Words. For Your Consideration...
"...protecting young people has long been used to justify marijuana prohibition. But in reality, our drug laws have failed to stop marijuana use among American youth but have succeeded in punishing them with damning criminal records, loss of financial aid for college and removal from after-school activities.
The simple truth is that prohibition doesn't work, and regulation and education do. Most young people will tell you that marijuana is easy to buy despite nearly a century of prohibition that has cost billions of tax dollars and put thousands of people behind bars.
Anti-drug groups such as D.A.R.E. refuse to acknowledge that today's marijuana prohibition causes the same problems as alcohol prohibition did in the 1920s. It's no wonder, then, that D.A.R.E. has been called ineffective by the National Academy of Sciences and, in 2001, was placed under the category of "ineffective programs" by the U.S. surgeon general. The Government Accountability Office reported in 2003 that there are "no significant differences in illicit drug use between students who received D.A.R.E. . . . and students who did not."
...Legalizing and taxing marijuana won't cure California's chronic budget woes. But should we really be cutting from education while spending all the money it takes to enforce our failed prohibition policies? Furthermore, the California Tax and Regulate initiative on the November ballot would not allow the use of marijuana by people under 21. I certainly don't want more young people smoking marijuana. But some of the teens I helped as a substance-abuse counselor told me that it was easier to purchase marijuana inside their own schools than it was to buy beer or cigarettes from a convenience store. This is not what a successful policy looks like.
...D.A.R.E. can warn people all day about the harm associated with marijuana use. What it refuses to acknowledge is that these arguments only support ending prohibition. If marijuana is so dangerous, D.A.R.E. and its allies ought to support efforts to remove control over distribution from black-market drug dealers.
It's time for D.A.R.E. to take a back seat to evidence-based drug prevention programs that don't use scare tactics. It's time to legalize marijuana."
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