My current understanding is that waging a war against these things is largely a waste of time. Making drugs illegal, for instance, gives way to underground markets and all sorts of other problems involving violence. Prohibition didn’t work, either.
Likewise with the war on terror, is the point that there’s only so much you can do? How are you going to stop someone from creating a plan in a garage somewhere and then wreaking havoc later, etc?
This is also a bit of a side question, but what’s the big deal about Iran? From what I can tell, it’s not like they’re going to start going nuke-happy any time soon, so why are people proposing we go to war with them?
You need to narrow this question down a bit. Do you want to talk about drugs, terror, or Iran? It sounds like you want to debate the merits of fighting an objectively futile situation, but I’m not at all certain.
These are such vastly different topics that I am not sure you’ll be satisfied with the answers to any of them in one thread. You’ll probably get a lot of agreement that war makes a dumb metaphor for a lot of problems. Terrorism is a military and law enforcement and intelligence issue, drugs are primarily law enforcement to the extent they’re outlawed and also a social and legal issue. “War on Terror” is a dumbass metaphor that a lot of people have been complaining about for years, which is why the Obama administration has minimized or abandoned it.
Prohibition was a bad idea and generally a failure but it did play a role in reducing the truly staggering amount of alcohol people used to drink and in raising awareness of women’s issues and (I think) spousal abuse. Banning alcohol was dumb but there were important things that came to pass along with or because of Prohibition. Banning drugs - particularly the ones with fewer effects like marijuana - is also a bad idea and the amount of resources that have been devoted to the drug war are staggering and simply awful. So there is a very valid comparison to be made there.
You can also make some of those arguments regarding counterterrorism, but it’s more an issue of priorities and how many resources need to be devoted to the problem (legalization not being an option). You can say ‘how do you stop someone in a garage making a bomb,’ and the answer is that to a large extent you can’t. But then again that doesn’t happen very often, and you can’t justify that attitude with regard to large-scale international terrorism (which is where most of those resources go despite the prevalence of sting operations against low-grade terrorist wannabes). That’s not futile.
We have several other long threads about this. Iran is a country run by religious fanatics with longstanding links to terrorism and they’re building nuclear plants that they say are only for peaceful purposes (but they won’t let international inspectors do their job to verify) it. Iran also happens to be in the Middle East, which is not the most stable region in the world. So if Iran gets nuclear weapons you’re likely to see other Middle Eastern countries try to start their own nuclear weapons programs (which Israel did long ago). Most people are not worried about Iran firing off a bunch of nuclear weapons at the first opportunity, but they’re concerned about terrorists getting them and they are concerned about the prospect of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
I suppose this is what I am really asking about. I lumped these subjects together because I tend to think of them as “Spending lots of money and resources for something we can’t realistically regulate or control.” But I don’t know if that is the right way to look at things.
Well, the idea is to mitigate or at least contain (as far away from the US as possible) terrorist acts by attacking the terrorists where they live and attempting to disrupt their C&C by killing off their leadership and also by making them spend resources fighting us abroad and looking over their shoulders. To a certain degree, at least from the US’s perspective, I’d say we’ve been pretty successful so far. Whether it’s worth the cost in terms of blood and treasure is probably another issue.
I don’t think it’s meant to work, if by that you mean it’s meant to completely halt the use and importation or production of illegal drugs. It’s meant to mitigate both things. As you say, it’s been the equivalent of Prohibition, but it’s been at least marginally more successful simply because, unlike alcohol use, it’s not as wide spread through the population. Personally, I’d be all for legalization, but there would be costs to doing that. Whether they would be larger costs overall (I don’t think they would be) than our current attempt to ‘fight’ it is, again, probably a different issue.
It’s totally off the wall, but the deal with Iran is that no sane country wants to see a potentially unstable nation such as Iran get nuclear weapons. Not simply because folks think that as soon as Iran gets nukes they will go ‘nuke-happy’, but because having nukes would further destabilize the region, and because Iran would use their possession of nukes in a similar way that North Korea uses them…as a sort of get out of jail free card to do whatever they want without fear of retaliation…and, lastly, because, like North Korea (and Pakistan), Iran is not exactly the most stable nation on earth. If the PTB in Iran ever lose control of the government, gods know who might end up with the nukes when the dust settles. It’s better to prevent Iran from getting the things in the first place than to have to deal with the mess after they have acquired the nasty things.
As an aside, the only country that is seriously contemplating going to war is Israel…and they have more of an immediate stake in the whole question of Iran having nukes, since they are more directly threatened by the possibility than most other countries (you can bet that a lot of Iran’s neighbors wouldn’t shed any tears if someone, even Israel, stepped in and stopped Iran from getting the things, though they won’t directly get involved).
The basic idea is that by calling for a “war” against something (drugs, terrorism, crime, poverty, cancer, graffiti) you’re calling on society to mobilize all its resources and participate in the effort to eliminate whatever it is you’re declaring war on.
The pros are you get a lot of effort directed at a problem. The cons are you may get so much effort directed at one problem, you don’t devote enough effort to other problems.
Another negative is that sometimes a war metaphor is seen as justification for using excessive means against a problem.
The pros of the war on drugs do not neatly fit into the utilitarian boxes where the pros of the war on drugs are based on reducing suffering from drug use.
The true pros of the war on drugs (from what I can see)
1). Doing the same thing, even if it is a bad idea, is generally easier than making a 180 and doing the opposite. After a while ideas seep into the collective consciousness. Drugs are now an aspect of social purity the same way we used to think of racial or sexual purity as parts of social purity (meaning generations have been raised to think of consciousness altering drugs as a form of social impurity the same way premarital sex was considered a social impurity in the past but less so now). Unbuckling that connection will be pretty hard.
2). The drug war is a multi billion dollar industry funding various law enforcement agencies and organizations associated with the legal system. Nobody wants to give up those jobs or that money.
3). The drug war probably does reduce, at least a bit, drug use. I drink alcohol but don’t smoke pot. I’d love to smoke pot but I don’t want to get arrested or show up with a positive on a drug test at my job. Rates of alcoholism are far far higher than the rates of cocaine, meth and heroin addiction. In large part I assume because alcohol is easier to get.
4). Because of all 3 few politicians wants to go out on a limb and oppose the drug war.
The so-called “War On Drugs” has been an expensive failure. However, it has been a meal ticket for the warriors, and it has become institutionalized. This means that it has become impossible to have a rational discussion about its costs and drawbacks. People have built careers upon it, and they want to keep the money flowing. We now have the highest prison population in the world, and thousands of jobs depend upon things continuing this way. We have an entire industry built up to keep the “War” going, and our system has caused violence and blood shed in places that supply illegal drugs (Mexico, Columbia, Peru).
I’m looking forward to seeing how Portugal fares-they have decriminalized most drugs-they should see a lot of benefits from this.
The major problem with these so called wars is that they are not. The word war is used to justify the extreme actions that are required in a real state of war even though the justifications for those actions may not exist. There is a big difference between the ‘War against Terrorists’ and the ‘War on Terror’.
Especially when we’re not devoting enough effort to the ‘War on Horror’. We need to do something about the three nations in the Axis of Horror: Romania, Egypt, and Haiti.
I think you are addressing two different things here.
The war on drugs is a futile failure because some people want drugs, and will do nearly anything to get them. There is no real way to fight this need and desire, you could execute drug users if caught and there would still be users.
The war on terror is mostly a farce, while terrorists exist they exist in such small numbers that any measures used against them applied to the general public is a waste of time.
Not everyone is so desperate for drugs that they are willing to risk everything to obtain them. Some people are, sure, but as mentioned above, the measure for success of the War on Drugs is not that it is 100% successful and no one uses drugs.
As in many other situations, ISTM that you have a bell curve. A certain percentage of the populace is going to use drugs no matter what. A certain percentage is not going to use even if they are legal and freely available. And the rest may or may not use, depending on the opportunity costs. If a drug is easily available, use tends to go up - that’s why many more people use alcohol than cocaine.
If, therefore, we legalize drugs, they become more available and usage will tend to go up.
I think an illustrative example is not necessarily Prohibition, but the War on Smoking. As it becomes progressively more and more difficult and expensive and inconvenient to smoke, smoking is going downhill (although not at zero). No doubt if tobacco were outlawed, even then some people would smoke (or dip or otherwise use tobacco). But it would probably be a lot less than do now.
The failure of Prohibition was due primarily to the fact that alcohol is deeply embedded in human culture, and has been for tens of thousands of years. Other drugs, apart from nicotine and caffeine, are nowhere near as ubiquitous. And therefore can be plausibly outlawed without failing as badly as the USA did in the Twenties.
The best explanation of the reasoning behind the war on terror is from Ender’s Game. The part about why the humans have to destroy the formic planet.
The jist of it is that defense is impossible because there are too many places to defend. The only way to have safety if to defeat the home base.
This applies to the war on terrorism. Every tall building in the US is a target, every commerical flight, every large gathering of civilians is a potential target. It is impossible to cover every target so the only way to defeat terrrorism is to attack the base of terrorism. That means the regimes in the Middle East that support terrorists. If you turn the regimes that support terrorism into regimes that fight terrorists that is the only way to protect our citizens from terrorism.
“In the Netherlands 9.5% of young adults (aged 15–34) consume soft drugs once a month, comparable to the level of Finland (8%), Latvia (9,7%) and Norway (9.6%) and less than in the UK (13.8%), Germany (11,9%), Czech Republic (19,3%), Denmark (13,3%), Spain (18.8%), France (16,7%), Slovakia (14,7%) and Italy (20,9%) but higher than in Bulgaria (4,4%), Sweden (4,8%), Poland (5,3%) or Greece (3,2%).[26][27] The monthly prevalence of drugs other than cannabis among young people (15-24) was 4% in 2004, that was above the average (3%) of 15 compared countries in EU. However, seemingly few transcend to becoming problem drug users (0.30%), well below the average (0.52%) of the same compared countries.[27]”
In order to keep other factors equal, one needs to compare, not countries like the Netherlands where marijuana is decriminalized to other countries, but drug use before and after decriminalization in the same locales. For example, Australia (cite - pdf) and Alaska (cite - pdf).
And the Netherland example is not as clear-cut as it might seem -
This is not to say that decriminalization or legalization is not a good idea - it means that actions have consequences, and it is a good idea to be aware of all those consequences before acting.
Pro of the war on drugs: if you are not too risk averse, you can make an awful lot of money producing and selling drugs.
Con: the most risk-averse types in this field are groups like the Mexican drug gangs. Somebody gets shot and killed every. single. day. for drugs, usually innocents. American drug users’ money funds Mexican mass murder.
