But the guy on the street corner can sell it much cheaper and can sell to kids.
This is all a part of a contimuum, in which legislation and law enforcement seeks to prosecute people not for what have done, but who they are. There always needs to be a Gotcha Law.
The Vagrancy Act came into existence right after the Civil War, to enable freed slaves to be re-arrested for simply being there. Those who could not afford the fine were essentially sold back into servitude. The intent was clear.
Vagrancy laws ended in the 1960s, with the final nail being Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 1972, where the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a Florida vagrancy law was unconstitutional because it was too vague to be understood.
April 1968, the Civil Rights Act made it a federal crime to “by force or by threat of force, injure, intimidate, or interfere with anyone … by reason of their race, color, religion, or national origin". Being black (or otherwise conspicuous) no longer an enforceable crime by itelf.
On June 18, 1971, the media happily coined the circulation-enhancing phrase “War on Drugs” the day after publication of a special message from President Nixon to the Congress on Drug Abuse Prevention and Control—during which he declared drug abuse “public enemy number one”. The people who used to arrest non-offenders for being “vagrant”, ot black, or otherwise unorthodox, now just had to frisk them and find a cigarette paper, or similar incriminating “paraphernalia”.
When the War on Drugs is over, they’ll find another way.
I don’t see what the problem is. We told you not to do it, you did it anyway, you suffer the consequences. I can conceive of no reason why someone would deliberately inject this shit into their bodies. The fact that in doing so, they financially support terrorists and criminal insurgencies just adds to the horror. Anyone who does drugs deserves what they get.
So you’re saying by outlawing drugs we give criminals and terrorists a reliable source of income that we ourselves could control? :smack:
No, I’m saying that it wouldn’t be a problem if shitheads didn’t do drugs in the first place. :smack::smack: The fact that people turn to illegal markets to get it is only more fuel for the argument that they shouldn’t be doing it to begin with, and only compounds their guilt.
Addiction is not a “disease” and the people are not “sick.” It is something they deliberately chose to inflict upon themselves. If I went out and peed on an electric fence, people wouldn’t say I’m “sick.” They’d say I’m an idiot who deserved exactly what I got. They willfully and deliberately chose their affliction, so fuck them.
Show me a society in which lots of upstanding, successful citizens are responsibly indulging in crack, meth, or heroin, and maybe I’ll believe you that the effects on society of legalizing those substances would be just as benign.
China stopped the use of opium. Drug use CAN be stopped!
From the following link…
[“Families of known addicts were educated not to blame their addict members, but to encourage them to seek help. Addicts themselves were impressed by the fact that they were not blamed for their addiction, since they were considered victims of foreign governments and other enemies of the people. After their cure, they were given training and then placed in paying jobs. Many of them were hired by the government to work with other addicts.”]
How China got rid of opium…
Tell that to Prince or Michael Jackson. Opiates are dangerous because they can be very addictive and it doesn’t matter how clean your supply is. You can still kill yourself easily with Oxycontin or medical grade morphine especially after years of increased tolerance to it. Even if you don’t kill yourself, an opiate addiction is debilitating and can affect people of every demographic group.
I think the war on drugs needs to be rethought and completely reformed but the ‘all drugs should be legal’ argument is a nonstarter (and I say that as a moderate libertarian). I work in the pharmaceutical industry and we have the FDA for a reason. It is one thing to say that recreational marijuana should be legal but quite another to say that all drugs should be. What does that even mean? Heroin? Cocaine? Penicillin? Ketamine? Amphetamines? Nitrous oxide? chemotherapy drugs? Ecstasy?
The distinction between recreational and medicinal drugs is not always clear-cut. You can’t draw a bright line and say that certain recreational drugs should be legal without having others that still aren’t. As an extreme case, you can’t deregulate antibiotics which have no recreational appeal without causing a very real public health hazard because it would induce even more antibiotic resistant bacteria. All of the other drugs except possibly for marijuana have other risks. Even marijuana is not exempt from it. There will be some people that are killed by marijuana impaired drivers but the cost/benefit analysis may show that risk is less than fighting an endless war against it. That is the key. You have to look at the cost/benefit ratio of every single drug and determine what the appropriate response should be. That is going to be a different answer for every one of them.
Right, and gay people are just choosing a sinful lifestyle, and transgender people are just wearing Halloween costumes.
I think most people would be a little more uncomfortable giving the government so much power over what free adults can and can’t do.
Portugal has been showing the way for over ten years. They decriminalized all drugs: marijuana, cocaine, morphine, you name it. Addicts that are brought to the authorities’ attention go to treatment programs, not to prison. The country has saved large amounts of money, hard drug usage is down, and there’s been no increase in crime or “drug tourism”.
Do you see guys selling alcohol or nicotine on street corners? Commercial sales generally drive out street level sales if a product can be sold legally.
Thank you! Remember, our government also told us not to beat our wives with any stick bigger than our thumb. (smaller was just fine though.)
I know that that’s not an analogy and I am not trying to create any kind of logical similitude. I just have trouble accepting “because I say so” without question from the same government that put radium in orphans’ milk, just to see what would happen.
Well your argument is all fine and dandy IF people didn’t do drugs but thats a very big IF. The fact is that people intoxicate themselves and have done since the beginning of recorded history. Now we can either choose to fight it the same way we could fight to never die or never have any natural disasters occur but the fact is that these things will always happen. So instead of making the problem worse by outlawing addicts we could embrace a more harm reductional way of approaching the issue.
The two aren’t exclusive. Lung cancer and heart disease are diseases even though people choose to smoke and eat red meat.
I don’t know, it’s become too complicated.
I think they need regulation, and certain drugs should be eliminated. Maybe if some of them were legalised the others would start to disappear. Though probably not.
I hate all recreational drugs, including marijuana, but whatever, I don’t like alcohol or coffee either, so my opinion probably isn’t worth listening to. But in any case, though I wish all recreational drugs were banned, I don’t know if that would ever happen, even if they adjusted the war on drugs to be a little less aggressive (and entirely non-hypocritical).
Would you propose a War On Red Meat, with about a million people incarcerated for possession of red meat paraphernalia?
As a theft victim by a scuzball that was looking for money for his next fix, I say no. Property crimes are on the rise in my state, most of the blame is based on the legalization of marijuana.
I’m a darwinist. I think we should legalize them all, and let natural selection take its course.
Those who practice self-indulgence would die.
Those who practice self-discipline would live.
After they buried a lot of their elders, and a few of their friends, the next generation of teenagers would grow up, sadder but wiser.
We should also legalize prostitution. That way, the junkies would be able to support themselves until they OD.
The problem is that the human brain is not fully developed until around age 25. Specifically they lack the ability to make long term consequences. So although they might see a generation die from drugs it wouldn’t necessarily stop the next group. After all most teens already know druggies, alcoholics, and smokers in high school. You wouldn’t leave a table full of loaded guns near a group of 7 year olds would you and we wouldn’t blame the 7 year olds either even if you explained the danger to them.