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When selling is legal is when organized crime leaves the picture, taxes can be collected, product is clean and measured and of quality.
Both sides of the equation are important to legalize, doing one without the other means huge problems remain.
One thing that people aren't considering is that we have legalization experiments within the United States, and we have seen an uptick in marijuana usage[1]. This uptick has been benign because its been limited to Marijuana. I think that given our culture (one that I believe is potentially universal, but I can not speak to universality) has a tendency toward over consumption, its not clear to me that legalization of…
Isn't that a desirable thing from a government standpoint? More tax income from legal sales? The point to legalize something is that you put some controls in place to know where and how, and at what quality it's being sold, not to have its consumption decrease.
Because the US prison industry policy is working as desired.
That doesn't explain the rest of the world.
We attach riders to these agreements which make adoption of US drug law a condition of the deal.
This is in first world countries. In the second and third world countries (the middle east and south america, and to a lesser but not negligible extent Africa) we just enforce our laws by force with or without permission.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair That's about it really. There are a whole lot of people across the world whose salaries depend on an unending drug war.
That thought doesn't really capture the reason. It applies in some circumstances but not this one. In a republic, people are only paid to enforce restrictive drug policy because the people want them to. Most people look at the issue in simple terms. "Drugs are bad, so keep them away from people". Legalization is a counterintuitive way to lower incidence of use and addiction, it will take a lot to convince people it i…
So in that sense it wasn't Rs vs Ds, it was rather Ds & Rs pushing strong for "law and order" --which was likely precipitated by the high crime rates of the 80s and early 90s as well as shoddy studies[2] about criminality.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center
[2]http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/very-brief-his...
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair That's about it really. There are a whole lot of people across the world whose salaries depend on an unending drug war.
That thought doesn't really capture the reason. It applies in some circumstances but not this one. In a republic, people are only paid to enforce restrictive drug policy because the people want them to. Most people look at the issue in simple terms. "Drugs are bad, so keep them away from people". Legalization is a counterintuitive way to lower incidence of use and addiction, it will take a lot to convince people it i…
>Portugal’s remarkable recovery, and the fact that it has held steady through several changes in government – including conservative leaders who would have preferred to return to the US-style war on drugs – could not have happened without an enormous cultural shift, and a change in how the country viewed drugs, addiction – and itself. In many ways, the law was merely a reflection of transformations that were already…
One thing that people aren't considering is that we have legalization experiments within the United States, and we have seen an uptick in marijuana usage[1]. This uptick has been benign because its been limited to Marijuana. I think that given our culture (one that I believe is potentially universal, but I can not speak to universality) has a tendency toward over consumption, its not clear to me that legalization of…
Where does the assumption come from that the idea is to decrease usage? I would expect drug usage to increase when legalized.
Portugal’s policy is deeply flawed because it does not legalize the sale of all drugs, only the consumption. When selling is legal is when organized crime leaves the picture, taxes can be collected, product is clean and measured and of quality. Both sides of the equation are important to legalize, doing one without the other means huge problems remain.
Other options that, in my amateur opinion, would be better, would be to more heavily penalise adultered drugs, or to have pharmacies supply, with a prescription, addictive drugs, but only to addicts. The latter idea is basically an extension of safe injection clinics.
People will debate something that is done elsewhere, and ignore completely that it's done elsewhere.
Gay marriage is a prime example, as it's something that has been legalised in a lot of countries now. Every time a country goes through the process of debating whether to legalise gay marriage, there's a bunch of people that say it's going to cause the corruption of society, or ruin the sanctity of marriage, or cause God to punish us.
However, legalising gay marriage in other countries hasn't caused the sky to fall. But anti-gay marriage people conveniently ignore this.
The same wilful ignorance of existing examples is also applied to Universal Healthcare, drug laws, minimum wages (for either raising or lowering/removing), criminal justice, firearms, and education.
Obviously countries are all different, but the general ideas are the same. For example, it's fairly well established that the less guns there are, the less gun crime there is, however, an Australia or British-style "ban handguns and buy them back off owners" isn't going to work in America. But the same principle applies, less handguns = less deaths.