Decriminalizing any drug facilitates and increase in use – This metric is all but universal. Legalizing any drug gives it societies highest stamp of approval and protects possessors and users of this drug from any judicial educative process. The mantra becomes ‘I have a right to do this, because it is legal’.
No jurisdiction, including the over-quoted and under investigated ‘Portugal Model’, has seen drug use decrease under these models.
One does not need a degree in any of the social sciences to understand that the increased use of psychotropic toxins and their mood, psychological and behavioural modifying capacities also leads to a litany of passive and active harms – everything from a-motivational and unproductive lethargy to extreme violence.
The environmental wrecking ball that is illegal cannabis grows is almost incalculable, and the human trafficking that accompanies these enterprises is shocking.
Of course, we will disappear down a rabbit hole of dysfunction when we begin to look at the other associated criminal, social, familial, health and mental health harms of addictive substances.
The cost of the production, use and inevitable harmful outcomes of a product that has essentially only one end – the altering of mind and mood, is staggering.
And it is invariably the non-drug using public that bears the lion’s share of the fiscal and social burden of these pernicious behaviours.
See also
- Permission – The Most Effective Drug Pusher
- Up In Smoke
- Then There were Three – Marijuana Markets paper
- Proposition 64 and the Growth of Black Market
- Cannabis & Hemp – A Scientific Review of the Evidence
- Risks of Marijuana Use
- Cannabis Harms: An Overview of the Known Neurotoxicity and Genotoxicity of Cannabis.
- Legalizing Harm – Why Legalizing Cannabis is a Huge Public Health and Well-being Misstep
Communications Team – Dalgarno Institute