For a fraction of the cost of drug enforcement, we could fund drug treatment facilities to help people get off meth, crack, heroin, etc., and meanwhile allow marijuana to become a taxable commodity like cigarettes.
There are no perfect solutions obviously but the war on drugs has proven to be probably the worst of the lot.
Until then, we're still living primitively... in the jungle as a savage, infant race.
Physical pain is also important. It keeps you from doing stupid things that end up with you getting hurt.
Both mental and physical pain can be modulated/reduced somewhat through psychological training (one form of which would be meditation). I think making pain reduction any easier could cause more problems than it solves.
It goes through the horror of what that implies.
A politician's career should be based on reconciling principle with reality. Their livelihood should be linked directly to their ability to do this successfully.
That comes with a certain level of idealism, true, but without that we have to concede that our lives are in the hands of people we don't even expect to care.
Maybe it's naive, but I think it's possible to have a society where most judges are genuinely obsessed with being just.
Granted, Kofi Annan was not a politician in the same way as the folks I'm really aiming this comment at, but still.
The next step is when we recognize the victims of the War on Drugs, specifically persons who were sent to jail because of Marijuana. You expand the affected to be people who've committed all non-violent crimes, and advocate for reform from that angle.
I don't care what the law really has to say regarding Heroin, as long as victims/addicts get helped instead of aggregated and exploited by a pseudo-warrior class.
Being illegal didn't keep my brother from becoming addicted and dying from it. If it was legal and pure he might have had a chance.
But on the other hand, nobody is trying to outlaw tobacco and alcohol, which are the biggest killers of all. Thats what did my mom in.
So yes, legalize it and keep it pure. Educate people on proper drug use and spend money on health resources for those who need it rather than jail.
I am not so sure I would support the legalization of heroin. At times I have expressed support for the Gore Vidal approach, i.e. legalize all drugs and provide them at cost. In any case, I fully agree that drugs ought to be decriminalized and treated as a public health, not a criminal, issue.
I just think it's intellectually dishonest to pretend that all drugs are the same. Consider, for example, the ratio of the therapeutic dose (or, I guess, recreational dose) to the lethal dose. A very small amount of marijuana or LSD causes the intended effect, yet it's virtually impossible to die from overdosing on these substances. Clearly this is not the case with alcohol, cocaine, heroin, etc.
I'm not trying to argue strongly for tiered classification of drugs, but I am saying that it's not obvious to me that we should just treat them all the same. There are more-or-less objective measures that we can use to establish their risk to the individual and society.
They aren't trying to outlaw tobacco but they are trying to stop it's use in a different way. Banning smoking in public places (which I agree with), health warnings on packaging, and the latest thing they are trying to do is ban branding on packaging (i.e. cigarettes can only be sold in plain white boxes). In many places they also can't be on display (displays are covered) and the age at which it's legal to buy cigarettes has risen in many places over the last 5 years or so.
I agree with your main point. Recently where I'm from there were news reports about several deaths from a 'bad' batch of ecstasy. Police informed people what to look out for on the news (what the bad pills looked like) but the main message was drugs kill, don't use them. The problem wasn't the drugs it was a poison being cut with them. If they were legal and regulated we wouldn't have this problem.
Discussion on legalization of controlled substances like heroin is fraught with bias and misinformation. It's a discussion worth having, but clouding it with contradictions makes an already difficult topic that much harder to address.
While I believe that making choices about one's own biology and consciousness is a fundamental right, there are realities of addiction and drug-seeking behavior that can't be ignored. Ensuring that a medical professional is in the loop regarding a user's drug choices (in my perfect world, even for alcohol and cigarettes) could lead to real harm reduction while respecting personal freedom.
I would argue that the most important impact of drug use is to people who are not drug users. Any legislation should put the interests of those people first.
You don't want that. Trust me, you don't that. All you need to do is look at how heavily regulated tobacco is. Right now, the way to get people to stop smoking is to simply make it unaffordable. It just keeps getting taxed more and more and the price keeps going up and up.
Thinking the Feds will do a better job than the states is a joke. Look at how well the states have handled their own Obamacare exchanges and then how the Federal Obamacare website is a joke. If anything, this should be left at a state level. Let them regulate, tax and decide whether the people in that state want to allow it.
I'm confident I missed many aspects here, although really interested in: What are the problems with this model?
Basic medical education should be provided as part of national education. Except, properly done, not the factually incorrect, dramatic anti-drug programs they have these days.
There also seem to be a bias against drugs here, which I don't believe is founded in research. After all, we encourage people to get treatment for mental illnesses, the treatments which usually involve becoming addicted to very strong medications like SSRIs. Yet there's no education against being "trapped" onto such things.
I agree with the other points you've discussed.
Hell, I technically am in the category myself with my Suboxone treatment. My life is better than fine, and has been since I went from paying $400 a day for heroin, to $5 a day for suboxone.
My lowest points where when I was poor and addicted. I never stole, and went through withdrawals instead, but I can tell you it crosses the mind of any addict at some point. Take that away, and the impact on society is lessened considerably.
The real issue is to transition the law enforcement and prison spending to addiction treatment spending.
Is this actually true? We've invested an enormous amount in the war on drugs.
How much money and weapons are used in protecting bootlegged alcohol these days?
The state I live in in the United States, Minnesota, has a low rate of incarceration in large part because it has a low rate of criminal prosecution of drug offenses, with even the small number of persons convicted of drug offenses being unlikely to do time in prison. But this state has a thriving private industry of drug treatment centers, drawing in people from all over the world who want to become clean, and responses to drug use often include judicially ordered drug treatment. Stopping a war on drugs waged by the police and courts and prisons doesn't have to include giving up on discouraging drug use.
[1] http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/time-to-end-the-war-on...
AFTER EDIT: I'll use the last bit of my edit window to post two more links to news reports about the experience of Portugal. These links are in chronological order, and newer than Richard Branson's blog post.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/evaluating-drug-d...
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-05-01/news/ct-met-po...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/07/05/ten-years-af...
There's big business in prisons and law enforcement. There's also big business in rehab and pharma. Getting the monied interests to shift their focus from one of incarceration to one of health shouldn't be this hard. We just need to shift dollars from one big industry to another. Perhaps pharma and health companies need bigger lobbying efforts?
But there is no incentive to "cure" people. A new therapy/drug just needs to appear effective long enough for the industry to come up with the next wave of therapies and drugs.
The real cure for rampant drug use is better schools and a move away from the growing gap between the haves and have nots. Fix that and you'll notice a change in one generation.
And the way to fix those things is by repairing a failed democracy so that public funds can be used for the good of the public instead of funneled into private hands.
And the way to repair a failed democracy is through a healthy media, dissent, active citizens willing to disrupt the status quo.
http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-decriminal...
Did you read the article before commenting?
The Global Commission on Drug Policy and its recommendations are nothing more than a ruse.
Collaborators from large drug organizations (tens of thousands of criminals, running millionaire operations, heavily armed) won't simply boo-hoo, go home and look for real jobs once drugs are decriminalized. They would look for the new weaker link of the chain and then concentrate all their violence on it. Once drugs are legalized and are freely sold on public points of sale (whatever government calls them), criminals would target the "supply chain" and distribution network. All of the sudden drug organizations would find themselves operating wholesale, not retail anymore. They would steal cargo to sell it at poor city areas or in places where official suppliers haven't established POSes yet. Stealing (buying for zero) and selling is much more attractive than "cooking" and selling. It's like outsourcing your production the bad way, keeping the benefit of higher profit margins. Higher margins lead to more competition, thus guns, thus violence among organizations (this is the current scenario in cities like Rio where drug organizations fight for territory dominance[1]). On the bright side, anyone interested in consuming drugs would be spared of this fight. They would be the same people who ever bought drugs, but now with the benefit of new regulations, treatment and care from the government.
[1] This video shows a battle between two drug organizations in Rio that mobilized around 100 members coming from different slums. You can see a great deal of collateral damage in the local population, and this is what my point is all about. Watch from 1:00 onwards (sorry, Portuguese language all the way). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etu6YWC-rT4 Criminals were even able to shot down a police helicopter killing two officers. Drug war at its finest.
If they are properly legalized, the price should plummet. So even stealing or going wholesale is far less lucrative. You can already steal other goods. You could hijack a shipment of beer - but end-users aren't going to pay $15 a bottle for it because the normal price is known to be far less. So even if these organizations moved into theft, they wouldn't be able to finance huge armies anymore.
I'd also note that stealing does not have a cost of zero. You need to finance people to attack, pay for their weapons, etc. And the cap on pricing means even if stealing was cheaper, the absolute profit still won't be as high, overall.
Unless Brazil has a problem with criminal gangs already monopolizing distribution of other goods (like aspirin, tabacco, or alcohol), it seems like a stretch to say they'd do this for drugs.
Even in the US, people have been killed in hijackings of trucks containing Intel processors.
It's very hard to know what's the most profitable LOB of crime organizations here. What is well known is that they operate on a wide "portfolio" of products and services since there are strong dependencies between them. Drugs, weapons, bank robbery, ATM stealing, truck robbery, kidnapping... the list is long.
Drugs is a relevant LOB because it employs a great deal of terror on the human structure of the organization. Debt with a drug dealer is usually seen as a death sentence. So the dealer knows he can manipulate those who cannot pay their debts by forcing them to commit various crimes as compensation. Dealers don't need money to finance crimes, they do it mostly through terror. Drugs are just the foundations.
Black market. If the legal drug is sold for $15, drug dealers would sell the same amount for $10. Like the do with stolen medical drugs sold mostly in slums.
Government/private companies would have a hard time trying to sell legal drugs anywhere near slums. Not only the dealers would exterminate the workers of those places, but would also steal the products to resell them.
I'm pro drug decriminalization. I believe people should be free to experiment anything they want in their lives, of course, being properly accountable for that. But my problem is with people that generalize the success of ANY decriminalization campaign only because Portugal made it right. There are so many variables in this game, so many social and cultural pre-requisites that we cannot treat this subject with just a couple of lines.
I appreciate you time articulating your ideas while commenting my point. I think that's the type of exercise that this subject deserves.
Alcohol is legal, and that doesn't stop people, specially teenagers, from abusing it. It's also proven tobacco addiction starts during adolescence. In this case, legalization is just removing responsibility from the people who profit from it, since in practice the law isn't protecting who it's supposed to protect. Just because something is legal doesn't make it ethical.
Then, we know legalizing certain drugs will only move traffic to worse drugs. Legalize marijuana and dealers will move more crack, just like the mafia moved from alcohol to cocaine after they lifted the prohibition in the US. Now what, the government will legalize crack too? Make even more unethical businesses operate under the law, knowing these products will be abused by teenagers just like alcohol and tobacco today?
There's no easy solution, and no one is addressing the real issue: that substance abuse is cultural and heavily promoted. You talk to young people, and their concept of having a good time is "getting wasted". Dysfunctional families and poverty only worsen the issue.
The big question to me, is what causes more harm: drug use, or the criminals that it funds? I'd wager the latter; drug use can be dealt with as a medical problem (I'm living proof) to some extent, murderous cartels, warlords, and corruption around the world can't be.
Something to think about anyway!
Tobacco.
Tons of counterfeit cigarettes cross the border between Paraguay and Brazil, and that funds crime syndicates. A legal and regulated product. Now imagine if marijuana or anything else is legalized... they will do the same thing to avoid taxation, which would go to fund health assistance, and buyers won't care about where it comes from - they'll just care that their fix is available for cheap.
That drugs should be dealt with as a health issue, I don't disagree with, but legalizing substances isn't a silver bullet to stop crime, crime is rooted on other issues (education, poverty, lack of assistance).
The fact that we collectively choose to participate in this madness is, well, maddening.
Which, I would say, is true. Our argument should be where the facts are: It's bad, but it should be handled like a public health problem, not like a criminal problem, because criminalizing it does not protect you from dangerous drugs as the last century shows, but it primarily finances mafia groups which cost even more lives than even the most evil drugs.
But above all, end the war on liberty.
If Obama wanted to make a real change he would have stopped the war on drugs already.
Cue Homer Simpson sound bite: "I haven't learned a thing"
I didn't like him when he was the president, but I do like very much his approach to legalize/decriminalize drugs... Kudos for them!
Maybe black markets are useful for providing an income for people that have criminal records and no skills.
- How about "fuck you, pal"?
- I'd believe it, if it was louder.
In other news, I'm a bit sick of public figures coming out against the War on Drugs after their careers are functionally over.
