Legalizing pot isn’t one of my causes, but emptying our prisons of people who committed victimless crimes does seem like the sane thing to do. It is estimated that 800,000 Americans are arrested every year for marijuana use. Surely there is a better way to deal with our nation’s drug problems than prison. According to the United Nations World Drug Report last year, the Netherlands, where pot is legal, had a user rate of 5.4 percent compared to a 13.4 percent user rate in the U.S. where it is not. Furthermore, people in the Netherlands use fewer hard drugs per person. Their cocaine usage is 0.6% compared to our 2.4%. Their opiate usage is 0.31 compared to our 5.9%.) This trend relates directly to the fact that the Netherlands has a rate of 87 people in prison per 100,000 compared to our 730. It’s something we should think about in the “land of the free.” As someone who sees the devastation of drug usage, I am not defending addictive substances, but I also think its time to admit that the “war on drugs” has been a failure and that a less violent approach should be considered.
And don’t forget the entrenched lobby of the growing for-profit prison industry. It lobbies for tougher anti-drug laws so as to increase the profitable prison population.