What exactly does it mean to win the war on drugs? When does the madness stop?
Ideally you'd want a world where it was effectively impossible to buy drugs without proper authorization. Singapore has managed it, though being much much smaller helps a lot there.
I actually grew up in another relatively small state that had a huge heroin problem in the 80s: Portugal. Portugal solved it by decriminalizing drugs and by making treatment modalities available for the people who needed help, namely methadone. This worked spectacularly well.
By the way, if you want to make it "impossible to buy drugs without proper authorization", I imagine you will want to include one of the most dangerous hard drugs there is: alcohol. We all know how well that worked the last time it was tried...
Thank you for using this term instead of calling Singapore a dictatorship (as many others are wont to do). It's a much more accurate description of Singapore's style of governance.
Something that certain people could learn from in their futile attempts to control others, wouldn't you agree?
It simply does not work to fight it aggressively. Junkies on the street can be managed but probably not eradicated in the next few decades, the issues the USA sees with drugs are extreme, and the root cause is usually much deeper than the drugs themselves. A lot of other developed countries have managed to help their drug addicted homeless population, the USA seems to be on a downward spiral on that front for decades...
Attacking the surface of the problem is a game of whack-a-mole, a Sisyphean task that won't ever come close to solving the actual problem.
You need programs to address the root causes (homelessness, poverty) as well as aggressive enforcement of drug laws. I’d argue the two are not necessarily at odds, and actually would complement one another.
How would that work in reality though? Aggressively enforcing drug laws push people to the margins (being arrested, having a felony charge, etc.), living on the margins of society is a major factor into pushing people into despair, despair fuels drug addiction.
Aggressive enforcement of drug laws is not compatible with an empathetic approach to drug abuse, it also creates many consequences which could've been unforeseen when introduced but we all live in the world of such consequences. Removing freedoms in name of pushing anti-drug laws, for what ends specifically? What are we trying to achieve by being tough on drugs in the end?
It does work. It works extremely well. Extremely well. The problem is that if you don't actually want to win the war, it works poorly. As is evident in the US and many other first world nations.
No, fixing the problems that just letting it run rampant is whack a mole. You're spraying for cockroaches when you find them rather than fumigating the house.
It's okay, most people from leading countries of the world think their situation is the best and they need compassion for all the amazingly negative aspects of drug use. Junkies, aggression, organised crime involvement, etc. The truth is that your governments don't want to fix the problem and it's obviously snowballed out of their control. It's easier to lay down and admit defeat than actually tackle the problem when it's this far gone. Good thing places like Singapore never let it get to that point.
They've won the war on drugs. It's not even a contest which is better, the drug free environment is way better. You just have to experience both to realise.
Even with all the repressive stance, death penalty, they still see an increase. That isn't what I would consider "working" for such harsh penalties.
> They've won the war on drugs. It's not even a contest which is better, the drug free environment is way better. You just have to experience both to realise.
There are absolutely no "drug free" environments in the world, absolutely none so your statement is impossible to assert in reality.
I prefer to live in a society where death penalties do not exist, even less for the cases of substance use/abuse.
[0] https://www.cnb.gov.sg/docs/default-source/drug-situation-re...
This is how enforcement works in a world where people are giving up their enforcement.
It's almost like the world is connected... and people doing things easier in other countries cascades on.
>There are absolutely no "drug free" environments in the world, absolutely none so your statement is impossible to assert in reality.
Wrong. There are several. It's okay if you want to be wrong.
>I prefer to live in a society where death penalties do not exist, even less for the cases of substance use/abuse.
Irrelevant. I don't care about your personal stance on death penalties. Has nothing to do with what I wrote.
They also have several thousand in drug rehab/prison right now.
They haven’t solved it by any means. They did successfully drive it out of the public eye though.
Does this ideal world include classification of alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, and high-sugar food products as drugs?
What does "proper authorization" look like?
It's amazing too. It's weird how many people are for drugs when such environments exist.
> Obviously it's impossible to eliminate every single instance
Exactly. So when does it end? What target needs to be reached for the war on drugs to stop?
> it's quite easy to eliminate virtually all negatives to society.
Then why has nobody done it?
The same way when does anything end? When you reach the level that is what you can feasibly resemble as "the end". So in this case, drug-free.
>What target needs to be reached for the war on drugs to stop?
You need to eliminate the negatives that society has to deal with related to illicit drug use? It's not that hard.
When is a newly built house finished?
>Then why has nobody done it?
Huh? Many countries have done it. Why many others haven't is because they don't want to.. Drug usage is a problem for the lower rungs of society, not the government or higher ups. The government must want to improve the life of their citizens at the cost of themselves. Like most objectively good government decisions.
You seem to be unaware that you're cyclically defining "the end" to be "when it's over".
War generally ends when the other side capitulates, or when both sides run out of resources and come to a peace agreement. In war on drugs, there's no "other side", there's just an invisible black market that you can get more and more visible by introducing more and more survaillence.
Exactly that. War on drugs can not effectively be won because the concept of "winning the war on drugs" is ill-defined.
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing them both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night in the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” - Richard Nixon’s domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman, 1994.
Drug free societies are way better in every measurable way. You only have to live in one for long enough that returning from that place seems absurd to be ridiculed with drugs.