I have just come back from California where you can walk in off the street straight into a Kush Doctor’s clinic and as long as you are a Californian resident and can site pretty much any medical condition going they will give you a medical marijuana card  for $40. With this card it is state legal to buy, grow and consume marijuana for medicinal purposes, supposedly in order to help alleviate the physical symptoms of said condition.

So if you have pain it is ok to consume, but if you don’t it isn’t. I had to question why suffering was necessary to make it acceptable? Why was an unpleasant physical sensation the difference in making something illegal or not? The effects of the drug are the same as they always were, its just now they’re “tolerated” as side effects to pain relief rather than the main attraction. Allegedly.

The marijuana dispensaries have such innocuous names such as “The California Herbal Relief Center Compassionate Care” and you must always refer to it as medication. But it’s not really medicine, but then neither are any of the prescribed pain killers on the market. A pain killer never cured anyone. They just mask the effects of your condition which remains the same.

How many people use pain relief as a socially acceptable justification for drug consumption (whether it be prescribed pain killers or dispensed marijuana) when in fact it is actually the effect of the drug they are chasing rather than its ability to remove a physical discomfort they already have? In these health obsessed times, pain and suffering have become the only legitimate ticket to indulgence. Even back in Victorian times when you could legally buy heroin and cocaine in Harrods it was still being sold as medication for coughs and colds.

Why is it not acceptable within our society to want the effects just for themselves? Why is that such a terrible thing? For example, which aspect of recreational marijuana use is so offensive its illegality is supported by most of society? Which bit didn’t they approve of? The laughing? The tangential conversations? The unnecessary eating of snacks?  Exactly what part of the experience was causing it be viewed as a crime and something that must be stopped?

There are many arguments for and against changing the law on drugs, most of which have been voiced at length from both sides and most of which I won’t go into here for that reason.

The most repeated argument for banning the use of cannabis is that it leads to harder more damaging drugs. For the tiny percentage that do go on to use all-consuming drugs such as heroin and crack illegality is rarely an issue. Those that have a need for oblivion will simply seek out the most potent, effective and available means to get there. The stepping stone(d) is irrelevant.

People also generally choose their poison/potion according to their effect and accessibility rather than their legal status. If you include all dependants of prescription and recreational drugs, alcohol and even junk food, there aren’t that many adults on Earth who aren’t indulging in at least one of them.

But it actually doesn’t matter what people are consuming (illegal or otherwise) because they are all essentially just different routes to the same drug, and that is the one generated inside your body.

All intoxicants serve as no more than to act as catalysts to initiate the deployment of the reward chemical Dopamine into the nervous system.  This is, in reality, what everyone is really addicted to and we all just have different methods/substances in order to access it. So does it really matter how you get there?

And is there really any point banning some drugs and not others when they all ultimately send you to the same place?  They can’t make dopamine illegal so why block some routes to it when others are always available?

This is why the war on drugs has failed.

Billions spent. Millions incarcerated. Thousands dead. It has all been for nothing. The situation has not changed nor ever will. No matter what they do, it will always exist. People will spend their whole lives searching for a dopamine boost because it is fairly evident we all have a need otherwise we wouldn’t have to seek it out.

We are all Dopamine chasers in some form or another…so what’s the point of suppressing or denying it? Why pretend it will go away when it won’t?

And as the war on drugs has been constantly proven over the last few decades to be utterly futile, why not simply accept failure and try something else? Why indulge a policy that clearly doesn’t, nor will ever work? How many more countless lives have to be ruined and destroyed slavishly following a course of action that has been defined by its inability to have any effect whatsoever other than to make things worse?

Since California has introduced this halfway house legal loophole, drug consumption has not increased and society has not broken down. In contrast their judicial policy over the last decade to incarcerate every druggie they can find, has led to a systematic breakdown of the prison system and brought the state to virtual bankruptcy. Has this hardline approach improved the situation even marginally? No. It has just criminalised people who should never have entered into the prison system in the first place.

Portugal decriminalised all drugs over a decade ago  believing it is better to treat than punish. They do not see drug users as criminals to be demonised and incarcerated, and think recreational drug users should be left alone or if they have an addiction should be offered help. It was argued before the implementation of decriminalisation that Portugal would become a drug destination for tourists and drug use would explode among youth. It didn’t. In fact, drug use among adolescents decreased and it has not become the “Club Meth” of Europe. Life strangely carried on just as it did before.

Some of man’s greatest follies have been caused by an inability to deviate from a course of action regardless of its efficacy….

…its time to move forward.