So you're saying I either a. don't care about addicts and see them as a waste of life? b. am a pothead? Nice, real nice. Because, you know, treating addicts like criminals is such a better, more humane alternative to legalizing drugs. If an addict posses x amount of y drug, they're sentenced to years in prison. You're telling me that's caring about addicts? And no, I'm not a pothead thanks.
How about murder, should the state legalize that also? The job of government is to protect people, if not we should just abandon it and live like animals.
Take a minute to reread what you're writing John. You don't know me, and yet you assume, even after everything I just wrote that talks about how current drug laws, and stronger ones, will only treat addicts terribly with ridiculously harsh punishments, you assume that I think addicts are a waste of life? I suppose you think I think alcoholics are a waste of life too?
Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!The Peace and Freedom Party, seriously? I remember my father in law voted for them one year (back when he was my girlfriend's dad). It was kind of fun, because he was the only person in Lake County, IN to vote for them, so when the voting results came out, there was his vote. When I asked him who the hell the Peace and Freedom party was he said, "I don't know, but who could be against peace and freedom?" That was a hard point to counter, except to note that the name of a political organization doesn't always tell you much about what they're really about. Anyway, this is the first time I"ve heard anything about the Peace and Freedom party since that time.
One of the state's jobs is to protect other people from people like you, who want to run their lives for them - jail them, murder them, wreck their lives. Coffee is addictive. Mormons might jail you for that - living like an animal, slurping coffee every chance you get, neglecting your family and responsibilities.
So Carcano thinks addicts are simply foolish and you think there should be no laws protecting people from a life of misery and destitution. There is absolutely not much comparison to be made between the substances themselves - alcohol and hard drugs. When people do make that comparison that pretty much tells you they are fairly clueless. Alcohol can be, in most circumstances, regulated by the individual user whereas as hard drugs cannot. It is like comparing a BB gun to a 12 gauge.
Agreed...but not to protect people from themselves. In a libertarian society drugs would be sold by government agencies with accurate medical warnings. This system lets them make an informed choice.
Nope. That is not what i want to see done or do, And you are the confused conservative here. Are you serious?
My only concern is to protect poor people who do not have access to every protection that a rich kid does. You want to take away the only protection they have? You have to understand that there is a message that legalization sends out to kids. I want to see hard drug use eliminated not legalized.
Uh, what? Right now the current laws don't protect people from a life of misery because addicts are treated like criminals when they should be treated like patients. Of all the ways to argue your point, I can't believe this is the one you chose. Clueless? This is coming from the guy who made completely unfounded ridiculous claims about the effects of marijuana in another thread. Which hard drugs do you refer to that can't be regulated by the individual user? There are casual users of most of them who are not addicted and lead successful happy lives. Why? Because they were educated enough to know the risks of drugs, how they should be taken, the proper frequency, dosage, etc. Now can you imagine if drugs were legalized and that information being available on the packaging of every drug for everyone, including the poor who previously wouldn't have access to this info? Not to mention having a safer product than what's out in the streets now. That alone would result in less addicts in our society.
Depends on your libertarian. Many would abhor the idea of government agencies being in charge of the industry.
The problem is John, the first part of your argument falls flat, if decriminalising drugs doesn't create more addicts. So lets look at the evidence: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/other/dutch.htm so in summary - the simple decriminalising of weed in Holland did not significantly increase its use there, and those increases are way behind the rest of europe where cannabis is still criminalised. Plus hard drug use and hard drug addiction are down, with the majority of addicts being old surviving addicts rather than new ones. What was it you were saying about creating more addicts ? Now lets examine the second part of your argument: "The only people who really want to legalize drugs are those who do not care about addicts " Not treating addicts as criminals helps stop the spread of diseases like HIV to non-addicts. http://www.peele.net/mccaffrey/mccaffrey.html Providing prescription heroin reduces crime, reduces drug deaths, and enables addicts to be productive members of society. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/heroin-the-solution-480734.html Drug prohibition hands the profuts of the drug trade to terrorist organisations: http://www.terrorisminfo.mipt.org/Terrorism-and-Drug-Trafficking.asp Are you STILL certain that "The only people who really want to legalize drugs are those who do not care about addicts " ?
Arresting by force, trying in court, and throwing people into violent and dirty prisons, does not protect them, or their families, from lives of misery and destitution. Driving the price of of an addict's addiction through the roof, and preventing them from obtaining their drug in legal and safe ways, does not protect them from misery and destitution. Putting an entire balck market economy onto the streets of a city, that depends on the disruption of law and order and the endangerment of the citizenry for its profits and survival, protects nobody from misery and destitution. The only people protected from misery and destitution by such practices are major drug dealers and other organized criminals. It is what you advocate. You do it to "send a message to the kids". Yes. It's not a "serious" addiction, of course. But that is partly because it's legal. In Peru and Colombia, chewing coca leaves is not a serious addiction either.
Oddly enough, I'm not terribly in favour of legalising drugs - replacing one group of criminals and terrorists (drug dealers) with another bunch of criminals and terrorists (government) doesn't seem particularly smart to me. I'm just not a big fan of the kind of sweeping generalisations and sloppy thinking that John was guilty of. I prefer an approach that decriminalises drug users and drug addicts (particularly addicts) and treats addicts like patients instead of criminals, and recreational / occasional users no worse than someone who likes a drink or a cigar. And a production side drug enforcement rather than supply side drug enforcement. Basically if, by international agreement, we can set up an intergovernmental pharamceutical buying conglomerate to buy the raw materials (opium, raw coca etc) directly from the peasant farmers who produce them, at a guaranteed higher price than they will get from the drug barons, taliban etc, we can cut them out of the equation completely by not allowing them to have a product to sell in the first place. And recover some of the costs of the operation by selling the stock to drug companies for legitimate pharmaceutical purposes.
