Look at your history and check your ideas. While I will defend the fact that you have ideas, you are grossly wrong.
I don't have any sources at the moment, but from what I've read, the problems associated with drugs are actually due to poverty and the fact that drugs are illegal, making those who use and sell them criminals. There is an important distinction between harm due to the criminalization of drugs, and harm due to drugs per se.
There are a few real world examples of states that have decriminalized all drugs, such as Portugal:
The resulting effect: a drastic reduction in addicts, with Portuguese officials and reports highlighting that this number, at 100,000 before the new policy was enacted, has been halved in the following ten years. Portugal's drug usage rates are now among the lowest of EU member states, according to the same report.
One more outcome: a lot less sick people. Drug related diseases including STDs and overdoses have been reduced even more than usage rates, which experts believe is the result of the government offering treatment with no threat of legal ramifications to addicts.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/portugal-drug-policy-decrimin...
Only Stalin's gulags held more in prison than the US has under the war on drugs. It's easily arguable that over the span of the program, we've outdone Stalin.
Poverty, crime, cartels, destroyed families, destroyed lives, millions in prison: hundreds of billions of dollars spent without solving a single thing, without fixing anything, without ever reducing addiction or stopping drug use. America's cities became war zones when the war on drugs began.
Tell Mexico's tens of thousands of innocent victims that have been slaughtered by our war, that it's all working out just swell.
Tell you what, why don't you go ask the "folks in Michigan" if we need to bring back alcohol prohibition as well, since alcohol continues to be the most destructive by far.
A lot of the problems of drug use are either orthogonal to legality or worsened by prohibition. We saw this with alcohol and it's just as true with marijuana and most other drugs.
Why do I suddenly have the feeling that I'm being trolled?
Now I'm pretty sure that you're either playing me, or you really are one of those "folks" I mentioned above.
If the evil White people you are referring to didn't care about the poor, why would they say "the free market will sort everything out". They would say "the free market will screw you over, but that's the way things should be".
You legalizers who cite theories and internet sources make me laugh. So passionate for your weed, as if its the most important thing there is.
You may have seen people killed by crime, or untreated addiction to other drugs. You may have seen lives ruined by the legal system. I am sure you saw many of the problems the war on drugs has given us, but you did not see anybody killed by marijuana. You did not see a plant tear a community apart.
What the fuck is an "internet source" anyway? What is next, disbelieving anything written in a book that has a black cover, instead of a white one?
And no - I did not see anyone killed by crime, or lives ruined by the legal system, or some other theory of yours. Just people who drank and drugged until they were dead or caused terrible harm to their family.
Dude you are so eager to assert what I know or have seen. Enjoy your pot.
Perhaps you can provide us with your own "theories and internet references" that might change our minds? Like, I don't know, maybe some evidence that throwing people in prison for minor drug offenses (a necessary consequence of making drugs illegal) has helped those people, their children, and their communities in any way. Statistically speaking, that is.
No wait I have a better idea! How about you convince me that the addicts in my own family would be better served by criminal records than by treatment. Now that's a real appeal to emotion!
And yes I am in favor of more restrictions on both drugs and alcohol. I'm opposed to the notion that drugs and alcohol are consequence-free substances. In the wrong hands, they kill and they destroy lives.
If it's so unimportant, why should we spend billions combatting it, and give people prison time and criminal records for using it?
>> And yes I am in favor of more restrictions on both drugs and alcohol. I'm opposed to the notion that drugs and alcohol are consequence-free substances. In the wrong hands, they kill and they destroy lives.
And prohibition does nothing to keep it out of those hands.
> "I'm opposed to the notion that drugs and alcohol are consequence-free substances."
See this is what we call a strawman, and this is a particularly blatant example of one. Opponents of prohibition don't argue that drugs and alcohol are "consequence-free substances". They do argue that the consequences of prohibition are far worse than those of the drugs alone.
If you are intent on making this personal, I can tell you that I haven't had a drink in over 12 years, and I remember the exact day of my last drink. If you can guess why I'll mail you a star sticker :). Oh and I don't smoke anything either.
But although I personally can't be trusted with the stuff, I have the maturity to accept that other people can, and I'm not blind to the horrors of preemptively punishing everyone else in deference to my personal weaknesses.
> "In the wrong hands, they kill and they destroy lives."
Granted. But I don't understand how you get from there, to concluding that the solution is to criminalize everyone who uses a substance, regardless of whether or not they actually do something bad with it. Criminal records are pretty good at destroying lives too, and they do nothing to help actual addicts.
Look, I realize you're probably immune to logic on this, and you seemed to acknowledge earlier that the evidence isn't on your side, so I'll spare you all that jazz and just issue a very basic rhetorical challenge:
Tell me with a straight face that the drug addicts in my family (or anywhere else) are better off being treated like criminals, on top of or in lieu of whatever treatment they may receive. Then convince me that everyone else who isn't an addict should also be treated like criminals simply for possession, just so we can continue imprisoning the "wrong hands".