History Repeats Itself... again

I am often amused by watching the statement from George Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" happen again and again.

We are getting ready for mid-term elections in the US and the same old tricks are coming out, I sometimes wonder what it says about a country that falls for the same trickery every two years?

One REALLY obvious example is in California with Prop 19, an initiative to legalize marijuana and tax it along the same lines as alcohol and tobacco.

Most people are unaware that pot was criminalized in the 1930s at the behest of the cotton industry that did not want the competition from hemp. Sadly, the hemp plant is both hardier and less detrimental to the fields unto which it is grown and can yield several crops per year where cotton tends to leach the soil of its nutrients and being notoriously difficult to grow and process. The other use was an excuse.

I often think of George Carlin's famous discussion of pot use in one of his acts where he posed the question, "What's the worst crime a pot-head is going to commit? Steal a Twinkie?" The crime attributed to drugs is most often either victimless, use or possession, or due to the unavailability by criminalization and that raising the cost.

We have apparently not learned the lesson of 1919 with the prohibition of alcohol with the 18^th Amendment to the Constitution and the subsequent 1933 repeal with the 21^st Amendment. As a nation, the US should have learned a lesson that you cannot prohibit anything as long as there is a demand for the product. Apparently not.

We spend millions and billions pursuing the illegal drug trade in this country and the D.E.A. admits that illegal drugs are more available now then at any time, in other words, it has been not only a complete failure but a waste of resources that could just as easily been put to much better use.

On top of that, we have made many people excruciatingly wealthy as the suppliers and overloaded our jails with non-violent offenders that did nothing more then be in possession of a substance that as adults should be their choice.

I am neither for nor against drugs from a moralistic point of view, people will do what they want no matter what I or society says, history has shown this to us repeatedly.

Know what the largest killer of illegal drugs is? Overdose. This is most often caused by the lack of regulation and quality/quantity control. People are used to getting some drug at some level of potency and then they get something much more potent and die.

If people want it so badly, let them do it, or take away their alcohol and nicotine as well. Maybe Canada has a good idea with tobacco. They tax the hell out of it to pay for the additional costs of dealing with the later health effects caused by its use, maybe some variation could be used here.

For me it breaks down as follows, why can we always come up with the money to do something that history has repeatedly shown does not work. Since we are so busy spending money on these wastes, we cannot fund education and public programs that could benefit all society. I get so tired of hearing how children and the ill are constantly getting funding cuts when we throw away this money.

I am waiting for someone to explain the logic of this to me as I just do not get it.

The site for the Proposition