later man, had too much tonight already…
oh you haven’t responded to astrology/horoscope yet.
Excellent posts, Phaedrus and abgrund. I stand corrected. 
My contention that drug-induced crime is the reason we need to eradicate drug use via prohibition is seriously problematic. First, there is little evidence of a correlation between drug-use and violent crime. Second, there is however a clear correlation between the prohibition of drugs and crime. Third, there has yet to be any success in reducing drug use via prohibition.
That said, we still need to respond to the problems associated to drug and alcohol abuse.
In researching America’s drug war on the net, I found a lot of well-documented research on sites devoted to ending the war on drugs.
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/
http://www.drugsense.org/wodclock.htm
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/index.htm
Quote from http://www.drugwarfacts.org/crime.htm
Another quote from a well-researched article at http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/basicfax.htm#q6
There are some who disagree with the overwhelming majority. Here’s a post arguing in favor of the drug war at http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/debate/myths/myths3.htm. It’s a written to teach those in favor of the drug war how to properly respond to the “legalizers”:
It seems that volumes of scientific findings support the assertion that America’s drug war is an utter failure and a poor response to the “drug problem”. However, it is still important to ask: What is, in fact, the drug problem? The war on drugs has unnecessarily reduced the drug problem to that of illegality handled by police, courts, and prisons, when in fact the underlying problem, drug and alcohol abuse, is a social problem affecting and destroying lives and communities, and there need to be other approaches to help resolve this problem.
[contented edited by ILP]
God, I hope so. Impoverished and sober sucks.
Listen, the material you quoted looks like an anti-drug propaganda sheet from one of the many institutions that seeks to prop up or irrational war on drugs. A casual reading of it shows many errors (either out of date info or information that’s been refuted by many other studies) plus many cases of causal fallacies (post hoc ergo propter hoc, joint effect, wrong direction & complex cause).
One stat in particular uses the same cirular reason- what does it matter if 70% of those arrested are high if being high was the crime? I think abgrund pointed this one out, too.
To me the issue isn’t even whether or not there’d be drug related crime- I’ll concede that of course there would be. There is now. But by decriminalizing it, we’d eliminate most of the violent crime, and save billions of dollars in the process. Alcohol and tobacco are far worse than, say, pot, which has been demonized in an utterly irrational way.
Even if we legalized only some of the drugs that are currently illegal we’d have progress. A rational evaluation of the evidence would show that pot, while not harmless, is in the same general category as booze and could be legalized with no harm to society. And we’d definately free up an immense amount of money and resources to do so.
Mostly I say we’ve lost the war on drugs, but we won’t admit it. All the billions of dollars we pour into it will never make a dent, and just causes more problems than it prevents. No one is being served by the Drug War, IMOHO.
While it seems that one must carefully define a social problem, because facts and myths are easily confused:
hmmm…
One must also not turn a blind eye to the obvious problems of frequent drug use:
It seems agreed that drug abuse leads to individual destruction. I have also seen that it destroys lives of their spouses and children. As for destroying neighborhoods - even if the drug war plays a significant part in the destruction, the abuse of drugs is equally a factor. Here’s what I propose: until I can be absolutely sure that there is no causal connection between the destroyed lives who abuse drugs and the crimes they have commit, such as burglary, assault, and rape, I will continue to consider their drug abuse a social problem. And since I rarely share the views of the libertarians among us, I will consider it a duty of the government to deal with this particular social problem.
[contented edited by ILP]
(Emphasis mine- P)
I feel that’s backwards. In a free country we should only limit a freedom when we’re absolutely sure something IS a problem. My contention is that drugs weren’t a problem in America til they were criminalized. Nowadays even seeking treatment for drug abuse is dangerous. When drugs are stigmatized and criminalized to the degree they are now, it can even be dangerous for a user to try to “get straight” for fear they may be arrested for their troubles.
As one of the Libertarians among us, I think the government “deals with” too many problems as it is, and do so in a piss-poor manner, too, as a general rule. 
Oh, well. These are just my philosophies on the topic. I don’t seriously expect we’ll ever have a government enlightened enough to set aside the hysteria and examine the actual facts at hand. Spinning and selling the war on drugs is too important to those in power to let reason enter the debate.
See the prohibition, circa 1920’s.
See the lengthy posts by abgrund. 
By and large, I’m in agreement with what you’ve written abgrund (and mightily impressed that you bothered to flesh it out with such conviction). A few small points though:
I think you’re being intentionally implausible. Of course, a cost reduction of 95% would not lead to a 20x usage increase, but a 50% cost reduction would allow a user to increase usage incrementally. Many people who do not work within drug/mental health services (and I say this with utmost respect towards you) often make the mistake of characterising drug users of simply needing the ‘fix’ – irrespective of cost. Although this is true for many (such is the nature of physical addiction), many are genuinely limited by finance – it’s a political truism that a junkie will simply rob with impunity… it’s not that simple and it’s not that easy. Many users will budget and maintain their addiction/use according to the money they have or are likely to acquire, simply to avoid excessive criminal activity. A reduction in cost would lead to an increase in use almost certainly – not on the scale you cheekily proposed, but certainly at a lesser degree.
Not true I’m afraid. I’m just in the mood for being picky… It might not be a ‘black market’ for Japanese cars, but in the UK there’s certainly a ‘grey market’ for cars manufactured on the Continent (though whether this is due to taxation or profiteering salesmen, I’m unsure). As for ‘black market’ petrol/gasoline…. Where have you been, buddy? In the UK, most rural areas have a decent sized ‘red diesel’ economy. To give you some details ‘red diesel’ is basically normal gasoline used for agriculture and marine purposes, that has been infused with a red dye in order to distinguish it from the fuel you and I use. Why dye it red? Because such fuel is available at a vastly lower taxation band than the high-priced shit that you, I and John Q Dicksucker have to purchase (historically, diesel was always available at rebated prices and has continued to be so’ in the form of ‘red diesel’, as an implicit aid to certain industries).
To give you some idea of the figures we’re looking at, ‘red fuel’ duty rate is at 4.22p per litre at a VAT rate of 5% (meaning 18p per £1 goes to the Government), ‘white fuel’ duty rate stands at 53.2p per litre at the standard VAT rate of 17.5% (meaning 76p per £1 goes to the Government). With figures like that, it’s unsurprising that there’s a thriving black market in such petrol.
I have not read all the posts, and I’ve never dabbled in illegal drugs.
One thing to point out. The market in drugs is superbly efficient (you can find your local dope dealer on Christmas day!); it is because it is not regulated (does your dope dealer have a union contract?!).
Now, if the trade was legalized, supply would be controlled (hey man, the Government wants to tax the stuff), quality controls would be imposed (we don’t want people to be poisoned, do we?), and Federal Regulations will protect American producers (well, Californi producers are worried about cheap imports from Afghanistan).
Would you consumers benefit from legalization? Only asking!
I’d say its worse than backwards. By such logic, he government should again ban use of ethanol, and while they’re at it, being overweight and smoking (dead parents = affected children). They should also pull any habit-forming prescription drugs off the market (yeah right). This same ‘what about the children’ argument often gets used as a defense for the heterosexual marriage only policy.
I retain the hope that some day people in America will begin to take responsibility for their own actions, but we aren’t there yet.
Another thought!
Part of the ‘legalize it’ proposition is that if the law can’t stop people from carrying out an activity, then do not repress it. Fair enough.
But by the same argument, does it not follow that one should not stigmatize murder, rape and pillage? Even the most ardent libertarian would not suggest that, would he?
If one accepts, therefore, that some behaviour, even though ‘bad’, cannot be eliminated by Government edict or action, should nonethelsess be criminalized, why is it so difficult to apply that argument to drugs?
That’s not a very good example, Noel. You obviously can’t legalize murder since that harms other people. In the case of victimless “morals” crimes, no one is harmed but the doer. A better example would be alcohol. Between the health effects of alcohol abuse and traffic fatalities where alcohol was a contributing factor, over 100,000 people are killed every year. Compare that to the negligible amount of people harmed from pot. So should we ban alcohol?
And if the government is to protect us, how about banning skydiving? And tobacco? How about butter or fast food?
My assertion is NOT that drugs are good for you. I don’t think the government should be in the business of dictating a morality based on Christian dogma and antidrug hysteria, I don’t think the war on drugs is working, and I don’t think it’s the governments job to protect us from ourselves.
On the issue of drugs being bad for people. OK, let me first separate the users who have freely chosen to smoke pot, or chosen to do hard drugs, or chosen to drink alcohol, etc… Let me differentiate these choosers from the dysfunctional addicts and the destroyed users. My message goes out to all those who want, or need, to quit.
I propose, despite how my words have been likened to the worst forms of fascism by others here, that the government get involved in a serious way in dealing with a known problem - that of drug abuse. I don’t care about casual pot smokers - except when they cry out for help and there are only a handful of shitty little non-profits scraping funds from the crumbs of society in order to help them. I am talking here about when the drugs become a problem.
To this, I can add, that I don’t believe at all that drugs are inherently evil, or that heroin users are bad people - this is a moral crusade I have no interest in. In fact, I believe that people should have a right to junk it up when and how they see fit (especially given the number of bars where people every night legally junk it up with liquor). I am targeting my message, instead, to those casual or not-casual drug users who want to quit and can’t, who need to quit and don’t know it, or don’t know how, whose lives and that of their family’s are being destroyed, and to those who have witnessed both sides of this double edged drug sword.
Where there are people in need of help, any kind, I will always advocate a social solution, which necessarily includes a government solution. This doesn’t make me a fascist in favor of putting overweight americans in jail. It makes me, on the other hand, somebody in favor of using tax
dollars and sometimes the power of the government to teach and sometimes force people into solving their problems. There is a balance between individual freedoms and social needs, and I propose, in relation to the drug war and the question of legalising drugs, that we lower the crime aspect of drug use dramatically, get away from police tactics and prison terms to solve the problem, and put a lot more tax money into the low-funded industry of treatment (short-term detox as well as long term rehabilitation).
Instead of training new police officers every year to seek out drug users, perhaps these heroic individuals would be equally interested in a profession that deals with drug addicts in ways more medically inclined. Instead of pouring tax dollars into new crime initiatives, we should be pouring that money into new drug treatment initiatives. (But of course, in the campaign for the war on drugs, treatement - like rehabilitation in the war on crime - has become a dirty word.)
So, in response to Phaedrus and phOrk and abgrund, I do think the govt is there to protect us from ourselves (Phaedrus: “I don’t think it’s the governments job to protect us from ourselves”); I don’t think taking responsibility for ourselves is solution to all of our problems (phOrk: “I retain the hope that some day people in America will begin to take responsibility for their own actions”) - I don’t think this illusionary self-responsibility holdover from the reagan era has any relevency here to the addictive nature of drugs nor to its underlying economics; and I do believe rehabilitation works (abgrund:““Rehabilitation” has a poor success rate even with subjects who want to quit”).
Phaedrus,
Actually, I agree with you! I have no problem with skydiving. I have no problem with casinos (in the United Kingdom, the Government wish to make it easier to open casinos. Some people object on the grounds that some feckless individuals will lose all their money. I do not like that objection: people are free, and should be allowed to make their own decisions, and if they want to spend all their money at the gaming tables, so be it). I have no problems with prostitution, either.
So, in fact, I am quite prepared to go along with the argument: be free, but accept the consequences.
However,… I am not sure if ‘society’, ‘the government’, ‘the law’ should impose some limits?
If a policeman (or you or me, for that matter) sees a potential suicide, preparing to jump off a bridge, should we persuade him to desist? Following the argument of ‘personal responsibility’, the answer is No. If you say that, fine: at least you are consistent.
But do you say that? If you say ‘err, I’ll try to convince him to not jump’, you are interfering with his freedom.
Another question: would you try to stop a friend shooting up for the first time?
If suicide is to be discouraged, shouldn’t a slow death also be discouraged?
By alcohol? I’m not sure, frankly. I must say that many times, an individual’s self-harm affects not only himself, but others too (who have no say in his choice and will suffer from his decision): think of his wife and children. Should ‘society’ try to protect them from their father’s stupidity?
I do not profess to know what I fell about all the above! I could be persuaded either way, I think.
Smoking, alcohol, etc. Yes, it is probably illogical to go to war on drugs and accept alcohol. But we have to be pragmatic: if one poison is widespread, it does not follow that we should accept all new poisons.
(By the way, I don’t think Christian morality drives the war on drugs. Many atheists and other non-Christians are opposed to drugs too.)
In a Nietzschean sort of way, you could make a claim that religion is at the heart of all of our impulse denying morality. Most Western style religions make all things carnal & pleasurable a “sin.” How many non religious people think “vices” are “sins?”
I’m not pro-drug. IMO drugs do harm to people. And certainly citing the legality of one “poison” to condone another isn’t a great arguement. I only do it to point out that there’s no logical reason behind our drug policy- if the govt really wanted to keep us safe and healthy they’d ban booze. But booze has a long history of being socially acceptable (to a degree) and the govt makes a mint taxing it. Same for tobacco.
I’d like to see tobacco be the model for drugs. Everyone knows it bad, everyone wants to at prevent it, hell, even the tobacco companies pay lip service to the idea of preventing kids from starting. We try to stigmatize smoking socially, but at the end of the day the law leaves it up to each of us to do as we like.
It baffles me how intelligent people can be for this futile drug war.
Let’s clear up a few points; 1) Alcohol is a drug 2) Pharmaceuticals are drugs, and they can be more harmful than illegal drugs. Does anyone else find it odd that it is illegal to buy a gram of weed, but you can get a prescription for THC(stuff in pot that gets you stoned) in pill form? 3) All drugs were once legal in America, you could once buy heroin from Bayer and syringes from Sears 4) Marijuana was demonized because it was introduced by Black and Hispanic immigrants…and this was at the same time Bayer was selling heroin and opium was sold over the counter 5) For a fraction of the cost of the “Drug War”, we could supply every addict with enough drugs to last them the rest of their lives. 6) The crime associated with the sale of illegal drugs would cease to exist if the drugs were legal because every criminal organization in America relies primarily on drug sales, especially outlaw motorcycle gangs
Drug addicts commit crimes because they need to buy drugs. Drug dealers charge inflated prices for drugs because they are illegal, and with this money they increase their power, which in turn increases their ability to buy and sell more drugs. In order for a pot-smoker to buy weed in America, they have to deal with criminals, which may also be selling harder drugs. This is why marijuana can be a “gateway” drug, because of the people one has to deal with in order to obtain weed.
Of course, I’m in BC, where pot is de facto legalized anyways. We have cafes where people smoke weed openly (if you want to smoke a cigarette,however, you have to go to a special smoking room). I also saw a cop pick up a joint these two guys dropped and give it back to them…“Don’t want to lose this!” he joked.
Yeah, the roots are deeply rascist- whites thought that marijuana was a drug that turned “colored people” into rapists, etc. I pointed out the same thing you did, Shyster, earlier in the thread- all the currently illegal drugs were once legal, and by all reports none were really big problems until after they were banned.
Think how long it would take for coke & MJ to kill as many people as Vioxx!