Why drugs should not be legalized

The potential benefits and significant risks associated with marijuana use should be taught in medical schools and residency programs throughout the country. Samuel T. Contact: ude. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Journal List Mo Med v. Mo Med. Wilkinson , MD. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Corresponding author. Copyright by the Missouri State Medical Association. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Abstract Recent years have seen substantial shifts in cultural attitudes towards marijuana for medical and recreational use.

Introduction Recent years have seen a cultural shift in attitudes towards marijuana. Lack of Evidence for Therapeutic Benefit In the United States, commercially available drugs are subject to rigorous clinical trials to evaluate safety and efficacy. High Potential for Diversion In some states, patients are permitted to grow their own marijuana. Recreational Marijuana The question of recreational marijuana is a broader social policy consideration involving implications of the effects of legalization on international drug cartels, domestic criminal justice policy, and federal and state tax revenue in addition to public health.

Myth: Marijuana is Not Addictive A growing myth among the public is that marijuana is not an addictive substance. Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders Marijuana has been consistently shown to be a risk factor for schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. Open in a separate window. Effects on Cognition Early studies suggested cognitive declines associated with marijuana especially early and heavy use ; these declines persisted long after the period of acute cannabis intoxication.

Other Negative Health Effects Substantial evidence exists suggesting that marijuana is harmful to the respiratory system. Social Safety Implications: Effects on Driving Marijuana impairs the ability to judge time, distance, and speed; it slows reaction time and reduces ability to track moving objects.

Risk Perception and Use in Adolescents Marijuana use among adolescents has been increasing. Footnotes Disclosure None reported. References 1. Gloss D, Vickrey B. Cannabinoids for epilepsy. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews. Antiemetic efficacy of smoked marijuana: subjective and behavioral effects on nausea induced by syrup of ipecac.

Pharmacology, biochemistry and behavior. Neuromodulators for pain management in rheumatoid arthritis. Cannabinoids for the treatment of dementia. Treatment for ataxia in multiple sclerosis. Fungal contamination of tobacco and marijuana. Cerebral phaeohyphomycosis in a patient with neurosarcoidosis on chronic steroid therapy secondary to recreational marijuana usage. Case Rep Radiol. Invasive pulmonary aspergillosis associated with marijuana use in a man with colorectal cancer.

Journal of clinical oncology : official journal of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Missouri Medicine. Effects of marijuana smoking on pulmonary function and respiratory complications: a systematic review.

Archives of internal medicine. Marijuana and medicine: assessing the science base: a summary of the Institute of Medicine report. Archives of general psychiatry. Pulmonary hazards of smoking marijuana as compared with tobacco. The New England journal of medicine. A case-control study of lung cancer in Casablanca, Morocco. Cannabis use and risk of lung cancer: a case-control study. The European respiratory journal.

Marijuana use and the risk of lung and upper aerodigestive tract cancers: results of a population-based case-control study. Journal of general internal medicine. Journal of drug policy analysis. Smoked medicinal cannabis for neuropathic pain in HIV: a randomized, crossover clinical trial. Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.

Cannabis in painful HIV-associated sensory neuropathy: a randomized placebo-controlled trial. A randomized, placebo-controlled, crossover trial of cannabis cigarettes in neuropathic pain. J Pain. Randomized placebo-controlled double-blind clinical trial of cannabis-based medicinal product Sativex in painful diabetic neuropathy: depression is a major confounding factor. Diabetes care. But there are certain reasons why recreational drugs should not be legalized. Let us ponder on the results that were taken out after the legalization of marijuana drugs in Colorado.

Not only this, the increasing amount of the drug doubled the hospitalization number from to 11, only in Colorado. These statistics should be enough to get a clue of what would have the United States become if recreational drugs are made legal for individuals over 18 years of age. Young individuals have a particular inclination toward drug abuse in the United States. Some of them take drugs for a certain reason and get addicted to them.

Give a thought. What will happen if the drugs get legalized all over the country? The individuals who were dealing with drug abuse will not consider the use of the recreational drug as abuse, but rather they may get addicted to more than one controlled substances. Naloxone would likely help them in saving their lives, but this will not be a permanent solution for emergencies. If drugs are legalized across the United States, then legislators have to think about increasing the number of rehabilitation centers in the country.

It may well be that the real difference is considerably less than this, because the patients have an incentive to exaggerate it to secure the continuation of their methadone. But clearly, opiate addicts who receive their drugs legally and free of charge continue to commit large numbers of crimes. In my clinics in prison, I see numerous prisoners who were on methadone when they committed the crime for which they are incarcerated. Why do addicts given their drug free of charge continue to commit crimes?

Some addicts, of course, continue to take drugs other than those prescribed and have to fund their consumption of them. So long as any restriction whatever regulates the consumption of drugs, many addicts will seek them illicitly, regardless of what they receive legally. They sap the will or the ability of an addict to make long-term plans. For the proposed legalization of drugs to have its much vaunted beneficial effect on the rate of criminality, such drugs would have to be both cheap and readily available.

The legalizers assume that there is a natural limit to the demand for these drugs, and that if their consumption were legalized, the demand would not increase substantially. Those psychologically unstable persons currently taking drugs would continue to do so, with the necessity to commit crimes removed, while psychologically stabler people such as you and I and our children would not be enticed to take drugs by their new legal status and cheapness.

But price and availability, I need hardly say, exert a profound effect on consumption: the cheaper alcohol becomes, for example, the more of it is consumed, at least within quite wide limits.

I have personal experience of this effect. I once worked as a doctor on a British government aid project to Africa. We were building a road through remote African bush. The contract stipulated that the construction company could import, free of all taxes, alcoholic drinks from the United Kingdom. These drinks the company then sold to its British workers at cost, in the local currency at the official exchange rate, which was approximately one-sixth the black-market rate. A liter bottle of gin thus cost less than a dollar and could be sold on the open market for almost ten dollars.

So it was theoretically possible to remain dead drunk for several years for an initial outlay of less than a dollar. Nevertheless, drunkenness among them far outstripped anything I have ever seen, before or since. I discovered that, when alcohol is effectively free of charge, a fifth of British construction workers will regularly go to bed so drunk that they are incontinent both of urine and feces. I remember one man who very rarely got as far as his bed at night: he fell asleep in the lavatory, where he was usually found the next morning.

Half the men shook in the mornings and resorted to the hair of the dog to steady their hands before they drove their bulldozers and other heavy machines which they frequently wrecked, at enormous expense to the British taxpayer ; hangovers were universal. The men were either drunk or hung over for months on end. Sure, construction workers are notoriously liable to drink heavily, but in these circumstances even formerly moderate drinkers turned alcoholic and eventually suffered from delirium tremens.

The heavy drinking occurred not because of the isolation of the African bush: not only did the company provide sports facilities for its workers, but there were many other ways to occupy oneself there. Other groups of workers in the bush whom I visited, who did not have the same rights of importation of alcoholic drink but had to purchase it at normal prices, were not nearly as drunk.

And when the company asked its workers what it could do to improve their conditions, they unanimously asked for a further reduction in the price of alcohol, because they could think of nothing else to ask for. The conclusion was inescapable: that a susceptible population had responded to the low price of alcohol, and the lack of other effective restraints upon its consumption, by drinking destructively large quantities of it.

The health of many men suffered as a consequence, as did their capacity for work; and they gained a well-deserved local reputation for reprehensible, violent, antisocial behavior. It is therefore perfectly possible that the demand for drugs, including opiates, would rise dramatically were their price to fall and their availability to increase. And if it is true that the consumption of these drugs in itself predisposes to criminal behavior as data from our clinic suggest , it is also possible that the effect on the rate of criminality of this rise in consumption would swamp the decrease that resulted from decriminalization.

We would have just as much crime in aggregate as before, but many more addicts. The intermediate position on drug legalization, such as that espoused by Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith Center, a drug policy research institute sponsored by financier George Soros, is emphatically not the answer to drug-related crime. This view holds that it should be easy for addicts to receive opiate drugs from doctors, either free or at cost, and that they should receive them in municipal injecting rooms, such as now exist in Zurich.

But just look at Liverpool, where 2, people of a population of , receive official prescriptions for methadone: this once proud and prosperous city is still the world capital of drug-motivated burglary, according to the police and independent researchers. Of course, many addicts in Liverpool are not yet on methadone, because the clinics are insufficient in number to deal with the demand.

If the city expended more money on clinics, perhaps the number of addicts in treatment could be increased five- or tenfold. But would that solve the problem of burglary in Liverpool? No, because the profits to be made from selling illicit opiates would still be large: dealers would therefore make efforts to expand into parts of the population hitherto relatively untouched, in order to protect their profits.

The new addicts would still burgle to feed their habits. Yet more clinics dispensing yet more methadone would then be needed. In fact Britain, which has had a relatively liberal approach to the prescribing of opiate drugs to addicts since I myself have prescribed heroin to addicts , has seen an explosive increase in addiction to opiates and all the evils associated with it since the s, despite that liberal policy.

A few hundred have become more than a hundred thousand. The legal and liberal provision of drugs for people who are already addicted to them will not reduce the economic benefits to dealers of pushing these drugs, at least until the entire susceptible population is addicted and in a treatment program.

So long as there are addicts who have to resort to the black market for their drugs, there will be drug-associated crime. The problem of reducing the amount of crime committed by individual addicts is emphatically not the same as the problem of reducing the amount of crime committed by addicts as a whole. I can illustrate what I mean by an analogy: it is often claimed that prison does not work because many prisoners are recidivists who, by definition, failed to be deterred from further wrongdoing by their last prison sentence.

But does any sensible person believe that the abolition of prisons in their entirety would not reduce the numbers of the law-abiding? The murder rate in New York and the rate of drunken driving in Britain have not been reduced by a sudden upsurge in the love of humanity, but by the effective threat of punishment. An institution such as prison can work for society even if it does not work for an individual.

The situation could be very much worse than I have suggested hitherto, however, if we legalized the consumption of drugs other than opiates. So far, I have considered only opiates, which exert a generally tranquilizing effect. If opiate addicts commit crimes even when they receive their drugs free of charge, it is because they are unable to meet their other needs any other way; but there are, unfortunately, drugs whose consumption directly leads to violence because of their psychopharmacological properties and not merely because of the criminality associated with their distribution.

Stimulant drugs such as crack cocaine provoke paranoia, increase aggression, and promote violence. Much of this violence takes place in the home, as the relatives of crack takers will testify. It is something I know from personal acquaintance by working in the emergency room and in the wards of our hospital.

Only someone who has not been assaulted by drug takers rendered psychotic by their drug could view with equanimity the prospect of the further spread of the abuse of stimulants.