Click here to Listen - NPR Radio (Skip to 3:10)

This is a great listen but I gotta address one thing that came up in the show.  An economist they interview claims that legalizing drugs is a trade off between reducing crime and increased addiction. But that's a false dichotomy, a logical fallacy.

Legalization is just as likely to decrease addiction as raise it... if addicts no longer have to fear legal trouble because of their illness (self inflicted but an illness none the less) and can be treated as patients rather than criminals, I think it will help improve treatment results. People often think of drug addiction as the result of some super addictive substance. That's the story we've been fed, that this scary drug will steal our soul and ruin our lives if we so much as take it 1 time, but it's not true. There's a whole list of things that contribute to addiction, from the drug's potency to your genetic predispositions to the room you use the drug in.  We like to have 1 thing to blame, it keeps things simple, but it's not accurate.  The environment around us (social attitudes, peer groups, access to treatment, etc), contributes greatly to addiction, and legalization would change the environment by switching our countries focus away from viewing drug use as a criminal problem and instead to seeing it as a medical problem.

For one second, please imagine prohibiting... masturbation ........  it just wouldn't work, would it?  We human's like to alter our state of consciousness, just like we enjoy sex and food, and you can't get us to stop.  We will always attempt to alter our state of consciousness whether it be by smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer, meditating, dreaming, yoga, skydiving, sex, or any other drugs, and how we want to do it should be our choice.

In all of our communities there is a small population that will always use drugs no matter how illegal you make them.  I have a theory that this drug using population won't grow so much, even if legalization happens.  Why?  Because the one's who aren't using crack right now mostly just don't want to use it. I know if crack was made legal tomorrow I sure wouldn't go out and buy it just because it was suddenly legal. I've no desire to buy it.  I don't think there's a rush of new customers to the freshly built corner drug store.  Any increase in use would be by current consumers who then have easier access.  But increased use by regular customers doesn't mean an increase in addiction.  If the liquor store has a sale and you buy more than you normally would, do you automatically become an alcoholic?  No (for the majority of us at least).  Alcohol is addictive and you can die from the withdrawal symptoms, yet increased use by a regular consumer doesn't cause addiction.

I'd rather that the current crack consumers be allowed to buy it without endangering their lives and mine by funding criminals and increasing crime, that instead of drug dealers getting all the money most of it goes to legitimate business owners and some of it goes to tax revenue, which should be set aside to fund treatment of drug abuse, health care and national parks. Let the drug purchasers fund the drug treatment. Isn't that better than the current system where our tax dollars pay for a little bit of treatment and a whole lot of wasted policing?  And might not the treatment programs be better funded if the billions we poured into persecuting citizens of our country for altering their state of consciousness in a manner of their own choosing (aka putting whatever the fuck they want to put into their own damn body) were instead put into treatment programs?  And wouldn't the farming industries in our country be boosted if they were allowed to grow the drugs here?  And wouldn't families be left better off because they no longer face the situation of being denied financial aid when trying to send their kid to college, all due to a drug charge from when their kid got caught with some weed?  That's the other problem with his argument - he acts as if the only benefit of legalization is a decrease in crime.

I can't say for sure that legalization would decrease addiction, but I think there's a chance that it could.  What I can say for sure is that prohibition sure as hell isn't working and under its rein new drugs like meth have appeared, addicting more people.  40 years of a drug war and things are just as bad as ever, yet we continue with the same strategy.  Isn't it insane to continue to do the same thing yet hope for a different result?