Just last night I spoke to one of my high school friends who now is attending Oregon State University. During this phone call we had talked about how much different Oregon and Oklahoma were including their laws. Just recently my friend was telling me how meth, cocaine and heroin are legal in Oregon and many of his fellow students were partaking in these drugs. Clearly, Oregon is a completely different place than Oklahoma and the idea of these people doing these types of drugs legally is crazy to me. While this idea of having these drugs become legal in certain states seemed crazy I had started to do some reading on the reasoning behind legalizing these drugs and now kind of understand the reasoning behind this.
After reading about this I had learned that the reason for doing this is to create systematic change. According to the NPR article I had read this will save the government millions of dollars and will generate more money. The way that this will save the government money is by reducing spending on mental health dollars and by reducing crime. On the other hand, the government will be able to make a lot of money on legalizing these drugs. This will be by being able to tax the users of these drugs when they make a sale.
Another part to this story is that some say that this a step in the right direction to ending racism. Many claim that the reason why these drugs were illegal is because this was an easier way get black Americans arrested. Overall, I am curious to hear my other friends opinions on this as I am unsure about how I feel about this.