Time to end the war on drugs
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Drug use is a health-related issue, whether it is a doctor prescribing medications, a patient taking meds off-label, a person self-medicating, an addict, or some kind experimentation. All of these situations are much more personal health concerns than public safety concerns. Yes, addiction is a terrible tragedy and sometimes danger for the rest of us -- but it's a personal disaster a long time before it affects any of us. I'd argue that in the aggregate most addicts suffer a lot more personally than any damage they inflict on society.
We have a caricatured view of the drug addict -- the unwashed, illiterate, toothless junkie hiding out in a crack house. Yes, addiction ends up that way for some, but by and large addicts are middle-class, educated, and live in houses with their friends or families. Hollywood and moralists have done us a great disservice by putting these horrible outlier pictures in people's heads when they think of drug use. Take for instance the word "addict", which like the word "war" is such a broad term that it doesn't have much meaning on it's own without further clarification. One side wants you to believe that all drug use consists of PhDs smoking pot while talking astronomy. The other side wants you to believe that all drug use ends in addiction and death. People need to stop with the histrionics.
I support legalization, although I am extremely cautious personally when it comes to drug use. I might support criminalization of dealing hard drugs. I'd have to think about it a bit. But declaring "war" on our own population is a pretty idiotic way to spend our social resources if you ask me. Just like the "war on poverty," the "war on illiteracy," the "war on obesity," and the "culture war," enough with the wars already.
I'd like to upvote that a hundred times.
If you are engaged in a mass bombing of civilians and military targets or committing ground forces to combative action for a period of longer than a week or two, that is a war, not a "police action" or other euphemism meant to get around (American) Constitutional requirements.
I come from a country that suffers this "war on drugs", I've had members of my family kidnapped, I've seen people being assassinated in front of me by hit-men. Some others haven't been that lucky.
I, with you permission, call this a "war".
Declaring "war" on an idea allows the state to permanently oppress anyone who can be associated with the idea.
This is a powerful totalitarian tool. [0]
This produces 2 less that awesome situations:
It is because of the prohibition called "The War on Drugs" that a real war fueled by drug money is out of control.
Because of the over use of the word, it's now harder to distinguish between what is a war and what is not a war.
TLDR: You can't have a war on a concept. It logically and literally makes no sense.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Humans fighting humans. That is a war. The War on Drugs also includes locking up 16 year olds for smoking pot in their own houses. Calling the general concept of drug control and prohibition a war generates this very confusion.
"claiming that it's a war on an abstract principle trivializes the very real combat"
Claiming those 16 year olds are part of the war is what trivializes it. Theres bloodshed in Latin America? Oh well that's just part of the war on drugs. Got caught with an ounce on you at a party? Oh thats just part of the war on drugs.
It's really interesting to me in what way his statement is actually true, as you say, just not in the way that it is sold (he is right on that part - declaring "war" on anything from Iraq to Christmas is in itself an issue that can create dangerous narratives). As you've said, the way it is conducted in the US, it certainly does involve large numbers of deaths - if the drug-related deaths (due to criminalization) within the US don't convince you, the Mexican border or even further south paint a clear picture. Furthermore, the only option that is offered is indeed total surrender - the stated goal of The War On Drugs being to end illegal drug trade, preferably to end illegal drug use, completely.
The problem, via Wikipedia, is: >>ONDCP's view is that "drug addiction is a disease that can be successfully prevented and treated... making drugs more available will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe."(2011)<<
Illegal drugs equal addiction equal disease. Increasing availability increases addiction, reducing safety (think of the children!), meaning the only option is criminalizing any sort of availability. If that is the narrative you are selling, you have indeed polarized the debate enough to warrant a war. The problem is that it really just isn't true. The US has created this war - it is a fight they picked.
Today, the economics of prohibition have tipped off the scale and laid power in the hands of people that really shouldn't have any. The reality of criminalization has simply created a large number of criminals (rocketing the percentage of US citizens in prison from 0.2 to 0.8), it has not served to scare people from using drugs, it has actually been an example of the same-old "hide it, to make it more interesting".
But again, the real issue is that the War On Drugs completely misunderstands the actual reality: Drug addicts are people primarily having a problem, not causing problems. Drug Users can range from people enjoying a glass of wine to the Hollywood "crack house zombies". That is a sliding scale of regular folks to folks with some military grade issues. Rubber-stamping the majority of them as criminals is simple, costly and foolish. What they don't get is that you shouldn't punish people for having a problem. You should help them. That is what Portugal got right.
The problem is understood backwards and then it is "solved" backwards again. That such a thing can happen in a country that already got a pretty definitive statement on the counter-productivity of prohibition is incredibly ironic.
How many of us have had a beer or smoked a bowl of marijuana to "chill out" after the stress of work? It's normal to self-medicate in this modern world. We have to work at jobs, and then we take a chemical that used to be a religous sacrament, and use it to get a little numb and giddy.
People who can't handle life in a modern society... some of them become the drug addicts, who self-medicate to create a curtain between themselves and the world.
I don't think anyone's disputing the toll the “war on drugs” is exacting – often outside the US, as is typically the case with these things. The problem is the idiotic approach to a problem, declaring it a “war”.
It may be held a truism, but it bears repeating that the violence in Mexico and South America is caused by drugs being illegal. Prohibition benefits three parties: criminals (especially organized, like the cartels), makers of non-prohibited drugs, and those making profit on jailing people, selling weapons and so on.
(I'm sure that many of the criminals would find other illicit activities to engage in, but I doubt they'd escalate to the level the cartel warfare has.)
> We have a caricatured view of the drug addict -- the unwashed, illiterate, toothless junkie hiding out in a crack house. Yes, addiction ends up that way for some, but by and large addicts are middle-class, educated, and live in houses with their friends or families
Excellent points. If there were just two things I wish everyone in the world (or at least in the US) would understand, it's this:
1. The drugs that you are prescribed and the drugs people consume recreationally are not fundamentally different. In fact, in many cases, they're essentially interchangeable from a chemical perspective (Adderall/Desoxyn/Methamphetamine/"Speed" are a great example; Marijuana/Marinol is a partial example too). The prescription vs. "everything else" divide is almost arbitrary. If someone told you that they were prescribed diacetylmorphine for chronic pain, what would you say? What would you say if they took heroin for pain?
2. The stereotypes of 'drug addicts' and 'drug users' are grossly inaccurate. Yes, some people who use heroin/meth/coke/etc. fall into the respective stereotypes. But many don't - you just don't know it, because they're the ones who manage to maintain normal lives. Look up diactylmorphine (heroin) maintenance programs in Switzerland and the UK, and you'll see that many people who used to fit the stereotypes of the homeless sex-working heroin addict are able to maintain steady 'normal' jobs if they are given regular access to heroin of a consistent quality/potency and with no adulterants (this requirement is key!)
In the UK, there was a 'Nice People Use Drugs' campaign, which was aimed at exactly that - demonstrating to people that the stereotypical drug users are just more visible; the invisible majority of people who use or have used drugs have no lasting/debiltating/noticeable problems (if any at all). Everybody knows people who use drugs of some sort; they just don't always know that those people use drugs. (And sometimes, they're not the ones you'd expect!)
That is not true.
> In fact, in many cases, they're essentially interchangeable from a chemical perspective
This is true.
In a sane society, both would be true. But they are not. The "war on drugs" is not an innocent mistake. It is calculated and it is doing precisely what it was designed to do.
Its purpose it to line the pockets of the politicians who support it.
By prosecuting drug dealers and users, you bring the cost of using illegals drugs up. Significantly. In other words, you make illegal drugs less competitive vs legal drugs. This allows the pharmaceutical companies to maintain or increase prices for legal drugs. The additional funds the pharmaceutical companies get, they do not get to keep. They funnel that into the regulatory apparatus and more importantly, into the campaigns of the very politicians who support the system.
>Its purpose it to line the pockets of the politicians who support it. I would say that it's more for the large pharmaceutical companies. Politicians are cheap these days, and the profits from the "war on drugs" are orders of magnitude larger than the money given to politicians to support it. The ATT/T-Mo merger "only" had $9 million in lobbying support -- an order of magnitude less than they stand/stood to lose if the deal fell through REF: http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/12/09/attmay.have.tr... .
Both local law enforcement and the for-profit companies behind our jails profit enormously from the US having the highest percentage of population incarcerated of any first world country. The majority of individuals currently doing time are in for drug-related crimes.
We have the highest incarceration rate, full stop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat...
For-profit prisons, however, are the most direct beneficiaries of the (completely fucking insane) "war on drugs". For-profit prisons are one of the best examples of how an otherwise fairly functional democratic society can end up with a system of profoundly deranged incentives that visits grievous harm upon a staggering number of people.
These institutions conduct a program of systematic, industrialized dehumanization of millions of people -- including millions of people who have never harmed another person. In my view, this makes them evil, profoundly evil.
Although this sounds extreme to some people (especially those who have never paused to think it through), I put America's industrial prisons in the same league with the Nazi extermination camps. America doesn't actually starve people to death or gas them in ovens, but that's a matter of degrees. America does separate children from parents and force nonviolent human beings to live out their lives as caged animals. Millions and millions and millions of them.
There is not much about America so disgusting and disgraceful.
Small clarification: Adderall isn't methamphetamine, it's amphetamine. When discussing street drugs, for some value of safe, it is a considerably safer substance.
(Real, lab-made methamphetamine, even abused, is naturally much less bad for you than the typical battery acid sold on the street, too.)
Adderall isn't methamphetamine. However, the methyl group doesn't change the way that the drug affects the brain; it just makes the drug cross the blood-brain barrier more easily. The increased bioavailability means that less of the drug (by weight) is needed to achieve the same result, but the drug isn't activating any different receptors or having a substantially different neurological effect in any other way or for any other reason. Subjectively, there may appear to be a difference for that reason (more efficient access to the brain), but the same pathways are being accessed - just to a greater degree.
An analogous and more familiar (but not identical) example would be Vyvanse and Adderall. The actual metabolic process is different from the example above, but in essence, about 50% of Vyvanse is lost when converting from a form which has no effect on the brain to a form which does. Once it's converted, it's chemically equivalent to Adderall. That's part of why Adderall XR is prescribed in doses about half the weight of Vyvanse.
[Nitpick: Yes, this isn't a perfect analogy; pharmacology is complicated! Vyvanse contains a single enantiomer of a single amphetamine; Adderall contains two enantiomers each of two amphetamines, but if you know that, you probably already know everything else I'm clarifying here anyway. The reason Vyvanse has reportedly lower side-effects is because it lacks the less effective l-enantiomer, not because the amphetamine is otherwise radically different.]
Maybe I should have been a bit clearer, but my point was that Adderall (legally prescribed amphetamine), Desoxyn (legally prescribed methamphetamine), [street] methamphetamine, and [street] amphetamines ('speed') are pharmacokinetically different because of the way that they are taken, the mode of ingestion, and the set & setting, not because of the active ingredient itself. In general, people don't seem to understand that difference, and for that matter, neither do our laws.
[Disclaimer: Everything I've said above is 'false' in the sense that it is an oversimplification, but this is HN, not a discussion board on pharmacology, so I'm sacrificing some precision in favor of accessibility/simplicity and (attempted) conciseness.]
Doctors, in the US at least, are a bit less than helpful when you ask about this kind of stuff, and I've had more than one actually act offended when asked about how/why what they're prescribing works. I know that in IT, if a client asks us how something works, I'm more than happy to explain, or at least point them in the right direction and link them to some documentation and/or how-to articles. With doctors, I typically get more of a "it just does" / "it's complicated and you wouldn't understand" / [very technical explanation, not even trying to make it make sense to laypersons].
For example: How do SSRIs work? Statistically, they do "work," for certain values of work. We know that they result in more serotonin in the synapse. But we also know that that's not the reason they work, because that happens immediately but it usually takes a few weeks for the drug to actually work. Evidently they work by inducing some kind of structural change, but nobody knows what.. Nor do we need to know what to know that they're good drugs to prescribe in certain circumstances.
Meanwhile, many people want "reassurance" to be part of the product that they receive when they go to the doctor. If your doctor said, "these pill seem to sort of go with your symptoms in the massive table I have painstakingly memorized, nobody really knows what they do, try eating them", she would be providing a strictly worse product in many people's eyes than if she said "You have condition X. It happened because of Y. Take these pills and you'll be all right."
http://www.radiolab.org/2007/may/17/ http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo...
While unrelated to the science, I am a previous user of Adderall XR and then Vyvanse and I want to share some advice on the subject for any hackers out there using these drugs or thinking about them:
It's crazy, it makes you operate on a different level, and I feel bad for anyone in a competitive college or learning situation that isn't using it: it's just unfair. But is cheating at being smart unethical? Oh, nootropics.
However, for hackers, for developers, for designers: it's not what you need. I've written code and spent months in photoshop on and off of those drugs, and that stuff will not put you in the mindset you need to be a great hacker. Highly productive for hours on end? Sure! But it tends to tunnel your vision and cause you to waste time on details.
My work is always better, hands down, off that stuff. That's because the intensity they brought were fantastic for my grueling science degree, but terrible for creating great apps. Nothing beats 8 hours of sleep, healthy diet and exercise for developing good software. Nothing.
If you're going to use it, in my experience, Vyvanse was 100X better than Addy. Addy felt like it crammed energy and focus down your throat and you were a passenger on the productivity express. Vyvanse, I felt, allowed me to be calm when I wanted to be calm, and focused and energetic when I wanted that. I could sleep and eat on it fine. Also, keep your dose small, increasing it is a slippery slope, you will build tolerance, and quitting might take effort. Best not to start.
I hope my anecdotal experience helps someone!
Not so fast. "We" have decided that obesity is a public health issue that warrants all manner of intrusions.
I think agree with you about drug use but ....
This is totally orthogonal to your main point, but by this definition the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan would not qualify as wars.
The government know that the war can never be won, but that isn't actually the point of the war.
What Portugal did was decriminalize the possession of small amounts of drugs. They did not legalize them. There is a huge difference. Decriminalization essentially means that possession of small amounts of drugs is no longer an offense that warrants an arrest and jail time. In a decriminalized system an officer can still stop someone for drugs, but they can only write them a ticket- similar to speeding, jaywalking or illegal parking.
This makes a huge difference for a number of reasons. First, it's easier to implement politically because the substances are still illegal. Second, it's less costly because people caught with small amounts are not caught up in the justice system for years, and only pay a small fine. Third, it decreases the adversarial nature of the "war on drugs" because being caught with drugs is no longer a life-changing event.
Marijuana possession is already decriminalized in many states in the U.S. (California, Colorado, New York and Oregon off the top of my head). It is clearly not an impossibility to implement politically, and in fact the trend in the U.S. is already on its way. An important hurdle is that we do not have any states that have yet decriminalized "harder" drugs like heroin and cocaine, but it is simply a matter of time. Pressure on lawmakers in the form of education, money and votes will in fact work. It just takes time.
All decriminalization is not alike. In New York, for example, decriminalization is in in name only, because police can easily exploit a loophole that allows them to charge people with possession of more than an ounce (criminal) even if they only have a few grams (not criminal). Because of this, New York City arrests more people (per-capita and in total) than any other city in the entire world. Compare to the Netherlands, which also has 'only' decriminalized marijuana.
The history behind how New York's marijuana decriminalization and this loophole came to pass, especially in contrast to the Rockefeller drug laws, is actually a rather fascinating example of the sheer racial/socioeconomic hypocrisy within US drug laws.
If it's for medical use and you're all registered as a patient, it's now technically legal under local and state laws, but illegal under federal law.
TL;DR the laws are a mess and if the FBI catches you, you're still pretty screwed. We need to work on reforming the laws at a federal level, since that overrides all lower laws. It'd be at least cool to have the federal law just refuse to say one way or the other on marijuana, so that states could decide what is right for them.
I think you may be incorrect.
In any case, the 1937 bill created an impossible-to-satisfy tax structure, because they knew that a direct prohibition would have been deemed unconstitutional. Unfortunately, by 1970, everyone had forgotten and the Controlled Substances Act passed easily.
In the US even though in some states marijuana is decriminalized, drugs are still treated as a criminal issue.
But it's still illegal at the federal level, and federal penalties are quite severe. Prosecutors can force you to plead to other charges with the threat of turning you over to the feds on marijuana possession.
I'm a NYC-based, Colombian entrepreneur. My step-brother died piloting a Black Hawk helicopter in Colombia that crashed while executing an anti-narcotics operation. The helicopter was "donated" by the US as part of "Plan Colombia" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Colombia ). Plan Colombia is a periodic subsidy sent by the US to Colombia to help with the war on drugs. The program is lobbied in part by Sikorsky and Monsanto. The subsidy includes some cash, but it also comes in the form of helicopters (built by Sikorsky), glyphosate (banned in the US but used in Colombia to destroy coca plantations), and weapons.
You can say that the "war on drugs" allowed my brother to realize his dream (flying a helicopter), but it also killed him.
I may be emotionally charged with the topic and may not exercise good reason about it, but I've seen enough to realize that the "war on drugs" is just a big mess that won't be won, no matter what.
I believe the use of glyphosate in the US must abide by very strict standards and regulations. I'm sure its forbidden to fly around town and spray it on anything you feel like it, much worse if there is livestock, potable water, or human populations close by.
This does not happen in the Colombia (Disclaimer, I, just like torrenegra, am a Colombian entrepreneur residing in NYC, currently Lead Engineer in an NYC startup, formerly a Pharmaceutical Chemist graduated from the National University of Colombia, I also did a Bachelor of Science in Biotechnology in Sydney, Australia). The irresponsibility surrounding the crop-dusting practices in Colombia is inimaginable. After almost 12 years of cropdusting, the overall coverage of crops has grown. But instead, human populations have been affected, and the real impact on the dusted areas has not been measured. Logically, I can't imagine how 10 years of constant poison bombing the same areas can't have negative effects.
From the american citizens perspective, huge amount of taxpayers money has been spent and the goals have not been met. If there had been a reduction in the production of cocaine, this would've certainly been reflected in the street prices, it is my understanding that this hasn't been the case. We can oversimplify the problem, with the following analogy:
If you caught your kid doing cocaine, what would be more effective?
- Go looking for his dealer and putting him in jail.
- Getting rid of all the dealers in his neighborhood and school
- Waiting for all the coca plants in the world to be erradicated
- Actually talk to your kid, show him the real effects the drug has on his body and mind. Taking him to places where he can see the real effect that drug addiction has in society and people.
There are obviously thousands of variables that affect each path, but from a market perspective, if the demand for certain product is high, someone will find a way to supply it. After the demise of the large Colombian cartels, Colombian drug dealers have stopped trying to control the whole supply chain, that is why now its the Mexican cartels are now in an inner battle to be able to control the best route into the US. There have been submarines, there's mules, airdrops, fast boats, and a thousand different ways of to try to get cocaine into the US.
The big question here is, how do we reduce the demand for drugs?
Richard Branson's point is certainly interesting, and Portugal's attempt has been the only one I've seen to successfully reduce the demand for drugs.
Drug use is a personal decision, just like alcohol consumption and smoking are. Legal does not mean right, or ok. Tobacco industries are horrible monsters, and the problem of alcoholism is not brand new. It's a matter of education, of parents taking the time to explain to their children why anything in excess is harmful, even sugar. How narcotics are dangerously addictive, just like nicotine, and any wrong choice may take them down a path that will punch them in the face down the road.
PS: I am Brazilian-American, so I have experienced both sides of the "war on drugs".
Edit: I realize my post is a little confusing, but just to make it more clear: My point is that the "war on drugs" causes more damage than drugs themselves.
For every productive member of society using drugs there must be at least 2 -3 that drain from society
I rarely see anyone use methadone long term and rehabilitate themselves back to productive members of society. They end up being permanently high. My opinion is not isolated amongst my colleagues.
Spend a couple of hours in a hospital that provides free health care and see the devastation caused by all drugs.
Alcohol and smoking cause the largest volume of problems but many of the users have jobs.
Heroin produces real life zombies!
On what grounds do you make this claim?
Perhaps for every user that makes it to your hospital there are 2-3 that don't and are relatively adjusted. Drugs certainly have their hazards but it's fallacious to extrapolate the big picture from the perspective you are presenting.
"A total of 1 486 800 prescriptions for methadone were issued in 2003" and "A total of 1 486 800 prescriptions for methadone were issued in 2003"
These are both methadone substitutes.
I have done time in community psychiatry and addiction psychiatry.
My best friend is a psychiatrist that spends a lot of time with drug addicts.
I have seen the results, and the HUGE costs, with my own eyes.
I'm not arguing against the dangers of drugs. My point is if your only interaction with drug users is through people who have hit rock bottom then you are operating under a selection bias.
>I have seen the results, and the HUGE costs, with my own eyes.
How many of these costs are a result of the drugs being illegal? Lack of access to clean needles and clean drugs is what causes the spread of diseases like HIV and Hepatitis C. Artificial scarcity of drugs is the leading reason why addicts turn to crime.
Anyone on methadone needs to see a doc first to get a prescription. Ifmedical professionals are seeing the tip then it is a huge iceberg.
I did a stint of general practice in my training in a poor neighbouhood. I was doing checks on pregnant and new mothers. 50% were drug addicts, average age 16. I went on to a well of f area after. Same checks and maybe 10% were addicts. The addicts were mostly under 20.
Opiates cannot be used on a population scale safely. when someone is having renal colic, said by many to be the worst pain possible, we give morphine as it alters the brains perception of your senses that much!
Deaths due to overdose of opiates, for example, accounted for 9% of deaths in young Australian adults under the age of 50 in 1998 and for more than 10% in several European cities despite the fact that they were used by less than 1% of adults in any year.
572kg of methadone, which is not the only heroin substitute, is prescribed each year. The cost of the medical staff, the supervised consumption, security around it etc is enormous. That is for a population of 5 million people in the whole of Scotland.
No evidence exists of any sustained heroin shortage or reduction in the number of heroin users in the UK over the study period. In fact, all indices of the availability and use of heroin, including deaths due to heroin overdose, rose steadily during the study period,41 as did the number of heroin dependent people being treated by methadone maintenance.
How does that compare to the cost of running drug enforcement agencies, prisons, or treating preventable drug related diseases?
Here's an interesting question: what would end the war on drugs? Is it something that can be made to happen by sane, enterprising individuals?
2) Silver bullet solutions? Yeah, I believe in them. And Santa, too.
It is not very difficult to convince Monsanto if they can make more money in some other way -- it may not be something that can be solved by gcc, but when has raw computer programming talent ever been the deciding factor for a computer programmer?
If it's not very difficult to convince Monsanto of this, then please do it right away, if it has the benefit of ending the war on drugs. If you can't be bothered to do it yourself, then pray tell us the 5 easy steps to convincing Monsanto to start exploiting Marijuana and therefore decriminalise all drugs.
Unless you think, as I do, that the above is a fantasy and has no practical value as a line of action.
Any hemp-based economy is a threat to centralized industrial concerns. With the invention of the hemp decorticator in the 1910's (the cotton gin of hemp) by George Schlichten, hemp's potential as an industrial crop to replace petroleum was unlocked.
Large, centralized industries have no interest in seeing their monopoly threatened.
Remember, hemp is illegal, not just marijuana.
Could you clarify this statement? Are you saying hemp can be efficiently used as a fuel?
Popular Mechanics was touting hemp in 1938:
http://www.globalhemp.com/1938/02/new-billion-dollar-crop.ht...
In this case, there would be money on both sides. The drug war itself is a massive industry at this point --- look at the power of prison guards in California. There are also a whole lot of politicians with a massive ego stake in the existing set of laws. And Monsanto, the tobacco companies, and agribusiness all have much easier and less stressful ways to preserve profits by lobbying. (Maintaining agricultural subsidies, for the first two, for starters.)
So, don't expect this to happen really soon.
What can sane, enterprising people do?
This strategy takes a long time, but there's empirical evidence that it actually works.
Organised religion fizzled away when faced with widespread access to the facts (though two world wars surely helped).
There seems to be a trend for humans becoming brighter and more socially connected. (See Pinker's decline of violence work.)
I'm making the assumption that those trends will also stamp out boneheadedness with regards to prohibition.
Where? That's certainly not the case in America; access to facts does nothing more than make believers even more devout.
Various primitive gods/spirits probably fitted the available facts pretty well at some point.
The educated middle class is perhaps outnumbered, but holds much power (ha like iOS vs Android) in that most teachers are educated middle class. And at least in the UK, teachers seem to be mostly areligious.
Lucky you.
Aside from the occasional completely irrational commenter on DenverPost.com, most folks around here just don't give two shits about these dispensaries. Crime rates at these shops (as well as their warehouses where they grow their product) are lower than that of banks and pharmacies. Their security and ID-checking measures are all taken very seriously, you simply never hear about them letting in underage kids or folks without medicinal permits. All of the irrational fears of "dispensaries ruining neighborhoods" or "dispensaries selling marijuana to underage kids" simply have not materialized.
In regards to your question - most of these shops are owned by "sane, enterprising individuals" and not creepy street dealers. The culture of marijuana around here is NOTHING like it was back in the midwest. There is no paranoia, fear, or any of those weird dynamics that surround marijuana in non medicinal states -- people simply don't care. Smoke it if you want, get a medicinal card if you need it, but just keep it to yourself and there will be no problems.
THIS is how we defeat the war on drugs. There are people that will say medicinal marijuana laws are just a backdoor effort for full legalization .... and they're right. With decades of brainwashing from our very own government, it's going to take time and patience to change public opinion of marijuana. The best way to do this is to regulate the production and distribution of this plant (Colorado has some of the most progressive and proactive medicinal laws in the country, much more than even California) and to slowly expose the general population to it.
Ending the war on drugs isn't going to happen over night but we are certainly beginning to move in the right direction.
SOPA is extremely relevant to most of us here in our roles as 'hackers' and startup people.
Drug laws are not directly related in the same way. If people try and argue that they are, they're playing "7 degrees of hacker news". For instance, "traffic laws are related to hackers because many hackers drive to work".
Funny cat pictures should not be here either - and aren't. Let's try and keep politics out of this site, even if individually, most of us are quite interested in the subject.
True motive may be way different, but the convenient fact is that the stated goals of proponents of war on drugs are more efficiently achieved by decriminalization.
To my knowledge pretty much all of the fears that are voiced in opposition to decriminalization have been shown to be unfounded in practice.
The red light district is being slowly dismantled [1], new draconian laws are being introduced to shut the coffee shops down (with a Think Of The Children argument) [2] and foreigners are being banned from using coffee shops [3].
I blame the ageing population: the "boomers" [4] have had their fun, but they're getting older now and young people getting high only "disturbs" the peace. They're the biggest voting block, so they get their way (yet again).
So yeah, I don't see the Western world changing any time soon.
[1] http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-12-15/netherlands-stop...
[2] (sorry I couldn't find an English language version) http://www.cbs.nl/nl-NL/menu/themas/onderwijs/publicaties/ar...
[3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/8961513/Amsterd...
[4] They've even got their own party: http://50pluspartij.nl/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
And keep in mind, much of the prison system is privatized, many of those inmates work hard labor for far less than minimum wage, they have access to almost no real rehabilitation programs, and can't vote once they serve their time.
Large parts of law enforcement funding are due to this "war", and whole prison industry sprung up around this.
Everybody knows that the "war on drugs" is ineffective and will never reach its stated goal!
Conversely by creating artificial scarcity, the price for drugs are driven up (because demand is more or less constant) and this guarantees huge profits for illegal activities providing these drugs.
Most people seem to start taking drugs, because others do it and simply because it's cool or rebellious (in fact I smoked for a while in my childhood because of that). I think most people wouldn't start and get hooked, if it was legal. To most people it's ugly the first time anyways.
Hmm, when making things illegal leads to consumption then we should maybe make vegetables and stuff illegal. :D
PS I'm with richard Branson, but he is being naive or he is not mentioning these elements on purpose as a strategy.
Edit; Forgot to mention the United States Prison-Industrial Complex- that is even more anti-legalize momentum that would have to be addressed.
Here's how it works. If you overdose, and you go to ER you're forced to admit you did something illegal. Many people would rather die than face a life of humility that's unfairly associated with being a junkie. Not to mention overdoses would be less likely if everything was legal and properly labeled.
Same thing with addiction. Removing stigma and legal consequences associated with being a drug-addict will help many people seek help if they need it. How many people do you think are too afraid to go the doctor and admit they have problems, considering drug use is illegal and stigmatized? A lot.
I think it's a matter of creating a minority and punishing the fuck out of that minority. Being a drug-addict right now is like being gay or black hundreds of years ago.
Being an addict is not a fucking choice. It's a grueling mental torture accompanied by physical torture that's relieved with a consumption of a particular substance.
When you're addicted to opiates and you use, it's not because you want to rebel against the world. At that point it's about PLEASE STOP THE FUCKING PAIN. Mental and physical pain, violent diahrrea, puking, being unable to sleep for days.. basically all your natural painkillers are gone and everything is pain. All of that can be ceased with a hit.
The fact that anyone thinks it's okay to throw these people in jail sickens the fuck out of me. And you know what, I don't fucking care. Some of the best minds used heroin, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain. Wanna throw them in jail or fuck with them to the point of suicide (as with Cobain)? Go ahead. "Drug warriors" are like a grown-up version of bullies punching a sick kid.
Portugal wanted to remove punishments from drug users because they viewed it as a medical problem. However Portugal did not want to make a full legalization for then you end up with drug dens, the situation you try to avoid.
The only logical solution is to legalize usage and small possesion as a medical excuse. Then you ban larger possession and dealing.
- You are not allowed to buy it
- You are not allowed to sell it
- You can have a small amount of it in your possession, "for personal use" (declared as a maximum amount per substance, so that 'users' aren't in the same category as 'dealers' here)
What we have instead here in the United States (and attempt to force onto other countries) is a view that all use is abuse, regardless of any reasoning, even medicinal use. We can't even grow it for research or non-drug uses because of federal agencies that want to continue this for as long as possible. Today I can buy marijuana at retail stores here in Michigan. There is no violence associated with buying it from people who just grew it in their house and brought it there to sell to me.
In most cases, a prostitute is forced to work as slave labor by the controlling pimp. That makes her the victim. Without customers to pull money in (the Johns), she would make no income for her pimp.
Once one instead follows the money, we realize that we can starve this trade by punishing the ones who have money (the Johns) and can dissuade prostitutes by making their somewhat forced career choice legal.
I'm not real political. I haven't studied it too thoroughly, so I am disinclined to make strong recommendations one way or the other. But I'm female and I have some difficulty wrapping my brain around the idea that a man can spend gobs of money on an expensive restaurant and movie and gifts to try to get into my pants but can't legally give me cash up front after asking nicely if I am amenable to such an arrangement. I generally think it would be best if prostitution were decriminalized. I am hesitant to speak to that overly much in public because my views on such topics tend to go over extremely badly with both genders.
Also, if I saw compelling data indicating that decriminalization would cause worse problems, I would be inclined to go with "whatever works for the greater good". However, I doubt I will see such data. Most studies are pretty poorly done. I find few of them all that compelling. For the moment, that leaves me with "This makes no sense to me." as a simple personal opinion.
Suffice it to say, if your recommendation could be implemented and did not turn out to have unexpected hidden social costs (in terms of causing problems), I would support it. With the proviso that I see no reason to actively try to dissuade prostitutes from making their living that way if they so choose. However, it would make it more feasible for them to change career paths if it were not illegal and I am for that. I have seen some things that indicate that difficulty in transitioning to other (legal) work is one of the things which keeps them trapped. Admitting you are a hooker doesn't exactly look good on a resume.
The vast majority of prostitutes in the USA and similar countries are choosing the occupation of their own free will because it pays far better than alternatives. And a large fraction are now entirely independent, with no pimp or other structure involved. The "prostitutes are sex slaves" line is a myth propagated by organizations who would like you to believe this.
No it is not. Two examples of this are Singapore, Taiwan and Japan.
In both these countries there are zero tolerance for drug users and drug traffickers and the results show. Smoking Marijuana almost teenagers in Japan is basically unheard of.
It seems that laws in the USA and Europe are not strict enough to act as a deterrence. If many of these countries adopted the death penalty or similar penalties for trafficking, then perhaps something could be done about it.
(Singapore executes drug traffickers. I don't know what legal punishments there are for traffickers in Japan, but I know the social punishments are severe. A family will often cut contact with a relative if he is sentenced for a minor crime. Sports stars, tenured professors and celebrities will loose their jobs if they had a criminal offence even for something completely unrelated to their career. Quite different from the attention that washed out American celebrities get.)
Japan just has a low crime rate across the board, largely for the reason you mentioned. Again, this probably isn't helpful - inducing a general respect for the law into a society is a difficult proposition, or every nation in the world would be doing just that.
furthermore I don't think drugs themselves are the problem but the underlying mechanisms of society that drive somebody into drug abuse.
You can find the first edition online if you google; as far as I know, the second edition (the one I have, which covers Afghanistan as well) is not online.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.ht...
Excellent work, Dick.
Edit: After completing the Times article and rereading R. Branson's, I can confirm that the general flow is the same. In some parts, he only just paraphrases or summarizes, but the information is really the same.
This isn't reddit.
Anyone have any more info?
Do any of you think we can end the war on drugs before enough of the baby boomers are... pardon me... dead?
Dealing is still a big crime there, due to the citizens of Portugal not wanting to be akin the worlds drug den. The different viewpoint of legalizing usage was that it is a medical problem, and not a evil crime. Even that said, Portugal also made their problems less severe by bringing them out in the open instead of draconian punishments forcing users to hide.
The biggest hurdle for Portugal's idea to work in the USA is that we do not have any sort of socialized or national healthcare in which to attach a "fund substance abuse as medical problem" freely as Portugal does already. I can imagine that issue alone taking 10+ years in Congress, if any action is done at all.
Note: iPod farted earlier leading only posting the first character of this post: "O".
The lack of a socialised healthcare system is actually a boon in this case, since the state is basically getting rid of a large cost (funding the police work on the war on drugs) without creating another cost (since patients then have to pay for themselves). Isn't it?
We would also have a sizable chunk of the DEA disbanded (we wouldn't need them). We can add that to reduction of police forces around the US.
Where I am unsure is how the dependency of money works within the state system of the drug trade. I have a sinking feeling that there is probably the same amount or money moving around in the "War on Drugs" as there is in the drug trade in the US. My question then is, "What happens if we try to manipulate or disband this system?"
ObAside: I've seen this specific iPod bug before. When I click on an edit window, it will flash the keyboard up then down. And any sort of button click on the page submits the form. The only way I've seen to 'fix' it is to close and open the offending tab.
I think we well understand what is meant by "free". It is usually contrasted by the US system in which emergency care is 'free' if you have no garnishable income or property to take.
As a grandson of a retired couple who had to pay 60 Euro for a public hospital bill just a couple months ago, I can tell you that not only are is it not free, as it can be too expensive already considering the low salaries and pensions.
Some addicts are somewhat functional, but not enough to hold down a job. They may steal things. So the cost is borne by the community, who have to deal with stolen car stereos and broken windows.
What seems to work out cheapest is community based group therapy like what you get with Alcoholics Anonymous. You meet a couple times a week, and talk out how shitty your life was, and how shitty you were to other people. Then promise to not be shitty, and not get down. Maybe you get in touch with the fact that you're kind of "off" and need to see a shrink. Yes, it's a little culty, but so is worshipping the bottle :)
AA and NA are dirt cheap.
As cliché as it seems, AA and NA are cults of indoctrination and trample our Bill of Rights as they can and often are court mandated.
Tossing the bureaucratic issues aside seems the larger problem.
I can just imagine the headlines: "Senator Blabla wants to release druggies who solicit behind YOUR KIDS ELEMENTARY SCHOOL!!!!" Citizens already appear to want harsher and harsher punishments for crimes.
And then is the open question about what we do with the whole lot of people who work on the governments side. It appears to me in the medium term a fat job loss across the US. Especially in this economy, that kind of job loss, even if countered by a hiring of social workers, still looks nasty.
I think the more subtle and meaningful response (and one therefore unworkable in what passes for political dialog in the US) is to recognize that we're dealing with the broken window fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
If we criminalize something relatively harmless, then all the apparent economic activity related to enforcement is pure waste.
How is drug usage a "medical" problem? It's a personal choice. Most addicts aren't born addicted and they make the choice to pick up that first joint.
I don't want to make it easier to be a drug addict in this country. Especially at my expense.
If you truly believe this, then you wouldn't want to have drug addicts in the first place. Making it easy to start very addicting drugs in the first place (like heroin) with little to no consequences means we will most likely have more addicts.
If you look at the stats on Portugal, lifetime addictions increased after drugs were de-criminalized. Legalizing it will make it even worse because it won't have any negative stigma.
It's very telling when a community that is supposed to be about honesty down votes me because they don't believe in my opinion. Without an honest discussion with all view points, your issues will never get solved.
a thousand people who wouldn't have tried drugs in the first place to get addicted is better than 10 addicts who wanted to use drugs because it feels good.
I really don't understand why people are so willing to punish others (and pay dearly to do it), but not to help, even if it is cheaper and more efficacious.
Why? Because when drugs are legalized/decriminalized, more people are willing to try it (which makes sense).
"I really don't understand why people are so willing to punish others"
Sorry, but drugs are a personal choice. If you can't accept the consequences that come along with it, you shouldn't be ingesting mind-altering or addictive drugs.
It's just that simple. I'm not even taking about putting people in jail or having harsher drug laws, just not having my tax dollars pay for their medical expenses.
Or maybe existing addicts feel more comfortable being identified now that they aren't going to jail?
"drugs are a personal choice"
In the US, drugs are not a personal choice. I'm fine with you saying you don't want to pay for treatment of drug users, but why are so many of those same people (I don't know if you are in this category) so willing to pay to incarcerate them, which has been shown to have much, much higher costs, both in terms of actual dollars and in term of social costs?
The fact that I can go to jail for a small amount of weed says drugs are absolutely not a personal choice. But you are right, they should be.
This isn't really correct, certainly not the way you've stated it. The data you're probably thinking of point to a slight rise in "lifetime use". Almost all of that is cannabis use. The only significant effect shown by the data is that there has been a ~5% rise in the number of people who regularly use cannabis, and are expected to continue in the future.
Twisting this into "created more addicts" is a bit tabloid, don't you think?
Because it's the ingestion of mind-altering substances to achieve a certain goal. Most often this goal is inebriation for entertainment purposes, some times (especially in indigenous cultures) it's a spiritual goal.
> It's a personal choice.
Sure, many times it is. But I think more often than you'd realize it's less of a choice and more of a predisposition. I mean, if some people are born with allergies or giant feet or different colored eyes, would it be too crazy to assume that some people are more easily addicted to drugs?
> Most addicts aren't born addicted and they make the choice to pick up that first joint.
Just real quick, I think you mean joint as in marijuana joint. Marijuana is completely non-addictive physically, in any circumstance. Nor does it kill brain cells, etc. These are remnants of the hilarious Reefer Madness nonsense that the US unfortunately took part in.
> I don't want to make it easier to be a drug addict in this country. [...]
Then make drugs further decriminalized. Marijuana, for example, is not a gateway drug. Drug dealers are gateway drugs. Every drug dealer that I know, except one, doesn't just deal pot. They've got cocaine, saliva, mushrooms, ecstasy, et cetera et cetera. So instead of being able to just go to a safe environment and get some harmless little green stuff, many drug laws force benign drug-users to be around shady, scummy people with lots of other shady, scummy drugs on them.
> [...] Especially at my expense.
See the above comment, and recognize that your hard-earned tax dollars are being brilliantly spent on DEA sweeps of Marijuana dispensaries in California, for example; countless arrests are made and resources used over completely benign drugs. Massive, massive wars are being waged around the world that suck money into them faster than a black hole. I'm not a socialist myself and would agree that Person A having Person B take money from Person C to pay for his/her decisions is almost laughably dumb; but there are far, FAR more money-sucking endeavors in the US than drug addiction care/treatment. I'd take a socialistic addiction treatment plan over 3 million+ Dept. of Defense employees (that we know about), 216,000 "Department of Homeland Security" employees, massive military expenditures, and who-knows-how-many-millions of dollars spent annually "fighting" marijuana and other drugs.
Just my two cents. Sorry for the long post guys.
A "medical" problem to me is having cancer or a disease. Something you can't stop. If you don't ever ingest illegal drugs, you will never becom an addict of them (funny how that works).
" I mean, if some people are born with allergies or giant feet or different colored eyes, would it be too crazy to assume that some people are more easily addicted to drugs?"
Some people have addictive personalities. But some drugs actually change brain chemistry and are physically addictive.
"Just real quick, I think you mean joint as in marijuana joint. Marijuana is completely non-addictive physically, in any circumstance. Nor does it kill brain cells, etc. These are remnants of the hilarious Reefer Madness nonsense that the US unfortunately took part in."
ugh. I never said it was physically addictive. However, I will just let you keep believing it doesn't kill brain cells . I know otherwise.
"Then make drugs further decriminalized. Marijuana, for example, is not a gateway drug. Drug dealers are gateway drugs."
As long as we never have universal health care or addicts never get free treatment. This is my problem: you not only want drugs legalized, but you want me to pay for your medical expenses in taxes (but first deny that it causes any health problems).
"Every drug dealer that I know, except one, doesn't just deal pot."
You sure seem to know a lot of drug dealers. It's interesting to me because almost everyone I know that smokes pot falls in love with it. It becomes almost like their girlfriend. They talk about it all the time and defend it to the death.
You can't tell me that this doesn't have some effect on the brain.
"They've got cocaine, saliva, mushrooms, ecstasy, et cetera et cetera. So instead of being able to just go to a safe environment and get some harmless little green stuff, many drug laws force benign drug-users to be around shady, scummy people with lots of other shady, scummy drugs on them."
I wish the people on the left were as interested in less control control and less taxes as they are about drug usage.
We all agree that drug abuse can have a detrimental effect on individuals and society. The question is whether our current policy is the most cost effective.
The DEA as is a government organization. And like all other organizations, it acts to grow its influence and power. If you are looking to limit government, all government organizations should be looked at not just those that give away your tax money to others.
You assert that marijuana "kills brain cells". I would LOVE to know where you got that from. Keep in mind that the bar is pretty high here. Brain cells are slaughtered in mass by drugs which are now perfectly legal -- one in particular, I'll let you guess which one.
Your last sentence is telling I think. Why would you assume that arguments against you are coming from "the left"?
I'm not sure drug dealers are really getting a lot of demand for saliva. At least, I hope not. I mean, gross, right.
Here in San Francisco marijuana is effectively legal; friends tell of walking past cops smoking joints. I'd much rather deal with a thoroughly stoned stranger than a thoroughly drunk one.
I think the weed vs booze distinction is really a distraction. There are plenty of cities that sell alcohol that don't end up party destinations. It seems like the right solution to public nuisances is enforcing laws against being a public nuisance.
1. Half the law enforcement, out of the job.
2. Half the lawyers and the judges, out of the job.
3. Half the privatized prison system, out of the job.
4. A few million other jobs that support and/or depend on the above, done away with.
It's pointless to even try this in the USA... No one is going to be willing to give up the ongoing and ever-giving spoils of the war on drugs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs#Costs_to_taxpayers
Also, a lot of jobs does not equal half the jobs.
Let see ... there is the $3/hour farm hand shortage going around in a few states.
Or do you mean all the new jobs that are going to be created, you know, just-like-that? For which they'll be re-trained, just-like-that? For which they'll get the same pay/benefits, just-like-that?
So the real question is how many people are employed by the war-on-drugs, and how many of them can be re-asigned, and how willing will they be to let this happen.
Here in Canada, the official usage rates for cannabis and tobacco are nearly the same. The latter being a legal substance. The laws aren't stopping anyone who is interested in trying the drug. Those who are not interested in trying it, still won't be interested if the laws change.
For decades, my family has considered various members to have been "ripped apart" by drug and alcohol abuse. As it turns out, some were self-medicating, such as the schizophrenic who went undiagnosed and unmedicated for so many years it caused irreparable damage to his brain. Others were survivors of terrible abuse who drank, used drugs, and engaged in other rote addictive behaviors to shut out the pain and demons.* While more complicated than the more physical, medical problem of schizophrenia, the fact that these mental health concerns have also gone undiagnosed and untreated is the reason the substance abuse continues.
Addiction and addictive behaviors, whether involving substance or not (and there are many horribly destructive addictive behaviors that have nothing whatsoever to do with mind-altering and/or harmful substances) are not what we were taught to think by scare tactics in school. I see a lot of commentary throughout this thread that indicates a lot of people are educated in an adult manner on the topics of addiction and substance abuse, which is great. Getting there is a bit of a challenge, though, and one you have to undertake personally. Public policy regarding drug awareness, unfortunately, still revolves around cheap scare tactics.
* Homeless street addicts use substance to stop the voices in their heads or escape great mental pain. The substances are not where the problem originated. They're simply the way the person has of dealing with those problems.
My brother is wasting his life as an alcoholic. Our current drug policy didn't help him or my family.
I have no interest in gambling, drinking, using currently illicit drugs, or prostitution. My drug use consists of over-the-counter pharmaceuticals to treat minor symptoms.
I am interested in laws that protect people from others. Some believe vice laws fall into that category. I do not.
If an adult chooses to hurt himself, that is his choice. The threat of force should not be used to stop him from doing so. We should ask the question why would an adult choose to hurt himself.