Of course local marihuana growers enter this scenario. :rolleyes:
I see you ignore the continued efforts of the federal government to even arrest medical marihuana growers that are not smuggling anything.
And you have not noticed that I was not talking about smuggling at the border, I agree on interdiction there. (However, even there, there are other tragic results: recently two military helicopters and their crew were lost by doing what local authorities should have been doing: drug patrol (Nobody shot at the helicopters BTW))
Locally this waste of manpower is still idiotic in light of our current situation: were are our priorities?
Why not train dogs to smell for traces of deadly gases instead of marihuana then? Think also on all the technology that is used to find local growers also. Think of the time that is wasted in this hour of need.
Realize that this new reason on why to drop the WoD is being ignored on top of all the other points the pro-legalization crowd has put forward for ages.
I was on the fence on this legalization thing but the lack of any effort to deal with the harmful effects of the WoD, together now with the idiocy of ignoring a waste of resources that would be useful in this war on terror, has convinced me to say: ENOUGH.
And remember, if this burglar’s drug of choice was legal, he wouldn’t need to steal to support his habit, because drugs would be cheap enough for him to buy them without stealing.
Tell that to the tens of thousands of non violent drug offenders currently languishing in our jail cells :rolleyes:
Besides, when you analyse it, there are very few things on earth we can’t live without. That doesn’t mean we can’t complain when we can’t get it. We can live without TV but if it were illegalised tomorrow I bet you’d bitch just as loudly as the rest of us.
That’s not a benefit. Either police and lawyers are being pulled away from legitimate cases, hurting society overall, or extra ones are being hired to do something that only hurts society. It may be a benefit to them, but not to society - it doesn’t benefit us to hire someone to do something that effectively has no positive effect on society, you might as well pay them 50k a year to stare at a wall.
It also introduces lots of corruption into the system. Drugs and police powers related to drugs increase the ability for a crooked cop to play games with people. It’s easy to plant weed on someone’s car, for example, and a lot of unreasonable searches can be justified by saying they suspected drugs, etc.
But will the police arrest you for possession or consumption of alcohol? No, they’ll arrest you for drunk driving. See, we can deal with the bad consequences of drugs, without putting people in jail for using drugs but actually doing anything to infringe on the rights of other people.
The logic of that last paragraph can apply to any government imposition (that’s a nicer word than oppression) on freedom. “Quit whining about your lost rights of free speech, you have a good life here, and anyway, the government is doing it for your own good, all that seditious talk is harmful to society…”
Basically, what you said was “Quit whining, the government can fuck you any way it wants because you have nice doodads and lots of food, you’re all a bunch of spoiled kids.”
Unfortunately, it’s this logic, and this willingness to impose one’s will on society through government, that created this whole situation.
Feel free to disagree with me, and tell me why your logic wouldn’t apply to lost freedom of speech, for example.
Stalinist logic. I’m sure you grew up thinking you were so much smarter than everyone, and things would be just perfect if only you were in charge, and it created this idea in you that society couldn’t possibly function without a central authority dictating it.
Well, it’s your opinion to hold - and I used to share the same sentiment, until I realized that my current set of views made more sense.
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Really? States only exist to dictate what people should do? They’re not there, to say, protect people’s rights?
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Yeah, you’re right. If someone comes and robs my house, I’m not going to find their violating my rights to be the problem, I’m going to find their right not to have some storm troopers bust into their house at 4am problematic.
The issue is that the guy robbed my house, not that he took drugs.
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We can’t be having those rascally ideas about freedom getting around the real world, there’d be utter chaos.
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The act of getting drunk hurts no one. The act of doing negligent things that could hurt people is taking an action that will possibly harm people. Again, you’re confusing the action with the drugs.
If I get high and murder someone, is the problem that I murdered someone, or that I got high?
In case you think I’m some sort of angry pothead, not at all. I hate drugs, and generally dislike people that use them, especially those who use them excessively. But I’m against taking my personal distaste of drug users and trying to force my view on other people at gunpoint through a central authority. You obviously don’t have that inhibition.
You seem to be implying that we’re using the logic that ANY police interaction with people is an unfair imposition of force. So, if I’m, say, murdering people, and police come, they must be violating my rights! It’s a straw man.
You’re putting up situations in which one person is using force against someone else in a way that violates that person’s rights, and then associating those situations with drugs to make them seem harmful by association - unless, perhaps, you’re asserting that taking drugs automatically makes one do harmful things.
You haven’t even addressed the situation of people responsibly using drugs - all you’re doing is using scare tactics by naming random crimes and then associating them with drug use to demonify the drugs by association.
Suppose 2 people watch a car wreck, one is Amish and the other is an individual in a technocracy. The Amish person’s response might be
“this is why we should steer clear of technology”
the person living in a technocracy would, on the other hand, try to discover safer ways of driving. While the Amish person uses this death too further his cause, the individual in a technocracy would invent airbags, traffic lights, crumple zones, and other safety measures. But there would still be tens of thousands of deaths a year. Its all a matter of what your motivation is. If you want drugs to be illegal its not hard finding excuses to keep them illegal.
Our current drug war is largely fought on the former idea, that any bad consequences of drug use is due entirely to the drugs themselves, not ignorance or the emotional stability or mental competency of the user. In a way, politicians & soccer mom’s want people’s lives to be destroyed, where else would they get the justification to keep their war going without victims to hold up as examples?
I know i will catch flac for this, but i know alot of steroid users. Some of them fit the stereotypes of muscular, beliggerent bouncers. However most are just everyday people. these people know more about how these drugs work, how the side effects work, what causes the effects, how to avoid them, etc. than 99% of politicians, judges, prosecutors, police officers, everyday people and probably a good deal of healthcare professionals. These people are among the most well-educated people alive on this subject, yet their say has no power against the say of soccer moms who have grown up on a diet of stereotypes or politicians who only want to get re-elected or appear hard on something scary. The fact that these drugs are illegal doesn’t bother me as much as the fact that the users are much more educated than their persecutors and that isn’t even a consideration when it comes to making policy. Why should the ignorant & overemotional call all the shots?
I personally think drugs should have a scale rating of how dangerous they are, and people should have easier access to info on how to use them responsibly & safely. Not all ‘drugs’ are the same, there are hundreds of them, and an endless supply of personalities that use them. The idea that all drug problems would go away with decriminalization or legalization is a myth, the wrong people would use the wrong drugs in the wrong ways and peoples lives would still be injured or destroyed.
Well a consequence that we can be fairly sure of is that farmers in Colombia wouldn’t have to join FARC for employment because the US planes weren’t spraying defoliant killing their banana and coca cash crops.
I Know Lots: I’d like to hear how you justify the oppression of third world farmers in the name of the drug war. Is my desire to limit their oppression entirely juvenile and selfish? Am I just being a spoiled child born of a capitalist economy when I say that farmers in Colombia should have the right to grow whatever they like because the poverty there is so endemic that they should make a buck any way they can, that they may feed their families?
I like your tactics of trying to make people feel guilty for disagreeing with you. However, us spoiled children are too mature to fall for it when people call us names to get us to change our viewpoints.
Look up the term “Cost/benefit analysis” and then come back and talk to us about this situation.
You know, IKL, stupid, self interested people make decisions every day and manage not to kill people. Some even manage not to kill themselves. Do you suggest we have government “nannies” go house to house and look in kitchens for beer and potato chips and ship them off to jail lest they get fat and lazy? Or check the medicine cabinet to make sure they’re not taking too many tylenols or sudafeds? What’s in your medicine cabinet? Do you drink coffee? Do you eat bacon? Better be careful, they may come after you next.
I’m glad I don’t live in your world IKL, and I hope I never do,
Indeed, I would wish he/she could buy a 3 quid bag from the NHS rather than the same bag for 60 quid (possibly mixed with lethal impurities).
If drug dealers are the enemies in the drugs war, then one should remember that the first rule of war is always to do what your enemy least wants you to do.
Drugs can be dangerous and lethal. Drugs can ruin your life through debt and addiction, or through long term effects on body and brain. Drugs can have undiscovered side-effects which leave you with a crippling disease when you are still young. The point, however, is that the only person whose business that is, is yours.
I agree!
The illegalization of drugs has created a complete parallel criminal government in Colombia. Now THAT is an enormous source of human suffering.
I’d like to hear your opinions on drugs that are released on the open market. Are they “truly safe”?
Maybe I don’t get out a lot but I haven’t heard people saying that legalization is the end of drug problems. It is the beginning of fixing them, perhaps, and it seems that the costs to society are less when
drugs are cheaper,
tax on drugs helps subsidize health programs for addicts, and
the incentive to manufacture or distribute illegally virtually disappears, though this won’t take the drugs out of the criminal, it will take the criminals out of drugs.
(3) is the catch, though. If we legalize it but maintain significant roadblocks to production or distribution then there will still be crime centered around its production and distribution. I largely suspect this will be the biggest hurdle to face, as it will be legalized but severely regulated, making it still hard to get (almost a de facto ban on consumption or production) and thus still worth having a black market for. Then the pro-ban camp will just say, “See?”
The one flaw that I see in most threads about legalization is that the discussion always seems centred on ‘recreational’ drugs. Problems, maybe equal to or greater than recreational drugs exist. Nobody seems to ever mention the cost of prescription drugs and the problems those high costs seem have.
This article in today’s Dallas Morning News (registration is needed) shows the problems that high cost of legal drugs cause.
I challenge anybody to get a positive out of that. At least if there were legalized ‘recreational’ drugs, the revenue from that could be used to help people like Denise Henley, whose major crime is to be poor and mentally ill.
There is a whole mess of problems with prescription drug costs and health care in general. The government says they want to help but they have no money. How many billions would be available if the WoD ended today? From this story:
If the WoD ends today that frees up roughly $40 billion, also removes the cost of incarcerating non-violent drug offenders. Plus factor in the revenue from taxing the sale of legalized marijuana, and all of a sudden many of our most vexing problems seem much more manageable.
Those numbers were said to be related to “diversion cases”, though; obviously, people will still attempt to steal valuable goods and resell them for profit. From the context, it doesn’t appear that any of the crime in question involved illegal production of alcohol or tobacco – which, quite frankly, probably is beneath the media radar for a reason. Modern-day moonshiners produce moonshine because people like buying moonshine, because they like the element of risk, because its been romanticized, etc. Since alcohol is available quite cheaply on the open market, there’s little economic incentive to produce it illegally, except as a “boutique item”.
Yes, in theory it can – inhaling burning plant matter probably isn’t particularly healthy for you. However, there has yet to be a single documented case of lung cancer occuring in an exclusive pot-smoker; you’ll find that there are plenty of folks who smoke cigarettes daily, and pot on occasion. This makes it far more difficult to study with any amount of accuracy.
I believe that a basic premise of the pro-legalization line of thought is tha these crimes all have victims. Smoking a joint seems a personal choice that doesn’t infringe on anothers right, therefore victimless.
Law enforcement isn’t limiting drug use. Therefore drug use isn’t evil.
Well I read an article in Penthouse a few months ago discussing recent efforts by law enforcement to crack down on moonshining because of the violence and territorial issues associated with it, and how the people who were reporting these crimes were now sorry they had done so because it didn’t improve anything. I would have said that already but I am rather doubtful anyone here considers Penthouse a credible source. I would have cited my mother who used to live in such areas only a few years ago, but the plural of anecdote is not data. I’m trying to find information.
All of this is mostly irrelevant: there are moonshiners, it is illegal, and people buy it anyway, even though there is a legal market for it. That is pretty much my only point, I don’t really care to ascribe any motivations to people nor do I feel an urge to explain them away. Fact is, alcohol is technically legal, but that doesn’t stop it from being on a black market. There are roadblocks to consumption, production, and distribution in place for alcohol a whole lot more than for tea or other widgets.
I don’t care if people run cars with it or tie ribbons on the jugs. The point is: there is economic incentive and people do it and it is illegal. The same thing will happen to overregulated drugs should they become legalized.