|
Tuesday, 10 October 2006 15:10 |
 | | Laura Eshelman |
According to U.S. statistics, a child goes missing every 40 seconds. Someone becomes the victim of sexual assault every two and a half minutes. And every year, roughly 750,000 Americans are arrested for so-called crimes related to marijuana.
Furthermore, since 1997, FBI crime reports show that marijuana arrests outweigh arrests for violent crimes by 100,000 or more.
What are the police doing with their time?
Better
yet, the question we should be asking ourselves is, why do our tax
dollars pay for this travesty? While bureaucrats squander time and
paperwork on enforcing marijuanaës criminality statutes, real crime
flourishes. As the proverb goes, while the cat is away, the rats play.
Most everyone has been a victim of some crime at some point, be it
theft or property damage. Misdemeanors like these require relatively
little time to perpetrate, but seriously inconvenience and harm others.
That being said, itës impossible to know how many thieves and vandals
get away for every 30 seconds that an officer spends patting down a
pothead for his or her stash. Furthermore, itës also impossible to know
how many more felonies would be prevented if law enforcement quit
stepping on the grass.
Many people are
not receptive to arguments for marijuana legalization, not because they
believe itës wrong, but because theyëre not motivated to fight on
behalf of the stereotypical red-eyed couch potato who plays video games
eight hours a day, eats Cheetos for breakfast and desires legal
protection to get baked. The problem is, whenever the law busts those
Jay and Silent Bob figures and takes them off the couches, it not only
creates criminals, it creates victims.
For example, two
UNC Asheville students who live less than a mile apart filed reports
for their stolen mopeds within one month. Moped theft is common in
Asheville, and with the coincidental circumstances of the
aforementioned crimes, police might easily nail the culprits in a
sting. However, while the culprits remain at large, there are plenty of
inmates in the Buncombe County Detention Center facing charges for the
sale or possession of marijuana. Sadder still, three UNCA students died
in the past year due to opiate abuse. The school decided to target the
problem by increasing police monitors in the residence halls for
marijuana use (the universityës housing department subsequently evicted
many students last spring).
The federal
government essentially makes Americans pay to jeopardize their own
safety ÇƒÓ and thatës not simply for the 100 million Americans who say
theyëve tried the wacky weed at least once in their lifetimes. Billions
of hard-earned tax dollars go toward prisons, which house 10 percent of
all Americans.That money might be well spent if inmates were all
legitimate threats to society.
Unfortunately,
people like celebrity toker Tommy Chong, who spent nine months in
prison for selling glass pipes across state lines, take up cells that
would be better occupied by domestic batterers, aggravated and sexual
assaulters and gang members. For that matter, tax revenue would better
benefit society if aimed at preventing truly dangerous drugs from
becoming a problem. The fact that the war on drugs applies to college
kids with bongs when so many young children (especially in Western
North Carolina) lose their extremities after their parentsë
methamphetamine labs blow up is another crime in and of itself.
A law is
supposed to be set in place to protect the people from negligence and
wrong-doing. Laws are supposed to shield us from harm and punish those
who threaten our well-being. The illegality of marijuana does none of
the above. It is an oxymoron to say that marijuana is a victimless
crime, because a crime always has a victim, and in this case, there are
none. However, the U.S.ës marijuana policies hurt the entire spectrum
of our society, for users and non-users alike. These laws make even
less progress than the idle stoner on the sofa. Lawmakers are,
colloquially speaking, one toke over the line and should be ashamed of
themselves.
Furthermore, it
wouldnët hurt the guy on the couch to put down his bubbler every once
in a while and stand up, literally and figuratively, for his own
justice and societyës justice.
ï
Laura Eshelman
is a fourth-year mass communications major at UNC Asheville and a
regular contributor to The Blue Banner, the schoolës student newspaper.
|
