It's helping law enforcement maintain high budgets.
The drug war fuels the violence of the drug trade and that violence requires the police be well equipped to handle it.
After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'
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Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'
#12The war on drugs is the single government program that has created far more damage to individual rights than any other. In law school it seems like every case that whittles away the fourth amendment just a little bit more is a drug case.
I'd say the income tax is in second place in terms of destruction of individual rights.
Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
killdozer style?
Yes, and soon before all the heavy machinery has kill switches mandated in them. xD I suspect that weakness will be shored up as we internet of things every car truck and pogo stick.
But all that's just what those machines are waiting for. Did we learn nothing from Maximum Overdrive?
Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'
#14This is one of those weird things about American Democracy where everyone I speak to thinks the Drug War was a terrible thing and should be stopped. And yet, our politicians never substantially do anything to change the status quo.
Are you kidding me? The "war" on drugs today is nothing like it was at all in the 90s.
For the most obvious example, marijuana is legal to purchase for recreational use in dozens of states, with more coming.
Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'
#15> "The war on drugs was an absolute miscalculation of human behavior," said Kassandra Frederique, who heads the Drug Policy Alliance, a national group that advocates for total drug decriminalization. For me it would be incredibly interesting to know how much it was a miscalculation or actually it was very well calculated. The "War on Drugs" have failed to make USA safer, healthier or any other positive metric. But, i…
> a national group that advocates for total drug decriminalization.
Will this ever be achieved in the US in the next... 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? 50 years?
Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'
#16Its still doing the most important things--lining the pockets of some, criminalizing large groups of people that the government wants to marginalize, and acting as a cornerstone of restrictive laws that are imposed upon the citizenry.
> large groups of people that the government wants to marginalize
Who does the government want to marginalize? I thought the government (and the rest of the world, really) was all about equality and inclusion as of late.
Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'
#17All I got was this DARE t-shirt
Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'
#18This is one of those weird things about American Democracy where everyone I speak to thinks the Drug War was a terrible thing and should be stopped. And yet, our politicians never substantially do anything to change the status quo.
At a federal level, perhaps not much is changing. But in the past decade, many states have been decriminalizing or legalizing recreational sale of certain drugs.
Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'
#19> "The war on drugs was an absolute miscalculation of human behavior," said Kassandra Frederique, who heads the Drug Policy Alliance, a national group that advocates for total drug decriminalization. For me it would be incredibly interesting to know how much it was a miscalculation or actually it was very well calculated. The "War on Drugs" have failed to make USA safer, healthier or any other positive metric. But, i…
The reasoning is well established at this point. It was started by the Nixon administration to reduce the amount of left and left-leaning voters, particularly black Americans.
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." — John Ehrlichman, to Dan Baum for Harper's Magazine in 1994, about President Richard Nixon's war on drugs, declared in 1971.
Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'
#20This is one of those weird things about American Democracy where everyone I speak to thinks the Drug War was a terrible thing and should be stopped. And yet, our politicians never substantially do anything to change the status quo.
Are you kidding me? The "war" on drugs today is nothing like it was at all in the 90s. For the most obvious example, marijuana is legal to purchase for recreational use in dozens of states, with more coming.
What do we need to do next that would have the biggest effect, decriminalize cocaine/crack cocaine?