Repeal the 21st Amendment!

When commenting on Patterico’s Pontifications, something I rarely do anymore, to differentiate myself from one of the staff writers named Dana, I style myself as “The libertarian but not Libertarian Dana”. While I very much believe in the philosophy that individual rights should be restricted as least as possible, I have about zero respect for the ‘official’ Libertarian Party. One of my major points of disagreement is the Libertarian Party’s position on drug legalization. While I personally do not care if someone fouls up his own life — as long as I am not required to support rescuing him from his own stupid choices — I am also married to a pediatric nurse. Mrs Pico has told me, many times, that she has never seen a case of child abuse, and those cases have to be hospitalization bad for her to have seen them, in which drugs and/or — usually and rather than or — were not involved. And let’s face facts: the vast majority of people wind up responsible for caring for children during their lives.

Which brings me to this sad story from The Washington Post:

Nearly 43 percent of young adults used marijuana in 2021

By Linda Searing | Tuesday, September 6, 2022 | 5:55 AM EDT

Marijuana use among young adults reached an all-time high last year, with nearly 43 percent of 19- to 30-year-olds saying they had used marijuana in the past 12 months, according to research funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and conducted by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.

The Monitoring the Future report found a steady increase in marijuana usage in the age group over the past decade, rising from 29 percent in 2011 to 34 percent in 2016.

My website’s regular readers — both of them — know that I have a major concentration on violent crime, particular in Philadelphia and Lexington, Kentucky, and much of the violent crime in our cities is fueled by drugs, by the drug dealers who use intimidation and violence to protect their ‘turf,’ and the drug users who get addicted to that poison, and turn to theft to steal the money for their next fix. It’s simple: if you use marijuana, you must have obtained it from somewhere, and unless you are growing your own, you have, at some point down the line, enriched and enabled the brutal thugs of the drug gangs which have led to most of the 373 people who spilled out their life’s blood on Philly’s mean streets so far this year.

Some have argued that the obvious solution to that problem is to legalize marijuana, and several states have ‘decriminalized’ marijuana possession and use, though it remains illegal at the federal level. But I spent most of my career in the ready-mixed concrete industry, and that involves commercial drivers. While alcohol is testable at the current intoxication level, the only tests we have for marijuana are measurements of the waste metabolites pot usage leaves in the body. We can tell, from blood or urine tests, whether someone has used marijuana within 30 to 45 days, but we have no test to determine whether someone is currently intoxicated by pot. If a ready-mix driver rolls his truck, or runs over a pedestrian while turning a corner, the test for pot will tell us only whether he has used pot fairly recently, not whether he was messed up at the time of his accident.

The researchers also reported that use of hallucinogens — psychedelic drugs that alter a person’s perception of reality, such as LSD, peyote and mushrooms — was less common than marijuana use in the same age group, but that it too is increasing, up from 3 percent a decade ago to 8 percent in 2021.

The only hallucinogen to decline in usage was MDMA (ecstasy), down from 5 percent in 2020 to 3 percent in 2021. Monitoring the Future research has tracked substance use in the United States by various age groups for more than three decades.

The chart at the right is a screen capture from the 2021 Monitoring the Future report referenced by the Post article.

“Other drugs” in the chart at the right means “An index of non-medical use of any drugs other than marijuana includes hallucinogens (including LSD), cocaine, amphetamines, sedatives (barbiturates), tranquilizers, and narcotics (including heroin).” One would have thought that, given that fentanyl, a synthetic opioid supposedly 100 times more potent than heroin, has largely replaced heroin as a drug of choice, because the smaller amounts used to produce a high are much easier for drug dealers to transport, that would have been the drug listed rather than heroin.

But we have to realize that all of those “other drugs” are illegal for off-label usage, and it’s not just pot: one out of every six Americans aged 19-30 — assuming that the surveys are accurate — have been using drugs other than marijuana illegally, drugs which make them menaces on the roads and to children at home. And four out of every five Americans those ages, the ages at which people are most likely to have smaller children at home, are drinking alcohol.

The problem with using mind-altering drugs drops somewhat as people get older, but if the statistics are correct, we have one out of every four adults in their most productive years smoking pot, and slightly more than one out of ten of them — and there’s doubtlessly some overlap — using other drugs.

More, an even greater percentage of such adults than the younger ones are using alcohol. How many are driving home from a bar, or a friend’s house?

I fully recognize that a lot of people will disagree with this, but I wish that the 18^th Amendment had been a success. Marijuana advocates like to tell us that pot is less harmful than booze, and in some ways, that may be true, at least as far as the long-term marijuana and alcohol cause to our bodies, and at least as far as we know. But messing up your mind, whether with marijuana or alcohol, is always bad. Both reduce your reasonable inhibitions, both mess up your judgement, both make you do stupid things.

At a certain point, there’s little the law can do. We saw how the 18^th Amendment failed, as too many Americans liked their beer and whiskey too much, and Prohibition led to a surge in organized crime. The prohibition of marijuana has also led to the organized crime of drug dealers, but drug dealers sell more than pot; they also sell the poisons other than pot which is killing so many Americans.

It’s clear that we will never get rid of alcohol, though in my mind, we should. But marijuana and other drugs are still illegal, and we should strive to keep them illegal. Marijuana use is high, but it’s still only half the use of alcohol among younger adults, and less than a third the use of booze among adults in what are supposed to be their most productive years. We need to do what we can to keep marijuana use as low as possible.

I entitled this article “Repeal the 21^st Amendment,” and I know full well that won’t happen; I do know that the title may draw readers. But if drug dealers are selling poisons, so are distillers and brewers, and I, for one, will not support them.
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