love that the link is the text version
After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'
51–60 of 353 posts
Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'
#52Just think of the the savings if they just removed Cannabis from the war and legalized it? I'm guessing a trillion $$ over the last few decades. Just think of how many peoples lives have been utterly destroyed by the system over low level Cannabis possession/use? Even now the Biden Administration and the Democrats in Congress are dragging their feet and not fulling an election promise to the American people by legalizing Cannabis. I predict it won't happen because of lobbying from some of the industries below and the 100's of millions given to to these same representatives over the years to keep the status quo.
Winners 1.Police System/Unions 2.Prison System/Unions 3.Judicial System/Lawyers. 4. Politicians
Losers 1. The American people/tax payer
Disclaimer: I do not use Cannabis or ever have.
Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'
#53Created a lot of jobs in the industry of arresting and detaining humans. Being number 1 per capita in prison population isn't a lean operation, a lot of people's lives depend on the system continuing. I think the solution is to rent bulldozers, armor them, and just level a bunch of them. Too many prison beds, too many laws, it's all gotten very dumb.
> Created a lot of jobs in the industry of arresting and detaining humans. What portion of those arrested + detained are the type of people we want in society/civilization?
A huge portion of them, considering just how much of our prison system is filled with first-time non-violent offenders. Also considering the socioeconomic effects of even a misdemeanor drug conviction at a young age, a lot more career criminals could've been prevented by not sending them to prison in the first place.
Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'
#54Its 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.
To borrow the quote from another post on this thread (which is still very valid): "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?'
#55I see the failure of the War on Drugs and the resultant human toll as an indictment of the big government idea. Its an attempt to central micro-manage an issue that should be addressed at the state or even community level. The federal gov often involves itself in much more than it should.
Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'
#56Created a lot of jobs in the industry of arresting and detaining humans. Being number 1 per capita in prison population isn't a lean operation, a lot of people's lives depend on the system continuing. I think the solution is to rent bulldozers, armor them, and just level a bunch of them. Too many prison beds, too many laws, it's all gotten very dumb.
> Created a lot of jobs in the industry of arresting and detaining humans. What portion of those arrested + detained are the type of people we want in society/civilization?
Probably a sizable number of them. Because the people in prison are still people, and there's no good reason to keep most of them locked in a cage if they're not posing a risk to other people.
Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether or not it was Nixon and friends acting like racists is secondary. Tons of individuals and institutions piled on because there was power and money in it for them.
My read is that your statement is incorrect, in that they were not simply 'acting like racists'. Instead, they were instituting racially motivated policies to combat the advances of the civil rights movement through the '60s. Plus ca change.
Isn't that exactly how you'd expect racists to act?
Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'
#58> "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…
If you haven't heard of him before, you may want to read up on Harry J. Anslinger[0]. Joe Rogan also has a really in depth episode on him. He was deputy commissioner of the federal department that oversaw prohibition. when that ended, he went on to narcotics enforcement.
Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'
#59Counterpoint: The war on drugs has been progressively ramped down since the late 90s. NYTimes wrote a long story about how during the feds quit using tactics such as convicted drug dealers to flip on their bosses, etc. We aren't putting as many drug dealers in jail and we aren't putting many drug users in jail. What you get is an epic rise in opioid deaths over the past 30 years and chaos on the streets of our cities…
When I was younger drugs (meth) ruined a lot of friends and some family. While I believe in personal responsibility, availability was a big factor and drug pushers are a thing. I don't mind if they were incarcerated to stop or slow the damage they caused/exacerbated
Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'
#60> "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…
Its not an uncommon thing in history either. One of the incarnations of the KKK supported prohibition because it gave them an excuse to persecute catholic irish immigrants.