...and for there to be a war on drugs in the first place. Eliminate the fundamentals, and there should be no issues at all, really.
And that's why it's so wrong to keep data for so long, and actually be able to use it.
Let me put you in rehab for your coffee addiction or beer habit, ok?
You ever caffeine withdrawal? Yeah, during that week-long vacation last year when you stopped going to Starbucks every morning. Most of us have gone through that; it is a bitch and lasts longer than most hangovers.
You ever get pot withdrawal? Yeah, me neither.
Whatever, lets say for the sake of argument that pot and caffeine are on par with each other despite the obvious discrepancies. It is undeniable that pot prohibition is harmful to society; why would caffeine prohibition not be?
@whyleyc is asserting that drug "hardness", not drug prohibition, is the cause of the societal harm associated with drugs. I am pointing out that we see similar harm with marijuana, which everyone here accepts as not "hard", but which is prohibited.
It therefore stands to reason that if prohibition can cause harm to society with a "non-hard" drug like marijuana, it would cause harm to society with a "non-hard" drug like caffeine.
I mean, that is the sort of shit that spawned the temperance movement, but when prohibition came into effect, did the temperance movement actually see the sort of social change that they anticipated? I doubt that the 1920s were some sort of utopia for battered children and spouses...
Its not. Its representative of what its producers think will appeal to its target market.
I don't have any stats for crack cocaine, but look up the effectiveness of diacetylmorphine maintenance programs in Switzerland and the UK - these are government-run programs in which heroin users are given access to pure, unadulterated heroin so that they can have steady day jobs.
Spoiler: These programs have been proven time and again to be effective in reducing crime.
Crack cocaine is biochemically identical to powder cocaine (the main difference is the means of ingestion, not the chemical compound). And I can assure you that many cocaine users hold very steady, very high-paying jobs (in certain industries more than others).
One of them is the drug itself, and since I am not familiar with crack (thank god), I would consider alcohol a good example. It's legal, "dirt cheap", and can utterly destroy lives with a completeness few drugs seem to be able to match. Everybody knows what alcohol can do, yet it still happens a lot (to put it mildly). So yes, making stuff legal and having information instead of disinformation is not a magical solution.
But that doesn't mean illegality and misinformation cannot make things even worse. Legality does affect price and safety, I think it's very hard to deny this or show otherwise (feel free to try). If a dealer sells rat poison instead of Ecstasy, it's not like the buyers can go to the cops about it, for example... and I'm not saying Ecstasy if safe no matter how it's used, I'm saying rat poison is harmful in all cases. And dealers are operating in the underground anyway, so they have little reason to care about adding on top of that. I'm not sure about "gateway drugs", but I am pretty sure about "gateway criminality" being a real thing, and it also applies to addicts, not just dealers.
Crack is also particularly bad for your health outside of just being extremely addictive. If it wasn't a Class A drug people would rapidly end up in treatment for it anyway.
Ultimately there's hardly any actual science involved in the War on Drugs, just as there wasn't during prohibition.
Hello, old friend.
According to this spurious page [0], "up to 75% of those who try cocaine will become addicted." Of course, the page also says "an estimated one-in-four Americans between the age of 26 and 34 have used cocaine at least once in their lifetime, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy." Since it looks like around 15% of Americans are between the age of 26 and 34, that would mean that "up to" 11.25% of Americans will become addicted, which seems unlikely. We need some better data.
[0] http://www.treatmentsolutions.com/cocaine-addiction-treatmen...
Then stop talking out of your ass and do some research before machine-gunning the thread.
> This isn't going to happen because a bunch of people in line at an airport isn't a high-value target.
Can you point to research?
> I mean it would suck, of course, but 'bunch of people get blown up at an airport' isn't nearly as worrying as 'large plane falls/is steered out of the sky and into downtown.'
Proof that it isn't as worrying?
> It doesn't have much value to terrorists because it's not as scary and it won't generate vast numbers of photographs.
How do you know it's not as scary? Have you measured?
Yes, I'm being rude, because by your own admission you are arguing from a position of ignorance and inaccurate prejudice.
Have you researched this, as you suggested I do, or is it just what you believe?
More troubling however is community-consuming gang violence. The sort that we see today and the sort that we saw during prohibition.
Safe to assume a very small percentage of alcohol users, which makes the difference here. Safe to assume that during Prohibition the vast majority of alcohol users could have been sober during working hours to pay for it.
This myth of "alcohol is not a 'hard drug'" needs to die. Prohibition of alcohol wasn't somehow a different animal than the prohibition of other drugs, you just relate to alcohol more than you relate to cocaine.
Does making meth and crack legal make less crime (violent or robbery) than if their usage was nil? I highly doubt it.
An addiction to morphine is really little different than an addiction to heroin, except society has a greater understanding of addiction to morphine as an illness, not a crime. Treating morphine abusers like we treat heroin users would be devastating to society. It would be a ludicrously senseless step backwards. Your perspective on drug use is absolutely insane.
No, rehab for them and all other people addicted to hard drugs. I'd seek criminal prosecution against the pushers who knew or should've known the drugs hurt much more than they help.
You would really prosecute the psychiatrists? Good for you.
"CHILD DRUGGING: PSYCHIATRY DESTROYING LIVES" : http://www.cchr.org/cchr-reports/child-drugging/introduction...
"Rebecca Riley": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Riley
Quote: "Rebecca Riley (April 11, 2002 – December 13, 2006), the daughter of Michael and Carolyn Riley and resident of Hull, Massachusetts, was found dead in her home after prolonged exposure to various medications, her lungs filled with fluid. The medical examiner's office determined the girl died from "intoxication due to the combined effects" of prescription drugs. Police reports state she was taking 750 milligrams a day of Depakote, 200 milligrams a day of Seroquel, and .35 milligrams a day of Clonidine. Rebecca had been taking the drugs since the age of two for bipolar disorder and ADHD, diagnosed by psychiatrist Kayoko Kifuji of the Tufts-New England Medical Center."
"When Is a Pain Doctor a Drug Pusher?" : http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/magazine/17pain-t.html?pag...
I don't think it's a stretch to believe that legal things become more prevalent than illegal things, especially highly addictive things. Believing that requires no more support than disbelieving that.
I don't see how that's defensible. You seem to be talking only about people with zero money, which is few people even among jobless (even homeless) people. Surely the price of the drug, all else being equal, would strongly correlate to the number of crimes committed to obtain the drug.
> I don't think it's a stretch to believe that legal things become more prevalent than illegal things, especially highly addictive things.
I absolute think that's a stretch to believe, at least for things like drugs in large areas like the USA, where physically preventing their existence altogether is (apparently) not feasible.
You have a good point there. If I was wrong and crack and meth became dirt cheap and there was no long associated violent crime and robbery, to no longer support a war on it I'd have to see that its legality lead to no significant drain on society in other ways. That would include parenting, job performance, accidents / injuries, etc.
The difference is that normal people work at jobs to obtain money for food, but serious drug addicts are incapable of working a regular job and so have to steal to support their drug habit (and for their food as well).
So in fact, crime is proportional to how much drugs interfere with ability to hold a job.
The level of crime (and particularly, the level of violent and organized crime) surrounding alcohol jumped up sharply with prohibition, and dropped back down with the end of prohibition. I don't see why you'd expect that to be any different for any other drug.
> Even at a dollar a hit a jobless person tends to need to steal to get that dollar, in addition to money for food.
If its legal, a person has less social pressure to not to admit use, and therefore there are less social pressures against them admitting their problem and seeking treatment before being compelled to as a consequence of criminal activity.
Further, when becoming involved with a substance as a user makes you a criminal and violator of societies rules, there is less holding you to observe those rules once you have decided to violate them in the first place.
That's not one of the available options. I mean, looking back at the article, the spoils of this program are incredibly paltry given the enormity of the data set. Criminalization of drugs and Militarization of enforcement groups is not significantly deterring usage because they are so ineffective even with so many resources and so little respect for the civil rights of users and non-users alike. All these programs have been effective at is raising the bar for drug distribution organizations to a point where militarization and violence is necessary for operation.
>Coffee addictions don't lead to more violent crime or robbery, as far as I know.
Perhaps they would if they were criminalized. There's nothing very violent about marijuana use except the militarized distribution chain and criminal enforcement apparatus. If 7-11 could sell it from behind the counter, I expect that you would see marijuana related violent deaths drop precipitously.
But why would it be criminalized? For that to be justified it needs to be a drain on society in some significant way.
I don't support the current flawed war on drugs, especially forfeiture of property and imprisonment for users. I don't support a war on drugs that are essentially victimless, like on marijuana. I support the ideal war on drugs (one based on evidence to show that it does more good than harm).
Substance bans do not /at all/ have a track record of being grounded in quantifiable measures of societal harm. That is to say, the current substance restriction policies are more or less completely arbitrary. The arbitrariness of current policies gives a natural experiment opportunity to assess the harm of the criminalization policies themselves by comparing the societal impact of substances such as caffeine, tobacco/nicotine, and alcohol with those of marijuana plus the associated negative impacts of marijuana criminalization. At least in the case of marijuana, the cure seems to be significantly worse than the disease.
>I support the ideal war on drugs (one based on evidence to show that it does more good than harm).
I wrote a more generalized comment[1] on the idea of an "ideal war on drugs". The gist is that I think it's a completely fantastical idea. The idea that you can squash a market with inelastic demand is soundly dispelled by all current and historical attempts at doing so. Further, I think that it's harmful that such an idea persists, because it allows for the justification of more and more extreme enforcement measures. Arguments like "If we got rid of meth then society would be significantly improved?" are based on a false premise. This is an outcome that clearly cannot be brought about by the war on drugs, yet such reasoning is continually used as a justification for more and more extreme enforcement measures that have increasingly diminishing returns as well as an increasingly negative impact on broader society as a whole.
Agreed, I'm talking about justifying criminalization in an ideal way, not the current way.
> The idea that you can squash a market with inelastic demand is soundly dispelled by all current and historical attempts at doing so.
The demand comes after the addiction. Remove addiction and the demand is reduced.
> This is an outcome that clearly cannot be brought about by the war on drugs...
That's the current war, not the one based on evidence. What if the evidence showed that a different war could improve society on average and reduce hard drug usage? For example, instead of taking away a user's property and imprisoning them, you give them rehab and (if needed) job skills and actually find them a job, and any other assistance that costs less to provide than the monetary value of the drain on society they'd otherwise be?
> The demand comes after the addiction. Remove addiction and the demand is reduced.
To me the latter statement reads like: "If you can create a perpetual motion machine then energy would be free"
This is the very problem, using impossible potential ends to justify means.
>> This is an outcome that clearly cannot be brought about by the war on drugs...
> That's the current war, not the one based on evidence. What if the evidence showed that a different war could improve society on average and reduce hard drug usage? For example, instead of taking away a user's property and imprisoning them, you give them rehab and (if needed) job skills and actually find them a job, and any other assistance that costs less to provide than the monetary value of the drain on society they'd otherwise be?
Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but I don't see anything that's at all hinted at a remotely workable solution that would have such an effect. You seem to be assuming that we can somehow overcome all of the imperfections of past policies but do not offer a clear, strong novel mechanism by which that can happen. In the meantime our current policies are enormously destructive, and I see that as the more pressing issue. Really, solving addiction and substance abuse is a problem that is not very closely related to criminalization policies, but it's those criminalization policies that are leading to broad 4th Ammendment violations, police militarization, and unnecessary deaths and incarcerations.
[edited to remove the implication that no solution was offered, but rather that a new solution wasn't offered that could reasonably be expected to end addiction and substance abuse in a significant way]
Actually I think what I propose has nil chance of becoming reality in my lifetime and maybe for centuries in the future, if only because the masses wouldn't support it. That doesn't stop me from supporting the best possible solution to hard drug addiction.
I support ending the current war on drugs almost wholesale, because it's so inefficient and even unconstitutional as you note. But I'd concurrently want to see some movement toward the ideal. I definitely don't buy an argument that nothing better can be done now than ending the war on drugs in its current form. I believe there's always room for improvement even within the confines our current misguided society. Maybe I'm an optimistic pessimist?
This isn't really quite what I'm saying, per se. I would rather say that I think that currently people tend to couple the idea of changing the status quo with the introduction of superior policy. I'm skeptical that significantly superior policy can be achieved, so I would prefer that the two problems be decoupled. We shouldn't be letting blood just because it's the only action that we've come up with to respond to an intractable disease. We should stop the blood letting (pursuit of harmful policies), and then work on actual cures to the difficult problems of addiction and substance abuse thereafter. The harmful policies only serve to give the illusion of addressing the problem, and so actually hamper the search for effective policies. And if we maintain the status quo for lack of a superior alternative, then I fear we'll never see the end of it.
> The harmful policies only serve to give the illusion of addressing the problem...
Politicians currently have the incentive to give such illusions rather than true solutions. That's another problem, close to the root cause, that I support fixing.
It's a dangerous drug. It makes people violent. People drink and drive and kill people. Let's make it illegal too, eh?
Drug addiction is a health issue and should be treated as that. Making drugs illegal CREATES MORE CRIME.
We could stop this madness if only people would STOP SUPPORTING THE MADNESS.
Sorry to shout, but I'm sure you're an otherwise intelligent individual, but you are failing in this subject.
You mean, it could be legalization, taxation, and using taxes to fund intervention, referral, and treatment programs, and not be opposed to legalization at all?
If so, then its obviously not what people supporting legalization are arguing against when they are arguing againt the War on Drugs.
I wouldn't stop at using the taxes from the sale of hard drugs to reduce their usage. If spending $X against drug usage lead to $2X in net benefits, I'd support spending $X no matter how much higher it was than those taxes.
A key component would be rehab, in which case it might be tough to make the drug legal. Suppose crack is legal and so there's some parent high on crack all day, providing only the most basic of care for the kids. If it takes keeping crack illegal to legally force that parent into rehab, then I'd want crack to stay illegal, but change the consequence to rehab.
If the "most basic care" is adequately meeting the society's minimums, this obviously doesn't justify criminalization.
If it doesn't, then child neglect can be made illegal (hint: it already is), independently of whether it results from drug abuse.
> If it takes keeping crack illegal to legally force that parent into rehab
Compulsory-as-an-alternative-to-prison rehab obviously requires that something be illegal, but it doesn't require that the illegal thing be the drug of abuse. Rehab as a condition of a suspended sentence could conceptually be tied to any crime for which drug abuse was a contributing factor even if the drug was legal (IIRC, this is sometimes done with alcohol in, e.g., the context of DUI, even though alcohol is legal.)
So, the premise here that making the drug illegal might be essential to make compulsory-as-an-alternative-to-prison rehab an available tool is simply false.
I accept that. I support whatever it takes as a minimum to get the person into rehab, even if the minimum bar for parenting is raised so that crack addiction doesn't reach it. If the majority of crack users could be model citizens while high then my mind could be changed.
You don't know at all, because it's never been illegal. However, there is plenty of evidence that making it illegal would indeed lead to robbery and violence.
Why do you assume this? Do you think people so inclined have any trouble getting "meth or crack or other drugs"? Prohibition only raises the price, and I could make the argument that just means addicts have to rob people more often before they start having medical problems.
Why do you think that the war being fought on those drugs isn't reducing the risk of you being a victim of violent crime or robbery? Or do you just assume that the existence of those drugs create a risk which justifies the war, even if the war makes that risk even greater?
But what's the constitutional justification for having any war on drugs in the first place? Alcohol prohibition took a constitutional amendment, and that's been repealed.
Yes some people are more prone to addictive behavior than others, and yes severe depression is a serious disease which must be handled by professionals. However, the malaise in America is not clinical depression: it's the lack of opportunity to learn, excel, and be rewarded for such excellence. Yes, this opportunity exists for many people, and many do take advantage of it, to great benefit. Many others, though, for a variety of reasons, lack that opportunity. It is generally these people who fuel demand for drugs, to escape the misery and blight of a dead-end future. These people are not losers, but people to whom the dealer of cards dealt a poor hand, and who have not been told by the media and their peers that no hand is a bad hand, that there are opportunity in adversity, that it is through failure that success comes. They, alas, believe that their lot is to suffer, then die, not having achieved anything worthwhile. So, in their desperation and utter loneliness, they seek a fleeting pleasure, a personal high, to momentarily drift away from the relentless and inexorable approach of Death.
Do you wish them well? Do you seek to help them? Change yourself. Show them by the example of your own life that adversity can be overcome. Show them by the kindness in your speech, by your countenance, by your actions, that they are not ostracized from human society, but rather, as fallen and wounded, deserve further aid, further care from the rest of us.
Or do you wish them away? To be put in prison and removed from your neighborhood, your city? Do you blame them for the poor choices they have made? In their lack of ability, they fell, and unable to stand, they stayed down. Are they weak, ill-fitted for society, and perhaps their premature death at the hand of violence, poverty, and the lawman, is the just reward for their inability to thrive in the Modern Age?
As I see children in the playground at my son's elementary school, I see them all alike: full of joy, vitality, and wonder. As children, we too were alike. Then life happened. For some, with privilege and wealth, to great achievements; and for others, with violence and meanness, to suffering and loneliness.
Oh, and somehow ignore the First Amendment and ban American citizens from insulting certainly notable religious figures. Then they will surely leave us alone.
"The War on..." is a phrase that signals to us that we should be on the lookout for crude solutions that do more harm than good. It is a crude phrase that perfectly embodies the simplistic attitude that inevitably backs whatever program the phrase is being used to describe.
Wherever there is a "War on..." there is almost certainly something that we could be doing smarter, rather than harder.
I don't personally live under the false dichotomy that an unending "WAR ON TERROR" is required to suppress terrorism. But nor do I fall into the trope that the solution is to simply let anyone inflict any attack that they wish.
As you say, it is possible to actually fight terrorism without destroying our rights and liberties, and I agree wholeheartedly.
My point was simply to object to the idea that doing nothing and simply pretending the outside world doesn't exist or that there aren't people who wish us harm out there is a Bad Idea™.
I do of course agree that open ended campaigns which cripple our rights without clear and predictable expectations is very bad, if not as bad.
To rephrase, then: I want to address and fight terrorism, but I don't want a blind or self-harming "war" on terror.