Is the USA's War on Drugs a waste of time?
DouglasDanger
PennsylvaniaRegistered User regular
PennsylvaniaRegistered User regular
Orikaeshigitae wrote:as long as it doesn't become a general drugs threadDouglasDanger wrote:Can I make a thread in SE to debate the US War on Drugs?
There was some discussion about the War on Drugs in the Europeans continue to be smelly hippies thread. Basically, the EU has said that it will not block any possible Member State initiative to move towards legalizing cannabis or other previously illegal plants. (from here)
The US War on Drugs is a bigger waste of time and money than (alcohol) Prohibition. Despite billions of dollars worth of effort, drugs are still available. You may have to talk to some sketchy guys to get them, but you can get your drugs.
And I am not just talking about weed. People around here (northeastern Pennsylvania) are crazy about meth. You can make it in your car! I know a few people that abuse heroin too, and I don't really associate with that group of hard drug users. I just know them from our friends overlapping. When I was in southeastern PA, I knew a bunch of drug abusers. Coke, crack, heroin, some kind of pills that turn you in Lurch and every other person at my old job, from the 30 year old new dad, to the 45 year old bachelor, to the 35 year old take off work to go to NASCAR guy all smoked weed.
And all of that is despite the War on Drugs. We are blowing all kinds of money and it doesn't have much impact. People who want to do drugs will do drugs. This prohibition means all kinds of unsavory types profit. All kinds of assholes in South America and Central America, for example. Drugs are a big source of income for gangs, and maybe even THE TERRORISTS!
Why not legalize and regulate drugs?
DouglasDanger on
0
Posts
Plus there are other factors to consider. Is the drug trade and drug use high because of a failure of the War on Drugs, or is it because there is an economic recession in the US right now with lots of unemployment etc which inevitably causes an increase in crime, and through that drug trading and use. We also have to consider other things, such as do we want drugs like heroin to be freely available in the open market? Even if you have restrictions on purchase you are opening up a number of potential problems here, such as a potential increase in addicts (and drugs like heroin are life-destroyers). Perhaps the War on Drugs drastically reduced the amount of drug use in the US from what would otherwise been an astronomically high amount. This might be the case, it might now, but I don't think anyone can really know this.
Now drug gangs in South America consist mainly of cunts who barely manage to remain within the definition of human being, and a lot of these groups are linked in with other highly unsavoury practises such as prositution, people trafficking etc. And I am happy for the US government to give them all the shit they can, though how successful they have been in that I don't know. But I am happy for governments to move against these gangs, and if legalising drugs will do that then it should at least be considered.
welllllll, part of it is because at this point, they'd be basically either admitting they were wrong in fighting an anti-drug battle, or they'd be admitting to LOSING that battle and caving in
there's just too many people that have fought for too long against drugs to suddenly go "well okay we'll allow it now"
End of thread.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
I don't do any drugs but I feel like legalizing pot wouldn't be so bad. Hell it might even help the economy, and then we might be able to enforce laws about the harder drugs, which are awful and need to get out of my country.
My theory is nuke Mexico, see what happens.
Secret Satan 2013 Wishlist
migrant workers might actually be more efficient with mutated extra limbs
1. Less people are addicted to certain substances than they otherwise would be
2 Legalizing drugs wouldn't solve any societal problems caused by them; does the lottery reduce the effect of gambling on the poor? No. It's a silly proposition.
3. Ok pot isn't really a thing it's true, it's kind of weird that it became illegal in the first place because after years of youthful experimentation I'm not convinced it actually does anything at all psycho actively. What an utter waste of my rebelliousness.
4. The war on drugs employs thousands of people, removing it would have a similar economic impact to removing easy access to dialysis.
5. No one has a god given right to get high as fuck. The notion that certain mind altering drugs should be illegal is not an indefensible moral position, and it is appropriate for countries to criminalize drug use in so far as that is the desire of the polity.
However, the ring will never leave your finger, and you will be unable to ever describe to another living person what you see.
your #5 is kinda not correct
hitting hot metal with hammers
The war on terror isn't really less winnable than the cold war so i'm not really sure what you are getting at
heck it is basically the second cold war anyway except it is harder to claim that any particular group involved with it has some kind of ethical or moral high ground
it's basically the series of conflicts that revolve around middle eastern issues and the united states's policy toward the middle east
i tried to coin a word to describe it recently as ideologigafada, but that sounds dumb and nobody likes it except me so I think it's probably better to just call it the second cold war anyway
But yeah the war on terror is winnable because someone has to win it, it's about a concrete series of issues that can be resolved through war, diplomacy, and economics, and involves specific actors
The war on drugs isn't really similar at all because its just a policy on the use and sale of drugs, it's not winnable for the same reason the war on the proper use of quotation marks isn't usable
However, the ring will never leave your finger, and you will be unable to ever describe to another living person what you see.
which are good
which are bad
Drugs Drugs Drugs
ask your mom or
ask your dad
Dear satan I wish for this or maybe some of this....oh and I'm a medium or a large.
break it down man are you going to take some aynsteroids and go super sayjin on me or what
However, the ring will never leave your finger, and you will be unable to ever describe to another living person what you see.
We can examine the policies as they exist and determine that, as they exist, they aren't even designed to protect the public. We can look at the foundation of the laws being clearly influenced by business interests and racial prejudices of the times in which they were enacted. We can look at the continuing racial disparities in conviction and sentencing. We can look at Panama. It's pretty fucking clear the War on Drugs has never even pretended to be in line with the morals espoused by anti-drug rhetoric.
Dear satan I wish for this or maybe some of this....oh and I'm a medium or a large.
We also need to start viewing drug abuse as a medical problem rather than a legal problem.
None of those are good reasons to legalize drugs. They're certainly arguments for modifying the policies used to 'fight' the war on drugs, but they don't suggest that drugs should be legal. African-Americans frequently get harsher sentences for things like shoplifting, but that doesn't mean shoplifting should be legal.
However, the ring will never leave your finger, and you will be unable to ever describe to another living person what you see.
1) Do you have any kind of evidence for that proposition or are you just blowing smoke?
2) Legalization isn't a) the only way to reform the drug war nor b) really intended to eliminate drug use. It does demonstrably reduce the ability of criminal organizations to exploit the illegality to control their customers
3) You're right, pot really isn't a thing, but I suspect you got to that conclusion because no one taught you how to smoke properly
4) This is the Broken Window Fallacy writ large. Money not spent on enforcement would be spent elsewhere, perhaps even doing something productive.
5) You're absolutely right about this. There are a very few rastafarians arguing the opposite, but most people are having this discussion because they think the policy is wrong. Don't appeal to the status quo. That's just silly.
Legalizing and regulating drugs might make drugs like crack and meth less popular.
SteamID: Baroque And Roll
Can you really back up either of these?
Welp, you're left of liberal.
Learn what liberal means, because it isn't necessarily that.
The War on Drugs is nothing if not those policies.
actually i retract
the first sentence of your #5 is still incorrect i think (but i ain't a lawyer). i just feel like if you want to make something illegal, you have to come up with a pretty good set of concrete reasons why it should be illegal, rather than having to defend something's legality. so wanting drugs to be illegal isn't indefensible, but you have to do a lot of defending on the view
edit: also man, you make some interesting points but the fact that some people might be out of a job if we stop banning drugs is not a good argument for keeping things the way they are. keeping a couple thousand folks from being out of work isn't as important as keeping people from getting murdered and imprisoned for no goddamn reason
hitting hot metal with hammers
The phrase "liberal-conservative line" almost certainly suggests he's referring to the tepid political dichotomy, not the actual ideological position.
I hate that (not your comment, but those labels)
When I hear about the "liberal media wants big government!" I want to do something violent. It makes me irrationally irritated, because that's not what liberal means.
The term has evolved through many different definitions and contexts. If you really do get that angry about it you're just being pedantic.
Well I live in England where we have a different definition
but the ideological definition remains the same regardless of place
It just winds me up because things like state owned healthcare etc are not liberal, yet that's the name they are given in general US political discussion. And when the general term and the ideological and academic term differ it just irritates me, mostly because it's doesn't fit. I did say it was irrational but that doesn't help me not get wound up, even though I probably shouldn't.
lol
1. Nicotine is one of the most physically addicting substances out there, despite it being easily accessable the rates of people smoking cigarettes have gone down over the years, most likely because of social pressures against its dangerousness. People aren't as self destructive as you'd like to imply; get the information out there and most of them will stay away from the actually dangerous drugs.
2. Drugs are an enormous cash crop for terrorists, gangs, and thugs, and what's more are responsible for an enormous amount of money and time wasted pursuing and incarcerating what mostly amounts to victimless crimes on our side of the border while maintaining policies that created this problem over boarders in the first place. Let's be clear: America's demand for illegal crops shares significant responsibility for mexico's current state of affairs. We have a duty to them as well as ourselves to fix this stupid, stupid problem.
3. Uh, the psychoactive affects of THC have been scientifically proven. Different brains process chemicals differently. I don't like marijuana at all because it doesn't do good things to me.
4. You act like the enormous amount of money we spend on the war on drugs couldn't be appropriated to something that, you know, actually has social gain. Not to mention the money we would receive from taxing these newly legalized substances. And the safety to the consumer that would come from regulating it so that party kid gets less cocaine cut with something stupid like detergent
5. Fuck abstract rights, does the war on drugs cause a significant net negative in social utility? yes? then let's get rid of it.
On the black screen