Drugs Win the 2020 Election!

The 2020 election was a stunning rebuke to prohibitionists and a crucial milestone in the unraveling of the disastrous U.S. War on Drugs. Across the country and by overwhelming margins, American voters came out in favor of legalizing marijuana, removing criminal penalties for psychedelic use, and opening new possibilities for treating drug addiction as a public health concern. The biggest victory was in Oregon, where voters overwhelmingly approved a measure that will make it the first state to eliminate the possibility of jail time for possession of heroin, cocaine, oxycodone, and every other narcotic. Instead, those possessing small amounts of drugs could be hit with at most a $100 fine. It’s a really bold experiment. It essentially embodies this idea that, look, arresting people and locking them up for using drugs is not very effective.

00:48 - So let’s stop arresting and putting them in prison, and instead set up education treatment recovery programs, use the money from the legal marijuana market to fund all of that. It’s the harm reduction approach written into law, across the board. Oregon also passed Measure 109, making it the first state to legalize psilocybin, the main psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms. In 2018, the Food and Drug Administration granted psilocybin “breakthrough therapy” status for treatment-resistant depression. In Washington, D.C., voters opted by a margin of 3 to 1 to require that law enforcement make the prosecution of use, possession, and cultivation, of entheogenic plants and fungi, like psilocybin mushrooms, its lowest priority.

01:33 - The most important thing to keep in mind is it is a referendum in the sort of classic sense. It does not change law in any way. It simply says, “Look, government of DC: we, the people, think that the police and the district attorneys should stop arresting and prosecuting people for psychedelic plants. So please do that. Mississippi, Arizona, South Dakota, New Jersey, and Montana all passed initiatives allowing marijuana to be sold for either medical or recreational use. Moore says that there’s a danger that some of the legal structures established by these ballot measures, such as in Arizona, will repeat the mistakes of other states, where regulated cartels dominate. It really is designed to give the existing medical marijuana providers control of the market and not let anybody else into the market, which is kind of crazy.

02:26 - It also establishes all kinds of rules governing the market that have been pretty well shown in other states not to work very well. So on the one hand, it legalizes marijuana. On the other hand, it sets up a market that is destined to be full of problems and corruption and crony nonsense. But, so far, a clear take away from the 2020 election is that the American public has had enough of the government locking people in cages for putting mind altering substances into their own bodies. And the tragic War on Drugs is finally coming to an end. .