Drug dealers: Good, bad or necessary?

I have mixed feelings about drug dealers. Obviously if people want to smoke pot there has to be people willing to grow and sell pot. If cannabis consumers want to smoke they need a steady supply and drug dealers do a very fine job of providing a valuable product.

I suppose it’s the term drug dealer itself that has gotten a bad rap. “Drug dealer” evokes the image of a young man getting rich from the proceeds of crime. Does anybody stop to think that drug dealers are created by the war on drugs? In a legal sense, anybody that provides a controlled substance to another individual is a drug dealer. Everybody who has ever smoked a joint with a friend is guilty of “trafficking“.

I personally am all for free enterprise and I have no problem with an entrepreneur who creates wealth through hard work. But I definitely have a problem with the type of person that cares only about the bottom line. They may realize in an abstract sense that drug prohibition is bad but they have absolutely no interest in seeing the legal status of cannabis change. They do not wish to be a member of a political party because of “the heat”.* This drug dealer knows that in a legal environment a one ounce bag of plant matter is not going to be worth hundreds of dollars. Prohibition allows an individual to make exorbitant profits from growing plants. These are also the same types that will sell you a quarter ounce bag of utter wet shwag that is a gram short of the proper weight. They do not take pride in providing the customer with a quality product.

Then you have drug dealers like Carol Gwilt or the BC3 that flout the law and do what they can to make change. Now I certainly don’t expect people to accept jail time as a way of supporting the cause of repealing prohibition. But there certainly are things that an individual can do. There are many fine organizations and individuals fighting on behalf of cannabis consumers. Like the BC3, NORML, LEAP and SKMP* (just to name a few). It is a sad fact that many of the people that would like to support repealing prohibition rightly feel that it would be dangerous to join one of these organizations. However, monetary support is one way that a person can support activists that are making real change. A recent example of this is SAFER, the organization based in Colorado that has successfully gotten drug reform on the ballot. It was the hard work of volunteers and monetary donations that made this happen.

So there you have it. I love drug dealers as long as they see the futility of drug prohibition, provide a high quality product at a reasonable price and support the repeal of drug prohibition.

I may be asking too much!

*The member list of a political party is a highly guarded secret. If the list were ever made public, the repercussions would be horrendous.