An Anarchists Opinion On Drugs; Agree or Disagree

The amount of logical fallacies compressed into this paragraph is impressive. Well done; perhaps you should seek employment at the ONDCP?

Drug abuse and drug prohibition both have social costs, monetary and otherwise. When it comes to formulating effective policy, the only relevant question is which costs are higher.

 

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Well... only in the tautological sense that all anarchists, by definition, share a common idea that all laws should cease to exist as such.

Only if there were some legal regulatory framework to perform such certifications and punish manufacturers who failed to comply. Which doesn't sound much like "anarchy" to me.

Again, only to the extent that there is a powerful state ensuring that such does not happen - in actual anarchy, said drug syndicates would have no less incentive to war one another or distribute faulty product than they do now. So, again, anarchy doesn't seem to be in your plan, there.

Last I checked, being an anarchist implied that you don't approve of imposing regulations on such things.

Maybe you're not an anarchist at all, but some kind of left-libertarian?

"Appropriate" meaning "increased likelihood of injury to self and others," or meaning "deterrent punishment meted out by a hierarchal authority?" Because only one of those is consistent with anarchism.

 

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So you only want to get more people high because legalizing drugs is a sure way to open a vast new market to anyone of age. Instead of 10 million users, of course there's more but just a number I'm using, there's going to be 100 million because once they are legal many will want to try them out as you well know. We all know alcohol has been a very destructive drug in the society with drunk drivers who kill others to break up of families and now you want more of this to happen, which it will.

 

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False logic, and proven wrong by history, there were more Illegal drinkers during prohibition This link here has some quick info. than immediately before or after. The reason for this is many users try something perceived as illegal just for the thrill.

Second, we spend millions of dollars incarcerating people.
Third, The illegal drug market moves much money into the hands of violent cartels and supports slave labor on many farms.
Fourth, The illegal drug market creates unsafe usage, and violence surrounding the distribution.

My reasons are simple: Legalization will cripple criminal networks making billions on them, remove the criminal status of use and allow safer means of obtaining the drugs, tax dollars can be raised on the sale of the goods, slave labor on many of these plantations will cease to exist, slave trade as a support mechanism (i.e. forced prostitution) will be reduced if not end.

You act as though these problems don't already exist with drugs, they do, but legalization has historically REDUCED use, as people who were drawn to the thrill of doing something illegal, don't.

 

Ideas have consequences.

 

You know what else breaks up families? A system that treats drug addiction as a moral failure rather than a medical condition and incarcerates addicts rather than treating them.

 

Portugal has decriminalised it all and seen big reductions in use.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html


It also completely removes the crime element, so no gangs. No trafficking.
No huge police budget. Almost no child users.

 

I'd rather my tax dollars go towards rehab than prison, myself-prison doesn't usually end addictions-they seem to manage to get drugs, even inside...and there's very little rehabilitation going on in prison these days...just warehousing.

 

You just show how much you dont understand anarchism and its ideals on crime and punishment. You also have to relize that this list of ideas is refering to more quick changes happening, not what would happen in an anarchist society.

 

On the contrary, you seem to be the one lacking there.

Then what does it have to do with anarchism?

 

There's where you're wrong.

I am under no ethical, moral or legal obligation to subsidize and fund other people's life-styles. The only way drugs could be legalized is if people obtained a license to purchase drugs. No one in the right mind is going to allow welfare pukes to purchase drugs. If you claim you need money for food, fine, I'll pony up some money so you can have the damn food stamps, but if you got money for drugs, then you got money for food. You're still going to see violence: rape, kidnappings, assaults, robberies and murder related to drugs and drug use, and the only solution the courts will have is to bar them from using and purchasing drugs.

In that case, you create an instant black market, so you'll still have drug dealers.

If the government sets the price, that will also create issues because others can sell cheaper than the government can, so again you have black market drug operations.

I can stop them. It's called the "War on Drugs" but there has never really been a war on drugs. The reason the "War on Drugs" exists is because Americans weren't convinced that the godless commies and bocialists in El Salvador, Columbia, Nicaragua, Honduras et al were a threat to the US, so the very clever "War on Drugs" allows the US to maintain a military presence in those countries.

The "War on Drugs" also creates a lot of jobs. And jobs mean employers, and employers mean companies, and companies mean lobbyists.

First thing to do is eliminate the demand for drugs. Hair testing every 6 months for those on SSI/SSDI, VA disability, HUD, food stamps, unemployment benefits, Medicaid, Aid to Dependent Children, WIC, student loans, FHA loans, etc.

The rest of it is a cake-walk.

Yeah, right, funny how "rights" work. You destroy your body and mind, and then demand that I pay for it and subsidize your life-style.

You debilitate yourself to the point that you lose your housing, then demand that I pay for it; lose your job and demand that I pay for it; sustain damage to the brain, liver and other organs and then demand that I pay your health care bills; and that probably wouldn't be so bad, except that ultimately you'll be demanding that I pay for your drugs too.

And those were unbiased studies, right? No.

 

Strange facts you have there because there's more people today, on average, than when prohibition was in effect using alcohol and many more deaths by automobiles as well from when it was illegal to drink . I do not think you have your logic and reasoning working well when you say such nonsense about less will do drugs because they are legal.

 

Meh-third variable-there's tons more cars now than when it was illegal to drink-and they all go a lot faster.

Hard to drink and drive when you don't have a car.

What Prohibition did do was to increase the use of hard liquor and decrease the use of beer...I wonder if there's any demographic data from Portugal showing a move away from hard drugs and towards pot...

But again, the Portuguese legalized, they saw a significant drop in drug use, an increase in people seeking treatment, decrease in HIV transmission through needles, they ploughed the money saved from enforcement into treatment facilities.

Here's the link again: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html

A more in-depth article from the Boston Globe here:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/01/16/drug_experiment/

states that more people do try drugs, but less actually end up becoming addicts, it seems, and the switch made from funding enforcement to funding of rehab has really seemed to help.

That's what I want-stop treating it like a moral failure and start treating it as a public health issue.

Mircea, with all due respect, do you really think the majority of drug users in this country aren't full-time workers as well?
Trust me, I can assure you that's so, it's just that the well-off can afford to get away with it more effectively.

 

Population at the time : somewhere between 106 and 123 million persons.
Automobiles on the road at the time 23 million by 1929
Population now : 306 Million
Autos on the road now: 250 Million

So your saying a time when between 1 in 4 and 1 in 5 should be compared to road ways today when 5/6 Americans own cars?
I won't even get into speed and power potential here. Or traffic density.

Your not seriously going to go this route are you, and then accuse me of having my logic and reasoning not working well?

Seriously?

Sir, apples and oranges. tomatoes and kumquats. The population is higher too, so yes there are more drinkers. The percentage of people who drink has changed, this however is not a factor of it being allowed and easy to obtain, but rather economics. Poor people drink more. When times go bad, more people drink.