101–110 of 211 posts
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I can imagine that, because a crack or meth user can't hold down a decent job. Whether legal or not they'd tend to have to rob to get the money to stay high. And when legal it's likely more people would get addicted.
If you're expecting levels of drug abuse to rise with deregulation, let me just point you to ... well, everywhere that's deregulated drugs.
This, the Parallel Construction story, and the Patriot act having been principally used for the War on Drugs than terror... has made me consider that the War on Drugs may actually be more dangerous to Liberty than the war on terror. No doubt it's basic premise, that putting a substance into one's own body is a "crime", is a pernicious lie. The War on Terror's pernicious lie is twofold: Terrorism isn't a crime, and th…
I can appreciate where you're coming from with regards to the basic premise of the war on drugs. Like the old adage says: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The thing that tears me up about it is that some of these drugs (primarily meth and to a lesser degree heroin) completely obliterate lives and leave a huge cost to the general welfare of society. I don't think that we should be throwing users in jail…
What good intentions? The war on drugs has never been about good intentions. It has been a combination of racism, power-grabbing, and lobbying by big business from the start. Look at the things that were said in newspapers and to Congress in the early days of drug prohibition, back when cocaine was an ingredient in Coca-Cola, if you do not believe me.
"The thing that tears me up about it is that some of these drugs (primarily meth and to a lesser degree heroin) completely obliterate lives and leave a huge cost to the general welfare of society"
The funny thing about methamphetamine is that it has medical uses -- it is used to treat narcolepsy, obesity, and ADHD. Yes, the same drug that people smoke out of broken light bulks happens to be available by prescription and sold at your local pharmacy. You know what the most important difference is? Quality control.
See, pharmaceutical drugs have regulated purity, dosage, and ingredients. You know that the methamphetamine your doctor prescribe will actually be methamphetamine and that it will not be contaminated with oxidizing agents. Methamphetamine is not the safest drug to use to get high (the dose is higher than it would be for medical uses) but even at medicinal doses the black market version is not safe. Likewise with heroin: adulterants are a bigger problem than the drug itself, and pharmaceutical opiates are safer because their production is nice and clean.
"Weed, MDMA, I can see being legalized, but the hardcore stuff I'd be more comfortable simply decriminalizing usage."
There is a bit of irony in saying that you think MDMA should be legalized but that methamphetamine should not be. MDMA is not all that different from methamphetamine (in terms of chemistry, effects, and danger to users) and quite a few "MDMA" pills actually contain methamphetamine (as a mixture, or maybe just methamphetamine depending on how unscrupulous the producer is). MDMA carries with it all the negative effects on amphetamine withdrawal (the "crash").
Really what we need is to legalize and regulate all recreational drugs. A world where methamphetamine is legal but regulated is better than a world where it is decriminalized and unregulated. If someone checks into the hospital because of a bad reaction to drugs, they should be in a position to tell their doctor exactly what drugs they took -- and their doctor should be able to assume that those drugs were not laced with heavy metals.
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You're making a big assumption: that the war on drugs, even if it cost no money and ruined no lives on its own , in any way lowers the number of people addicted to hard drugs and the amount of violence related to hard drugs. While I don't have any specific data, it seems pretty obvious to me that it only increases both.
I do make the assumption that a war on drugs can lower the number of people addicted to hard drugs, and from there the amount of violence related to it. But that assumption includes the way I would handle it, like forcing users to be in rehab before prison is considered.
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Now you're assuming both that drug abuse would increase if drug prohibition ended and that drugs wouldn't get drastically cheaper. Both are claims you would need to support, and claims I do not believe.
I don't think it would matter how cheap it is. Even at a dollar a hit a jobless person tends to need to steal to get that dollar, in addition to money for food. I don't think it's a stretch to believe that legal things become more prevalent than illegal things, especially highly addictive things. Believing that requires no more support than disbelieving that.
I don't see how that's defensible. You seem to be talking only about people with zero money, which is few people even among jobless (even homeless) people. Surely the price of the drug, all else being equal, would strongly correlate to the number of crimes committed to obtain the drug.
> I don't think it's a stretch to believe that legal things become more prevalent than illegal things, especially highly addictive things.
I absolute think that's a stretch to believe, at least for things like drugs in large areas like the USA, where physically preventing their existence altogether is (apparently) not feasible.
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That's because caffeine is legal and therefore dirt cheap.
If crack was dirt cheap, people would still rob to get the money for it, because they couldn't hold down a decent job while using it.
One of them is the drug itself, and since I am not familiar with crack (thank god), I would consider alcohol a good example. It's legal, "dirt cheap", and can utterly destroy lives with a completeness few drugs seem to be able to match. Everybody knows what alcohol can do, yet it still happens a lot (to put it mildly). So yes, making stuff legal and having information instead of disinformation is not a magical solution.
But that doesn't mean illegality and misinformation cannot make things even worse. Legality does affect price and safety, I think it's very hard to deny this or show otherwise (feel free to try). If a dealer sells rat poison instead of Ecstasy, it's not like the buyers can go to the cops about it, for example... and I'm not saying Ecstasy if safe no matter how it's used, I'm saying rat poison is harmful in all cases. And dealers are operating in the underground anyway, so they have little reason to care about adding on top of that. I'm not sure about "gateway drugs", but I am pretty sure about "gateway criminality" being a real thing, and it also applies to addicts, not just dealers.
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Of course there were. Even today there are alcoholic bums that will mug you for booze money. You don't really think they are all crack or smack fiends, do you? Heroin withdrawal can make you wish you were dead, alcohol withdrawal can make you dead . More troubling however is community-consuming gang violence. The sort that we see today and the sort that we saw during prohibition.
> Of course there were. Safe to assume a very small percentage of alcohol users, which makes the difference here. Safe to assume that during Prohibition the vast majority of alcohol users could have been sober during working hours to pay for it.
This myth of "alcohol is not a 'hard drug'" needs to die. Prohibition of alcohol wasn't somehow a different animal than the prohibition of other drugs, you just relate to alcohol more than you relate to cocaine.
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You're also conflating all levels of alcohol usage with crack addiction . It's possible for many people (though granted, probably nearly genetically impossible for some people) to use either without becoming addicted. And for alcoholics, it's often very hard to hold down a job.
It's a matter of percentages. Perhaps 5% of alcohol users have a significant problem with it, that drags down those around them. I don't know what the percentage is for crack but I bet it's over 90%, high enough that we shouldn't take a chance on the users who aren't addicted to it promoting it to the 90% who would become addicted it.
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Prescription opioid drugs like oxycodone kill more people than meth or crack. And there are a lot of people able to hold down a job and pay for cocaine (see also: wall street). What was your point again?
I'd include a lot of legal drugs in my war on drugs!
An addiction to morphine is really little different than an addiction to heroin, except society has a greater understanding of addiction to morphine as an illness, not a crime. Treating morphine abusers like we treat heroin users would be devastating to society. It would be a ludicrously senseless step backwards. Your perspective on drug use is absolutely insane.
Chances are little scientific research was done on the accuracy. What is the false positive rate? Are there policies and procedures in place to determine if the phones actually matched the individual? This can't be done without the voice data.
Are the analysts savvy enough about the limitation of the underlying algorithms?
If these questions have not been addressed, it's possible innocent people have been prosecuted.
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No dude, all we have to do is be nice to everybody, increase our foreign aid even further, and establish Shariah law within the U.S. Oh, and somehow ignore the First Amendment and ban American citizens from insulting certainly notable religious figures. Then they will surely leave us alone.
I'm not sure why my answer merited either a down vote or a sarcastic response, but I regardless, you can work to minimize terrorism without destroying our rights and liberties. I'm not sure where you're drawing the false dichotomy from.
I don't personally live under the false dichotomy that an unending "WAR ON TERROR" is required to suppress terrorism. But nor do I fall into the trope that the solution is to simply let anyone inflict any attack that they wish.
As you say, it is possible to actually fight terrorism without destroying our rights and liberties, and I agree wholeheartedly.