Addiction is a hideous condition, but it’s rare. John Daniel Ehrlichman (/ ˈ ɜːr l ɪ k m ə n /; March 20, 1925 – February 14, 1999) was counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon.
Marijuana is Nobody I spoke with in the United States or elsewhere envisioned stores selling heroin, cocaine, or methamphetamine as freely as Colorado stores sell marijuana or as state liquor stores sell vodka.
It will take some courage to move the conversation beyond marijuana to ending all drug prohibitions, but it will take less, I suspect, than most politicians believe.
.” If a lawful, regulated system is fine-tuned — so that drugs are cheap and trustworthy, the process is not too burdensome, and the taxes on them are not too high — users will likely come to prefer it to the black market. Even with only four states and the District of Columbia having legalized, and only twenty-three states allowing the medical use of marijuana, legitimate production is already a $5.4 billion industry. Canada began a pilot program in Vancouver in 2014 to allow doctors to prescribe pharmaceutical-quality heroin to addicts, Switzerland has a similar program, and the Home Affairs Committee of Britain’s House of Commons has recommended that the United Kingdom do likewise. Death toll rises as wildfires burn 3.4M acres in western U.S. Last November, Ohio voters rejected marijuana legalization, most observers believe, precisely because the proposed initiative would have allowed only ten companies, all of which sponsored the initiative, to grow and distribute marijuana in the state.If we can summon the political will, the opportunity to establish a state monopoly on drug distribution, just as Rockefeller urged for alcohol in 1933, is now — before the genie is out of the bottle.
John Ehrlichman From the Archive.
And a limit to cocaine addiction is you can’t sleep. Ehrlichman was intimately involved in the Watergate cover-up. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news," "Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Most of what we hate and fear about drugs — the violence, the overdoses, the criminality — derives from prohibition, not drugs.
Nixon resigned rather than be removed from office.
Get Access to Print and Digital for $23.99. As indefensible as Watergate was, this quote, from a 2016 The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. “You can decide whether you want to raise your quota — a bureaucratic process — or see someone about your cocaine problem.
He was a broken and pathetic man. Timeless stories from our 170-year archive handpicked to speak to the news of the day. Getting them to raise taxes is like pulling teeth.” What’s more, if legislators overdo it and set taxes too high, they’ll risk reawakening a black market in untaxed drugs.A government monopoly on distribution solves the problem by making the setting of prices a matter of administration, not legislation. Religious leader who said COVID-19 was gay 'punishment' tests positive (Teenagers — particularly eighth graders — are considered harbingers of future societal drug use.
Price? Some smokers are apparently continuing to buy on the black market, which is often cheaper. Binge drinkers — 20 percent of the drinking population — consume more than half of the alcohol sold, which means that for all the industry’s pious admonitions to “drink responsibly,” it depends on people doing the opposite.