During a recent court case challenging the constitutionality of laws prohibiting marijuana users from possessing guns, lawyers from the Biden Administration have made an interesting argument. Not only did they dust off the old reefer madness hysteria (“psychosis and long-lasting mental disorders”), but they also pointed out that people who use illicit drugs sometimes “lose their lives in drug deals gone bad.”
The federal government argued today that marijuana users can be banned from owning guns because they are more likely "to develop psychosis and long-lasting mental disorders", commit suicide, and "los[e] their lives in drug deals gone bad": https://t.co/Eve8ggcR6A pic.twitter.com/peyMjvnFOm
— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) July 29, 2024
Apparently the DOJ prefers that people at greater risk of being shot and killed be disarmed. They’d rather they be easy targets than able to defend themselves. The government’s attorneys also conveniently overlook the fact that most of the country now has legal marijuana (at least at the state level), so the chances of a drug deal going bad at the local dispensary are probably lower than buying a fifth at a local convenience store.
To be fair, there are still illegal drug deals that go on in the states without legal marijuana, even for weed, which some continue to buy illegally in order to avoid taxes and high prices. But to accept the government’s arguments, we’d have to overlook one critical fact: the federal government’s own role in creating the problem to begin with. In other words…prohibition.
From 1920 to 1933, the federal government banned alcohol. During the Progressive Era, people got the idea in their heads that the bad things associated with alcohol use could all be solved by simply banning the stuff. Alcoholism, domestic violence, and even political corruption were all blamed on demon rum. Temperance activists managed to get a constitutional amendment passed enabling the ban.
Once the bans were in place, though, all hell broke loose. The ban did nothing to reduce demand. People didn’t stop drinking alcohol, so almost none of the problems were solved. Prohibition resulted in black markets cropping up, gangsters shooting each other while fighting over turf, and even…NASCAR.
With all of these problems, support for prohibition naturally plummeted over time. In 1933 Utah (yes, Utah) became the 36th state to ratify an amendment repealing Prohibition.
Sadly, we here in the United States rarely learn from our mistakes. Instead of accepting the idea that banning substances leads to all kinds of unique problems, we keep trying it over and over with other things we find problematic. And every single time, illegal substances end up bringing in criminal elements along with violence and increased criminal activity.
It’s also been found that the more stringent drug enforcement becomes, the harder the drugs get because they’re easier to smuggle (this has been found in both alcohol and drug prohibition).
At the end of the day, much of the violence associated that’s with drug use is caused by the same government that claims to be fighting it. It’s absurd for them to then to argue now against people exercising their constitutional rights because of their prohibition laws.
Thoughtful piece! Prohibition of any kind–drugs, marriage, prostitution, abortion, guns, alcohol–simply doesn’t work and instead brings harmful unintended consequences that cost more than the underlying evil government tried to ban.
This law is a bunch of BS. I’ve smoked cannabis almost my entire adult life and have yet to become psychotic or shoot anybody or anything not deserving of being shot at. Not all self medicating people are crazies that should have their constitutional rights infringed. Heck, our founding fathers grew cannabis and there once was a law in America that farmers were required to plant a tablespoon of seeds as a tax to the Feral gov’mint.
Typical go’vermin… create problems that they need to fix. They’re never out of a job and all they need to do is always screw things up. That’s something they excel at.