Your Congressman Voted to Put Patients with Cancer, MS, and AIDS in Prison for Using Marijuana

Ever since the insane war on drugs was begun, there have been large numbers of vicitms. The most recent victims have been cancer, Multiple Sclerosis, and AIDS patients who may need to smoke marijuana to get better. For example, during chemotherapy for cancer, many doctors have discovered that smoking marijuana may relieve the nausea that most folks undergoing chemotherapy tend to experience. Such 'extreme left-wing counterculture types' as Lyn Nofziger (Reagan's former press secretary) have come out for medical marijuana, and Bill Buckley and the Nobel Prize winner in economics Milton Friedman have come out for legalizing drugs entirely. We spend not only billions per year on the direct cost of doing drug busts, incarceration, etc., but there are even larger costs of ruined lives. Indeed, most drugs like heroin are only as expensive as they are due to their illegal status. Their illegal status makes it inevitable that drug addicts will break into your car, your home, hold you up for your wallet, etc., for the money for their 'fix' when legalization would take the cost out of it - and also take the profits out of it that keep organized crime in this country as well as drug cartels in other nations in business in the first place. Moreover, because it is quite literally true that you can get the drugs on the inside of a prison easier than you can on the outside, what kind of Communist dictatorship will we have to make this nation in order to make it tighter than a prison? Clearly, the war on drugs doesn't work and actually may increase the prevalence of drugs in our society, especially amongst younger people. The way it does this is that making a drug illegal makes it expensive. Yet the pushers have the BIGGEST incentive to not just sell to adults, but to the young. This gets them addicted, and thus gives them a huge profit forever. Ironically, legalizing even something as horrible as heroin would probably LOWER the long-run usage amongst young people, although it would increase the usage short run amongst adults. The reason that if drugs were legal for adults (but sellers severely punished for selling to minors) that minors' usage would go down is that the sellers would have a lot to lose if they are caught selling to minors, just as minimarts have a lot to lose if they sell beer and cigarettes to minors. Thus, people selling drugs would have a lot less incentive to sell to minors than they do now where it's illegal, but highly profitable (due to the high price) if you don't get caught. I don't know about y'all, but where I'm from, if something doesn't work, you stop doing it. I don't want to practice medicine in the state of ANYWHERE - so why does my opponent feel that the Federal government should do so?