Should marijuana be legalized for recreational use?

Voters across the State of California are currently weighing the merits of Proposition 19, also known as the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010, which legalizes the possession of up to one ounce of cannabis, its recreational use by adults over the age of 21 in non-public spaces, and the cultivation of up to 25 square feet of cannabis for personal use. Before filling out your ballot, consider what two current CSPP students had to say while weighing the evidence in consideration of cannabis legalization.

By James McCollum

Imagine you happen to look into the open window of an apartment. Inside you see a man hitting a woman. Quickly, you look down the street and see a police officer at the end of the block. Do you let him know about this crime in progress? Now, imagine that instead of seeing the man hitting the woman, you see the two of them happily smoking marijuana together. Is this something you'd report?

I'm willing to bet most people don't think smoking marijuana is as condemnable as simple assault, yet both are illegal and carry similar penalties. If one believes punishments should match the crime, this doesn’t make sense. Furthermore, one only needs to look at the amount of marijuana we collectively consume to see that our public morality, our system of laws and regulations, doesn't square up with our private morality and how we behave individually.

I’m not interested in using marijuana, and I think it’s bad for people, just like alcohol and cigarettes. However, even though I don’t want to use marijuana, others might, and maybe they should be allowed to make the decision for themselves. Drug use is complicated both from legal and moral perspectives, but there are compelling reasons to consider legalizing marijuana.

The greatest benefit of legalization is a decrease in crime. Prohibition of marijuana leads to crime. When a high-demand good cannot be acquired legally, an underground market will naturally arise to fulfill that need. Because individuals in underground markets cannot settle their disputes through legal means, they resort to violence. Our demand for drugs, and our prohibition of those drugs, has a real cost in human lives, even if we need to go to Mexican border towns to see it.

It may be argued that marijuana is a “gateway drug,” either to other drug use or to a life of crime, and thus legalization would eventually increase crime. However, it is a fallacy to base predictions of increased drug use or criminality upon those who currently use marijuana. Many current marijuana users do so illegally, thus demonstrating a lack of respect for the law. They follow the laws they like and ignore the ones they don't. The people who currently use marijuana are precisely the people who we'd expect to use other drugs or commit more crimes. In other words, it is a biased sample.

As a policy to stop the usage of marijuana, prohibition has failed. Marijuana is readily available. I'm a pretty “uncool,” not very street savvy person, and even I could get marijuana if I wanted. Yet we as a society continue to pour millions of dollars into fighting what usage rates tell us many people don't care about. The truth is that many people will use drugs no matter the laws. It seems to me that we ought to spend our money on treatment of the real problems associated with drug use, psychological, medical, and social, rather than continue to fund prohibition.

Legalization is not an all-or-nothing proposition. There are sensible measures to curb usage or to dis- courage use among certain populations. Minimum purchase ages and taxation have had some effect in controlling the use of other drugs like alcohol and tobacco, and changing social attitudes toward behaviors such as drunk driving show that mechanisms other than laws can contribute to responsible drug use in society. Attitudes toward drugs have more impact on behavior than laws do; compare the prohibition of alcohol to the changing attitudes about smoking tobacco.

There are serious health and social consequences for drug use, marijuana included. If risks to health and well-being don’t deter use, it is not surprising that laws don’t deter it either. Marijuana use is inevitable. Given that, we as a society should ask ourselves how best to respond. Prohibition diverts resources from the real problems associated with drug use. Use itself is not the problem, we know many people can responsibly use drugs like alcohol, and many people can responsibly use marijuana. Unfortunately, there are those who cannot responsibly use and we should do what we can to help them through treatment and rehabilitation, not through prohibition and punishment. In a society with such high levels of drug consumption, prohibition is hypocritical. Remember that apartment you happened to look into with the couple smoking marijuana? If you don’t care enough to tell the police about it, why should we collectively care?

By Manny González

In a recent article by the British journal, Society for the Study of Addiction, they summarized the cannabis debate claiming a “powerful implicit media simplification of the central policy issue, namely, that cannabis use is either harmless, in which case its use should be decriminalized, or it is harmful, in which case cannabis use should continue to be criminalized.”

I would tend to agree with this statement and when applied to Proposition 19, it appears that its proponents are attempting to disrupt the status quo by swinging the pendulum to the opposite extreme. California needs to find a middle ground on the marijuana issue and unfortunately Proposition 19 is not the panacea that will ameliorate all of California’s woes.

If passed, the proposition will allow Californians to grow up to 25 square feet of cannabis and have up to an ounce of it in their possession, arguably legalizing recreational usage of cannabis. However, the federal government still considers it to be a Schedule 1 substance, along with heroin and LSD. This means that the government officially does not recognize its medical usage and argues that it has a high potential for abuse. While the feds have lately turned a blind eye toward raiding and prosecuting California cannabis dispensaries, effectively opening up the floodgates for medicinal marijuana use (which had been passed in the 1996 California Compassionate Use Act), the passing of the current legislation may usher in more federal involvement and subsequent prosecution. The Attorney General has recently made a statement declaring that the federal government will still seek to prosecute Californians even if Prop 19 is passed.

Prop 19 proponents argue that cannabis is a harmless substance and that the government should seek to legalize it and tax it as a means to generate revenue to balance our state deficit. Although the legalization of cannabis would alleviate some financial burdens, these savings would arguably be dismal in comparison to those associated with the legal fees that we would incur from the federal government battling it out with the state courts.

Furthermore, the long-term consequences of legalizing cannabis would eclipse the short-term financial gains. In addition to the health complications of smoking cannabis, which are on par with tobacco usage in chronic users, cannabis use has also been found to increase the risk, onset, and acuity of psychotic symptoms and disorders. It is also argued that the long-term costs associated with poorer education outcomes in marijuana users, such as reduced memory and attention performance, will produce lasting effects on the workforce that will not generate as much revenue for the economy and prove to be more of a burden upon tax-payers. It has also been found to be highly addictive among lifetime users, with one in ten developing dependence (both in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, where it has been legal de facto since 1976).

The question is not whether or not we should pass Proposition 19. The question is whether or not we want to have a state that may turn into a cannabis tourism destination and that attempts to solve its economic problems by taxing cannabis, effectively producing more economic and psychosocial problems for its citizens. It this the state you want to be associated with and live in?