Drugs are a complicated subject. Some help people, others hurt people. Sometimes the same drug can do both things. This is not an article in support of drugs; this is an argument that bad policy can hurt people even when it intends to protect them. Specifically, I'd like to focus on marijuana.

In the Reefer Madness era of the 1930s, alarmists tried to convince people that marijuana use would lead to murders and psychosis. The public called BS on that, but over the decades, there have been various public service announcements about how smoking marijuana will make you a deadbeat or cause brain damage.

It's true that smoking marijuana is bad for you and it might damage your brain (the same is true for alcohol, of course). Maybe cannabis will turn some people into deadbeats, but there are marijuana users who live healthy lives and make meaningful contributions to society. And yet, there is an almost guaranteed way to damage a marijuana user's wellbeing and create a need for taxpayer support: Send that person to prison.

Many marijuana users hurt no one but themselves, so it seems callous to want to punish or hurt them further. If there is a moral argument, it's to help or to rehabilitate people who are hurting themselves. Let's play doctor and pretend that we want to help our imaginary patient suppress his marijuana cravings. Would you prescribe a pill with side effects that include separation from family, physical and sexual assault and a lifetime of social issues? Our justice system prescribes this pill whenever it sends a marijuana user to a prison population that is already the largest in the world.

Prison hurts people, both mentally and physically. Studies show that incarceration can cause a lifetime of psychological issues and create a dependency on government support. Put another way, the way our law operates is like enforcing a mandatory death sentence for anyone caught playing Russian roulette: The law is used to guarantee the crime's worst possible outcome.

Excerpts From Studies on Incarceration