If you do drugs and it ain't cocaine, atmosfear don't like ya
The idea behind legalization is that once drugs become legalized and regulated that it would eliminate the black market. I think that is true, but a real perspective on the situation is that may not come for a long time. Meanwhile, supporters are advocating for better legislation they are still committing crimes and supporting the black market which on stretch supports the slaughter of tens of thousands of people.
Also, I do think drugs are bad because they contribute to long lasting ill effects to poor health and accumulate risks.
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
Albert Einstein
That may be true. I probably should have said that drugs intrinsically are not all that bad, and societies treatment of them in a lot of ways makes them worse than they really are. I will readily admit that hard drugs are pretty unequivocally a societal bad. But very rarely do you hear a discussion of whether the negative side effects of criminalizing the drug trade are worse than the negative side effects of the drugs themselves. And at least to me, it seems like the side effects of criminalizing the drug trade are worse.
It doesn't much matter when it comes about, the point is we need to try to get to that point. Whether we attempt to get there or not, the black market for drugs persists, and people commit crimes, murder and get murdered over the drug trade. This will happen whether we attempt to legalize and clean up the supply chain or not. The more harshly and violently we fight the cartels, the more violent and efficient we force them to be. Organized crime should always be criminalized, investigated, and punished. But unless we accept that the reason that organized crime exists in the first place is that there is a market for substances (and in a broader sense beyond the drug trade, products and services in general) without a legal way of obtaining them, we will continue to look at the problem incorrectly. In an ideal world, hard drugs would be illegal and nobody would use them. That's not how the world works, and we do not live in an ideal world. Time to deal with it.
"CLEANING UP THE SUPPLY CHAIN" DOESN'T WORK YOU FUCKING MORON. Driving up the cost isn't going to move the needle... Cigarettes still sell just fine. Smoking was solved by reducing demand. This is a demonstrable fact.
I defy you to find me a single comparable criminal market that reduced in size after increasing punishment for suppliers.
O boohoo, troll boy called me a moron.
Shut the fuck up.
Seriously though, if you wanted to eliminate the drug trade entirely, you would make the penalty death for any drug charge of any size. Eventually, nobody would be left who was even interested in trying them.
But that is fucking insane. The drug trade is bad, but it's not so bad that we're better off with every drug user and dealer dead. That's just fucking ridiculous. It leads me to assume that you're joking, because you would have to be such a fucking asshole to think that's a good idea.
Last edited by yrogerg123; 12-08-2011 at 06:02 PM.
I done here. If that's your takeaway, I believe there's a 2 year community college somewhere that wants its associates degree in economics back.
Also, a village is missing its idiot.
Seems Atmosfear wants the US to implement Singapore's drug laws.
Seriously though, I think Atmos' views are quite a bit extreme.
Economics? Legalize Marijuana, and small opiates(not heroin, not Oxycodone, nothing hard, pretty much just codeine and maybe Hydrocodone, at low doses) and tax the ever living dog shit out of them. There will still be a small black market for those items(see alcohol and Moonshiners), but it will be mostly killed, and the Gov't could use the money generated from taxes to get us out of this hole we're in.
Those economics work better than either 2 previously proposed plans, so I want my associates/bachelors in economics from one of you two.
VS the purpose of the war on drugs is to end the drug trade, not to maximize the government's profit off of it. Anyone can propose a solution to a different problem and feel smugly self-satisfied that no one has yet mentioned it.
And I wasn't proposing to implement demand-reducing punishments starting with the death penalty, but it is generally considered to be the most extreme punishment we allow. It represents the maximum possible effectiveness of the economically sound solution. All you need to do for practical implementation is to scale back the punishment until you reach levels of drug use that are acceptable, after normalizing the externalities (the ill effects of a large prison population, the risks and rewards of alternative illicit or legal activities drug dealers may turn to, etc).
Fair enough, but that objective isn't satisfied by VS' idea either.
well, no, because they approach different objectives completely.
If you buy the stated goals of the war on drugs, then eliminating drug use = safer/better society and your suggestion of harsh penalties to eliminate demand would fix it.
VS' goal is to say the eliminating drug use has nothing to do with a safer/better society, so normalize the illegal things with our system and let everyone get what they want (drugs, taxes), except for the rabid anti-drug folk.
What I said was that drugs have nothing to do with the war on drugs, just the undesirables associated with them. It's approached the same way as Atmosfear's logical extreme, but with a different motivation and objective.
The drug trade will not stop until drug demand stops. The War on Drugs must be fought economically, by which I mean to end the demand to end the supply. I believe the only way to do this is to generate an alternative. I dont mean offer something to replace drugs, like cheaper alcohol. It needs to be something beneficial to society. The joys of other things must be encouraged.
Yes its utopian, but I believe that its the only way to do it.
YO HO YO HO
ceci n'est pas une signature
I don't believe you could ever have anything to take the place of drugs. Just as some users like downers, and others like uppers, some people like narcotics rather than alcohol, and some people like altered (intoxicated) minds/feelings over sobriety.
I don't believe anything being changed would ever change the fact that some people like drugs. America is the number one drug using country in the world, and we're supposed to have the ultimate freedoms and happiness, even the idea of freedom and happiness is not an effective deterrent from drug use.
I think the only way you could ever stop drug use/ exchange it with something else, is to never have the availability of them. If a bottle of Rum is in the room with 100 people who have never seen or heard of alcohol, I would bet my life that by the end of 2 days the bottle would have been drank from, or gone. The reason I used drugs when I was younger was because they were accessible, I knew there was a punishment (both legal and parental) if I were to be caught, but I still partook in drug use.
(I don't know if that's a coherent thought, I'm high)
The problem with your what you're saying is that no one does drugs until they see them.
The problem with what you're saying is that 100 people is too many people for a bottle of rum should be more like one person - me.
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
Albert Einstein
I made up my mind to do pot before I'd ever seen it. Little did I know that I came into contact with it much earlier than when I smoked it.
What I was trying to get at, was that if you had never heard of pot (when I say not available, I mean does not exist) you wouldn't have done it.
That is the only way to stop all illegal drug use, and it's what the War on Drugs is trying to do, yet failing terribly. 80 years in a war(well, it was proposed 40 years ago), and they're still losing.
So we shouldn't tell people drugs are out there?
No, I don't think that's the answer at all.
Not everyone can go to Harvard, but every dumb ass can fuck.
I didn't read the sarcasm in that. Sorry.
Maybe this is a downside of democracy? A lot of people like and want to continue drugs despite fears of ruining their lives, excluding addiction, but because a lot of people are misinformed or feel it is morally wrong it won't ever be or decades before progressive drug law reform will occur.
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
Albert Einstein
MPR is spot on, I think. People have been saying for years "Oh, in X years, marijuana will be legalized" I think we are very close, with the amount of states legalizing medicinal, and some decriminalizing, but I think we're at least another 10-20 to legalization of pot, let alone anything.
We'll see it in our lifetime, unless we hit a guardrail.
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