This Friday will be a trippy one for our hippy campus. Popularly known as “4/20,” April 20 is the cannabis counterculture’s international holiday, and Berkeley is one of the focal points of celebration. Fire alarms will echo throughout the dormitories as some amateur freshmen “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Students for Sensible Drug Policy will hold its annual 4/20 Rally and (legally compliant) Brownie Sale on Sproul Plaza. Local street vendor Patches will have his best day of business selling “merchandise” on Telegraph Ave. And, to cap it all off, hundreds of stoners will flock to Memorial Glade donning Bob Marley shirts as the magical minute of 4:20 p.m. approaches.
Certainly our school’s celebration is no match for that of UC Santa Cruz, but that’s all right. Unlike the Banana Slugs down south, we actually have work to do anyway. Besides, Berkeley’s cannabis culture is much more interesting considering our campus’s rich history. Ironically, one of UC Berkeley’s biggest benefactors was a critical player in banning the drug in the United States. The newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst (of the William Randolph Hearst Greek Theatre) launched a yellow journalism campaign in the 1930s, turning popular opinion towards prohibition. So, next time you’re at the Greek, light up to truly stick it to the man!
But while our school may seem like a utopian portal back to the 1960s on 4/20, life is less blissful outside of the Berkeley bubble. Although UCPD is fairly tolerant towards marijuana on campus, the federal government is certainly not, if you walk a few miles down Telegraph.
Just two weeks ago today, the Drug Enforcement Agency raided Oaksterdam University, shutting down the city of Oakland’s celebrated marijuana training school. Tragically, the raid involving hordes of armed federal agents occurred at roughly the same time and just a few miles away from the shooting at Oikos University that left seven dead. Although the officers certainly couldn’t have predicted the massacre or intervened in time, the incident nevertheless stands as a symbolic statement of our government’s perverse priorities. Instead of improving our broken criminal justice system, the federal government has counterproductively concentrated on prosecuting nonviolent “crimes” like cannabis possession for too long.
Unfortunately, the trend is only worsening under President Obama. Despite having promised on the campaign trail not to waste “Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue,” Obama and his administration have raided more than 100 pot dispensaries. This pace is so incredible that it’s currently poised to exceed President Bush’s previous record.
Now, you may be asking yourself, what’s so terrible about the War on Drugs? Perhaps the propaganda of the past has been a bit over the top (see: “Reefer Madness”), but drugs are still bad, right? We all have that annoying stoner friend who raids our kitchen without permission while high. Perhaps a little drug war would force him to have a more productive life, right?
Wrong. Proponents of prohibition often forget that drugs are already illegal. So, the fact that marijuana is so prevalent today is living proof of the ban’s failure. Indeed, the facts unquestionably prove that prohibition is ineffective. A survey from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, for example, found that pot and prescription pills are more accessible to teens today than beer. And the past is even worse. America’s national alcohol prohibition from 1919 to 1933 only led to higher consumption and crime.
Unfortunately, America has not learned from her history and has only repeated it. Regarding increased consumption, a 2010 study conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that marijuana use has been on the rise over the past decade. Regarding crime, America’s prohibition has created a black market in which Mexican drug cartels battle each other and their government to smuggle narcotics into the United States.
In the past six years alone, more than 47,000 people have been killed in Mexico because of drug-related violence, according to government estimates. Such are the unintended consequences of our government’s War on Drugs. If drugs were legalized in the United States, on the other hand, customers could buy safer products from legitimate businesses. Instead, drug users today have no choice but to buy products of the Mexican Drug War from back alley dealers.
But, at the end of the day, the question we should all ask ourselves this 4/20 is not one of policy but philosophy. Do we want a government that asserts control over our bodies in regulating what we choose to consume, or do we want a government that respects individual freedom? Smoke a joint, and think it over.
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Also, I’m fairly sure this kid has never smoked weed in his life.
I personally guarantee you (from direct experience) that you are dead wrong about that.
There are a couple things I think you should add to your column relating to drug prohibition. Another unintended consequence of the prohibition is the manufacturing of highly dangerous synthetic drugs like meth. This is caused by the high cost of enforcement significantly raising the price of drugs which creates a market for their cheaper synthetic equivalents.
On the other hand
I used to be very pro-legalization until I spoke with a cop who explained to me that often police are faced with circumstances where they use drug charges to arrest suspects who are guilty of other crimes. The example he shared with me was that recently there was a series of burglaries occurring in a neighborhood in my hometown and a couple officers stopped a man matching the description of the suspect and were able to arrest him on the spot for possession of narcotics and sentence him to several years (multiple drug offender). After his arrest the burglaries stopped. He could not have been arrested if not for the narcotics charges. Basically, situations like this are very common and booking suspects on drug charges is a very common tool in apprehending people guilty of other crimes. This makes the issue less clear to me…just my 2c
…that’s a terrible reason to make something illegal.
Maybe we should make scratching your ass illegal too. You know, not because it hurts anyone, but because everyone scratches his ass from time to time. So if he’s guilty of something else but we can’t prove it, we can always get him on that. It’s not ludicrous and oppressive. It’s just a tool.
I’d be all for legalizing marijuana if the proponents of legalization weren’t the most annoying people in the world.
Hey man. What about, you know….ah, ah…shit man, I forgot what I wanted to say….man.
Reading your columns is akin to watching a child learn
“Proponents of prohibition often forget that drugs are already illegal. So, the fact that marijuana is so prevalent today is living proof of the ban’s failure.”
Sound logic… So, the fact that cheating on exams and plagiarism is prevalent today is living proof of the failure of forbidding such conduct in schools and universities in California.
STFU.
Another liberal who cannot tolerate free speech when faced with an opposing opinion.
I don’t know what the statistics are on cheating and plagiarism, but you could well be right. Unfortunately for you, that isn’t actually an argument, and your reply cherry picks Casey’s actual argument instead of addressing it in its entirety. His point isn’t simply that the ban doesn’t work, it’s that it carries a demonstrable laundry list of devastating unintended consequences, helps no one, and even AT THAT, doesn’t accomplish its STATED goal. Hence, drug laws aren’t merely inefficacious but downright harmful.
Cheating and plagiarism cause tangible harm to the credibility of an educational institution and the fair competition between earnest and hard working students. It makes sense to punish these things–and we do, quite severely, in fact. And there can be little doubt that students weigh in their minds the risk of a ruined academic career against a C or a D on a paper they procrastinated on, especially given the advent of services like turnitin.com that make it trivial to detect. Tangible deterrent value against a tangible threat to something valuable. Not comparable to the drug war in the slightest.