The point is, even though the government doesn’t profit from the war on drugs, the government hires many many employees whose salaries are paid by the war on drugs, and who would suddenly find themselves jobless should the war end.
BTW, how did we manage to repeal Prohibition the last time? Where did the popular groundswell come from?
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Who would pay for the numerous funerals, as well as people who didn’t die but managed to fuck themselves up for a lifetime. Legalizing recreational drugs is one thing, legalizing all drugs and relying on social darwinism to take care of the rest is something else entirely.
And, on the off chance that they do manage to reproduce, they can be counted on to kill their kids quickly, so the gene pool is still safe!
(Though I imagene it will be a cesspool of antibiotic-resisitiant bacteria).
We only die once each, so there are no extra funerals. Some just get accelerated.
I just do not agree with government imposing laws that are “for our own good”. Everyone should be allowed to screw themselves up if they so wish.
I agree, assuming that the rest of society does not have to bear the cost of unscrewing said people.
'Tis a very important point, Brutus.
So, suppose John is free to screw himself up to his heart’s content. John happily fries his brain with a couple months of crack usage. John now has the mental capacities of an infant, and needs constant supervision and care.
Who, then, is responsible for the care of John? Must you and I put forth the tax dollars that will support John for the rest of his life? Or do we leave John to himself, and do nothing as he starves, lacking the motor skills even to feed himself?
Not to sound completely heartless, but yes, I would do nothing as he starves.
Others may want to help him; That is their prerogative. Charity should be voluntary and all that. But I will not spend my resources to take care of someone who ‘willingly’ fried their brains. (Unless, of course, that someone was a family member or loved one, but drug use just isn’t an issue in my social circle.)
What’s the difference between paying Johns way in hospital, or prison? At least through legalization, focus could be moved to more efficient ways of discouraging ABUSE, rather than prohibiting its USE. Hopefully saving money for us taxpayers.
The scenario is no different from many others:
[ul]
[li]John smokes 40 a day and screws up his lungs[/li][li]John drinks a bottle a day[/li][li]John boxes and scrambles his brains[/li][li]John plays one of many sports where injury is possible and breaks his neck[/li][li]John becomes a vegetable after wrecking while driving his car[/li][/ul]
We don’t prevent people from doing things because it may take expensive medical treatment to put them back together again.
And then there is the question of damage control. Humans will mess with the chemicals in thier brains, always have, always will. We cant control all the negative impacts of that fact, but there are those that we can control.
The junky is more harmful to society than the wino. Why? Must the junky must steal for his habit, the wino need only beg a few coins. If heroin were as cheap as Thunderbird, the junky wouldn’t steal. (These are not highly motivated people, beyond thier chemical needs.)
Further, addiction to opiates is survivable. Witness Bela Lugosi and Hermann Goering, both of whom were addicted to morphine due to war injurys for years. And they can recover, given support and motivation. But not if bad junk and shared needles have done them in before they reach that point.
A further example is the recent popularity of XTC. There is a drug that mimics the effect of XTC, but is far more dangerous. It is also easy to produce. The swine who sell the stuff couldn’t care less what happens to the purchaser. But we can.
Damage control is practical and acheivable. Prohibition is an utter failure. Seems a simple enough choice to me.
I dispute this on several levels.
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Firing employees hasn’t stopped the government from changing policies in the past. Thousands of attorneys and support staff lost their jobs when the DOJ decided to settle with Microsoft.
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Particularly in today’s environment, I doubt that many, if any, government employees would lose their jobs. You think supporting legalization is political suicide, imagine firing thousands of law enforcement personnel. The result would be that the FBI, ATF, etc. would simply get larger, absorbing DEA agents and the like.
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In any event, the key players are the policy makers - political appointees. They didn’t become drug czars just to get a job, and they’re only going to be on the job for the length of an administration, at most.
Sua
<hijack mode>Here is a cite for you to peruse Hamlet</hijack>
One place I disagree with the OP is on taxation. These drugs should definitely be taxed, just like cigarettes and alcohol. Obviously they shouldn’t be taxed to the point where a black market is created and the drug war continues, but still, they should be taxed. I don’t believe that there is a significant black market for selling tax-free liquor to adults in any state, but I could be wrong; in any case there is no “booze war” on the same scale as the drug war.
First, it would answer some of the points that Gaijin has made. Just as alcohol taxes help pay for the highway patrols that catch DUIs and throw them in the slammer, heroin taxes would pay for addiction conseling and crack taxes could help pay for all the buhzillion problems that drug causes.
Second, it could help pay for other things. Naturally this point isn’t really separate from the first, since the taxes would, if I had my druthers, go mainly into the states’ general fund (I believe only a small portion should be “earmarked” - creating specific funds the legislatures couldn’t touch).
Third, it would help to control consumption. Obviously sky-high prices combined with the threat of jail don’t keep people from messing with heroin and cocaine, but I still think that consumption rates would be needlessly high under the OP’s taxless proposal.
One set of questions I can’t answer (and I was considering starting a new GD thread about it until I found this with the search function) is:
[ul][li]How much of an “underage drug war” should we be willing to fight? (I happen to think legalisation would help keep drugs out of the hands of kids, since supply would be directed into legal channels, and vendors would want to keep their drug-selling licenses, but this is pure speculation based on horror stories of 12-year-olds taking cocaine and such.)[/li][li]What should be the minimum age to buy this stuff?[/li]Should it be the same for all drugs or should it vary by drug? (I was toying with a 21-year age for the physically addictive ones and an 18- or 19-year minimum for non-addictive ones.)
[li]How do you respond to the argument that the 21-year drinking age has not worked, and that teenagers who get liquor easily now would get drugs easily after legalization? I mean, how do you reply to people who say that a mimimum age runs counter to the principle behind legalization, i.e. that prohibition just doesn’t work? (I ran into a few of these folks when I put together a drug-decriminalizing policy in - you guessed it - high school. They said they wanted no minimum ages for any drug!)[/li]How do you repond to the argument that drug prohibition has worked, as evidenced by alcohol abuse rates which are high even compared with street drug abuse rates (Soup_du_jour alluded to this.) (I, personally, respond that drug abuse is a small part of the drug problem, which includes collateral damage from the drug war, which is much worse. I don’t think all the hangovers, bar fights, and drunken teens are as bad as the ghetto gunfights, overcrowded prisons, and distorted, militarised relationships we have to countries who should be our allies. But I recognise that it is a difficult comparison.)[/ul]