Marijuana

[fishsupreme]

Yesterday's writing prompt was Talk to me about marijuana.

I'm one of the few people who has no experience with the stuff. Due to allergies, I've never been interested in smoking anything, and never have. The idea of introducing more crap into my lungs for me to sneeze out does not have any appeal

Comments

[fishsupreme]

Honestly, it's an atrocity how many people we incarcerate for drug crimes. The United States imprisons more people -- both in absolute numbers and in terms of a percentage of our population -- than any nation in modern history. Unless you count prisoners of war, we've surpassed Josef Stalin's gulag archipelago.

Part of the reason our crime rates are so low -- and they are low, lower than they've been since the 1960's, despite what the media would have us believe -- is that we have transferred poor minorities into a rights-free zone where crimes against them "don't count." With a tenfold increase in prison population, most of them drug offenders (i.e. most people's first crime, when they are in a bad situation, have little to lose, and aren't yet willing to commit violence), we've moved the people who formerly would have committed crime into a place where they commit crimes against each other with impunity, unreported. Even when they get out, their status as felons or parolees prevents them from rejoining the productive population and sends them back to prison promptly.

It's a dark bargain our country has made in the name of politicians being "tough on crime" and declaring a "war on drugs." We've built our crime-free paradise by consigning 3% of our population to Hell.

I'd rank it as our country's #2 problem, after our healthcare system and just above student loan debt.