Actually we don't. Those would be nice to have, but the current drug policy has failed horribly. The meth "epidemic" is a perfect illustration of this: it's illegal but it hasn't stopped those that want to use it from using it.
I also have a brother dead from a heroin overdose. It's illegal and it didn't stop him. Sanctimonious nanny staters like you think you're protecting people but you're just supporting organized crime, death and ruined lives by pushing this into the shadows.
I don't care what you put in your body (legal or otherwise), its your body and your life and you are compelled to do so for reasons I might not understand, but if I found a loved one was taking a cocktail of amphetamines and opiates I would do everything in my power to see they got the help and support they needed to get off it.
Legalizing amphetamines would trigger major societal problems. What percentage of HN would feel the need to consume it in order to compete at school, the office or the market.
Nanny state? You make it sound so simple. Drugs are just chemicals. Why not say all chemicals should be legalized. What about RDX (a military-grade explosive)? Is the nanny state getting in the way of me having a good time on private property blowing stuff up? I can safely use military weapons, so why can't I purchase them privately?
The drug war has not criminalized harmful behavior caused by drugs. That would make far too much sense. The drug war criminalizes the mere possession of drugs, regardless of any actual harmful behavior. Then the nanny state corrects your behavior by giving you a criminal record.
The only reason I see why cannabis is not legal yet is because it threatens the medical industry in a big way. Cannabis, although easily becomes an addiction, is also a big medicine for many things.
When people start to realize this in big quantities, the medical companies are going to get worried, as their prescription drugs that may cause coma and death, will not be used so much anymore.
If we're talking about alcohol, then the rise in consumption is absolutely acceptable because 1.) those who abuse are now treated as addicts instead of imprisoned by default, and 2.) those who don't abuse it are now free from the horrors of capricious and arbitrary criminal persecution.
Same goes for marijuana and tobacco (which is, in my meager experience, the most addictive drug of all).
Now, if we're talking about meth or narcotics, then obviously any rise in consumption has to be taken very seriously, and then addressed by treating addicts medically as they should be, instead of sending them deeper underground by making them criminals.
Very simple: Law enforcement protects individuals against the actions of other individuals, and not against themselves.
Your loved one needs addiction treatment (i. e.: heathcare), and law enforcement will not solve his/her problem.
If you think you could just convince a loved one to stop doing dope and crank with words, you're living in a fucking dream world. I speak from experience, having the disease of addiction.
You are extremely naive, stop posting please.
I agree. However, I shouldn't have to clean up the mess. IE: rocketing health care costs and social programs that come out of my tax dollars.
You could fund some pretty sweet social programs and healthcare if you took back the DEA budget...
Hell, there are 10,000 employees at the DEA, in the most simplistic case you could replace them with drug rehab folks and that's a couple of hundred extra per state. That's enough to have an impact.
(-edit-- yeah ok, I may have overestimated the budget of the DEA, but 3 billion is not to be sniffed at, and the DEA is really only the tip of the iceberg)
Because I'm not? Or are you just knee-jerk assuming that because I dare to raise any comment at all, I'm opposed to the general idea?
Don't assume that ending the war on drugs will free up some large, discrete sum of money that you can go and promise away on "sweet social programs". The money saved (of which there will be plenty) is in hundreds, even thousands, of small pools across all levels of government, all of which are perpetually money-starved, and it will be gone like dew on a summer morning before you'll get anywhere near it.
Naive response - well excellent, by the sounds of it we've just freed up a whole bunch of funds in all sorts of areas for all sorts of other important stuff.
More cynical response - government waste and perpetual hunger for more cash is a constant and something else we should be fighting anyway.
Either way, I'm of the opinion that even if all the money disappeared off into a vacuum, the WoD is counterproductive. Even if we kept paying the DEA to just hang around and scratch its collective butt all day, we'd be making a positive change to society by stopping all action in the pointless 'war'.
No where in my comment did I offer any judgement against you or your character. You're the one making assumptions.
> Don't assume that ending the war on drugs will free up some large, discrete sum of money that you can go and promise away on "sweet social programs". The money saved (of which there will be plenty) is in hundreds, even thousands, of small pools across all levels of government, all of which are perpetually money-starved, and it will be gone like dew on a summer morning before you'll get anywhere near it.
I assume nothing beyond the fact that the current system is massively expensive and demonstrably a net negative on society. My opinion is simply that the current system is worse than doing nothing at all and my philosophy is always for there to be less government intervention in people's lives than more. Therefore, my preference is that we end the war on drugs as I believe this is a better situation than we are in today.
Also, most of the money spent in the drug war doesn't go through the DEA.
For example, DEA doesn"t run prisons. It costs about $50000 to keep someone in prison. We have about 3 million prisoners in the US. Suppose only 10% of them are in prison for drug offenses. That's about $15 billion/year. Pencils out to $50/year for each US citizen. So about $200/year per taxpayer.
Think a little and you won't have trouble finding other sources of waste. Wasted police time. Lost productivity of the imprisoned. Truancy among children with missing fathers.
Personally, I'd rather give the $200 to a harm reduction program.
actually it's 50%.
However, I think you are trivializing it. The fact that some people do something that is illegal doesn't mean that the law has no effect. Alcohol is practically the only recreational drug I use and the same applies to a large group of my friends. I am sure that if other categories had been legal, they would have been more common as well. My parents would have had a harder time convincing me not to take something if you could buy it in a safe location with knowledge that the production was controlled etc. Now I'm not necessarily saying that this would have been worse, but you're suggesting that the only thing that would happen from legalizing everything would be that people would keep consuming like they do today (because people who want something can get it anyway), and drug lords would be replaced by taxable corporations. Which I think is hardly the case.
There aren't hard numbers of consumption during the prohibition (obviously) but statistics of alcohol related deaths and arrests seem to show that there was a serious decrease just before the prohibition, and after a few years it returns to its previous state, and was worse in some aspects.
http://www.druglibrary.org/prohibitionresults.htm
Also, in the Netherlands the marijuana consumption rate is less than in the USA, despite it being almost legal.
So, don't worry, things won't change much, except for those people who won't have to be worried about being arrested for smoking a plant.
As far as I know, there aren't any records of a boom in consumption just because a drug was legalized. And I'm not talking about marijuana only, but drugs in general, alcohol included.
Considering that, we can say that the fear of people going mad about a drug just because it was legalized is another myth of the "war on drugs".
Yes, rehab centres, education and healthcare initiatives would be great and I totally think that we should have those and fund them from taxes. But even if we don't, even if we say "fuck it, legalise everything and to hell with the rest" we'd be far better off as a society. Innocents would no longer die in drug-raids gone wrong. Taxes that fund the war could be cut, suppliers could compete on quality and price, removing major reasons addicts die and steal. Criminals would no longer have an easy source of income. Lives already ruined by addiction would no longer be further destroyed by criminal records and prison time.
So yeah, legalise it. All of it. Now. We can talk about the other stuff later.
that way you can afford to improve healthcare and education whlst simultaneously reducing harm by ensuring a cleaner product is made available to users.
Notice I didn't say it decreases use, because it doesn't (evidence: see Portugal case study, they decriminalised drugs and use went down).
If that war money had been spent towards educating people how to use drugs safely, health care and rehabilitation, instead of putting people in jail for a victimless crime, well, you tell me if that's a good idea.
The benefits of drug prohibition (if any) are far outweighed by the problems it causes.
Why bother when mental illness has been linked to cannabis use in adolescents? It's so logical to just legalize everything and call it a day.
> "lets throw drugs at the under educated and already disadvantaged that will help social inequality in our country greatly."
They already have the drugs aplenty. But we do them one better by giving them criminal records on top of their addictions. Isn't that helpful! Plus, as an added bonus, prohibition ensures that the profits from those drugs go to actual criminal organizations.
> " Why bother when mental illness has been linked to cannabis use in adolescents"
First, unless I'm missing something, no one here has proposed legalizing drugs for children. Second, tobacco has been linked to a bible-full of hellish ailments for everybody. Perhaps you'd like to illegalize that and call it a day yourself?