Trump’s pick to head DHS, General Kelly, is strongly against the legalization of marijuana. Kelly believes it undermines the war on drugs. Via Reason:
Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly, who plans to retire next month after more than four decades in the military, recently stepped down as head of the Miami-based U.S. Southern Command, a post he held for three years. In an interview with Military Times on his way out, Kelly repeated a complaint he had voiced while testifying before the House Armed Services Committee in 2014: Marijuana legalization in the United States made it harder for him to wage the war on drugs.
“The actual legalization does cause us problems because—the hypocrisy,” Kelly told Military Times. “Where you stand is where you sit. So if you’re a Latin American, and we’re harping on them to do more to stop the flow of drugs, they say: ‘Wait a minute. As we look north, the real problem is the demand. So why don’t you do more to stop the demand for drugs….Why would we do more when you seem to be legalizing this stuff?'”
Kelly is right to perceive hypocrisy—or at least, grave moral inconsistency—in our current drug policies. He is also right to suggest there is something outrageous about the U.S. government’s insistence that other countries bear the burden of stopping Americans from consuming intoxicants it has decided to ban. But the general’s mission-oriented perspective does not allow for the possibility that the war he has been asked to wage is bound to fail because it is fundamentally at odds with human nature and the laws of economics.
The desire to achieve altered states of consciousness persists across time, across cultures, and across nation-states. Governments cannot extirpate it, and they are asking for trouble when they try to dictate how it will be satisfied. Kelly thinks it is inconsistent to ask other countries for help in stopping the northward flow of cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine when four U.S. states and the nation’s capital have legalized marijuana for recreational use. But that situation is no more inconsistent than criminalizing production, distribution, and consumption of those drugs while tolerating alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, and the bewildering array of psychoactive substances that can be obtained with a doctor’s note. Prohibition is all about arbitrary distinctions.