Drugs Are Bad

When I was a kid in high school in the early 90s, we had these things called heads.

“Head” was short for metalhead, motorhead, or something like that—you remember the guys with Richard Marx mullets and bad attitudes in denim jackets and acid-wash jeans. You might find this hard to believe, but my high school had not one, but two smoking areas for students outside. They were full of heads. They would all go out and smoke in between classes. The archetype here is Judd Nelson from The Breakfast Club, who was referred to as a “burnout” in the movie.

Now, one thing that the heads all did in their free time was gasp! fainting couch! smoke weed. Not in the smoking area, mind you, but under bridges and in alleys and places like that. Now if you recall, back then we were in the midst of a very anti-drug zeitgeist, just coming off of 8 years of Nancy Reagan and Just Say No, and the social climate was very inhospitable to recreational drug use. At the time, it was said about the heads that they would smoke weed, drop out of society, and never amount to anything.

And you know what?  It was true!

None of those people ever did amount to anything. Marijuana was one of those taboo things that you just didn’t do, and if you did, it amounted to a breach of your character, and once that invisible line was crossed, you were willing to do anything—cocaine, meth, who knows. It was a gateway drug. The unacceptable became acceptable. A lot of those guys ended up in jail. None of them went to college. At best, they went to work in a chop shop somewhere, came home after work, covered in grease, and smoked more weed, which is not very uplifting.

To say that weed has had a rehabilitation in its image would be a colossal fucking understatement. Not only is it no longer a gateway drug, it is a miracle drug. Marijuana cures epilepsy, anxiety, headaches, cancer, diabetes, cirrhosis, erectile dysfunction (I’m just making shit up here) and all sorts of other afflictions. Not to mention the derivatives of weed, like CBD, which have no psychotropic effects, allegedly, but help take the edge off. Today, there is broad acceptance of marijuana use, and if you don’t use it, you’re a square.

The libertarians like to say that we shouldn’t be locking someone in a cage for being in possession of a plant. I can get behind that, sort of. Prohibition of a thing usually results in people being locked in cages for being in possession of that thing, and sometimes people get killed in the process. Alcohol prohibition was a messy affair, and after about thirteen years of it, we learned that the costs of prohibition were higher than the costs of legalization. What that means is that yes, bad things happen when people drink—they crash cars, they beat wives, but we concluded that more bad things were happening from trying to fight the enormous black market in alcohol, with violence.

Would that be true with marijuana?  Do the costs of prohibition exceed the costs of legalization?  In my view, it is about a push. Weed isn’t exactly harmless—it is am ambition-killer. It makes people want to watch Netflix and eat Dominos, instead of working. Add up the economic costs of the aggregate loss of ambition and it’s pretty huge. But so is the human tragedy of no-knock SWAT raids and shooting dogs and multi-decade sentences for mere possession. It really comes down to a matter of personal preference.

But the hard-core libertarians go further, and say that all drugs should be legalized—not just pot, but cocaine, meth, ecstasy, heroin, everything. After all, why should the state have anything to say about what I put in my body?  It’s my body. If I want to get fucked up, that’s my right. And I can get behind that, too.

But I would make the argument that in certain parts of the country, all drugs are already de facto legalized—especially Los Angeles and San Francisco—and the results haven’t been pretty. Sure, there are laws on the books against these sorts of things, but they simply aren’t enforced. The result is open-air drug markets on the sidewalks in front of God and everyone. An open-air drug market probably sounds like a libertarian paradise, but in practice, it is pretty gross. And people are dropping dead on the street, and committing violent crimes. You have heard about the story of San Francisco by now, I don’t need to rehash it here.

So maybe there are some drugs where the cost of prohibition is lower than the cost of legalization. Maybe there are just some things that shouldn’t be legal. Maybe there are some substances that are so powerfully addictive (and deadly) that they create real societal problems (as well as economic losses) when they are cheap and easy to obtain. This isn’t about Church Chat puritanism—I’m no prude about sex, drugs, or anything. My purity test score is really low. I’m looking at this from the standpoint of pure utilitarianism—having these drugs be legal is more expensive than having them be illegal. So maybe the status quo, where alcohol is legal, marijuana is half-legal, and everything else is not, is really the right solution.

Weed is a tough one, because the benefits are visible, but the costs are invisible. Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas. A lot of people say that weed is actually superior to alcohol, because you don’t become violent and unpredictable when you smoke weed. I heard once that 90% of crimes are committed by drunk people. Weed makes people tranquil and pleasant. It’s not addictive, but it is habit-forming. And there are some documented health benefits. But it makes you not give a shit, and tens of millions of people not giving a shit, taken together, isn’t a good thing. Knock one or two percentage points off of GDP. Sometimes I wonder how much weed is responsible for the drop in the labor force participation rate. Probably a lot.

Drug overdose deaths recently topped 100,000 nationwide. Twenty years ago, they were less than 20,000. That’s pretty sad. I mean, the core of libertarian philosophy is that you should be able to put whatever you want into your body. But what if that is misguided? The last 20 years of permissive attitudes towards drugs have been an unmitigated disaster. What we need is a cultural change, not a change in laws or law enforcement. Maybe it’s as simple as someone in a position of leadership saying that even though some drugs are legal, they’re bad, and you shouldn’t do them. Overdoses put in new all-time highs every year, and oddly enough, nobody is saying it.  Overdoses are higher than they were 3 years ago during peak opioid panic, and people have simply stopped talking about it.

John Bender could not be reached for comment.

Go fuck yourself,

Jared

Music recommendation: So Excited by Ranking Roger.  One of my favorite tunes from 1988.  It charted at the time—barely.  You might remember Roger Charlery from The Beat. He passed away a few years ago.

P.S. We’re Gonna Get Those Bastards will always be free. Feel free to forward to as many people as you like.