[quote]Big_Boss wrote:
orion wrote:
Big_Boss wrote:
orion wrote:
Big_Boss wrote:
Sloth wrote:
Big_Boss wrote:
Also…control would still come from somewhere…we would still have drug dealers(duh)…murders,kidnappings,extortion,etc…all those lovely things associated with the “drug world”
So put them in prison for murder, kidnapping, extortion, etc? Why throw someone in prison for making bad choices if they aren’t depriving anyone else of their rights? You’re not doing them a favor. You think sharing a cell with a butt raping gang banger is an act of mercy, of concern for their sobriety?
And, of course we’d still have drug dealers. Then again, we still have them now. At least it’d remove much of the crime associated with prohibition and the resulting blackmarket. Those crimes you listed above are common amongst the drug trade because we’ve ensured that the violent career criminal has a monopoly.
I see your point,BUT How do you know they will not deprive anyone else of their rights?? Will legalizing drugs cure the country of crimes committed by those under the influence of drugs?? Legalizing them doesn’t diminish their effects,does it?
If drugs were legal…do you honestly believe a governing body(FDA,corporations)will not control them like every other drug?? Would that not breed a black market?..like we already have? You should ask yourself those questions
I did not like that argument coming from Zap, and I do not like it better coming from you.
We are saying:
The government is a big part of the problem.
You are saying:
Maybe , but it will never ever let go of controlling and coercing people and simply create a black market by other means.
So your solution is bowing to the inevitable tyranny of bureaucratized mediocrity and stupidity.
To kneel before petty tyrants?
Before the JeffRs of our world?
Um, no, thanks a lot.
I think you’ve mistaken what I’m saying…I never stated that the government is not part of the problem. Like I stated previously…control of the “drug market” will come from somewhere…thats all I said.
I stand correct for the most part about the blackmarket stuff BUT…my biggest argument was the fact that someone could think that legalizing drugs will cut down on drug related crimes…but what about those crimes committed because of someone being under the influence of drugs? Would it increase or decrease?
Don’t know were you feel I provided a solution,but you all support legalization…and yet you don’t provide a solution yourself for the possible negative effects of legalization. I’m just pointing out things that need the attention…nothing more.
So my point is:
Legalize it-
Does the Jim Beam outfit gun down the Budweiser Boyz in your neighbourhood?
No they don`t.
We cannot take away all the crime people do on drugs, just most of the crimes connected to the black market, with lower costs.
What more do you want?
So that makes legalizing drugs worth the crimes. I want the same thing everbody that has been affected by drugs wants. We can’t take away anything thats wrong with this world…but we can damper it…legalizing drugs is definitely not a solution. Oh and the Jim Beam outfit and the Budweiser Boyz are serving prison time for their 3rd DWI conviction because they pose a danger to people around them…THEY CAN’T CONTROL THEIR ADDICTION TO A LEGAL SUBSTANCE.[/quote]
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17438347/how_america_lost_the_war_on_drugs/3
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The War on Drugs became an actual war during the first Bush administration, when the bombastic conservative intellectual Bill Bennett was appointed drug czar. “Two words sum up my entire approach,” Bennett declared, “consequences and confrontation.” Bush and Bennett doubled annual spending on the drug war to $12 billion, devoting much of the money to expensive weaponry: fighter jets to take on the Colombian trafficking cartels, Navy submarines to chase cocaine-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. If narcotics were the enemy, America would vanquish its foe with torpedoes and F-16s - and throw an entire generation of drug users in jail.
Though many on the left suspected that things had gone seriously awry, drug policy under Reagan and Bush was largely conducted in a fog of ignorance. The kinds of long-term studies that policy-makers needed - those that would show what measures would actually reduce drug use and dampen its consequences - did not yet exist. When it came to research, there was “absolutely nothing” that examined “how each program was or wasn’t working,” says Peter Reuter, a drug scholar who founded the Drug Policy Research Center at the RAND Corp.
But after Escobar was killed in 1993 - and after U.S. drug agents began systematically busting up the Colombian cartels - doubt was replaced with hard data. Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn’t. The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn’t been heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public health, even though we know it isn’t. We continue to lock up generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know that military efforts are an ineffective way to cut the supply of narcotics in America or raise the price.
All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes - a twelvefold increase since 1980 - with no discernible effect on the drug traffic. Virtually the only success the government can claim is the decline in the number of Americans who smoke marijuana - and even on that count, it is not clear that federal prevention programs are responsible. In the course of fighting this war, we have allowed our military to become pawns in a civil war in Colombia and our drug agents to be used by the cartels for their own ends. Those we are paying to wage the drug war have been accused of Âhuman-rights abuses in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. In Mexico, we are now Ârepeating many of the same mistakes we have made in the Andes.
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Everingham and her team sorted the drug war into two categories. There were supply-side programs, like the radar and ships in the Caribbean and the efforts to arrest traffickers in Colombia and Mexico, which were designed to make it more expensive for traffickers to bring their product to market. There were also demand-side programs, like drug treatment, which were designed to reduce the market for drugs in the United States. To evaluate the cost-effectiveness of each approach, the mathematicians set up a series of formulas to calculate precisely how much additional money would have to be spent on supply programs and demand programs to reduce cocaine consumption by one percent nationwide.
“If you had asked me at the outset,” Everingham says, “my guess would have been that the best use of taxpayer money was in the source countries in South America” - that it would be possible to stop cocaine before it reached the U.S. But what the study found surprised her. Overseas military efforts were the least effective way to decrease drug use, and imprisoning addicts was prohibitively expensive. The only cost-effective way to put a dent in the market, it turned out, was drug treatment. “It’s not a magic bullet,” says Reuter, the RAND scholar who helped supervise the study, “but it works.” The study ultimately ushered RAND, this vaguely creepy Cold War relic, into a position as the permanent, pragmatic left wing of American drug policy, the most consistent force for innovating and reinventing our national conception of the War on Drugs.
When Everingham’s team looked more closely at drug treatment, they found that thirteen percent of hardcore cocaine users who receive help substantially reduced their use or kicked the habit completely. They also found that a larger and larger portion of illegal drugs in the U.S. were being used by a comparatively small group of hardcore addicts. There was, the study concluded, a fundamental imbalance: The crack epidemic was basically a domestic problem, but we had been fighting it more aggressively overseas. “What we began to realize,” says Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studied drug policy for RAND, “was that even if you only get a percentage of this small group of heavy drug users to abstain forever, it’s still a really great deal.”
Thirteen years later, the study remains the gold standard on drug policy. “It’s still the consensus recommendation supplied by the scholarship,” says Reuter. “Yet as well as it’s stood up, it’s never really been tried.”
