This week, as several states get ready to vote on whether to decriminalize marijuana to varying degrees, fear-mongers are taking to the streets to influence the country’s youth. That link is to the official site of CADCA, the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, where they’ve posted an article about their programs of “physician[s], law enforcement officer[s], and jail inmates” meet with children to try and convince them that marijuana is an extreme danger to their communities.
Their main argument seems to be that marijuana is a “gateway drug”. Let’s leave aside the fact that marijuana is a “gateway” only for a small percentage of those who try it, and that that percentage would likely have found their way to more extreme substances anyway. If marijuana is a gateway drug, there’s only reason for it: that marijuana is illegal.
Marijuana isn’t a “gateway drug” because it introduces otherwise innocent, naive children to the idea that they can alter their consciousness with drugs. Alcohol introduces them to that fact long before marijuana, in most cases, and for a good many more the first “gateway” is some form of tobacco. Why isn’t alcohol widely condemned as a gateway drug? It’s more addictive than marijuana, leads to more violence, and is more physically damaging. Why isn’t alcohol use painted as a terrifying slippery slope that leads to overdose on heroin and, eventually, death?
It’s circular logic: marijuana is seen as a “gateway” to other illegal drugs, not because it is dangerous, but because it is illegal.
We’ve talked here before about how scare tactics don’t work to decrease marijuana use; all they do is encourage kids to distrust sources of authority, once they discover that marijuana will not, in fact, kill you or render you catatonic. Of course, then, once they realize that the warnings about marijuana were lies, they start to suspect that all other warnings have been lies — and the experience of obtaining marijuana, which is illegal, convinces them that it’s not actually impossible or even very difficult to obtain “dangerous” illegal substances. I believe it’s that experience of going outside the law, not the mind-altering experience of the drug, that might convince them to try for later, more dangerous illegal drugs down the road. Alcohol doesn’t cause this problem because it doesn’t acquaint its users with illegal channels and those who frequent them; you can get it anywhere, from respectable upright citizens who are seen as such.
There’s an easy solution to this problem, and it’s to legalize marijuana.
Firstly, this makes the law both more fair and more sane; more dangerous substances are prohibited, while less dangerous ones are allowed (but always controlled!). The law makes sense, so we’ll have less disillusionment and conscious decisions to ignore it. Then there’s the side matter that taxing and regulating marijuana would be a massive boost to our faltering economy. And there’s also the fact that we remove a lot of the “danger” from the paths of pot-smoking kids, since they can acquire it from daylight channels and don’t need to be exposed to an underworld of illegal sale and possession. It’s that illegality that’s a jumping-off point for greater crimes; if potato chips were illegal, we’d see the same thing. We did see the same thing when alcohol was illegal — legalizing it removed many of those problems.
Legalizing marijuana is something we’ve desperately needed to do for decades. Let’s hope this election cycle we can at least begin to pull it off.