Weighing in

A front page story in Sunday’s Spokesman-Review about efforts to combat marijuana growing operations in the woods of Central Washington drew several comments at spokesman.com. Here is an edited version of the back-and-forth:

Jonathan Morse: Every one of the negative things described in this story would disappear if marijuana were made legal – the environmental damage, the drug cartels, the danger to hikers and campers or law enforcement officers. The gardeners would be growing legal pot, being paid legal wages, paying legal taxes the state could regulate … and the cops would be free to chase real criminals. The Spokesman might consider asking how much each of these busts cost us taxpayers and don’t forget the cost of imprisonment.

Nick42: How much do those flyovers cost? How much does a year of surveillance cost? How much does the “more aggressive eradication program” cost? How much will it cost to imprison all of these “gardeners”? And after all of this tax money is spent, what good has it done? Pot is still widely available everywhere. What we get for our money, it seems, is people tearing up forest land because of this silly prohibition.

crazyivan44: The notion that this is a “silly prohibition” is absurd. Do you really think pot is the end goal? What is going to stop (Ecstasy), and meth, and PCP, and any of the hard drugs from being legalized? It’s a pretty big gamble to assume that if things are legalized then all of society’s drug problems are going to cease, and if you are wrong then there is no way of going back.

Lewis: Shows how ignorant our government is, they spend millions trying to control an industry that is undetect- able. Sure they might find a plot here and there, but in Washington and Oregon marijuana are big cash crops that our government is too stupid to tax. …

Sadbuttrue: We are actually relearning the exact same lessons we should have learned, but apparently did not, from alcohol prohibition. Just before alcohol was re-legalized, we were publicly wringing our hands about the violent alcohol gangs which imposed an immense pathology on the country. And unsuspecting normal citizens who stumbled over backcountry stills were often shot at and killed in the 1920s. … Thus, these front-page stories that extol the horrendously counter- productive and anti-social efforts to eradicate marijuana are funda- mentally intellectually dishonest. Marijuana prohibition benefits just one group: the law enforcement prison/ industrial complex, at the expense of any other societal value.