BC Law IPTF Blog

Here’s another post that has nothing to do with IP or technology…

When I was in college, I had the chance to talk with an assistant district attorney (Dan Rather’s son–unfortunately, I can’t remember his name, nor will Google give it up to me). During our conversation, he mentioned that one of his more compelling arguments against the use of marijuana is based upon fact that by using marijuana one supports a drug trade that kills people.

I, personally, have not found a compelling medical reason that marijuana deserves the level of censure that the law provides. Practically speaking, should a kid picked up with a dime bag of pot be thrown in jail? You can walk around most colleges and universities in the US on any day of the week and find otherwise-law-abiding citizens smoking dope.

Yet, it’s illegal. And, on a related note, it’s mostly those who aren’t in US colleges who are being prosecuted for possession of marijuana.

I would wager that a good percentage of kids out there don’t think that pot is that bad a drug. And they use it in the face of the law, just as the plethora of underage drinkers–I mean, watch MTV at any hour, and you’ll see underage drinking plastered across so many frames.

But the fact is that when you buy pot, you very likely at least fuel an industry, a drug trade, that ends up abusing and killing people in other countries. Perhaps if you buy organic pot, grown domestically, then you may feel less morally obligated. But I’m not sure if most pot is grown domestically. At some point, it comes from a Central or South American country where a vicious drug trade exists, where people are forced to grow, under a gun and the threat of starvation, drugs at an extorted price to fuel an industry that illegally traffics the drug across international borders. If not, then at least you fuel a demand, no matter how fictional, that drives producers and processors and traffickers to use their various methods to supply this plant.

The fact is that our globalized world allows pot grown by subsistence farmers in Mexico to end up in the hands of US college students. And by purchasing this substance you fuel a market that ends up in the prosecution of potentially otherwise-innocent folk in other countries, and in the process of extortion and murder that global organizations participate in to produce these black market goods.

So while there may be perfectly good apologetic arguments for the softening of punishments for marijuana, an otherwise-honest and innocent baseline middle-class kid in college may think that they’re just smoking up a good time, but in the end their $20 is putting $10 in the pocket of some person who’s holding a gun to the head of someone you’ll never meet.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 3:02 am and is filed under Globalization, International. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.