The Student News Site of Sacramento City College

The Express

The Student News Site of Sacramento City College

The Express

The Student News Site of Sacramento City College

The Express

EDITORIAL: Reefer Madness

Illustration by Dan Curran

Historians remember prohibition of alcohol as a social experiment gone awry. From 1917 to 1933, the law that was intended to clean up the streets and improve society actually made things worse. Crime rates and prison populations rose in a tsunami-like fashion: quick and damaging. The same war is being waged today; except it’s marijuana that people claim is making society a mess. Since prohibition of alcohol didn’t work in the first place, what makes people think it’ll work for marijuana? As the common saying goes: History tends to repeat itself.

During Prohibition, the crime rate in 30 U.S. cities had increased by 24 percent from 1920 to 1921 and in 1929, the population of prisons, like Atlanta Penitentiary, exceeded to more than 3,700 prisoners when the normal capacity was only 1, 500 prisoners.

According to Jack A. Cole, director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or L.E.A.P., and a former undercover narcotics agent, alcohol poisoning increased during Prohibition by as much as 600 percent when it was supposed to decrease. It is safe to say that prohibition was a total bust.

Just like with prohibition of alcohol, arrests for marijuana related offenses are causing prisons to overflow with nonviolent offenders again. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML, reports that 786, 000 people were imprisoned in 2005 for marijuana related offenses alone.

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Just because it was made illegal, doesn’t mean that people have stopped smoking it.
According to “The Union”, a documentary about the legalization of marijuana by Adam Scorgie, when marijuana was first banned, there were 55,000 marijuana smokers and now, there are 50 million marijuana smokers.

In 1972, The Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs from 1972 recommended the “immediate repeal of all federal laws governing the growing, processing, transportation, sale, possession, and use of marijuana” because “marijuana should be classed as a licit rather than an illicit drug.”

If that were the case, why are people still being arrested for something that is considered a legal drug that should not be associated with any criminal offenses?

If marijuana is legalized, will it continue to be seen as unacceptable in society? Alcohol has become acceptable and the moral stigma associated with it has gone away. Yet, alcohol has much more damaging effects to the human body, such as cirrhosis of the liver, while according to “The Union”, no one has ever died from marijuana use. Even though people are beginning to see the benefits and the universal utility of marijuana, will that be enough to stop all this reefer madness?

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