Part I - Legalize All Drugs?

Most of my blog postings deal with the War on Marijuana and what a failure it has become. Recently, I noticed that there were those who argued for not only the extremely non-toxic marijuana to be legalized and regulated but also dangerous drugs such as cocaine, heroin and crystal meth. The position intrigued me, so I did some research as to their views and came to a surprising conclusion:

All drugs (not only alcohol, tobacco and caffeine) must be legalized and regulated.

I started my search into this view at Change.org, where people were increasingly discussing a revamp on not just the policy surrounding marijuana but also the policy surrounding ALL drugs. After some searching, I came across a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP.

(You can find LEAP's website at http://www.leap.cc/cms/index.php)

LEAP is a group of former and current law enforcement personnel who have come to the conclusion that legalizing and regulating any substance under the category "drug" would lessen the burden on taxpayers, health personnel and law enforcement personnel. To understand the LEAP argument, you have to break away from the traditional "harms of [drug] vs. harms of [drug]" argument so prevalent in modern society.

While I'm not an official speaker of LEAP (and they are welcome to deny my words), I can summarize their argument fairly well. They state that the current system of Drug Prohibition isn't working and that a system of regulation, control and education is instead necessary to stem problems of drug abuse, criminal enterprises and health issues.

A good example of Prohibition failing and a system of legalization and regulation taking over is Alcohol and the 1920's. Horrified by alcohol abusers and boozing degenerates, ministers led the way for an alcohol Prohibition to eliminate alcohol use among Americans. It was supposed to usher in a new age of sobriety and guard against problems that the usage of alcohol carried with it.

I think we all know how that turned out. http://thehive.modbee.com/?q=node/5005

Nonetheless, it bears repeating. Alcohol use didn't decline and die with Prohibition. On the contrary, following a drop in alcohol use (when it was banned commercially), alcohol use rose and may have risen past the rate of use BEFORE Prohibition had not the US Government stepped in and repealed Prohibition. Not only did alcohol use rise but the only ones who could produce it had to operate illegally. Cue the rise of gangs using alcohol to fund their operations in major US cities with hidden bars called "speakeasies" more plentiful than modern-day Starbucks Coffee coffeeshops.

A little-known fact is that one of the major proponents or advocates of continuing Prohibiton was Al Capone. You may wonder why a criminal would want to continue a system that kept his product illegal.

It's actually quite simple:

1) With Prohibition active, the price of alcohol climbs from its previous price range. Because the market for alcohol is illegal, there are no restrictions on price floors or ceilings.

2) There is no need to use anything close to health standards or minimum wage restrictions when your very production and sale is illegal. This saves money even though your product is noticeably less healthy and probably produced in much less safe conditions.

3) Competition doesn't need to be that big of an issue when you're located in an illegal market. It's not as if you'll get into more trouble if your competition "disappears" under suspicious circumstances.

Eliminating the kingpins was nearly impossible due to the money they received and spent in lawyers, cover-ups and elimination of whistleblowers. When it did happen, police would stand proudly in front of the camera with their seized alcohol and their accomplishment of taking down a major kingpin only to discover that within a few months, middle-of-the-criminal-pyramid lieutenants would cause a major bloodbath to reach the top. One would succeed, and viola: alcohol production and sale continued, the seized amount of alcohol was quickly replaced and the criminal organization continued as normal (with bodies on the street in the aftermath).

Sounds similar, doesn't it? But a system of legalization and regulation considerably solves the criminal problem as legalizing and regulating alcohol considerably solved the criminal problems of Prohibition. All of the effects above can be compared to any illicit drug today (with speakeasies replaced by drug dealers and criminal organizations rooted and spreading routes from South and Central America).

What's next? We've learned what mistakes we've made with regulation. What needs to occur is a complete overhaul of drugs, legal and illegal. When tobacco advertising was hampered, use of tobacco went down. When doctors calmly explained the dangers of tobacco and showed horribly disfigured lungs, use went down more. We must legalize drugs, but we must regulate them as well, the reason for the intense debate on Drug Policy Reform. An end of Prohibition and a beginning of what? Would limiting alcohol advertising lower the usage rates of alcohol?

Thus the discussion of Drug Policy Reform. It's all very well to declare that drugs should be legal, but HOW should they be legal? Discussions of heroin clinics that provide heroin to their users and clean needles (as long as the use occurs within the clinic) is a common topic. So is legalizing and regulating marijuana like alcohol with restrictions on advertising and using money gained to help fund non-biased drug education.

It's often hard to get people from across the United States to share their views (even in this Information Age). Could Google Wave provide the support needed for Drug Policy reformers?

Part II - A New Wave of Information... and Reform? 

Announced by Google on May 27th of this year, Google Wave is an application currently under development that promises a new form of information sharing and creation.

With the Google Wave application, users can create new "waves" and then invite others to assist them in creating, editing and even deleting information contained in the wave. Waves can be used for a huge number of different purposes (from chat rooms to project documents to conferences to... well, you get the idea).

Imagine a Wikipedia page that changes before your eyes. Like worms tunneling through dirt, names of Google Wave users appear as they delete, add or edit information. One new subpage is started with a conference application allowing people to connect and talk to one another. Someone plays casual games with a number of others far below the actual work, then deletes those games when they finish.

For Drug Policy reformers, it's perfect. A group of interested persons works to create laws governing the use or sale of specific drugs. Another "Wave" is dedicated to comparing information on an adequate tax to implement on that specific product. Yet another works with doctors and physicians to develop ideas for clinics and a safer way to distribute these drugs. One "Wave" works to figure out the cost to current drug-producing criminal organizations and how to best dismantle them through a combination of law enforcement and simple economics.

But there are several things that need to improve with Google Wave before all of these "coulds" and "woulds" and "what-ifs" can reach reality.

I am currently a user of Google Wave and while basic functionality exists, it needs a LOT of work. Occasionally the application won't load or goes down. When too much information fills a Wave, it becomes extremely laggy and slow. Not good when multiple people are attempting to edit multiple lines of information. There are only a few applications as of now and those applications are somewhat confusing to implement and use. Sometimes you will read a Wave but Google Wave will still show that Wave as "Unread."

Then there are the problems that arise when considering things that aren't even implemented yet. Although many users can edit, add and delete information (and a person can go "back in time" with the Google Wave timeline feature to before that information was added, edited or deleted), there's no way aside from creating a new post within a Wave to determine what information was edited by Joe and what information was edited by Jane.

What about all of those "woulds" and "coulds" and "what-ifs" above? How does one connect one Wave to another? Is there a way to see a network of related Waves or Waves connected to one specific Wave? Authorizing one Wave connected to another? Inviting and assuming control if one Wave is below another?

Google Wave has just begun. There's a lot of work ahead of it for it to even closely resemble a working product worthy of Google applications. This conjecture is great for now, but it's just conjecture. Until then, we can hope that Google knows what it's doing... an application like Google Wave would greatly aid not only Drug Policy Reform but a number of causes and groups in creating a structure of information that they can use to further benefit.

We can only wait and see.