Police Chief Joseph McNamara explains his reasons for making this advert at the Huffington Post. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-mcnamara/lets-be-honest-the-war-ag_b_773627.html.
Honestly, while I do support Prop. 19 and similar incremental movements toward control through legalization, I suspect it ain’t going to happen. Just as prohibition made gangsters rich and really created the institution of organized crime in the United States, the prohibition of marijuana created a criminal class for its cultivation and distribution as well. In his video, Chief McNamara believes legalization would help eliminated organized criminal involvement . . . and he is correct . . . IF . . . unfortunately, this is a case where necessity creates some very strange bedfellows as conservative prohibitionists are now working hand in hand with organized criminals for the same goal but for very different reasons.
McNamara does make a very good point as he quotes from William F. Buckley who said: “Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.”
Of course, most folks familiar with the history of marijuana prohibition know that most reefer madness allegations are not true . . . the statistics were cooked at the get-go by folks working under the influence of William R. Hearst and his desire to put hemp growers out of business to protect his own paper mill businesses and by others who saw the ends of prohibition of vices justified by the means of re-arranging facts.
However, even if reefer madness were real, the percentage of actual users of marijuana who have committed crimes is far below those who use alcohol (violent deaths related to the marijuana trade are because of criminal illegalization as gangsters fight it out not because of the actual use of weed itself). Certainly the death toll is far lower than that caused by drunk driving.
McNamara has an insight in that “For 70 years, we have prohibited marijuana in this country, each day expecting different results” which is a beautiful parallel to Einstein’s definition of insanity . . . to compulsively repeat the same action over and over and over again and each time expecting different results. Current laws and policies have failed repeatedly for 70 years so why don’t we try something new? Certainly those readers familiar with NLP know the presupposition that if what you are currently doing is not working, try something else, anything else, until you get something that works. Repeating the same failed strategy doesn’t cut it.
All the best,
Brian
