Phil Murphy for Marijuana

[Haskell_Hunter]

 

I respectfully disagree.  You're using the same argument liberals use against us.

 

Liberals will tell you, people walking around with guns means it's going to turn into the wild west.  People will be shooting other people, bullets flying, you name it.  All these people carrying concealed weapons, you'll never know who has a gun and who doesn't. Not quite the same because in most states, you can carry, and that is not the case. However, one idea they have that rarely comes up (because most Americans would not agree with it) is that if we outlaw all gun ownership and remove them from society, death by gun will go down, way down. I agree with that, don't you? That would actually be the apples to apples comparison with keeping drugs prohibited. And firearm ownership is actually a Constitutional right, so trying to compare the freedom to have a gun to the freedom to do drugs, is a bit of a stretch. 

 

Legalizing drugs will not immediately create a situation where the general population will become druggies. I agree, it will take a while, maybe a generation or two, but is that ok with you?.  Those people with a desire and the means to consume drugs recreationally are all probably doing it right now.  I disagree with that. I spent most of my adult life in LE and understand people, crime and deterrents like you know IT stuff and that's pretty much why.

 

Based on the research being done in other states that have legalized, the percentage of people who consumed marijuana prior to legalization and after legalization has remained the same.  So don't expect a huge explosion of addicts or consumers of drugs.  It hasn't manifested in reality yet. I've seen and read several of those research papers and just about everything I've read said it's far too early to conclude anything about the impact legalization. However, just as one example, if alcohol were a banned substance, do you believe we would have the same number of DUI's each year as we do now? 

 

 

 

 

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, other stuff not so much.  But you make some very good points.

 

I disagree that completely removing or outlawing something will make it go away.  People will always look for substitutes.  If it's not guns, then it's knives (UK has a massive knife violence problem right now).  All outlawing something does is create a lucrative black market for it.  Since marijuana was outlawed in the 1920s, it's never gone away.  It's always had a lucrative black market.  People who have the means and desire to seek out illegal markets for marijuana have been doing it for nearly 100 years without any sign of slowing down.

 

The gun thing was a stretch, but it was more to illustrate that outright bans are usually the wrong approach and have an adverse affect of their own.  Maybe Prohibition is a better correlation.  We outlawed alcohol and then repealed that puritan decision.  By making alcohol illegal, we gave Al Capone a fantastic amount of power and money.  The drug trade lines the pockets of the Bloods, Crypts, MS-13, El Chapo, etc.  Prohibition creates black markets that will enhance bad actors.

 

I also disagree that legalization will create a society of addicts.  Prior to the 1920s we never heard of entire populations--or even significantly sized portions of a population--that because addicted and dependent on drugs.  I am not sure I can find a single occurrence of this in any historical account.  Yes, you will probably have a certain percentage of the population who cannot control themselves when it comes to drugs, but there is nothing in the historical record that shows a general population become overwhelmingly depending on drugs.

 

We disagree that people who want drugs are taking them now, and that's fine.  I still stand behind position, and I'll demonstrate it like this:  If drugs become legal, are you going to start taking them?  My guess is "no" you won't, and the vast majority of the population is like you.  They have more important things in their lives than taking drugs, and they have no desire to change that regardless of the legality of them.  I think you'd agree with this.

 

I didn't spend any of my life in LE as you have.  I don't have the same experiences as you do.  However, as an undergraduate I studied Communications--the theory behind communication as it applies to mass communication, small group communication, and interpersonal communication.  Over the past two decades I've been studying more business economics than IT or Communications at this point.  So you'll see that most of my discussion and points refer to economic markets.  I very much look at things from a supply and demand perspective.  And based one my observations, there won't be a significantly expanding market for drugs.  Those that are taking them will continue to take them.  There may be a slight up-tick like what has been noted in Colorado, but it is somewhere around 2%-4%.  I also agree with you that it will take time for this to stabilize and we understand what percentage of the population will become regular recreational drug users.

 

Regarding the DUI question:  My answer is "no".  However, that is viewing it very narrowly.  For most on college campuses, alcohol is illegal because of their age.  However, that does not stop students from being irresponsible and binge drinking.  Binge drinking can be attributed to the prohibition of alcohol, and the ready availability of it in the campus black market.  Students die every year from binge drinking.  So while the amount of DUI may go down, other irresponsible behavior may go up.  We have to be very cognizant of this when we create laws so that we don't make a bad situation worse.  Unfortunately, I have very little faith that our politicians are capable of this.

 

Here is a pretty good paper about prohibition and deaths.  It's not a direct correlations with drugs, but it's a place we can start because it is very similar to the prohibition on drugs, and it involved the US population.   http://www.nber.org/papers/w3675.pdf  and also available at this link with other relevant studies on this subject: http://www.nber.org/papers/w3675

 

Here is a screen shot from it:

 

 

What's important to note is the spike in alcohol deaths immediately after the start of prohibition (1920) and the end (1933).  A further read in the paper shows that consumers were being killed by poor quality alcohol, a similar thing we are seeing today.  These are the adverse affect of making something illegal, the unintended consequences.  After 14 years of prohibition, the country was pretty pissed off because law enforcement couldn't contain the problem, and it empowered organized crime.  Again, that's the same situation we have with drugs.  The difference of course is that we repealed prohibition, and only now, nearly 100 years later, we're starting to decriminalize marijuana.

 

The paper concludes with this paragraph:

 

 

Of course, any debate on drug legalization is incomplete if it solely considers changes in consumption.  The negative effects accompanying any increases in consumption are costs that have to be weighed against various benefits of drug legalization.  These benefits are likely to include an elimination of the violent drug culture that results from the battle for illegal profits, a reduction in overdoses from impure drugs, a reduction in robberies and burglaries committed by addicts who pay inflated drug prices, the stabilization of Latin American regimes fighting control battles with drug lords, the ability to combat the spread of AIDS from needle exchanges more effectively, and an unclogging for the criminal justice system.  This paper does not attempt to calculate the costs and benefits of legalization.  Rather, it suggests that if Prohibition is any guide, the cost to society from increased drug use is likely to be smaller than commonly believed.

[Haskell_Hunter]

If we to treat drugs like alcohol, like you and many others have said they should be, let's think that through. So we legalize them, and in a decade or so we not only have bars, we have smoke shops, crack houses, heroin dens, all legal, like bars are for alcohol, and people frequenting them, like bars.

 

Do you really think we need that in Society?

 

In my opinion, your (generic, not "you" personally) desire to get high doesn't outweigh the potential, and probable negative impacts to the rest of society if drugs are legalized.

 

My contention with this is that the legal enforcement of drugs laws does very little to curb society's appetite for them.  We are pouring copious amounts of money into a failing strategy.  Every data point to date shows that drug laws and their enforcement have been a failure at achieving their goals.  It doesn't work, and we need to change our strategy.

 

We already have bars.  We already have smoke shops.  We already have crack houses, heroin dens, and every other kind of place to consume drugs.  The difference would be that like alcohol bars, they could be regulated (as a libertarian it pains me to admit that, but it will happen).  You'd know where these places are and you could avoid them.  Today you don't know if your neighbor is a drug lord having drug parties when you're not around.  At least through legalization you'd have a system of known places where people are dispensing drugs, and like alcohol, you could regulate it (more libertarian pains).

 

To think that you can eliminate drugs and the desire for drugs is misplaced.  For tens of thousands of years human beings have been seeking out intoxicants.  Every society has their intoxicants, and many are noted in the historical record.  There is something immaterial to human beings that compels us to seek out altered states of mind.  You can't eliminate that.

 

What we do not need in society is the violent drug trade and all of the very bad things that come with it.  That's what we have right now.  It's something we've never been able to change.  So we need to change how we approach drugs.  I speculate that the money we're spending to fight this failing drug war would be better served supporting counseling and out-patient programs for recovering addicts.  We, as a society, need to acknowledge that we're going to have this problem.  It will exist.  We need to acknowledge that prohibition--in all of its historical attempts--has always failed.  It's time for a different strategy, different investments, and maybe we can live with the fact that this does exist, and we are investing in things that do not prop up a multi-trillion-dollar illegal market.

[BothBarrels]

 "Big Twinkie" lobbyists are giving money to Murphy. 

 

 

 

 

 

[flat9999]

Without delving into whether or not legalizing weed is a long-term general detriment to society, I will say 1 simple thing that kinda makes me scratch my head.

From a conservative standpoint, does anybody really believe that adding a revenue stream to a mostly Democratic state is EVER a good thing? Let's take a purely hypothetical number of adding $500 million to the State's income. On day one, every last penny of that money will be spent; funding everything from dependency programs to pencil erasers. The taxpayer will not see a dime of that money. All that will happen is expansion of "government programs", there will be new departments developed, there will be task forces established, there will be raises and new hiring to fill spots.

Then, 3/5/7/10 years down the line, the price of weed or demand takes a dip. Do you think that the State will begin to cut-back on their programs/hiring/raises? To even suggest that legalization is a windfall for NJ taxpayers is laughable at best.

[DV1]

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, other stuff not so much.  But you make some very good points.

 

I disagree that completely removing or outlawing something will make it go away.  People will always look for substitutes.  If it's not guns, then it's knives (UK has a massive knife violence problem right now).  All outlawing something does is create a lucrative black market for it.  

You typed a lot of stuff there, and I agree with a lot of it but, like you, not all.You misunderstood a few of the points I made, especially this one above. I never said, or intended to say eliminating all guns from society would completely end murder, or even murder by gun. I said it would go way down, and it would but not go completely away, we agree on that. 

 

As for the black market, we agree again, however, the black market is never as large as the stock market...meaning, if it's legal, there is a much larger availability and distribution of it, whatever "it" is. 

 

To be clear, I don't believe outlawing drugs will ever eliminate it, like outlawing other things never completely eliminates them either. However, we still do prohibit things as a deterrent, and it works to reduce the frequency of things we want to reduce. If you don't believe in the deterrent, why not remove laws against burglary, theft or whatever, if it doesn't work I mean, why not? We still have plenty of thefts, burglaries, etc, so by the logic here regarding the "failure" of prohibitions on drugs, why not legalize other things that are not completely eliminated by our laws? The answer is because the laws is meant as a deterrent to reduce the occurrence, fully recognizing that nothing will result in 100% compliance. 

 

As for predicting how tightening or loosening laws/penalties impacts substance abuse crimes/incidents, I come back to drunk driving stats.The last report I'm familiar with is a comprehensive study from 1982, when the Government began cracking down on DUI, to 2005. 

Despite a rapidly growing driving population, and an increase in traffic and traffic accidents, drunk driving fatalities decreased from 53% of all fatalities involving a BAC of .08 or more in 1982, to 20% in 2005. That can be directly linked to the increased penalties, increased focus by LE, and increased awareness and education, as well as societal stigma associated with drunk driving. 

 

By legalizing drugs, we are talking about reversing all those factors. As they become legalized, LE will focus less on them, they will become more accepted by society, resulting in more widely accepted use, and more wide spread problems associated with drug use; addiction, DUI, death, heath issues and financial strain on the health care system. These things WILL happen. Not in 2 or 3 years, but in 2 or 3 decades, you will see them.

 

You don't really believe that once you remove the legal prohibition, and social stigma of drug use, the number of people who decide to use them will not increase, do you? 

 

And for those who say it's just to keep LE employed, well, you might have a point since we don't have any alcohol related crimes occurring to keep LE busy now because it's legal...oh, wait... 

[Rdfhunter]

My take is the state doesn't need another single penny until they get their budget under control. They will waste every dollar from weed tax over night .. There are bigger issues right now than pot ..

[BHC]

My take is the state doesn't need another single penny until they get their budget under control. They will waste every dollar from weed tax over night .. There are bigger issues right now than pot ..

1000% on point

[B B]

As if America isn't fat enough! 

[Batsto]

I can't wait my surgeon to use weed or our train engineers.

Edited November 6, 2017 by Batsto