Do You Believe The War On Drugs Should Be Terminated?

[Katzndogz]

There has never been a war on drugs. It's a sound bite, a phrase that sounds good.

They sure as shit spend money on it though

That's because there's no war. There is accommodation, useless rehab programs, alternative sentencing, medical treatment but no war. War is where you destroy the enemy.

 

[Defiant1]

I have no problem ending the war on drugs as long as we end all tax funded rehab and support at the same time.

 

[Slade3200]

I have no problem ending the war on drugs as long as we end all tax funded rehab and support at the same time.

How in the world would that help our communities?

 

[MikeK]

I wasn't talking about Dealers. Dealers victims are the users thus not victimless crimes.

The same may be said about the owner of your local liquor store or tavern.

But the fact is everyone who drinks alcohol -- or uses some form of opiate, does not become addicted. Obesity is a far more life-threatening problem than are all of the recreational drugs combined. Should every overweight American be imprisoned along with sellers of high calorie foods? The fact is we are controlling the use of fattening foods as well as we can within a free and democratic society.

The users shouldn't be sent to jail and our jails are full of them. Releasing 19 or so of them every now and then doesn't make a dent.

I believe there is an insidious purpose behind this token release of drug offenders. A major percentage of those who were dealers will go right back to dealing, because it's what they know Those who were degenerate user/thieves will go back to buying from the street dealers because they have no legal option.

Both the dealer and user category eventually will be re-arrested and the derived statistic will serve to discourage any future efforts toward legalization.

 

[Slyhunter]

Dealers are getting out too

Today's "drug dealers" are the precise equivalent of yesterday's alcohol "bootleggers." The difference is then we had the intelligence to understand and apply a workable solution to the problem. Today we just keep on doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result -- which is one definition of insanity.

Having been observing its constantly repetitive failure and brutally destructive consequences for over three decades, who can deny the War On Drugs is anything other than insane and/or glaringly corrupt?

Otherwise wed still have wood grain alcohol causing blindness.

 

[Slyhunter]

If drugs were legal theyd be regulated for quality control purposes.

 

[Dont Taz Me Bro]

Yes, the War on Drugs has been a trillion dollar plus boondoggle with no measurable results. More lives have been ruined by the criminal justice system than the drugs themselves and our civil liberties have been grossly eroded.

 

[Muhammed]

If not, why not?

If you believe there is a more intelligent and potentially effective way to deal with the abuse of recreational drugs, tell us what you have in mind.

Do you believe some recreational drugs can be used without risk of seriously harmful effects? If so, which ones?

Legalize it!

 

[MikeK]

If not, why not?

If you believe there is a more intelligent and potentially effective way to deal with the abuse of recreational drugs, tell us what you have in mind.

Do you believe some recreational drugs can be used without risk of seriously harmful effects? If so, which ones?

The Harm Reduction Method. You will never see that here fully implemented. If there is one thing that is true, this country will operate half-assed and then bitch cry when they don't see the same results. People talk about treatment but they don't delve into it--as if there is some unified plan. The only unified plan is to do the least that can be done.

People also like to think that this is all about smoking a blunt on the stoop or doing a line of coke in the bathroom stall of some club. This is all about one individual being harmed in the process. I've seen some jacked up shit but one of the worst was a parent that taught their child to shoot up heroin. Meth labs? Flakka? Spice?

I'm all for decriminalizing smaller amounts but I am absolutely for nailing larger amounts. I am not ok with legalization.

Then in spite of the fact that you obviously are intelligent enough to know the drug war is totally counterproductive, having absolutely no corrective effect on the problem, you disapprove of trying something which has demonstrated positive effects in other nations (Switzerland, The Netherlands, Portugal).

Why is that?

 

[rightwinger]

Let's declare victory and go home

 

[OldLady]

There has never been a war on drugs. It's a sound bite, a phrase that sounds good.

Well, if it was a war, we lost.

 

[Slade3200]

There has never been a war on drugs. It's a sound bite, a phrase that sounds good.

Well, if it was a war, we lost.

It's an impossible war to win, nobody can ever eliminate the demand for drugs. The only purpose to declaring it a war is to justify funding towards the policing, jailing, persecution of drug related "crimes". The reality is the "war" is just a money pit and is killing our communities. It could be a regulated profit center that funds better education, support, and health care/rehab... that would actually reduce the use and abuse...Plus it would defund the gangs and put kids to work instead of in jail. Look how the education campaigns have reduced the amount of smokers over the past few decades. That which used to be "cool" is now not cool and the number of smokers has been dramatically reduced. The same could happen with drug use if we were smart about it.

 

[MikeK]

The war on marijuana was blatantly clearly self evidently a racist law aimed at Black folks and foreign workers..

During the relatively racist atmosphere of the mid-1930s there is no doubt what you've said helped to solidify the marijuana prohibition effort. But as Jack Herer has pointed out in his well-researched book, The Emperor Wears No Clothes, there clearly was a powerful financial motive for making marijuana illegal.

Briefly stated, when a process (decortication) was discovered which enabled the manufacture of paper from hemp, which is superior in quality and far less costly than the use of wood, the financial interests of those who were heavily invested in pine forests were seriously threatened. One such interest was William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate, who used his influence to have his son-in-law, Harry Anslinger, appointed as head of a hastily contrived federal anti-drug agency (now the DEA).

Shortly after that appointment the insidious demonization of marijuana (hemp) was commenced, the fallacious Reefer Madness era began, and the Nation has since undergone the most devious brainwash in political history.

 

[MikeK]

The War on Drugs was bound to fail because, like all vice based laws, it attacks the supply and only gives token lip service to reducing the demand.

With demand there will always be supply, and the more you do to stop it, the more lucrative you make it, which adds to the supply.

Someone is going to have to make the hard choices to end all this, I just don't see the balls for it from either side.

I believe Bernie Sanders as President would be a step in that direction. Probably not the end to the madness but a good beginning to an eventual end.

He does have the balls.

 

[MikeK]

That's because there's no war. There is accommodation, useless rehab programs, alternative sentencing, medical treatment but no war. War is where you destroy the enemy.

Please be more specific about what you mean by "destroy the enemy." How would you propose implementing the destruction.

 

[MikeK]

I have no problem ending the war on drugs as long as we end all tax funded rehab and support at the same time.

Which would ensure a massive surge of abuse and increased addiction.

If alcohol Prohibition had been ended with no effort to stabilize the consumption of that deadly drug the overall effect would have been horrendous. But the kind of federal regulation we see today has served to control the use of beverage alcohol and to minimize it's harmful potential.

The distribution of alcohol is rigidly regulated and the potency of every type sold is carefully measured and indicated, which enables one to better control his/her use.

 

[IsaacNewton]

First off let's drop the term 'war on' for everything. Something wrong with a society that has 'war' as their first thought ON EVERYTHING.

Marijuana should be legalized immediately, it was never in the category with other hard drugs. For the others some of them ARE highly addictive to people that are prone to addiction. I've known people over the years that used cocaine daily but could and did stop any time they wanted. The chemical did not make them dependent. Others have become highly addicted very quickly.

For things like heroin and other harder drugs it's a tough call. They need to be well regulated because they destroy too many lives of the people that are susceptible to addiction.

But Jesus H drop the 'war on' crap on everything. A 'War On Christmas'. What empty skull came up with that.

 

[TyroneSlothrop]

we should start with shooting white wealthy Oxycontin abusers like Rush Limbaugh

That works for me. Then on to anyone who has ever even SEEN a joint.

come for me and its war time ..I am going to smoke as much pot as I want...

 

[MikeK]

When my first daughter was about eight years-old I had become friends with a New York City Detective who told me he had taken his thirteen year-old daughter for a slow tour through Brooklyn's "heroin highway," a three block area near and around Pacific Street and Fourth Avenue, which at the time was crawling with strung-out junkies, some squatting on stoops, some nodding out in doorways, and semi-comatose hookers standing curbside motioning to passing johns.
While it's difficult to construct a fully effective image of this stretch of urban misery and its stunning ugliness at around midnight, it can be scary enough to bring a pre-teen age girl to tears -- which is what it did to my youngest when she turned twelve and I copied my detective friend's method of scaring the hell out of his young daughter and dramatically turning her off to the prospect of using drugs. I did the same thing with my two younger girls when they reached that same age. And it had the same thankfully frightening effect.

I believe one of the most effective ways to discourage kids from experimenting with drugs is to enlist the paid and cooperative service of some really fucked-up, strung-out junkies in their full state of filthy, stinking, scabby-armed, slobbering stupor and bring them into schools to stand before eighth-grade students and mumble warnings about what can happen if they are foolish enough to play around with drugs. The junkies will do that for a few bucks and the effect will be worth a fortune. It will occur as the metaphorical calling forth of souls from hell to warn against sin.

I have seen the effect such exposure has. I witnessed it on three separate occasions by simply driving my girls around a "hot" neighborhood. I have listened to them talk about the experience and I can say with full assurance that this is the way to prevent the vast majority of kids, those who are not cursed with self-destructive orientation, from considering the use of drugs. Because it is something that few relatively normal kids ever see -- and the horror of it scares the hell out of them.

But nobody does it. And therein lies the tale.

 

[Slade3200]

I have no problem ending the war on drugs as long as we end all tax funded rehab and support at the same time.

Which would ensure a massive surge of abuse and increased addiction.

If alcohol Prohibition had been ended with no effort to stabilize the consumption of that deadly drug the overall effect would have been horrendous. But the kind of federal regulation we see today has served to control the use of beverage alcohol and to minimize it's harmful potential.

The distribution of alcohol is rigidly regulated and the potency of every type sold is carefully measured and indicated, which enables one to better control his/her use.

It is very interesting to me on these type of issues where Party's seem to be flip flopped from their core values. Republicans are supposed to be about small government and more freedom for the people yet on issues like Drugs, Abortion, and Gay Marriage they fight to keep them illegal.