BRATTLEBORO — Can lawmakers do more harm than good?
I am troubled by lawmakers who cannot or will not see that the criminal justice system can actually do more harm than good. Too many legislators are in denial about that.
If we must have government studies for anything, we certainly should have preliminary safety studies before we enact laws that haul our citizens through the criminal justice system, not afterwards, when too much harm has already been done.
To my knowledge, no legislature - federal or state - has done a study to determine exactly why marijuana and hemp should be illegal.
Historically, marijuana was prosecuted by people who had a clear and present interest in keeping cannabis (both industrial hemp and marijuana) out of the competitive biomass-fiber market. It was business interests that initially acted against marijuana, not concerned citizens for public safety.
Marijuana was then tried in the fickle court of public opinion which was whipped into mass hysteria by the media and policymakers. By the mid-1930s, these ancient and indispensable plants became Public Enemy No. 1.
No government studies, scientific or economic, were ever performed to justify exactly why the feds needed to outlaw marijuana in the first place, which allowed the states to follow suit.
Even a cursory understanding of common law suggests that if you're going to make laws which hurt people more than the activity they are being arrested for, then that says more against the lawmakers than it does about the target of their laws.
Who is the real wrongdoer here?