Decriminalization of Drugs Going Mainstream?

I caught the end of Charlie Rose on Bloomberg earlier this evening, and I found the final three minutes very interesting. The topic was the State of Latin America and the panel was the Chair of NYU's Latin America History Department, the Dean of International Studies at Columbia, a policy wonk for a think tank devoted to Latin American studies, and a former high-ranking Costa Rican official (I apologize for not remembering names or details 100% accurately).

As was to be expected, there was disagreement among these men on a litany of topics. Yet when Rose brought up "non-State players", as I believe he so aptly put it, there was universal agreement among the panel that the War on Drugs was an absolute failure, needed to be amended, if not shut down, and that it was the single most devastating policy Washington, D.C. had enacted on Latin America in the past forty years.

Obviously such things won't happen for many years, if they happen at all. But it is encouraging to see such well-respected intellectuals of various ideologies and backgrounds all taking this position.

Marijuana a Gateway Drug?

I recently got into a brief debate with someone over whether drugs, and in particular marijuana, should be legal or not (the discussion arose after I made the (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek comment that if Detroit wants to survive, it should become the next Sin City).

Anyways, this person said he was against legalizing marijuana because it is a gateway drug. Now the Gateway Drug Theory as I understand it, when it comes to marijuana, is more or less defunct as a legitimate scientific theory. At the very least, it has been acknowledged by most in the scientific community that tobacco and alcohol are much "stronger" gateway drugs than marijuana.

This gateway argument doesn't hold for two primary reasons. The first is the age old rule of statistics: correlation does not equal causation. In other words, substitute the word "milk" for "marijuana" and you have the same exact argument. I believe that substance use or abuse is much more a revealer of who someone is and the conditions that affect their life as oppossed to being causes of a "bad lifestyle." Of course drug use/abuse can contribute to a downward spiral, but I'm unconvinced it is primarily due to drug use or is a chicken/egg problem.

Secondly, I think this argument reveals a great deal of confirmation bias within the proponent. And that confirmation bias is that a lot of people, for whatever reason, hate and are freaked out by weed. Even though marijuana is far less dangerous than tobacco and alcohol, there is a bizarre taboo that surrounds marijuana that has only been perpetuated by decades of federal taxpayer-funded propoganda campaigns. Why people have such an irrational fear of marijuana relative to alcohol and tobacco is beyond me, but if you find yourself discussing this issue with someone and they refuse to acknowledge that tobacco and alcohol are just as gateway-relevant as marijuana and thus should be made illegal as well, than this is most likely the reason why.

If anyone is familiar with scientific papers that find marijuana a more potent gateway drug than alcohol and tobacco, please forward on to me. My searches have been futile so far.

"U.S. Mellows on Medical Marijuana"

Per the WSJ, great news for freedom lovers.

Free Markets and Drug Prohibition

I have a philosophical question for conservative drug warriors: Why do you believe rational individuals should not be allowed by government to put any foreign substance they wish into their bodies? Put another way, why do you believe the state has the right to dictate to rational individuals what they can and cannot put into their own bodies?

You cannot call yourself "free-market" and believe in drug prohibition (and other types of prohibition that fall outside the Law). It is intellectually disingenuous to do so.