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Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health

arstechnica.com

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Re: Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health

#201

Post by shkkmo »

TheSoftwareGuy wrote: post #188
hourislate wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only data Politicians use is campaign donation data. When you have several different industries that rely on a steady flow of meat into the grinder (Prison, Police Unions, Lawyers, Probation Officers/Administrative, etc) and they give generous support and campaign donations , well you know why it has taken so long to end this useless "War on Drugs". Millions of Tax dollars were spent incarcerating people for havi…

How do unions rely on “a steady flow of meat into the grinder?”

Police unions have a vested interest in ever increasing police department budgets that were driven in many ways by the war on drugs.

Re: Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health

#202

Post by hwillis »

supernova87a wrote: post #97
intricatedetail wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you want to discuss? People have natural urge to use drugs and there is nothing you can do about it apart from trying to educate and ensure drugs are as safe as possible. Banning drugs is an idea of the same sort like banning music or sex for pleasure. Cartels make money on drug supply, because there is mostly no one else people can buy drugs from.

I agree that the war on drugs was a failure. But is your position that whatever people want to do, you should not try to prevent it? What are your positions on applying that logic to carbon emissions, letting people work for less than minimum wage, companies putting out products that people buy willingly but are non-repairable? Should government step out of those areas too? People want to do all those things.

> But is your position that whatever people want to do, you should not try to prevent it?

?? This does not resemble the way anyone has been talking about these issues. You're being downvoted because you're projecting an extreme binary that does not resemble reality.

Programs like DARE are not on the ballot and are presumably still well-supported. People aren't convincing each other that drugs have no negative impact. Alcohol being legal doesn't mean nobody tries to prevent its use or abuse. Alcohol and tobacco are still legal despite both causing more deaths and harm than all other drugs combined: https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sh...

Re: Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health

#203

Post by dalbasal »

gravypod wrote: post #4

Could this be a situation where politicians have faulty data and use that to guide how they act? I would have assumed that a majority of these states - and my home state of NJ - would be very anti-drug but these votes with >60% in favor of legalization show that significant portions of America think drug-related activities are not "immoral" or "wrong" and should not be criminalized. If you had asked me a few years ag…

The media is the message.

A referendum, sortition or representative process elected by one method or another... they'll often yield pretty different vote counts. Democratically, we think of these mechanisms as ways of discovering the "will of the people." Really, they are decision making mechanisms.

Re: Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health

#204

Post by viraptor »

pessimizer wrote: post #184
viraptor wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some threshold you probably don't want to legalise. With less addictive alternatives being available, do you really think that heroin production should ever be legalised? Otherwise what's to stop someone from creating a custom highly addictive drug purely for maximising profit? There are labs ready to do that. In Poland the drug laws targeted specific listed substances for a while which created a market for c…

> do you really think that heroin production should ever be legalised? Yes. The actual cost of producing heroin is about a nickel a dose. Junkies who get their heroin are productive members of society, and aside from the criminal element they're forced to associate with, the crime they commit to get the cash to not get sick, the inconsistency of product, and the aggression of the state, we have no reason to think the…

Why concentrate on ongoing use rather than providing addiction treatment?

Re: Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health

#205

Post by ArnoVW »

Judgmentality wrote: post #171
throwaway201103 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the draconian laws and mandatory sentences trace back to the late 1980s/early 1990s when crack cocaine hit. If you were too young to remember or not born yet, it was absolutely devastating. At least the equivalent of today's opioid crisis if not worse. Entire neighborhoods just fell apart. Politicians and voters freaked out and demanded harsh new drug laws and penalties. Lobbiest support from those who benef…

I really hate to sidetrack this discussion with an obvious political rant, but it's important to remember the CIA was intimately involved in creating the crack epidemic in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_coca...

I was intrigued so I read the page.

"the CIA's Office of the Inspector General which ultimately concluded the allegations were unsupported."

"Webb's series led to three federal investigations, all of which concluded there was no evidence of conspiracy by the CIA or its employees to bring drugs into the United States.

.. sounds to me like it was investigated and nothing turned up?

Re: Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health

#206

Post by retrac »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #139
masklinn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many did basically at the behest of the US? The US very much lead the crusade on drugs criminalisation after WWII.

All of them, it's part of the founding UN treaties, as far as I know.

The People's Republic of China has maintained its draconian anti-drug stance since before the international drug conventions of the 60s and 70s.

I would concur much of the puritanism and authoritarianism around the world about drugs originates from the US, but hardly all of it.

Re: Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health

#207

Post by retrac »

drran wrote: post #159
gravypod wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your opinion of Alcohol, lower grade stimulates (Caffeine), and pre-processed unnatural addictive substances (pure sugar)? If you are on welfare should you be prohibited from drinking alcohol? What about eating low nutritional value fast foods? Obesity and alcoholism is far more rampant than most drugs used in the war on drugs. In America ~40% of our population was obese in 2016 [0], ~25% of people drank >5 d…

> alcoholism is far more rampant than most drugs used in the war on drugs Unfair comparison. Alcohol is legalized and freely available. Let's compare alcohol and drugs at times, when drugs were free to use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars .

That very much depends on the drug. Two years into cannabis legalization in Canada, and alcohol continues to claim the lion's share of the harm from legal drug use. I suspect this won't ever change.

Re: Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health

#208

Post by jowsie »

ArnoVW wrote: post #205
Judgmentality wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate to sidetrack this discussion with an obvious political rant, but it's important to remember the CIA was intimately involved in creating the crack epidemic in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_coca...

I was intrigued so I read the page. "the CIA's Office of the Inspector General which ultimately concluded the allegations were unsupported." "Webb's series led to three federal investigations, all of which concluded there was no evidence of conspiracy by the CIA or its employees to bring drugs into the United States. .. sounds to me like it was investigated and nothing turned up?

The CIA concluding that the CIA didn't do something and hide it from the public doesn't seem the best way to settle such an issue.

They also ruled his death a suicide despite him having 2 bullets in his head.

https://theintercept.com/2014/09/25/managing-nightmare-cia-m...

Re: Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health

#209

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

wombatmobile wrote: post #133
heavyset_go wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason that my local PBA is losing their minds over the potential for drugs like marijuana becoming legal, and it isn't because marijuana is harmful. It's because 60% of the town's budget goes to funding law enforcement salaries, benefits and pensions, and the majority of arrests in this area are for marijuana possession.

But does it necessarily follow that law enforcement budgets will be cut if weed is legalised? Ideally, how might the budget be reconfigured constructively with the same dollar amount to make a better community?

It's not so much a question of law enforcement budgets as it is municipality budgets. Many of these smaller pass-through towns make significant money harassing travelers (speed traps) and through seizures of property. If MJ is legal, they can no longer use things such as "I smell marijuana" as a pretext for exacerbating a traffic stop or stacking more charges.

Re: Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health

#210

Post by MacsHeadroom »

freeone3000 wrote: post #45
vmception wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wish currently illicit/scheduled drugs simply had the same list of disclaimers that FDA-approved drugs had. The side effects aren't different enough to be rebuttals to support their prohibition.

All drugs except schedule I are approved for some therapy, so have the same list of disclaimers and side effect notations (with a smaller sample size than normal). Amphetamine, cocaine, and ketamine are schedule II and III; Cannabis is schedule I.

Most schedule 1 substances are much safer than substantially similar alternatives in their pure forms.

The real reason they remain in schedule 1 is because they've been around too long for any major pharma company to have a monopoly on them.

Cannabis isn't even a drug, it's a whole class of plants of a handful of related species. So it's the exception here.

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