The Drug War....

[Eldarion]

I'm against almost all prohibition, I say legalize all drugs as well.

 

[cziffra]

outright legalization doesn't solve that problem.

Whether legalization solves a problem or not isn't really relevant. Making drugs illegal has created numerous problems that didn't exist before. Most of these problems affect people who aren't involved with drugs at all. Drug use tends to affect those using the drugs, while the illegal drug trade often affects innocent people through increased gang activity and other things.

You basically have two choices on this issue:

1. A country with all the problems that arise from people using drugs.

or

2. A country with all the problems that arise from people using drugs plus a violent black market created by the government outlawing drugs. You also have to include the billions of dollars stolen from us per year to fund enforcement, incarceration, propaganda, etc.

I don't see any other option. The drug war not only hasn't succeeded, it can't succeed. There is huge demand for drugs, so there will always be supply. You can choose to have that supply come from peaceful exchange or from violence. Those who are against legalization are choosing violence.

The drug war has also likely increased the use of hard drugs by making alternatives harder to obtain. Read this for one example:

What Explains Crystal Meth? - Mark Thornton - Mises Daily

 

[b_sun]

y'all realize that legalizing this stuff increases the pool of the peeps that are beating/robbing/stealing/swerving down the road, right?

WF is pretty pro-legalization & pro-drugs, so I'll take the other side of the equation for argument's sake. First, the disclaimer that I truly don't give a damn what you do to yourself in the privacy of your own home. If you want to drink cat urine from the privacy of your own apartment, that's cool by me. But if cat urine is a powerful hallucinogenic, and then you decide it'd be cool to go drive on the same roads that my sober ass is coming home from the office on, we now have a problem. I'm not a believer in protecting people from their own stupidity, but I do believe in protecting everyone else from the consequences. It's more like fast-food to me, keep putting this crap in your body, but don't expect me to pay for socialist health care, or widen the doorway to my public biz cuz your big ass doesn't fit through it now.

I've been in the legal field a long time, seen lots of (often) non-violent peeps get nailed by drug charges. But I can't think of a single occurence where the person facing drug charges was minding their own biz when they got caught with them. Seems that they were always getting in a fight with the neighbors, stealing a car radio with a joint intheir pocket, throwing punches at a bar, or swerving through a school zone in a haze at 80, when police first contact them and, Surprise, they have drugs on them.

So, are there quiet pot-heads out there minding their own biz and doing whatever they freely want to their own bodies? Sure. But those guys aren't getting arrested or facing drug charges anyways, so I don't think as a general rule, their rights are getting too infringed on anyways.

Fact, the stuff isn't good for you. You can ramble all you want about "its all-natural, it just calms me, not like booze/cigarettes, blah blah blah". Bullshit, rattlesnake venom is natural, so is arsenic, that doesn't make it healthy. I have seen a lot of peeps harmed by other's drug use, through no fault of their own. The WOD has huge failures and problems, but so do most large-scale government operations IMO. Straight legalization under the guise of "people need their freedoms" isn't the answer. The peeps who are doing it "responsibly" aren't the ones getting arrested and serving time anyways for the most part.

And here we have the media fed, lack-of-facts way of thinking in this country that prevents common sense from prevailing. Hold on to these facts when the prisons are so over-crowded that they release thieves, pedofiles and violent offenders into our communities whilst keeping the guy that got busted with a pound of pot behind bars.

 

[Napolean]

1. A country with all the problems that arise from people using drugs.

Cutting healthcare entitlements and prosecuting those who harm others because of their drug use would solve a lot of those problems.

People would be much more health conscious if they weren't taken care of, no matter how bad they treated themselves.

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/pdf/wk/mm6035.pdf#page=21

Tobacco use has dropped since 2005 among people under 44 years old. It's dropped even more among people under 24 years old. A good reason for this could be that people are more educated about what tobacco does to you. People also know that all the insurance on the planet doesn't guarantee that you will survive cancer from smoking. I would imagine people don't think it's worth the risk.

Cigarettes are legal, but overall, their use dropped from 20.9% to 19.3% in just 5 years. People are perfectly capable of regulating themselves.

 

[Fatbat]

y'all realize that legalizing this stuff increases the pool of the peeps that are beating/robbing/stealing/swerving down the road, right?

As DanWesson asked, where's the proof to back up such a statement?

People are already driving drunk and stoned and tripping balls. Hell, half of America must be driving under the influence of something, be it the first cigarette of the day, too much coffee or shit loads of prescription and over the counter meds. I'd be more worried about most of them than anyone who just smoked a doob and got behind the wheel.

Beating, robbing, stealing; I find it hard to believe this kind of violence would increase as a result of legalization. Just removing all the various forms of turf wars should take a massive % of drug violence out of the equation.

If you follow what was posted below though, once legalized, narcotics use actually goes down so there should be less fucked up people on the road and less drug violence based on that alone.

@mont7071 You need to read this:

Decriminalizing Drugs in Portugal a Success, Says Report - TIME

Based on the only country to have gone through with total decriminisation - Portugal - drug use actually fell when they did it.

Why is that? I think it's because the mystery and allure of drug use goes out the window once everyone can do it. People are partly attracted to drugs because they're not supposed to have or do them. You tell people they can't do something because "the man" says so, it only makes them want to try it to see what the fuss is all about. You take the gangster hiphop lifestyle out of the drug scene and drugs become about as cool as your mom.

 

[MSTeacher]

in the 80's the CIA was actually caught buy/selling. We were also paying Noriega for quite awhile while also letting him traffic drugs...the head of the CIA at that time was Bush Sr. Netflix has a good documentarie, I think its call "The Panama Deception" pretty good one to check out. This is all public info of shit that actually went down, I cant imagine what has and is going on that we dont know about.

Dude the CIA gets caught like every year with a contract or proprietary plane going down somewherein the middle of nowhere with kilos of smack or blow on board.

Legalize drugs = no cia drugrunning
no cia drugrunning = no wall street money laundering

not to mention all the losses to the prison industry. but that's secondary. cia & wall street drugs are big business

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBRXZNuK3Jo"]Immortal Technique - Peruvian Cocaine (Full) - YouTube[/ame]

 

[-joe-]

You take the gangster hiphop lifestyle out of the drug scene and drugs become about as cool as your mom.

That brings up a point actually. Do we actually want legalisation? For example, would, say, Cypress Hill exist if weed was legal?