International - Time for a Drug Reform/Tax Cutting Alliance?

[zera]

Its pretty clear that most of the public is either hostile or at best apathetic to most of the drug reform arguments. Talk about cognitive freedom and spiritual/personal revelations due to drug use and someone will look at you like a dirty hippy. "What are you saying, you'd rather take something called 5-meo-mipt and meditate than drink beer and watch football? What are you some kind of Al-Qaeda sleeper agent?!" Then talk about record high incarceration rates, the degradation of the inner cities, the loss of civil liberties, etc. and people's faces glaze over. "Why should I care about that, I'm not black or poor? Wonder what the prices are now on Blu-Ray DVD players?"

Time to face it, people are selfish and if you want to get them worked up over something its got to be something that directly affects them. When you want to get an idea of whether an argument will work (at least on the American pubic) think of Springfield from the Simpsons. Thats about the right level of intellectual discourse that the public can stand. Where do people really care? In the taxes they pay and the government benefits they receive.

Thats where the drug reformers come in. There's no doubt there's money in legalizing and taxing drugs. Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman and 500 other economists estimated that the annual savings combined with the potential tax revenues from legalizing marijuana alone in the US would be $14 billion a year (link at bottom). Thats money that could either be used to cut taxes or raise spending on medicare and social security (and trust me the elderly, who couldn't give a rats ass about legalization, turn out in droves when you start talking about medicare and social security). We need to send a message to the general populace that legalization doesn't just benefit the drug users or the people living in crime-infested areas it can benefit those in middle-class suburbs through more extensive prescription drug coverage, lower property taxes, freed up police resources for them, etc.

If we get a marijuana legalization ballot initiative going in an already sympathetic state, like California or Colorado, and attach to it a provision that lowers taxes in proportion to the gains from legalization I predict you would see support automatically go up by 10-15% of the electorate. There is a very large proportion of the population who will vote for any ballot initiative as long as it cuts taxes. This strategy has been fairly successful in getting gambling legalized in a variety of places, so I think it can work for drugs.

On the federal level there are some additional alliances to make, namely with Archers-Daniel Midland, Conagra and other agricultural companies who could benefit from growing marijuana. Although it sickens me to think of jumping in bed with these agri-business, corporate-welfare slurping fat cats, politics is about alliances. And there is hardly a group that has a better lobby in Washington (or Brussels) than agri-business.

Tax cuts and higher benefits are one of the most successful messages in any campaign and so far drug reform has been one of the least successful. Its time to hitch our wagon to something that can get us out of the "third rail" idea ghetto.

http://www.forbes.com/2005/06/02/cz_qh_0602pot.html

Reputation Comments on this post:

The more it's talked about the more likely there can be movement.

[Lethargy]

Sounds good, perhaps I could speak so a few friends, I have a politically active friend who while not a cannabis user has a sympathy for the cause (due to having a reasonable amount of intelligence and capability to think for herself, go figure) that knows something about writing up initiatives...

[EntheogenicTruth]

Originally Posted by zera

Its pretty clear that most of the public is either hostile or at best apathetic to most of the drug reform arguments. Talk about cognitive freedom and spiritual/personal revelations due to drug use and someone will look at you like a dirty hippy. "What are you saying, you'd rather take something called 5-meo-mipt and meditate than drink beer and watch football? What are you some kind of Al-Qaeda sleeper agent?!" Then talk about record high incarceration rates, the degradation of the inner cities, the loss of civil liberties, etc. and people's faces glaze over. "Why should I care about that, I'm not black or poor? Wonder what the prices are now on Blu-Ray DVD players?"

Time to face it, people are selfish and if you want to get them worked up over something its got to be something that directly affects them. When you want to get an idea of whether an argument will work (at least on the American pubic) think of Springfield from the Simpsons. Thats about the right level of intellectual discourse that the public can stand. Where do people really care? In the taxes they pay and the government benefits they receive.

swiy sounds like swims gf... are you swims gf?? perhaps you are and are in disguise....

[El Calico Loco]

Such an alliance already exists. It's called the Libertarian Party. They spend most of their time shouting at each other over who was the true messiah, Ayn Rand or Murray Rothbard; it resembles nothing so much as the Kirk-vs-Picard debates of Star Trek geeks. They spend the rest of their time tilting at windmills. Not one in ten has read classical liberals like John Locke or Thomas Paine.

Hehe...I kid because I love. At least the libs are motivated by principle. I'm convinced that the average person doesn't give a good god damn about anything unless it affects them directly. Frex: Americans are up in arms over the Iraq war, but only because so many of "our boys" are dying...they couldn't care less about the 1000000 dead Iraqis. They vote for the politicians who has the best slogan and hair, never mind their actual voting record.

I can't speak to the situation in other countries, but the average American thinks that one whiff of crack will send their daughters whoring for the next hit. I've had relatively intelligent people tell me that legalizing drugs would turn a sizeable percentage of the country into hopeless addicts, because everyone would go out and try them if they were legal. They wouldn't, of course, but the other guy would.


ECL

[EntheogenicTruth]

Originally Posted by El Calico Loco

...but the other guy would.

hmmm i think that this shows everyones lack of faith in the human race to survive with temptation.