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| The War onDrugs? |
| Illicit drugs are harmful and we must continue to prosucute this war for the greater good. |
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23% |
[ 9 ] |
| Illicit Drugs are harmful to the health of every individual so we must prevent them from using them for their own good. |
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0% |
[ 0 ] |
| End it; enough lives have been lost in this futile exercise, though I don't condone drug use myself. |
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38% |
[ 15 ] |
| Dude, I've got the munchies!!! |
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38% |
[ 15 ] |
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| Total Votes : 39 |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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 Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2008 9:15 am Post subject: |
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The ideal start would be legalization of marijuana and decriminalization of all else.
But as BB said, that isn't going to happen anytime soon. |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2008 9:27 am Post subject: |
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| Kimbop wrote: |
crack/heroin junkies/dealers belong in there, but let out the pot peddlars!
You want evidence? Use your head!! Bucheonbum, tell me this: "If hard drugs are legalized, more and more people will use them and get hooked. There will be an increase in addictions, death, brain damage, unemployment, and state dependance."
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Dude, how familiar are you with drugs? No offense, but you come off as quite naive. Jailing junkies? Why? Sure, if they're caught committing a crime, but using? Who cares? Some libertarian you are.
Crime might actually go down (read Pluto's link to the Ed Burns interview to get an idea). Cops could no longer get the easy bust but have to do real police work. Fancy that.
There would be less death because the product would be cleaner, and the odds of od'ing would decrease. Also reduce the spread of disease via dirty needles.
Oh, here is some evidence that liberalizing drug laws could be beneficial.
Heroin the solution?
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The UK should follow the example of Zurich, which adopted a liberal drug policy a decade ago, and has seen an 82 per cent decline in new users of heroin, experts say.
The change has been achieved by offering drug addicts in Switzerland "substitution" treatment with injectable heroin on prescription, as well as oral methadone, needle exchange and "shooting galleries" where they can give themselves their fix.
The new approach has medicalised drug use and removed its glamour, researchers say. Crime and deaths linked with drugs have fallen, and the image of heroin use has been transformed from one of rebellionto an illness. |
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| The researchers say the finding confounds critics of the liberal approach who predicted that it would increase drug use. Despite giving addicts readier access to the drugs they want, drug use has fallen. Deaths from overdoses and drug seizures have also declined, they say. |
Also, in the book I mentioned above, Smoke and Mirrors, it describes Nixon's drug policy, which had a focus on treatment. It also saw better gains in the "war" than any other method. |
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Pluto
Joined: 19 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2008 10:45 am Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
Are posters arguing on this thread to legalize all drugs currently classified as illicit? Cocaine, crack, heroine, meth, etc. Or just marijuana?
My feeling is to compromise, legalize and regulate marijuana, and see what happens. I imagine that at least some of the violence would subside. As far as the hard drugs go, they remain linked with complex socioeconomic problems that we ought to address comprehensively. And, in any case, no, we ought not legalize these poisons.
Pluto: I cannot find an option in your poll that reflects my views on this issue. |
Yes, I know. I wanted to fix some things with the poll but was unable to. I wanted to add another option about stepping back rethinking, re-stratagizing and re-fighting so I apologize.
When we talk about the drug war, the criminal code is not too far behind. My feelings on prisons is that they should only house those who have proven themselves to be threats to life and property under due process in a court of law. Drug users and drug peddlers, no matter the drug should not be in prison. Having said that, I don't think we should just legalize everything right away. MJ and per haps ecstasy should be legalized but regulated. 'Hard' drugs should be decriminalized and I would agree with BB that addiction is more of disease than a crime; drug use should be treated as such.
The first sentence from Smoke and Mirrors:
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| [President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem really is the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to. |
The really sad part is that drug war is at least partly racist. You only need to look at the entire US prison population for evidence. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2008 11:38 am Post subject: |
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| I am reading something on the global narcotics trade now, Pluto. Ever read Alfred W. McCoy, Politics of Heroin, Rev. ed.? |
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Pluto
Joined: 19 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2008 2:57 pm Post subject: |
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I was only able to read the first few pages. It is interesting the effect of foreign policy vis a vis the drug war. As was pointed out in the OP, as students in San Diego continue to party on there is a real war and there is real violence happening. I don't know how familiar your are with the first 200km south of the American boarder but the northern provinces of Mexico are very violent and corrupt. Moreover, any of the Federales that get in the way of these violent vigilantes end up getting hurt if not dead.
There are also other more serious problems related to human trafficking just south of the boarder. The lobos, or coyotes, have a destructive business of getting simple laborers and even prostitutes across the boarder. As Justin Hale judiciously noted, fighting this nonsensical Drug War takes away resources from the real injustices are happening where there are real victims whose individual rights are being violated. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2008 3:02 pm Post subject: |
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| Pluto wrote: |
| I was only able to read the first few pages. |
Why was that, by the way? |
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Pluto
Joined: 19 Dec 2006
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Pluto
Joined: 19 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2008 8:17 am Post subject: |
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LA Times
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11 bodies found in Tijuana over 3 days
TIJUANA -- Police discovered the tortured and burned bodies of six men in an empty lot Monday morning, ending a period of relative calm in this border city beset by drug war violence.
Eleven bodies have been discovered since Saturday in violence believed to be drug-related, including the corpse of a woman found in a barrel, state and federal authorities said. |
Violence has gotten completely out of hand in northern Mexico. The Calder�n government is going to have to think about how to deal with the cartels in a different manner. There is a role for US policy makers too, but it seems that many Americans don't seem to understand how dangerous the north of Mexico has become.
Real Time Statistics |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2008 10:25 am Post subject: |
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luvnpeas
Joined: 03 Aug 2006
Location: somewhere i have never travelled
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| Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2008 7:06 pm Post subject: |
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All drugs should be decriminalized and most should be as legal as alcohol.
Criminality should only apply to what you do to others. You can't be a criminal for something you do to yourself.
It's really hard for the drug-war hawks to get around the hypocrisy of alcohol law. Alcohol is addictive (unlike some illegal drugs), it harms families and careers, etc. The only explanation (not excuse) for the disparity in the laws is that alcohol is a majority-choice, and the others are part of a minority lifestyle. The difference between the druggies in prison and the martini-slurping white-collar prosecutors who put them there is tyranny of the majority.
Organized crime in the US became a big-time institution as a result of Prohibition. Without illegal alcohol, Al Capone is a nobody. The more contraband in a society , the more opportunities there are for gangs to profit. |
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Jandar
Joined: 11 Jun 2008
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| Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2008 9:49 pm Post subject: |
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| Kimbop wrote: |
I am a devout libertarian. Cannabis marijuana should be legalized, but not acid, coke, crystal meth, or heroin, since they kill idiots.
We can't have a portion of our society spreading aids by riddling our streets with needles, relying on social support networks due to addiction and brain damage, eating their scabs, and ultimately killing themselves. |
What kind of libertarian are you?
Sounds like a nimby lib.
Legalize it and tax it so we can get the bulldozers out in the morning to plow the dead addicts into a grave. |
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Pluto
Joined: 19 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2008 7:44 am Post subject: |
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Anyone read the Wall Street Journal today?
HIDDEN COSTS:Communities Pay for High Prison Rate
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PHOENIX -- When she hit 60, Sarah Coleman thought she was done raising children. But today she is among the millions of Americans left to fill the void for family members gone to jail.
[Mary Black]
Now 66 years old, Ms. Coleman has three youngsters at home -- ages 5, 3 and 1. She doesn't know the whereabouts of her granddaughter, who is their mother. As for the children's fathers, they have both been in trouble with the law. One is in prison serving a 10-year term for second-degree murder. The other has been in and out of jail on drug charges.
"I didn't intend to raise my great-grandkids," says Ms. Coleman, who relies on supplies of diapers and baby wipes from a local social-services center. "There are so many things I can't do for them because of money, but I have to try."
Here in South Mountain, a district in south Phoenix, more than 3,800 residents are displaced, serving time in prison or the county jail. For every 100 adults, 6.1 are behind bars. That's more than five times the national average of 1.09 per 100, according to a report by the Pew Center, a nonpartisan research group. Arizona has the fastest-growing prison population of the Western states, having increased 5.3% in 2007 to more than 38,000. |
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| The Pew study released earlier this year showed the overall incarceration rate for all whites was one person per 245 adults, compared with one in 41 for blacks and one in 96 for Hispanics. |
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Behind those figures are many hidden, related costs -- financial burdens that communities are often left to manage. For every person who goes to jail, businesses lose either a potential employee or customer. Inmates' children often depend on extended families, rather than a parent, to raise them. With only so many government resources to go around, churches, volunteer programs and other groups must often step in to help.
In one nine-block stretch of central South Mountain, nearly 500 out of 16,000 residents are in the state system either as prisoners or as probationers who return regularly to jail. Prison costs associated with this nine-block area amount to roughly $11 million annually, according to an estimate from the Justice Mapping Center, a New York organization that examines crime patterns.
But the state spends more than half that amount -- an additional $6.5 million -- on social programs for the residents who remain. In that nine-block span, 2,000 people receive cash payments under the federal government's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Nearly 5,000 are on food stamps. Almost one-third of the residents live below the poverty level. The total cost of prison and social services combined: approximately $2 million per block. |
$2 million annually per block, and that is just one neighborhood is south Phoenix. Just think about adding the total costs of incarceration, social services and opportunity costs associated with labeling people felons in places like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago... and on and on... The numbers must be staggering. |
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agentX
Joined: 12 Oct 2007
Location: Jeolla province
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| Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2008 7:58 am Post subject: |
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I'm all for shifting the war on Drugs back from interdiction, especially foreign interdiction, to treatment and education.
We're just not seeing a light at the end of the tunnel here, folks. It's time to pack it in or change the strategy. No more of this "Stay the course" nonsense. |
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Pluto
Joined: 19 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 8:52 am Post subject: |
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More anti Drug War rhetoric from the WSJ's Mrs. O'Grady.
Mexico Pays the Price of Prohibition
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With the world fixated on Vladimir Putin's expansionist exploits in Georgia, a different sort of assault against a democracy south of the U.S. border is getting scant attention. But it is equally alarming.
Mexico is engaged in a life-or-death struggle against organized crime. Last week six more law enforcement officials were killed in the line of duty battling the country's drug cartels. This brings the death toll in President Felipe Calder�n's blitz against organized crime to 4,909 since Dec. 1, 2006.
Americas columnist Mary O'Grady tells Kelsey Hubbard how the U.S. War on Drugs and the demand for narcotics is taking its toll on Mexico. (Aug. 18th)
A number of the dead have been gangsters but they also include journalists, politicians, judges, police and military, and civilians. For perspective on how violent Mexico has become, consider that the total number of Americans killed in Iraq since March 2003 is 4,142... |
Related Video |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 1:24 pm Post subject: |
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| Justin Hale wrote: |
How we should deal with drugs depends on the drug. Cannabis and ecstasy are so statistically benign and non-addicting (with fishing and peanuts more deadly than ecstasy), it's difficult to make a case for these drugs not being on open sale like tobacco and alcohol. With hard drugs, I'd like to see restricted legalization whereby those chronically addicted can get a clean state fix and begin to live otherwise productive lives. |
Shrooms and E can be beneficial.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25464338/
http://www.jointogether.org/news/research/summaries/2004/psychiatrist-researching-of.html
Prohibition in current form is an attack on the poor. It is a way (in the US) to "deal" with the legacy of slavery and in Canada a solid way to "deal" with the reserves. It is dysfunctional, expensive and wholly futile. Anyways, booze is the real dangerous drug. And opiate medicines are killing more than illegal drugs in many states as well. |
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