There are many substances that might cause harm. Substances that can be seen to have harmed the health of some users. Substances about which it can be said that they might be the cause of some users doing bad things.
It does not automatically follow that such substances should be outlawed.
Outlawing the substances is not the only possible solution to whatever problems they’re causing. It is not the only approach; it is not the best approach. We should have learned that from the utter failure of alcohol prohibition, and from the ongoing failure of laws prohibiting prostitution and the laws prohibiting some forms of gambling.
There are two perspectives to view the “war on drugs:”
First, the practical - it does not work. In fact, attempting to interdict supply without affecting demand is ultimately fruitless as it simply increases profits. Prohibition was an abject failure and pumping $25 billion a year into this rathole has simply created any number of South American Narco-Tyrants and made the USA the number one incarcerator on earth. Hooray!
Second, the philosophical. By what right does society tell me what I can and cannot do in what is essentially purely a matter of personal morality? Is this a “free country” or not? And don’t give me the “benefit to society” BS either. If you want to use that then ban twinkies and Hagen Daz - obesity dwarfs drug use as a burden on society. As has been mentioned the hypocrisy is obvious. Living in a free society gives one the right to make a “bad” decision as well as a “good” one.
You know, the folly of the ‘Drug War’ is probably the issue that comes closest to having widespread agreement on the SDMB from people of all political persuasions. I suspect there would be widespread support for rolling back the drug war if some politician with clout had the balls to take on that issue. But it never seems to happen.
The parallels with prohibition are striking. The creation of an underworld, deaths and blindness from drinking bad product, widespread ignoring of the law, a huge strain on law enforcement…
If the drug war were ended tomorrow drug use might go up slightly. But we could also free probably a million people from our jails, and instantly take away the power base of a lot of thuggish regimes. Organized crime would lose a major source of revenue, and the government could free up the 15 billion dollars a year it spends on direct interdiction and tens of billions more that it spends funding anti-drug task forces throughout the federal, state, and local police forces.
To me, it’s a no-brainer. Marijuana and cocaine and heroin were all legal not too long ago, and society didn’t collapse. The ‘war on drugs’ has done far more to damage our society than drugs ever did.
Oh, and I should add that we now have an incredible opportunity to take on the drug war after Sept. 11. We just need a politician to stand up and make a case for it on national security grounds, which is a fair case to make. After all, the Taliban funded a pretty big part of their operation through opium trafficking, and one of the reasons our law enforcement dropped the ball on Sept. 11 is because so many law enforcement resources have been diverted into the drug war.
In addition, drug screening at the borders has taken resources away from screening for weapons and other materials.
So politicians who previously supported the drug war have an excuse to change their positions now. Rather than saying that they now believe the drug war was wrong, they could simply say that it’s a luxury we can no longer afford.
war on drugs is a stupid idea, and that’s just from an economic standpoint.
a farmer in peru can feed his kids if he grows drugs, he can’t if he grows maize. simple as that.
people living in ghettos, the unemployed, uneducated and the unrepresented see both short-term happiness and the possibility of economic gain from drugs. simple as that.
on a wider scope, i’m able to drink weedkiller, bleach and meths or overdose on aspirin and paracetamol (all freely available, with no restraints on purchase) if i feel like it, but i can’t eat a hash cookie? sort that out.
don’t forget that back in the 1800s you could buy opium as laudanum over the counter from a chemist. cocaine was also unregulated, and marijuana also popularly available…
the scourge of the time was cheap gin!
why not have VAT on pot, with confirmed purity, a list of users and a maximum allowance per person.
the government gets money, people get what they want and everybody’s happy.
Putting aside the morality and other arguents for one moment, I just wanted to reiterate that the motivational reason in the UK for the change in Marijuana/Cannabis policy appears, IMHO, to be the successful on going clinical trials (see my post, above). It is becoming increasingly difficult to justify a policy that does not have popular public support but, more importantly still, when it seems the substance in question is likely to be a significant medicinal option in the near future.
The very major concern, I believe, for US posters is that the Supreme Court has ruled against using the substance in any medical trials (in May).
I say that as someone with a Grandmother who suffered terribly and may well have benefited considerably had the medicinal option been available. I do think US dopers need to be aware of what is likely to be denied to them.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by London_Calling *
**Putting aside the morality and other arguents for one moment, I just wanted to reiterate that the motivational reason in the UK for the change in Marijuana/Cannabis policy appears, IMHO, to be the successful on going clinical trials (see my post, above).
I am not so sure about this. One of the big points of friction between the police and the ethnic minorities has been around hash. For quite a long tinme the police have been turning a blind eye to non-ofensive smoking of dope.
Are you referring to U.S. v. Oakland Cannibus Buyers’ Cooperative? This cannabis case decided that there wasn’t a medical necessity defense to distributing cannabis. The decision of this opinion is
Please explain how this means
In particular, note this paragraph from the Supreme’s opinion:
I don’t read the decision as removing the exception for Government-approved research projects.
Problem here is that you’ve demonstrated no evidence of hypocrisy on the part of anyone - myself, the government, anyone. You’re using this hot button word to disparage the legal prohibition of marijuana. Hypocrisy is a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ stricture. The government has taken a consistent stance toward marijuana. Because you may equate alcohol and marijuana does not in fact make it so. Therefore your use of the word in this context, while a commonly made error, is nonetheless invalid.
Right. Marijuana is illegal so that the government can throw people in jail. No individual responsibility here. And of course you largely ignore the long term effects of drug use on the user and society. And we’re to just accept that as a price of living in a free society? As my father used to say, “your rights extend to the tip of my nose”. Take a look at the statistics regarding alcohol abuse on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and tell me again why we should make other destructive substances widely available? The argument is inherently flawed, and usually supported in a simplistic fashion as an either/or statement. An all or nothing proposition will never gain support. Most of us see the shaded areas all too clearly.
I see. So what you’re really arguing here is that people who knowingly break the law, are caught doing so, convicted of doing so and sentenced for doing so are the helpless victims of the governmental tyranny. Puhleeze. Violence cannot be the only requirement for any law. Theft, bribery, extortion all result in jail time without resort to violence. Let’s keep on point.
Hmmm. Didn’t you just argue that the big bad government is throwing people in jail when they haven’t committed violent acts? I guess maybe you didn’t really mean that.
As to the theory that criminalization adds violence to the equation. Where’s the proof? Has prostitution turned violent? Has credit card theft turned violent? Has identity theft turned violent? Isolated cases, perhaps. Routine? No. You’re flirting with anarchy here. If making anything illegal results in bad things happening, let’s do away with the rules! Eureka! We’ve seen the light!
Again, where does this nonsense come from? Now we’re back to non-violence? Boy, do you change your mind a lot. Show me the violence in the sale and production of alchohol? Particularly when you’ve just said there is more violence due to the loss of protection of the police state. (Had to throw that in, it was just too easy.)
None of this supplies a valid argument to legalize any and all behavior or product. If some people are going to abuse anything, we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Again, you put the onus on government to prevent such occurrences by what, removing restrictions? And this worked with alchohol? Nope. Take at look at the statistics. A significant segment of the population, around 13%, is alcoholic/abusing alcohol. This is not an insignificant factor, but you’re ignoring this.
Wrong again. Your employer wants to know you’re capable of doing your job. Having stolen property or stashing bodies in your yard doesn’t impact your job. At least I don’t think so. Besides, your civil liberties are not at issue with private employers in this regard. The Constitution guarantees your rights with regard to governmental actions. If you choose not to ‘pee in the cup’, which I can fully support, by the by, you are perfectly free to take your employment elsewhere. For this reason, said employers haven’t the authority to charge you with any criminal action based on the results of that test. The two are not related.
Again I argue you that you haven’t satisfactorily supported your position that this is in fact the case. And no, not just to me, try the Supreme Court. Try the U.S. Government. Try the public at large which still opposes legalization of marijuana by a 2-to-1 margin. We ALL remain unconvinced.
I’ve noticed this trend on the SDMB as a consistent undercurrent to the various discussions. There’s a widespread assumption that “freedoms” are an absolute right. Nothing could be further from the truth. The flipside of this coin is responsibility. Not mentioned much, as you can see from this thread. Who wants to admit that as a member of society, we all have made concessions to the greater good. We set up traffic patterns and follow them. We have noise ordinances to minimize public disturbance. Nudity in your home is one thing; we acknowledge that public nudity isn’t the same thing. Now, you may agree or disagree with these examples, but the point remains that no one individual has absolute freedom. Ever. In exchange we have common defense, a means to adjudicate disagreements, support from the community at large in times of need, etc. I have cited two official sources for information on the impacts of illegal marijuana use on our country. I have seen no authoritative counter cites, despite the fact that this is the Great Debates forum. As I noted in my first post in this thread, I’m left with the impression that what “everyone knows” with regard to marijuana use and effect is so much fluff. Until you can present more compelling substantiation for your argument, and less “me, too!”, I’ll hold my opinion as already noted: some restriction is necessary, and the status quo is eminently preferable at this time.
This is quite true. We as a society make value judgements about things every day. I know judging is a bad word these days, but the fact remains we do so through our civil actions on a regular basis. I agree that examination of our societal values on an ongoing basis is a good thing. As I noted to MEBuckner, the public at large in addition to our government has taken a position vis a vis marijuana, and those who advocate a change must be demonstrably persuasive. Just pointing the finger at Britain and urging us to follow suit won’t work any better than such flawed arguments did in 2nd grade when you told your mommy "but everyone else gets to [fill in the blank]). Let’s see some hard and fast evidence to support your position. The onus is on you to convince the majority of the superiority of your position.
While I don’t particularly advocate prohibition as the ideal position on this subject, I do have to take issue with the disingenuosness displayed by this tack. If you’ve studied the 1920-1933 Probibition period closely, you’ll find that it was more or less in word only. If you say 'don’t do that, but take few steps to enforce your ban, as was the case during Prohibition, it’s no great surprise the ban will be ineffective. The same argument, that you believe prohibition is ineffective and should be scrapped, might as well be applied to murder and other crimes. We’ve banned murder for…, well, forever, yet we still have murder. We don’t throw our hands up in the air simply because some people will not obey the laws. This has never been a persuasive argument.
Prohibition was a failure for many reasons, not the least of which is that it wasn’t uniformly enforced. According to statistics; Nations banning advertising of distilled spirits had 16% lower consumption and 10% fewer related motor vehicle deaths as compared to nations without corresponding bans. Nations banning beer and alcohol ads had 11% less consumption than the nations banning distilled spirits alone, and 24% fewer related motor vehicle deaths. This would lead me to believe that you can in fact reduce demand if the aim is to do so. Your emphasis on the USA and our rates of incarceration are troubling, but do not alone merit removal of legal restrictions on marijuana. Does the crime create criminals or do the criminals create the crime?
Same argument MEBuckner and Hazel had, and it no more flies when you say it. This is a free country as long as your actions do not negatively impact upon my freedoms. That’s why we regulate, restrict, prohibit and in every other way minimize the ability of one to harm another. And penalize it when all else fails. Freedom is not absolute. Come up with a better argument.
Polls do not bear this out. I suspect the public at large has better capacity to see the gray areas than those at the extremes on this, or any other issue.
I’ve sufficiently countered this argument. We don’t change our laws because some people refuse to obey them. We throw them in jail. This is on its own merit an inadequate argument.
You can’t say that drug use might go up slightly any more than I can say otherwise. Don’t speculate if you’re trying to convince anyone. Same with prisoners. How many are in strictly for possession of marijuana? I don’t know, so I won’t guess. As far as freeing up governmental expenditures, yes that’s an argument. It only has value in relation to any resulting increase in costs associated with abuse, crime, lost productivity, etc. And I won’t assume those to be negligible just to satisfy your POV.
This seems to be your personal opinion, and worth every bit as much to the country at large as mine. Which is to say, little. When exactly were these drugs legal, and to what extent? NO restrictions at all? No resulting negative effects on society? Then why were they made illegal? This is a nonsensical argument. Something caused a change in the law. Your last statement again is opinion, and I’ll leave you to it. If you hope to persaude the majority to change its collective opinion on this subject, you’ll need much, much more.
Okay, enough already with the suppositions. Cite, please?
Again, cite please. By this argument every government resource not focused on screening for weapons and preventing other actions like the 9/11 events is directly responsible as a result. Hogwash.
Not unless you convince the 2/3’s majority who oppose drug legalization first. I’ve yet to see a persuasive argument from anyone here.
We don’t base our laws on pure economics. Our laws are an extension of the values of society. Right now, we hold marijuana use to be of little value overall.
I’d ask for a cite here, but my larger issue is this; we owe the farmer in Peru a livelihood now, do we? Wouldn’t you suppose that he or anyone else unable to make a living in said circumstances would change them?
[Sam Kinison]
You’ve got people dying in the deserts in Africa! What’s there? SAND! What was there yesterday? SAND! What’s gonna be there tomorrow? SAND! We need to stop giving these people food and give them money to MOVE![/Sam Kinison]
You’re not serious, are you? By this rationale, if we remove the control of marijuana and other drugs from the underground criminals and make it legit, these same people lose their livelihood! Not to mention the fact that the ‘ghettos’ do not get a free pass on this or any other issue. This is a subject better addressed in other circumstances.
bolding mine
Weedkiller, bleach and aspirin serve a legitimate purpose. You can also kill yourself with a knife, so I don’t see the logic to this argument. As to the two I bolded - meths and paracetamol, I don’t recognize these. The first wouldn’t be methamphetamines, would it? That is also illegal here. If I get a chance I’ll check the second out.
Yes? So? And something changed that resulted in these items being banned. What was it?
Hmmm. First you have to convince a majority that any resulting harmful effects wouldn’t override any benefits derived from the change in law. I’m still waiting for that proof.
We have certain chemicals which demonstrably pose a risk to human life and health if consumed. They have at least some potential, in same cases great potential, for physiological addiction or psychological habitution or both. Some of them are directly linked to anti-social behaviors which result in physical harm to other people, including the commission of violent crimes. They are generally consumed for purely recreational reasons.
These chemicals are not illegal. They are publicly advertised and openly sold in retail establishments frequented by children. The main legal restriction on their production and use is that people under a certain age are prohibited from buying them.
We have certain other chemicals, which do not appear to pose any greater risk to human health or of causing anti-social behavior than the first group. Possession of these chemicals is a crime, and production of them is considered a severe crime. Any rationale for banning this group of chemicals would appear to apply to the first group, and yet the two groups of chemicals are treated quite differently. Paradoxically, the bad consequences of the use of the legal chemicals is used as an argument for continuing to maintain the ban on the illegal chemicals. If the bad consequences of legal chemical use are an arguement against legalizing chemicals which are now illegal, why are those bad consequences not also an argument for criminalizing chemicals which are now legal?
This is what I mean by hypocrisy. Maybe “wild inconsistency” would be better. Attitudes towards the recreational consumption of mind-altering chemicals appear to vary wildly with little factual basis for the distinctions. Even attitudes towards consumption of the chemicals in the second group seem hypocritical, since many social leaders and politicians admit to having consumed them in their youth, but now favor harshly punitive policies towards others who consume them.
Your rights do indeed “extend to the tip of my nose”. This is precisely why no one’s rights should extend to what chemicals another adult chooses to ingest. People do have an individual responsibility to control their behavior so that they do not harm others, and if ingesting some substance will cause them to lose control over their behavior, they have a responsibility to not ingest that substance. Behavior which harms others should be punished, including such behavior which results from irresponsible use of mind-altering chemicals. But the mere consumption of those chemicals does not in and of itself harm anyone else but (perhaps) the user. Drunk driving, domestic assault, and date rape are all illegal. Drinking alcohol is not.
Violence is not the only proper rationale for making something illegal. Harm to others is the proper rationale to for making something illegal. Other people may be harmed by violence, by fraud, or by negligence. Harm to others includes infringing upon their rights, including their right to property.
All criminalized vices tend to be associated with violent crime, beyond merely the act of indulging in whatever vice has been criminalized. Legal drug producers do not generally kill members of their competitors’ distribution networks; illegal drug producers do. This is because people engaging in a legal enterprise act within the general protection of the law, whereas people in illegal enterprises do not. Even if some people in an illegal enterprise are not inclined to perform any criminal act beyond the criminalized vices themselves, they will be quickly driven out of business by people with no such compunctions, and the non-violent criminals will have no recourse to the justice system for protection.
Illegal prostitution is frequently associated with violence, most often against the prostitutes themselves, by both their customers and by the pimps who supposedly exist to protect the prostitutes.
When alcohol production was criminalized, it was associated with large-scale criminal enterprises which frequently resorted to violent crime as well as the crime of alcohol production itself. Legal production of alcohol is carried out by perfectly respectable public corporations which do not resort to murder to further their ends.
Criminalizing the use of some mind-altering chemicals thus results in both large numbers of people being jailed for actions which do no harm to other people–people being jailed for what they do with the tips of their own noses, not to what they do to any one else’s nose–and to the creation of organized criminal enterprises which result in major criminal activity, including violent crime.
Although the actions of private corporations and the actions of government are separate matters, private corporations do follow the government’s lead in how they treat the different classes of mind-altering chemicals. Almost all employers treat the use of legal mind-altering chemicals as a problem only as it directly affects the employee’s ability to do his or her job. Most corporations do not care if their employees use legal substances after work hours. Many corporations do have policies of testing for the use of illegal substances, even if done at times and places that do not affect the employees ability to do his or her job. If those chemicals were de-criminalized, corporations could continue to have policies of intruding into their employees private lives beyond what is needed to insure that the employees do their jobs properly, but it is clear that right now the government is actively encouraging private corporations to maintain such policies. Finally, the point is that the “war on drugs”, waged by the government and, with government encouragement, by private employers, has adverse effects on both civil liberties (with respect to the state) and privacy (with respect to both the state and to private employers).
Actually, what you cited were official sources lumping together the effects of legal and illegal drug use on our country, and then attempting to use that as an argument for continuing to make the use of some drugs illegal. As far as I can tell, you haven’t posted anything authoritative at all about the effects of illegal marijuana or illegal anything else on the country.
Attempts to “legislate morality” that lack extremely widespread support or a clear benefit to society are ultimately doomed to failure as they are entirely dependent on the government’s ability and/or willingness to coerce the individual into obeying. Never make a rule you cannot enforce.
Why should I come up with a “better” argument when this is an excellent one? The legality of some drugs versus others is completely arbitrary and dependent on personal values that are irrespective of the so called “costs to society.” The long term effects of the over consumption of ice cream will kill more Americans this year than all illegal drug use combined (read the most recent Rand report on the issue).
We could have sent an entire generation of Americans to college for what we have uselessly spent trying to get them not to smoke pot. Prohibition DOES NOT WORK and as I’ve said before, one of the basic definitions of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.