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"Fixing Mistakes" will be a new series where I talk about how our
society can learn from its mistakes and correct its own problems... but
we can only do it if we're willing to think outside the box.
We have spent countless amounts of money, manpower, and resources in
an attempt to fight the drug trade... but it seems like all we really
do is foster it. Suddenly, the government becomes the "bad guy" and
every rapper is glorifying the industry to a point where I actually
think the Geto Boys lyric "Damn it feels good to be a gangster" might
be true. Although I have read countless times that drug dealing is
actually much less glorious than we are often made to believe, experts still say that the "war on drugs" has, as of yet, been a failure (does that remind you of another war?).
I would think that after 30 years of failure,
we'd have a team of economists working on an innovative new technique.
Our biggest problem is the fact that innovative new techniques are
often met with resistance because, by definition, they stray away from
the common wisdom (case in point: Galileo, Einstein, Planck, etc.). In
this particular case, it seems that a myriad of economists agree
that in order to best combat the illegal drug trade, we should legalize
marijuana; we can see the obvious problem with that issue.
I'll skip all of the reasons in favor of legalization for now
(that's a topic for a future post, and plenty of other people have covered it before).
What I think is more interesting is the fact that this idea, despite
the fact that it is endorsed by many experts, is automatically
dismissed by many people just because our society has placed a stigma
on non-medicinal use of the plant. Whether or not it fits your "moral"
values, don't we all owe it to the world to at least consider the fact
that legalization would (according to most experts) be a breakthrough
in our attempts to curb the drug trade? Don't we at least owe it to the
world to read about it and make an educated decision? |
