Professional basketball player Brittney Griner was sentenced to nine years in a Russian prison for smuggling a small amount of cannabis oil into that country. She says she obtained it legally in the U.S. and accidentally packed it in her luggage when she traveled to Russia.
Many Americans, including high-profile politicians, are calling for Griner’s release. It’s assumed that she will eventually be freed in some sort of prisoner swap between the U.S. and Russian governments.
In a rational society Griner never would have been arrested or convicted for what she did, and she should not have to spend another day behind bars. How many of her advocates, though, have ever voiced similar concern for the other Brittney Griners — as many as 374,000 of them — locked up in America? That’s how many people on any given day are in jails or prisons in the U.S. on drug charges, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.
Granted, many of those convictions and charges involve nastier drugs than cannabis oil or recreational marijuana. Also, many involve more than simple possession; 99 percent of federal prisoners convicted on drug charges are there for trafficking, for example. Some of those prisoners may also have committed real — i.e., violent — crime along with their drug violations, in which case continued incarceration might be warranted (but not for the drug charges).
However, there are many heartbreaking and enraging stories of people being sent away for 25, 40 or more years, or sometimes life, for selling a few grams of a controlled substance to a friend, or to an undercover cop. A large number of these drug war victims are young people whose futures have been cavalierly sacrificed for the sake of boosting police arrest rates or padding out a prosecutor’s résumé before the next election.
Volumes have been written on the drug war’s insanity. The harms are multitudinous, and include the destruction of lives through incarceration, the waste of police resources, the corruption of criminal justice, the fostering of real crime and the empowerment of the most vicious individuals in society outside of politics — the organized gangs and drug cartels.
And it doesn’t work. The U.S.’s government-sponsored war on drugs has been as costly a failure as its equally wasteful and ineffective war on poverty. Witness the opioid explosion.
Most people now can see the ludicrousness of locking someone up for having a tiny amount of cannabis oil on her. There are many, too, who understand the futility and overkill of knocking down people’s doors because they smoked, bought or sold some marijuana. That, in part, is why a number of states have legalized pot to one degree or another. (Likelier playing a bigger part is that politicians realized they were missing out on the money the state could be skimming in the form of taxes and license fees on legal weed.)
This welcome moderation of attitudes toward some drugs and some users doesn’t get at the moral wrong of prohibition, though. “Illicit” drug use, drug manufacture and drug sale, in and of themselves, are victimless crimes.
If I, an adult, choose to put something in my own body, be it an aspirin or heroin, and I’m not posing an immediate threat to others by doing so, no one has the right to stop me, and certainly not to kidnap me and put me in a cage. The same goes if I choose to sell an “illicit” drug to a willing buyer.
It comes down to bodily autonomy, which is another way of saying property rights, as in: I own myself.
Our rulers don’t believe in bodily autonomy. On the one hand they’ll punish you for putting something into your body they don’t want you to have — certain drugs, say. On the other they’ll bully and coerce you to take something into your body they do want you to have — an experimental injection, for example. Simply leaving you the hell alone is not on their agenda.
When I argue this with people, I’m sometimes told that talk of rights and freedom is self-serving blather to cover for the fact that I “obviously” desire, personally, to smoke pot or do other drugs.
For the record my drugs of choice are coffee and alcohol. Although my alcohol consumption consists of a few glasses of wine on weekends, I down a dozen or more cups of coffee daily. It’s a good thing for me that coffee, in particular, is legal; otherwise I might have to knock over convenience stores for the money to pay elevated black-market prices for my java fix.
I don’t like marijuana, due to bad experiences the few times I tried it (the last time being 40 years ago) and, moreso, what I saw heavy pot smoking did to people.
I’ll admit to having a prejudice that may not be entirely rational, but that’s what negative life experiences can do. I once had a friend who grew up with an alcoholic parent, and as a result no one could drink a beer in front of him without him making deprecatory comments about it. Yet he smoked pot, a habit I consider in some ways worse than drinking.
Now, marijuana probably causes fewer social problems than alcohol does, and I’ve witnessed some pretty awful behavior by drunks (I once helped remove a guy from a party who kept falling into the furniture and breaking it). But for most drinkers I know, alcohol is a pleasant relaxant and social lubricant, whereas people on pot seem invariably … well, dopey. Stupefied. Zombied-out.
That’s my prejudice, and I’m sticking with it.
I lived for a time in a Victorian-era house on Birmingham’s southside, that had been divided into apartments. Tom and Donna were a couple in their twenties (about my age then). They got reduced rent due to Tom being the designated caretaker for the place, although I never noticed him doing any work or ever fixing anything. Donna worked as a nurse.
Their free time was devoted entirely to getting and smoking weed, and when they ran out they became frantic until they could score more. Don’t tell me the stuff isn’t addictive.
One day Tom knocked on my door and asked me to lend him money to buy groceries; he had already spent everything he had that day on pot. Donna would repay me when she got home, he assured me. I gave him $50. As this was decades ago and I was working a low-paying job, that was a fairly significant amount for me.
Donna didn’t come around that evening to repay me. The next day I saw her and asked about my money; she promised it “tomorrow.” Tomorrow became next week, and finally one day I knocked on their door and said I really needed the $50. “I can’t pay you,” Donna said, just like that — no more promises about later; basically she was telling me she was never going to repay. She might as well have said, “Too bad, sucker.”
The real kicker came not more than an hour later. There was a knock on my door. I opened it, and there stood Donna. She needed money to buy cigarettes and could I “loan” it to her?
I stared at her in stunned disbelief a moment and then told her absolutely not (I should have said, “Hell, no”).
“Shit!” she yelled as she angrily stomped away down the stairs.
It may be that Tom and Donna were people of bad character who happened to smoke pot, but I think their commitment to a pothead lifestyle likely contributed to their inability, or refusal, to behave as decent human beings. I later learned that Tom made a habit of letting himself into my apartment when I wasn’t there, rummaging around for change I might have left out, and even “borrowing” things of mine without asking.
Perhaps you, reader, are someone who consumes marijuana and whose pot use does not negatively affect your life, including in your behavior toward others. My apologies if I’ve tarred you with a bad brush here, but again, I have my prejudice, and it’s a hard one to shake.
Nevertheless, I do believe that marijuana is not the harmless substance it’s made out to be. Someone who agrees with me is Alex Berenson.
Berenson is the former New York Times writer I began following in 2020 for his independent writing on Covid, and particularly on the official claims made for lockdowns, mask mandates and, eventually, the vaccines-that-are-not-vaccines. Analyzing data from governments themselves, from agencies such as the CDC and WHO, and from peer-reviewed scientific studies, Berenson was out in front in exposing the lies that fed the propaganda used to justify tyranny in country after country. His book, Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives is one of several on the subject I would recommend.
Earlier, though, he was writing about marijuana. His book, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence takes on what he terms myths about the drug, homing in particularly on claims as to its harmlessness. He goes so far as to make the case that THC, the active component of marijuana, can cause psychotic episodes. Of late he has speculated that marijuana use may play a significant role in at least some of the mass shootings committed by (typically) young males.
I’m prepared to accept Berenson’s thesis, but where I part with him is on his opposition to marijuana legalization. I can disapprove of people misusing cannabis to their personal detriment, while abjuring the use of state violence to prevent them from exercising their right to do so.
For reasons both practical and principled, governments should not be in the drug regulation business at all, whether we’re talking marijuana, the newest pharma pills or the latest scary street stuff. Regulation is properly the responsibility of the market.
Politicians not only should end prohibition, they should get their grubby hands out of the drug business and stop taxing, subsidizing or licensing people who make or sell any substance, whether it’s one that is used to heal or to get high. By the way, they (that is, the state) shouldn’t be running lotteries or operating alcoholic beverage control stores, either.
Does this mean people must tolerate meth labs in their neighborhoods? Of course not.
Bringing all drugs out of the shadows through decriminalization should have many good effects, among them the creation of safer drugs, more transparency (the way my local microbrewery gives tours of its beermaking room), cessation of a great deal of the real crime that surrounds drugs now (e.g., robbery, assault,) , and the disempowerment of violent gangs.
As to meth labs on your street … well, the government hasn’t been very good at solving that problem, has it, even with all those SWAT raids?
In a free society — one without political rulers and politicized police — communities of private property owners could covenant to set whatever rules about drugs they wished, and establish non-rights-violating mechanisms to enforce them. Unlike today’s politicians, they would have the most powerful possible incentives to make them work.
Simply decriminalizing drugs, though, would go a long way toward de-fanging any threats they currently pose to people who have no interest in them.
Meanwhile, in the state-dominated world of 2022, it would be a good thing if the thug government of Russia were to be pressured to release Brittney Griner and anyone else it has caged for similar non-crime crimes. It would be good if the thug governments of the United States released all of their Brittney Griners, too.
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