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CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – In New Orleans, recreational marijuana use is legal. It’s sold to the public through roaming vans that look like food trucks. It’s available everywhere, especially where there is tourist traffic.
If you favor legalized drug use, you should see what’s happening in New Orleans.
Marijuana is, indeed, a gateway drug. Some, but not all, users eventually experiment with more dangerous narcotics. And once the police are told that marijuana is legal, street-level enforcement of other drugs goes out the window. Sure, there are still law enforcement task forces that target high-level drug rings – if you are bringing in large amounts of heroin, or cocaine, or meth, you are still hunted. But the pusher on the corner is now largely ignored. Drug dealing takes place out in the open in New Orleans. No one cares about a junkie getting their fix.
And where does that lead?
On every block in te French Quarter, the Warehouse District, and the lower Garden District you’ll find people passed out on the streets. In every alley, doorway, or outside any vacant building there’s a druggie, usually sleeping on cardboard, waiting to come-to to begin searching for their next fix. Every bus stop in the city has had its benches removed – they’d be used as a bed for the addicted. New Orlean’s beautiful parks are overrun with homeless, who are generally left alone so long as they stay away from where children are playing.
I’m sure that there are some addicts who eventually realize that their choices are a dead end. I celebrate anyone who turns away from addiction and gets on a path to sobriety. But I suspect that isn’t what happens to most of the addicts that I see. It’s more likely that the fall further and further down the rabbit hole. I’d guess many are biding time until their addiction kills them. Some day that man sleeping on a cardboard mattress in the gutter won’t wake up… he will slip away.
That’s why drugs should never be legalized. No one can ever be the person God intended them to be when they are using. The squandering of human potential is heartbreaking.
Chris Conley
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