Funny thing is, I can relate better to drug dealers than to war-on-drugs guys. At least the pile of money the dealers are after would be real, if they achieved it. What the war-on-drugs guys hallucinate, I don't even want to know.
... is a similar pile of money, just more legit. Larger budgets, higher salaries, performance bonuses -- law enforcement is not that different from your average corporation, they're just more violent.
What the politicians hallucinate on, that's a good question.
The same thing, plus more: money, power, status, the ego boost of being Senator/Governor/President.
Drug users aren't victims of the war on drugs (except maybe weed users). If drugs were legal they would still be hopeless addicts. Just because you can now buy your heroin at CVS instead of back alley Joe doesn't make you less vulnerable to addiction. Maybe they aren't in prison for doing drugs anymore, but they still might be in prison for robbing CVS to feed their addiction.
Drug users are victims of their own poor choices. To say otherwise is to say people don't have free will.
No, they'd just be addicts. If you prescribe heroin to addicts, a large proportion of them become productive members of society. Prescribing is incredibly inexpensive, because heroin is in fact a very cheap drug - it's expensive on the streets because of prohibition.
Switzerland and The Netherlands routinely prescribe heroin to treat addiction. By stabilising the lifestyles of addicts and bringing them into contact with the healthcare system, their cost to society is vastly reduced. Addicts with a prescription don't commit crime to fund their habit, they don't acquire blood-borne infections and they almost never overdose.
In Switzerland in particular, heroin has become an old person's drug, with a sharp decline in use among young people. The country has heroin addicts, but it doesn't have a heroin problem.
Harm reduction works.
So you are saying if people get addicted to heroin... give them free heroin indefinitely until they decide to stop (or die of old age)? Why pay for it if your healthcare covers it? Why not extend it and prescribe alcohol to alcoholics and nicotine to smokers?
That's not how it works. It's a coping mechanism.
If you give people the support they need to be happy without using it, and then slowly taper off the drugs, they stop using them.
Drug addiction is a social support problem.
You can buy alcohol and tobacco legally and relatively inexpensively. Substitute prescribing allows addicts access to a safe supply of drugs without creating a free-for-all. Substitute prescribing massively reduces the cost to society of drug addiction, for the reasons mentioned in my comment.
If alcohol was illegal, people were being killed by bathtub gin and people were burgling houses to fund their addiction, I'd suggest prescribing alcohol.
Tell that to the world's largest prison population, half of whom are there on drug-related charges. A very small percentage of drug users are hopeless addicts who would consume public health resources in a de-criminalized, health-focused system, but all drug users are criminals under the War on Drugs and potential 'consumers' of the costs of law enforcement investigation, legal prosecution, and ongoing expensive incarceration.
> Drug users are victims of their own poor choices.
The majority of drug users aren't victims of anything - they're perfectly functional, productive, creative members of society, who you don't know exist all around you because they're completely normal in exactly the same way that the majority of people who drink alcohol are completely normal, functional, productive members of society.
I say make it all legal, and tax it proportionate to the cost of running enough rehabilitation centers nationally that any American can get treatment if they so wish (and include alcohol, tobacco and prescription drugs under that same mandate). This is really a problem that solves itself.
It is interesting that most of this is just perception. It's "cool" to go out for drinks. It's "manly" to have a beer after work. It's "sexy" to drink wine.
I think that the binary demarcation between "normal" vs "addict" is naive at best. It is all a sliding scale. People can have compulsion problems with anything, most of which can become unhealthy.
At the end of the day, if my 85 yo granny wants to do some heroin a couple times a year, then whatever. Its probably no worse than the prescription pills she takes everyday.
Seems like a pipe dream. Tax the drugs too much and you'll just create a black market and/or encourage addicts to commit crimes to obtain the drug. Tax it too little and it won't cover the costs of rehab.
Are you sure about that?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/06/25/why-t...
"In New York, a Black Market For Illegal Cigarettes Thrives" http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1040938577857473793
Yes, they are.
> If drugs were legal they would still be hopeless addicts.
Perhaps, but it wouldn't be as likely, since if drugs were legal managing social and personal harms related to addiction would be less complicated, among many other reasons because relapse wouldn't be as likely to involve criminal activity.
> Drug users are victims of their own poor choices.
Even if one agrees this is true, that doesn't mean that they aren't also victims of drug prohibition.
Every criminal is a victim of the system, then. Had sex with a minor and now you are in jail? You're a victim of sexual prohibition.
> Every criminal is a victim of the system, then.
That does not follow; for instance, if one views someone as a "victim" of prohibition only when the harms done to them by prohibition (whether directly through punishment, or indirectly through costs and harms they bear only because of prohibition) are disproportionate to the harms prevented thereby, one can easily view drug users as victims of prohibition but not generally view, e.g., those involved in crimes of violence against other persons as victims of prohibition of those acts of violence.
Statutory rape and/or child abuse has a victim that is identifiable and distinct from the offender. The presumed harm done to the victim (and the class represented by the victim) goes so far beyond available civil remedies that the state pursues additional criminal punishment both to dissuade others from doing similar things, and to dissuade vigilantism and other extralegal retribution. We have a malum in se crime, an evil in itself. For such crimes, the state may put you in jail not just to make an example and to keep you from re-offending, but also to keep the minor's family from putting you into an unmarked shallow grave, at 2 AM during a new moon, with a strong false alibi.
The person who possesses, uses, or trades contraband offends only the state, which in a republic is not embodied in an individual, nor entirely distinct from the offender. Thus drug prohibition is a malum prohibitum crime, an evil just because someone said so. For the most part, no one cares if you smoke weed or not, unless you show up to work too stoned to do your own job, and then they only care because they might have to do some of your job in addition to their own. If you throw the offender in prison, that's a shame, because that guy is now doing 0% of their work, and their co-workers are now picking up 100% of the slack, until a replacement can be hired. If you don't go to prison, and don't miss work, the only ones you really harm are Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds, Jack Daniels, and Jim Beam, because the money you spend on weed cannot also be spent on tobacco and booze, and that is merely the sting from additional competition.
So are we pretending things that like DUI manslaughter, second-hand cancer, theft/robbery to pay for more drugs, etc. are unrelated crimes?
If a crime has multiple contributing factors, that does not necessarily make any of those factors a crime in itself.
One might as well say that because murder with a firearm is a crime, that possession of bullets should also be considered criminal.
It is perfectly reasonable to say that crimes may be related to non-crimes. But in our system, the crime should be defined by objective criteria, or elements, such that a judge and jury can determine whether they exist or not based on evidence and testimony.
And while is it possible to define a crime without a victim's complaint as an element, my own opinion is that such laws should be relatively rare, or severely limited in their application and scope.
I don't smoke weed. If I do smoke weed, in what way am I causing comparable harm to others? How is it reasonable to threaten me with criminal penalties? Is that good for society!?
Drugs are very cheap. 'Society' could easily afford to provide drugs for addicts, so they wouldn't have to advocate drug use to their non-addict friends just to feed their own addiction.
> Drug users are victims of their own poor choices. To say otherwise is to say people don't have free will.
My friend was shot up with Methamphetamine when she was 11 years old, by an angry 14 year old. Her brain chemistry never normalized after that, and neither did anyone know how to help her.
Medicine turned her into a drug addict by injecting her with Depo-Provera at around 19 years old. Science has known for a very long time that Provera (medroxyprogesterone acetate) and Progesterone have opposite effects on the body [1]. Progesterone is actually an important neuro-steroid; Provera suppresses the body's progesterone production. Medical practitioners figure that FDA-approval for Depo-Provera means its basically safe, and indiscriminately inject this bad drug into women who don't want to get knocked up.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=medroxyprogestero...
Also, it seems you don't make the distinction between drug users and drug addicts (or you're mixing them up).