Fiskings DrugWarRant / Pete Guither / 2,8,2012 We all like a good fisking here, and I enjoy doing it immensely, but today will be satisfied with some wonderful jobs done by others. Scot Morgan has done a hilariously accurate job with What if Day Care Workers Get Stoned on Marijuana and Kill Children?, which is based on a letter someone wrote to their newspaper opposing marijuana legalization: What about the children’s day care workers? If they smoke it and their senses are dulled by its use and they drop little Johnny on his head, whose fault is it now? If it’s legalized, there is no crime and no recourse for problems it causes. Scott rips it apart and I particularly loved this moment of snark: Fortunately, things aren’t actually that bad in real life, especially if you’re not a paranoid idiot. For example, our foremost concerns about bad things happening at day care centers can be resolved satisfactorily in almost every case simply by choosing a facility with a good reputation for not killing the children. … Over at the International Harm Reduction Assocation blog, they’ve got Child rights debates in drug policy deserve better than this. IHRA takes on a paper written by Drug Free Australia’ Josephine Baxter, vice president of the World Federation Against Drugs. The paper is The rights of the child: Ensuring a ‘child-centred’ drug policy is a vital human rights issue for those who influence drug policyThe weakness of the paper, especially given its international law focus, is evident from the first sentence: “Global drug issues (including manufacture and trafficking of illicit substances) have been controlled through cooperative efforts of many countries, within the framework of the United Nations Drug Control Conventions for 100 years’ See the problem? The United Nations was founded in 1945, for starters. It will be 100 years old in thirty three years. What’s more, the current model came into being in 1961. Earlier conventions were far less restrictive including legally regulated models for opium. Many substances weren’t included until the 1960s, others in the 1970s and others still in the 1980s and 1990s. The paper goes on to list these 100 year old conventions, starting at 1961. Baxter throws around non-existent words like unlaterally and unequivably in contexts that don’t even connect to what correct versions of those words would mean. The problems go on and on… As IHRA notes: This is lazy clumsy stuff. Child rights debates in drug policy deserve better. [/I]
I find this argument extremely infuriating. How the hell does being high legally make you invincible to being arrested? It seems like some people want to be able to punish MORE just because marijuana was present, or they think it's still bad even if it is legal, and they won't be able to put people in jail for simply smoking or being under the influence of it. Is it that hard for them to wrap their minds around the fact that if someone drops a child on their head, high or not, they should and would be held responsible for their actions.