Prohibition of drugs. Criminals love to see it. Why do we make their day?

Everything has a good and bad side. So you have to flesh out the points on both sides then compare them to each other and to the situation, to decide what's best. And the whole thing, like everything else, will be subject to point of view.

Kids are weak, stupid, and ignorant so they need rules. But anytime you create rules you simultaneously create rule makers and rule enforcers, which creates a new problem. Kids are the single most abused demographic in society. Abused by the very people that are supposed to be protecting them. But if we remove the rules they will just become self abused by their own stupidity and ignorance.

Some parents choose to discipline more, some less. Both have a good and bad side. Same goes for the government choosing to create more laws or less.

If illegal drugs were legalized, numerous problems would disappear, not the least of which would be the drug cartels.
If free needles are made available, the problems of diseases transmitted through shared needles is eliminated.
Both high-functioning and low-functioning drug addicts would benefit from having easy access.
All the poison that makes its way onto the streets would be eliminated.

What would we do in a world without a war on drugs? The possibilities are limitless.

Quoting OmniscientNihilist

OmniscientNihilist

What side do you favor, and why?

Regards
DL

Quoting uncanni

What would we do in a world without a war on drugs? The possibilities are limitless.

You have done some research on this issue and reached the right conclusions.

I think we are on the moral side, --- but then the question becomes, --- how do we get the legislation passed wherever we are?

People do not care about their kids the way we used to.

Regards
DL

Quoting Gnostic Christian Bishop

but then the question becomes, --- how do we get the legislation passed wherever we are?

It certainly won't be passed in the US with its hypocritical piety and the puritannical mask it wears while it drinks, smokes and opiates itself to death. BUT: we could all learn a lesson from the Netherlands and how its pollcies have worked since the 1970s: http://www.drugpolicy.org/blog/america-take-note-three-lessons-holland-learned-after-decades-evolving-its-drug-policy

And a quotation about Portugal's legalization of all drugs: "In 2001, Portugal decriminalized the use of all drugs and the results have been encouraging. Drug addiction, overdoses and drug-related HIV transmission have decreased dramatically in Portugal, without a significant increase in drug use."

The US has made billions and trillions of dollars off its war on drugs: that's the newspeak name for what's been going on. What it really should have been called: The Creation of the Industrial Prison Complex and the Neo-Monroe Doctrine. What the U.S. did in countries like Colombia to farmers growing coca and cannabis was inconscionable, since it provided no alternatives to keep these people from starving to death. It sprayed them with Monsanto's toxins. NAFTA should have been called Let the U.S. suck Latin America dry.

You have to be living in a rational country with a rational government, which is about as opposite of what we have right now if you want to change the laws. I personally feel that in many ways, I'm living in a Nazi Germany doppelganger right now. Hmmmm, perhaps I'll have to get out my yellow star patch...

And one of the reasons there is a war on drugs (on some drugs really) is that there is another cartel that governs us and that makes a lot of money by only allowing certain drugs and controlling the distribution of said drugs. Another reason is that it is a tool for social control. The war on drugs does not help prevent harm, it creates it.

There is a study that ranked various drugs in terms of the harms that they produce in the individual and the harms that they cause to others, based on 16 criteria: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(10)61462-6/fulltext

These are the results (the greater the score, the greater the harm):



Alcohol comes out first, yet it is legal. The idea that the ultimate goal of the war on drugs is to prevent harm is a myth.

So how do you push those who govern the people to do something for the people when they don't have their best interest in mind? Well those who govern us are not all-powerful and they aren't invincible either, so while they won't do something if it's in your best interest, they will do it if it's in their best interest. If more and more people become aware of these issues, and more and more people push for change, those in power will feel that their position of power is threatened, and then they will act to retain it by answering the people's demands to appease them.

This is also a good read: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “war on drugs” and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues.

I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Nixon’s invention of the war on drugs as a political tool was cynical, but every president since — Democrat and Republican alike — has found it equally useful for one reason or another.

The desire for altered states of consciousness creates a market, and in suppressing that market we have created a class of genuine bad guys — pushers, gangbangers, smugglers, killers. Addiction is a hideous condition, but it’s rare. Most of what we hate and fear about drugs — the violence, the overdoses, the criminality — derives from prohibition, not drugs.

“if you fight a war for forty years and don’t win, you have to sit down and think about other things to do that might be more effective”

What exactly is our drug problem? It isn’t simply drug use. Lots of Americans drink, but relatively few become alcoholics. It’s hard to imagine people enjoying a little heroin now and then, or a hit of methamphetamine, without going off the deep end, but they do it all the time. The government’s own data, from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, shatters the myth of “instantly addictive” drugs.

In other words, our real drug problem — debilitating addiction — is relatively small. Addiction is a chronic illness during which relapses or flare-ups can occur, as with diabetes, gout, and high blood pressure. And drug dependence can be as hard on friends and family as it is on the afflicted. But dealing with addiction shouldn’t require spending $40 billion a year on enforcement, incarcerating half a million, and quashing the civil liberties of everybody, whether drug user or not.

Quoting uncanni

If illegal drugs were legalized, numerous problems would disappear, not the least of which would be the drug cartels.
If free needles are made available, the problems of diseases transmitted through shared needles is eliminated.
Both high-functioning and low-functioning drug addicts would benefit from having easy access.
All the poison that makes its way onto the streets would be eliminated.

What would we do in a world without a war on drugs? The possibilities are limitless.

Exactly.

Quoting uncanni

uncanni

You speak of the tip of the corruption iceberg.

Regards
DL

Quoting leo

leo

No argument on your points.

The intelligentsia will prevail over time.

Regards
DL