171–180 of 374 posts
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Nothing weird going on here... It's the free market doing it's thing. Apparently staying in prison is in high demand, driving up prices. /s
How are actions by a government... "the free market"?
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With fentanyl being so potent these days and most guns never winding up killing anybody I wouldn't be surprised if the body count per "retail transaction" wasn't on the same order. This isn't your 70s hippie weed or 80s crack. Dealing in hard drugs these days is a business with a pretty high body count due to the low LD50 of the substances involved. It's like the addictive substances equivalent of giving dynamite to…
Impure drugs are a consequence of drug prohibition.
They’re also sourced from China, a geopolitical adversary where political figures routinely point to the opium wars and revenge for that period on the west.
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>Supporters say the collections are a legitimate way for states to recoup millions of taxpayer dollars spent on prisons and jails. Wait there are supporters of this? You're telling me if I asked 100 people on the street, there'd be someone that said "oh yeah this is a pretty fair and reasonable law to charge the inmates 5-star hotel prices"??
It’s insane. Prison conditions in the US are infamous for the degrading of the human experience to a point of no return. Open rape culture, radicalization, utterly despicable behavior that even barbarians would shiver at openly covered in popular culture as fact. As someone who grew up outside the US, it is truly astonishing how fucked up the system is.
In the UK it costs the taxpayer about $60K per year per prisoner to keep them locked up, according to official figures. However if you take the overall annual budget for the prison service and divide by the number of prisoners I think the figure is closer to $100K. I’ve often wondered what the cost might be to house that population somewhere else, somewhere less expensive, like Turkey or Greece.
I just checked the official annual budget for all of the penal institutions in Turkey. The 2022 budget is 3.2 Billion Liras[1] ($180M) for about 300.000 inmates in total. Dividing, you get about $600 per inmate per year! (and honestly it doesn't even sound that absurd considering the low cost of living here) [1]: https://www.sbb.gov.tr/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/2022_Yili_...
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Swap “drugs” for “guns” and you’d have the majority of HN flip out. The Government isn’t a magical entity of absolute perfection. Large classes of banned substances are indeed banned for good reason. Their effects on individual/societal well being documented quite heavily. Two things can be true at the same time: 1. Some substances that are detrimental to human health need to be controlled. 2. The US government and i…
Its very simple calculation really. Just look at the rest of the world if you're blinded by existing US system. 10s of countries have solved both of these problems in strikingly similar ways (similar as in similar for each problem not across the problems). So, why is US different? Answer: It's not. Majority of US folks need to just grow up to the fact that US humans aren't different than ROW humans and accept what da…
Who then is supposed to pay for a criminal’s stay in prison? Law-abiding tax-payers?
Laws that SEND people to prison (like drug possession laws) can be fairly painted as ridiculous, but when it comes to paying for the actual prison infrastructure… it seems a lot less ethically clear.
Years ago, I got a speeding ticket. I worked nights at the time, and the office to make the payment at had very strange hours because it was from a tiny town. My schedule made it difficult to make it over to the office during open hours, and one of the times I tried it was closed randomly over lunch because again, small town. (I learned later there was only one person who ran the whole office.) A day after my speedin…
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It is a response to: > The government strains, at extraordinary expense, to pretend they can stop drugs from being made, bought and sold, but they can't. My point is that whether or not something still happens once illegal does not have much bearing on whether it should remain so. Nor does it signal failure of the policy as long as there is reduction. Because marijuana being illegal did reduce the production, and con…
Did it? You're relying on surveys on people self-reporting illegal activity and comparing it to post-legalization data. There is a lot to think about in regards to these issues and I suggest you maybe read up on it some more if you are interested. In the meantime, before legalization, weed only become stronger and more readily available. Many teenagers could get it more easily than booze. That was with the government…
At least in my circles, usage has gone up significantly.
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Nothing weird going on here... It's the free market doing it's thing. Apparently staying in prison is in high demand, driving up prices. /s
How are actions by a government... "the free market"?
What drives me absolutely insane about stories like this is that so many of the people suffering under these policies are guilty of little more than market participation. The government strains, at extraordinary expense, to pretend they can stop drugs from being made, bought and sold, but they can't. They simply can't. Countless laws, countless billions of dollars and countless ruined lives later, drugs are no less p…
Plenty of countries, especially in Asia, but also the UAE and possibly others, have successfully stopped nearly all drug use and trade with heavy-handed policies. You may not like what it took to get done, but it did work. I'm not advocating for the heavy-handed approach, but it's intellectually dishonest to say that it can't work. Also, the other countries have done it with a much smaller imprisonment per capita.
> have successfully stopped nearly all drug use and trade with heavy-handed policies.
Like Indonesia for instance? It has one of the strictest drug laws in the world supposedly. Yet 70% of the people imprisoned in the country were convicted of drug related crimes. They had this policy for many years, yet this is what their president said a few years back:
On July 21, 2017, Jokowi stated that Indonesia was in a state of emergency due to widespread drug use, consequently instructing law enforcement officers that “if [narcotics suspects] resist a little bit, just shoot them immediately.”
Which would that their strict policies, far from having stopped nearly all drug trade and consumption, were a complete failure.
Also around 2% of all people in the country are active drug users.
> but it did work
So no, it didn’t
> but it’s intellectually dishonest to say that it can’t work
Yes. Theoretically if you imprison or shot every drug user fast enough and your police force is not thoroughly corrupt it might work. Not sure both of these things can ever be compatible in practice, though.
*https://ppid.bnn.go.id/konten/unggahan/2020/10/Drug-Abuse-Pr...