weeks to safely wean him from all the drugs so they could determine if he had any new underlying health problems and then prescribe only the drugs need for his health. He had gone through this cycle more than once.