Supposedly the tobacco tax in US states like California is meant to discourage tobacco use and recover costs to Medicare, – makes sense considering tobacco use has enormous health consequences and contains a highly addictive drug (and yet is publicly sold and promoted everywhere).
But then, if it’s so bad for society why aren’t programs for quitting the drug easily available and cheap? After all, smokers in many States are paying over a thousand dollars each a year (guesstimation) to the government, and yet nicorrette costs 30-60$ per week still? That’s more expensive than smoking. O.o WTF
So anyway, it turns out that those funds CAN’T be used for treatment programs because they’ve already taken out loans against future taxes and settlement payments to pay for other stuff. In fact, the States have every incentive for a portion of their populace to keep smoking, decades into the future. They’ve even got legal obligations to that effect.
So if the Government can be shown to do such a lousy job already managing one of the most addictive drugs on the planet with nearly the greatest physical harm – how can we expect it to manage drugs like crack cocaine or heroin under a full legalization model?
Ideally of course, ending the Drug War would also come with all sorts of effective treatment programs to educate people about drug use, help them spot signs of addiction early, and to help people quit the drug when use becomes problematic. Would our government supply those programs effectively? Would it be done cheaply and with compassion?
But in this line of thinking there is an assumption that often goes overlooked – just because we want something to be free and ubiquitously available doesn’t mean government has to provide it.
Communities can come together to provide services without all the bureaucracy and politics – after all there are so many unemployed young people in America- eager college graduates even, wasting their lives at Starbucks making payments on impossible debt- the manpower to fix any problem in the world is RIGHT THERE. If we could only really set about re aligning our assumptions regarding our role in society and the system of incentives we operate with, I really believe we can solve any problem without government.
Which is why I think we can go ahead pursue a full legalization strategy knowing full well that the government would badly mismanage it. The problem with supplying that charity to the inner cities right now IS the government, with their army of police knocking down doors, breaking up families, and creating a highly toxic and violent underground market dominated by international drug cartels and street gangs, all in the name of this terrible idea called prohibition.
Get the cops and violence out of the way and we can treat the inner city and begin to give the unfortunate kids growing up there a better world to look forward to, complete with whole families to come home to at night and safe places of education in the day.
