[quote]Iron Dwarf wrote:
The war on drugs will never be won. Just like the war on terrorism.
[/quote]
War on Poverty…
[quote]Makavali wrote:
Sifu wrote:
I understand that but in the long run they are saving us money by dying young. Between medical and pension costs old people are costly. Ciggarettes thin the herd.
But surely the non-smokers make up for it by being productive member of society for longer.[/quote]
I guess they’re right, old people, though slow and dangerous behind the wheel, can still serve a purpose.
[quote]pat wrote:
Regular Gonzalez wrote:
pat wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Taxing “taboo” goods just gives government an incentive to create more demand for said goods. For example, government uses the tax dollars from tobacco to fund anti-smoking campaigns which amounts to free televised commercials for Big Tobacco.
I wonder how many people sitting at home have said to them selves after watching such ads, “Wow, I better quit,” and not, “hey, I need to run to the AM/PM to get some smokes.”
Some of these anti-tobacco ads are so poorly done they look like pro-tobacco ads.
A bunch of geeks talking about how cool they are because they don’t smoke sells more cigs than a cartoon camel.
Definitely makes me want to fire one up. I feel insulted by those fucking ads.
Maybe they should try a more confronting approach.
They should just shut the fuck up. Smoking is a personal choice, if somebody wants to smoke I surely don’t give a damn. If the government says I shouldn’t do it, it makes me want to even if I didn’t consider doing “it” before…I detest the condescension that the media and the government try to bestow. As if these cocksuckers on the news have any right to suggest what I should or should not do.
If I was a media-pyte My morality would be like this: Drugs are bad unless they cure toenail fungus, make my dick hard, make a pussy wet, make my prostate small, improve my asthma, stop genital worts, etc. Being white is racist. Having money is a sin, not wanting to pay taxes makes you an asshole, thinking man-made global warming is nothing but fact, radical islam has a point, letting the government raise you kids is a good idea, turning over your health care to Nasty Pelosi, is a good idea, abortion is great sport and entertaining for the masses, being gay is better than being strait, etc.
So here’s my suggestion, get as fucked up ass you want and hold your middle finger high. I have a tremendous aversion to being told what to do.[/quote]
Agreed,
But if they are going to waste taxpayers money on these advertisments, they may as well use methods that are actually effective.
[quote]Makavali wrote:
pat wrote:
Then we should outlaw ALL unhealthy activities by that logic. Smoking is not the only unhealthy thing Americans do.
Nooooo! I’m saying that people should pay out of their OWN pockets for health problem they BRING ON THEMSELVES. No need to outlaw it.[/quote]
Exactly! Personal responsibility is more than a catch phrase. Live it!
[quote]pittbulll wrote:
Zeppelin795 wrote:
lixy wrote:
Sifu wrote:
ie In Afghanistan the Taliban funds it’s war against us by making money supplying drugs to dealers in the west. If we went to the model they use in the UK where heroin addicts can get supplied through the NHS it would deny the Taliban an important source of funding. It would free up law enforcement resources. It would deny gangs a source of income.
Haven’t you been paying attention? People here already bitch about the government providing things such basic things as food and housing.
Besides, there’s evidence that the CIA has been selling drugs for significant periods of time.
So true. Have you ever read Professor Alfred C. McCoy’s “The Politics Of Heroin”?
And what of the Iran-Contra Affair? In the foreign press they spoke about the drugs for gun trade that was going on the entire time of this sad episode. CIA and other agencies were supplying guns to the Contras AND Sandinistas in return for cocaine and marijuana. This was blacked out in the American press, surprise!
Is this what Rev. Wright was speaking of?
[/quote]
I can’t be sure as I have not paid attention to that matter.
[quote]Iron Dwarf wrote:
The war on drugs will never be won. Just like the war on terrorism.
[/quote]
Mostly true, but the war on terror can greatly be reduced for Americans but only if this country has a radical change in foreign policy.
Drugs should be legalized or at least decriminalized!
This is the flat out truth. When Reagan became president, he imposed his war on drugs. He then imposed Federal Statutory Minimum Sentencing Guidelines so that if you sold or bought X amount of drugs, you would receive Y amount of prison time. This made the rate of incarceration jump. By how much? It quadrupled within 20 yrs. This also solidified the Dept of Justice with enormous funding for prisons, guards, staff, judges, bailiffs, clerks etc.
This also secured money for probation, parole, and drug treatment facilities for those who work within the correctional system. Federal guards make 60k starting, without a college degree. Not bad considering you can go right out of high school into this field, and also land great benefits as well.
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
Makavali wrote:
Sifu wrote:
I understand that but in the long run they are saving us money by dying young. Between medical and pension costs old people are costly. Ciggarettes thin the herd.
But surely the non-smokers make up for it by being productive member of society for longer.
I guess they’re right, old people, though slow and dangerous behind the wheel, can still serve a purpose.[/quote]
Don’t you go dyin’ on me!
Here is an interesting article from Britain which discusses how the war on drugs has been a failure over there. The criticism of the government by the oposition at the bottom has the same old worn out cliches, of we can fight this and we can win.
Prisoners in jail can get drugs, yet these idiot politicians keep insisting that the war on drugs can succeed and we can keep a free society.
Probably the worst thing that has happened with the war on drugs is it has been politicised.
The Government’s attempts to tackle drugs trade do not work, says report
Police and customs are fighting a losing battle against the illegal drugs trade despite billions of pounds being spent every year on fighting it and taking offenders to court, according to a new report.
The UK Drugs Commission found that traditional crime-fighting tactics are simply not working and that the £5.3billion British drugs market was “too fluid” for law enforcement agencies to deal with.
In 2005/06, the Government spent £380million just on reducing supply in England, the report says, while the annual cost to the criminal justice system of dealing with Class A drug alone is more than £4 billion.
Tim McSweeney, one of the authors of the independent report, said: “We were struck by just how little evidence there is to show that the hundreds of millions of pounds spent on UK enforcement each year has made a sustainable impact and represents value for money.”
High-profile swoops on “drugs factories” and significant convictions of leading dealers had failed to have a noticeable impact on supply, due to the industry’s ability to adapt quickly to disruption, the report said.
The report showed that the price of cocaine has halved in some areas since 2000 while heroin has fallen in price by 35 per cent as the streets have become flooded with drugs.
A crackdown, which saw seizures of class A drugs more than double between 1996 and 2005 to nearly 40,000, has had little impact on the supply of or demand for drugs.
An estimated 60 to 80 pc of all drugs would need to be regularly removed from the streets in order to put major traffickers out of business, the report warned.
Seizure rates on this scale have never been achieved in Britain or anywhere else, with an estimated 12 pc of heroin and 9 pc of cocaine in Britain being impounded between 1996 and 2005.
Last year 1.5 tonnes of heroin and 4.4m ectsasy tablets were seized by the Serious Organised Crime Agency, according to the report.
But each year, 20 tonnes of heroin, 18 tonnes of cocaine and 16 tonnes of crack change hands on the British drugs market, while 412 tonnes of cannabis and 60 million ecstasy tablets are thought to be bought and sold.
Dealers simply reduce purity to maintain their profit margins, the Commission, an independent charity consisting of experts in drug treatment, medical research, policing and public policy, said.
The report called for more resources to be devoted to reducing the “collateral damage” of drugs on communities, by tackling gang violence and prostitution. Its authors say this would have a greater impact on the drugs trade than traditional hauls.
Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary said: "After a decade in office, this report shows the true extent of Labour’s failure on drugs.
"We need a zero-tolerance approach to drugs, from our shores to our streets. This report highlights the government’s failure to curb demand or prevent supply. It strengthens the case for a dedicated Border Police Force to stem the flow of drugs into Britain.
“But the government should also answer our calls to extend abstinence-based rehabilitation to help get addicts off drugs for good.”
Responding to the report, a Home Office spokesman said that seizures were only part of the Government’s approach to fighting drug crime.
He said: “Many of the report’s recommendations are already being implemented. Our drugs strategy encompasses enforcement, prevention, education and treatment.”
He added that “intervention” programmes were seeing 1,000 offenders each week move into drug treatment.
[quote]Makavali wrote:
War on drugs = Epic fail
The best way to go now is the way of the Netherlands. Start making a distinction between hard and soft drugs and maybe you’ll get somewhere.[/quote]
I completely agree - soft drugs should be legal - hard drugs should be the focus of enforcement and restrictions - and there need to be evaluation and controls on new synthetic drugs.
Good post on how drug legalization would be pro family values:
http://www.volokh.com/posts/1214680020.shtml
[i][Ilya Somin, June 28, 2008 at 3:07pm] Trackbacks
Why the War on Drugs is Bad for Family Values:
Social conservatives have, with some justification, long warned of the dangers of single-parenthood among the poor, which often leads to poor outcomes for children. However, some of those same social conservatives are also staunch supporters of the War on Drugs. Unfortunately, as Kerry Howley points out in a recent LA Times debate with Kay Hymowitz ( Ma, ma, wheres my pa? ), the War on Drugs is a major contributor to the prevalence of fatherless children in poor black communities:
[quote] [C]hildren tend to do better when they’re raised by two biological parents, along a variety of dimensions and controlling for all sorts of factors. It was always a mistake to deny that fact in the service of some larger political crusade.
Still, I'm not sure where blindly repeating "two parents are ideal" gets us. I have yet to meet a single mother who doesn't want help. The low-income single women in "Promises I Can Keep," the study of poor mothers I referenced during our pregnancy pact discussion ( http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-hymowitz-howley23-2008jun23%2C0%2C6039840.story ), hope upon hope for a worthy partner to come along....
For low-income black women, the world really isn't cooperating. We put an awful lot of nonviolent black men behind bars, which is not generally conducive to good fathering. With so many young men absent, the marriage markets are heavily skewed against women, and mothers who might otherwise demand that men stay home and change diapers find themselves in a miserable bargaining position. In his book "The Logic of Life," Tim Harford describes one study indicating that "a one-percentage- point increase in the proportion of young black men in prison reduces the proportion of young black women who have ever been married by three percentage points." Now consider: In New Mexico, 30% of black men between 30 and 35 are in prison. Telling women to want marriage more just doesn't seem like an effective strategy here. Nor does it seem right to suggest that they ought not to have children at all; these women are simply responding rationally to the world as it is.[/quote]
As I have noted in the past (here The Volokh Conspiracy - - and here The Volokh Conspiracy - - ), some 55% of US federal prison inmates and 21% of state inmates are non-violent drug offenders. And over 62% of incarcerated nonviolent drug offenders are black(most of them poor black males) http://www.cjcj.org/pubs/poor/pp.html . I don’t claim that this racial disparity in drug incarceration is caused solely - or even primarily - by racial prejudice. But even if undertaken for the best of motives, it drastically reduces the available pool of marriageable men in poor black communities. And, as Kerry notes, those men who remain have far less incentive to marry because their stronger bargaining position caused by scarcity makes it easier for them to obtain sex without making any longterm commitment to the women they do it with. Even after drug offenders are released from prison, they are likely to be worse marriage prospects than before, if only because it’s hard to get a steady job after being in prison for several years.
Some conservatives might argue that the kinds of men who get arrested for drug possession or dealing wouldn’t make good husbands even if they stay out of prison. Perhaps that is true in some cases. But these men still probably beat the alternative of single parenthood. Moreover, Kerry’s point about bargaining position is crucial here. If fewer men from these communities were in prison, there would be more competition between them in the dating market and thus stronger incentives for them to behave in ways that appeal to women. To the extent that women prefer men who don’t get high to those who do, that might well include staying off the drugs - as well as becoming better providers and fathers in other ways.
UPDATE: Some commenters question the implicit assumptions of Kerry’s and my bargaining position point: that many men would like to gain access to sex without making a longterm commitment, while most women prefer men who are willing to make such commitments. All I can say is that both points are backed by extensive social science evidence - far too much to summarize here. Promises I Can Keep, the book cited by Kerry, is among the studies that shows that most low-income women prefer men who will be good longterm providers. John Marshall Townsend’s book What Women Want, What Men Want ( http://www.amazon.com/What-Women-Want-What-Men-Want/dp/0195131037 ), provides further extensive evidence on both male and female preferences on these points. And Tim Harford’s book, also cited by Kerry, provides evidence showing that marriage rates do indeed decline in communities where more men are imprisoned, suggesting that men and women respond to incentives in the way the post posits.
The point is not that men are less “moral” than women. Rather, the two sexes are responding to different incentives. Men can gain a reproductive advantage from casual sex without commitment because one man can impregnate a large number of women. Women, for obvious reasons, can’t do this (because the number of pregnancies they can have is relatively fixed, regardless of how much casual sex they have). Therefore, men, on average, have a stronger interest in casual sex without commitment than women do. At the same time, they are willing to restrain such behavior and make longterm commitments if women are in a strong enough bargaining position to insist that they do so. None of these points apply to all men and all women all the time. But they do identify important general tendencies.[/i]
This point is tempered by the plea-bargaining issue with the stat on convictions for drug possession (see: The Volokh Conspiracy - - ), but the issue still has some resonance because dealing marijuana and cocaine wouldn’t be a problem (or at least as much of one, depending on the tax regime) with legalization or non-enforcement.
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
Makavali wrote:
War on drugs = Epic fail
The best way to go now is the way of the Netherlands. Start making a distinction between hard and soft drugs and maybe you’ll get somewhere.
I completely agree - soft drugs should be legal - hard drugs should be the focus of enforcement and restrictions - and there need to be evaluation and controls on new synthetic drugs.[/quote]
I do no really know whý there shoukd be any ditinction between hard and “soft” drugs.
If someone wants to kill himself, let him.
The problems law enforcement has with enforcing those laws also do not stem from drugs being “hard” or “soft” but from the general futility of it all.
If you could truly end the supply of heroin and cocaine, what then?
People would find something new.
Prisoners in jail can get drugs. Unless we go to a regime of strict control of movement upon all people the war on drugs will never succeed. What we really need is an iron fist of control. We need to stop worrying about the niceties of civil rights and due process.
The only solution is we need to deploy the military into our urban areas and establish at regular intervals check points. What we will need at these check points is reinforced concrete pillboxes armed with beltfed heavy machine guns. The check points need to be spaced close enough so that they have interlocking fields of fire. This will make people feel reassured and safe in the knowledge that the government is in control.
At the check points everyone will have to undergo strip searches and body cavity inspections. Another thing that will reassure people at the check points is mean guard dogs barking and trying to lung at people as they line up naked waiting for their cavity inspections.
Once people know they will have to go through a couple of strip searches and cavity inspections in order to get from one side of their neighborhood to other they will give up using drugs.