MEDICAL MARIJUANA PROPOSAL AND A BRIEF HISTORY OF U.S. DRUG PROHIBITION

The news that two out-of-city businessmen, Batzi Kuburovich and Neil
Forrest, have applied to open the county's first medical marijuana
dispensary at First and Westwood next to Togo's and Simply Romance,
was expected to raise as much ire among local conservatives as the
proposed strip club next to Home Depot.

The ire has simply not materialized. Of the Dispatch's Community Pulse
respondents, 7 out of 12 supported the idea of opening a dispensary,
and on the web poll, 1,521 people responded, with 67 percent
supporting the idea of a dispensary, 33 percent opposing. (To be sure,
web poll results are easy enough to bias.) All the blog comments
support the idea, many with verbal flings at imaginary conservative
opposition.

Police and city staff are researching the legality and likely effects
of such a business. In the meantime, let us examine the history of
drug prohibition in the United States.

There were no drug laws in colonial America, nor in the United States
of America for the first 100 years of our nation's history. The whole
pharmacopoeia, including opium and cocaine, was legal. Laudenum, a
tincture of opium in an alcohol base, was an extremely popular pain
medication, particularly among women, who used it to alleviate
menstrual cramps.

The first law banning a specific drug was enacted in free-wheeling,
post Gold Rush San Francisco in 1875; it outlawed the smoking of opium
in opium dens.

Progressives and muckrakers, including Upton Sinclair, decried the
ready availability of drugs and unregulated patent medicines. As a
result, in 1906, the first federal law was passed, the Pure Food and
Drug Act, which in addition to mandating federal inspection of meat
products, forbade the manufacture, sale, or transportation of
adulterated food products and patent medicines deemed poisonous.
Drugs, including cocaine, were still legal, so long as they were
clearly labeled: truth in advertising.

In 1914, the Harrison Act, named after its Democratic author, Francis
Burton Harrison of New York, was passed to regulate and tax the
production, importation, and sale of opiates. Originally, it only
required a license. Later, licenses were not granted and opiates were
thus no longer legally available.

In 1920, the sale and transportation of alcohol was prohibited by
Constitutional amendment. The amendment was not overturned until 1933.
In the meantime, organized crime made huge profits.

In 1937, the Marijuana Tax Law provided for the regulation and
taxation of pot, and like the Harrison Act, after a time, licenses
were no longer issued and the substance became illegal.

In short, progressives and do-gooders, mostly Democrats, used the laws
of the state first to regulate and tax, later to prohibit consumption
of mind-altering substances. Simultaneously, illegal crime enterprises
mushroomed to fill consumer demand.

Indisputably, marijuana, opium and its derivatives, cocaine, alcohol,
and tobacco are bad for the user. They impair judgment and reaction
time. Abused, they can kill the user. This is why social conservatives
oppose drug legalization: not from ignorance or fear, but because
drugs can be addictive and deadly.

However, I am not a social conservative but a paleo-conservative. In
my opinion, the twin problems of huge profits fueling the criminal
underworld and the incarceration and criminalization of drug users are
much worse than drug abuse qua drug abuse.

Therefore, I favor outright legalization of all drugs. Simultaneously,
however, we would need to end all forms of welfare, so that addicts
will not sit around and get high at taxpayer expense. People who
actually have to function at work the next day are much less likely to
abuse substances.

As for Gilroy's local issue of the proposed medical marijuana
dispensary, I am not interested enough to have an opinion. It may have
a bad effect on the community by encouraging illegal drug use. It may
have a good effect for some pain-sufferers who will no longer have to
drive to Redwood City.

But considered against the backdrop of the drug wars in this nation,
it is of no moment and no use at all. It is a bandaid remedy for an
infection of flesh-eating bacteria.