British Columbia has been dealing with a bad load of cocaine this year. Cocaine users have been getting sick with severe infections due to lowered white blood cell counts and weakened immune systems.

The cause is cocaine that has been stepped on (cut) with a de-worming agent called Levamisole. Authorities say it was likely added to the cocaine in its source Country - probably Columbia. Of course who really knows, we placed drugs on the black market where we have no ability to track these sorts of things. It’s impossible to know - just the way the drug cartels like it.

The tainted cocaine is not just a BC issue - this cocaine has been showing up all around the globe. Not to encourage drug trafficking but kudos to the traffickers for being so good at what they do. In spite of harsh international drug trafficking laws they moved a huge stash of coke all around the globe and into the hands of those demanding it. Once again prohibition fails.

Those who support continued prohibition and increased criminal penalties for drug use no doubt started making all sorts of “serves them right” statements upon hearing the tainted coke news story. I wonder if they would be doing so if it was one of their grand daughters who decided to try coke for the first time and ended up dead. I wonder if they may rethink their stance on drug laws when they realize that those laws did nothing to stop her from accessing coke and in the end made the coke she tried deadly. My guess is that they still wouldn’t blame prohibition and instead ask for harsher drug laws - which actually makes what happened to their grand daughter all the more likely to happen again to someone else’s family member. Good intentions, misguided actions.

Prohibitionists really need to step back, take a deep breath, and think. They need to realize that the vast majority of people who are actively trying to get drugs regulated and controlled by the government (notice I didn’t say legalized as that’s a loaded term) do so out of the same concerns that they have.

They have kids too. They live in the same neighborhoods. They go to the same schools. They care as much as you do about keeping people off drugs.

The difference is drug law reformers have paid attention to the harms that prohibition has caused in our society and haven’t turned a blind eye to it. They have recognized that drug abuse is very bad and must be avoided - but not at all costs. In comparison prohibitionists have the philosophy that drug use is very bad and must be avoided “at all costs". The problem is prohibitionists have never stopped and added up the true cost of prohibition.

A few of the costs off the top of my head:

* Policing drug crime
* Neighborhood grow ops and drug labs
* Impure unsafe product
* Unnecessary killings of civilians
* Corruption of public servants
* Easy access to drugs for kids
* Unsafe methods of ingestion
* Increased use of illegal prescription drugs
* Mistrust in law enforcement
* Enriching our terrorist enemies
* Clogging up the court system
* Over crowded prisons
* Destroying the environment
* Increased proliferation of gangsterism and related violence

Just to name a few!

All of these costs would not exist if drugs were legal. These are costs we created when we passed our drug laws. These costs are in addition to the cost of drug addiction on its own.

Now why would prohibitionists be willing to incur these costs? The most noble reason I can think of is because they acknowledge the harm drugs do to users and they want to avoid that from happening to other human beings. Very commendable.

If that is our noble reason for drug prohibition shouldn’t we also be showing the same compassion to people who become addicted to illegal drugs? I mean come on - if ending up addicted is so terrible that we add prohibitionist laws to our criminal code to avoid it shouldn’t we show a lot of compassion for those who are addicted? The compassion would come from the same place would it not? Why instead do we imprison the addicted and treat them as outcasts? Why do we have laws that make drugs more harmful than they already are and in some cases lethal for those who are addicted?

Another way of asking these questions is to ask “What would Jesus do with the drug war and the addicted?”

Would Jesus point his finger and scold addicts for being medically addicted to a harmful substance and then throw them in jail, ruin their chance at future employment, tear apart their family, and introduce them to all other sorts of evil people in prison?

I ask those who are supporting drug prohibition to take a look at what Jesus would do and see if it even comes close to what we’re doing with our drug laws. I think you’ll find that those trying to put an end to prohibition and its destructive unintended consequences are asking for the exact same thing Jesus would.

Amen.

(Jesus/pot graphic originally from Cannabis Culture)