How about an apology to the rest of the world for starting and persecuting this 'war'?
Any country without drugs fully legalized contributes to this war
Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health
241–250 of 304 posts
Re: Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
And Johnny Depp has lost his kids and career to a know liar arguably because of "sentiment". We KNOW Amber Heard is a liar but a court let the nonsense accusation stand. Sometime public sentiment is more important than the truth.
Re: Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe now that politicians see that people are very against drug laws we'll see some of them renege on their hard anti-drug stances. I'd love to see this, but I doubt it. I've sat in on court sessions, and towns and cities pull in a lot of revenue through low-level drug offenses, and cops spend a significant amount of their time investigating and arresting kids for drug offenses. The criminalization of drugs, espec…
So change the incentives. Don't get rid of the war on drugs rewards, redirect them to things like catching serial killers or rapists or whatever.
The vast majority of arrests are from small drug offences. Unfortunately there just aren't enough actual criminals to justify the amount of money they want.
Re: Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Margret Sanger was a eugenicist.
Eugenics is a broad term. There are many aspects of eugenics that make horrific government policy, but are still pretty sensible ideas. Being a "eugenicist" isn't a black spot on her record. Looking at her wiki page [0] she supported people thinking about how large a family they could support and then making decisions to stay within that. That is a commendable philosophy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sa…
That explains why she wrote papers like "A Better Race Through Birth Control" By Margaret Sanger
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents...
Re: Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health
#245Earlier 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…
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…
It looks like drug laws are bound to become a cycle.
1- Drugs are cool, and not really an issue, people take them mostly reasonably.
2- Hey, drugs can be addictive, that's when people stop being reasonable
3- Too many drug addicts, it is a real society problem
4- People demand strict laws, drugs are not cool anymore
5- Parents, who have seen the damage done by drugs support these drastic laws, and tell their kids how bad drugs are
6- Kids, who didn't experience a real drug epidemic, start questioning what their parents told them, and realize that taken reasonably, drugs are not that bad
7- These kids, now adults, seeing how harsh anti-drug laws do more harm than drugs, demand more tolerance
8- Drug-related legislation softens, back to 1
Re: Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health
#246Re: Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health
#247The problem we have on the Left is that even though 65% of the American population prefers our ideas (when stripped of D/R labels) they don't really like us. We're not very good at branding, and we've let Capital convince half the country that it's actually a "liberal elite" that is holding them down. We need to get better at getting our actual message out there. The recent victory is a start, but if it were down to…
This is clearly the democrats biggest problem. Biden just lost Florida largely because Trump falsely called him a socialist. Democrats are absolute losers when it comes to successfully getting people to understand their message.
"Socialism" may be a word we need to retire, not because it's an invalid concept, but because it means different things to different people.
Democratic socialists largely want a saner version of a market economy, where power resides with labor and government aggressively combats capital's worst tendencies, but they aren't calling for old-style command economies like the USSR, Communist China, or Castro's Cuba.
AOC is a fantastically talented politician with a lot of good ideas, but I think she needs to replace the word socialism with something that has less baggage.
This is the general disadvantage socialism has relative to capitalism in terms of appealing to others. Socialism and communism have more than a hundred years of history, including a lot of mistakes we've had to learn from. Capitalism has no memory and therefore on its own terms has no history.
Re: Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
[deleted]
Re: Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eugenics is a broad term. There are many aspects of eugenics that make horrific government policy, but are still pretty sensible ideas. Being a "eugenicist" isn't a black spot on her record. Looking at her wiki page [0] she supported people thinking about how large a family they could support and then making decisions to stay within that. That is a commendable philosophy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sa…
That explains why she wrote papers like "A Better Race Through Birth Control" By Margaret Sanger https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents...
I'm going to guess you didn't read that before you posted a link to it. She's using "race" as in "human race". The argument in that essay is pretty reasonable, she's saying women should have access to birth control. Which they should.
Re: Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health
#250Could 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…
> Maybe now that politicians see that people are very against drug laws we'll see some of them renege on their hard anti-drug stances. I'd love to see this, but I doubt it. I've sat in on court sessions, and towns and cities pull in a lot of revenue through low-level drug offenses, and cops spend a significant amount of their time investigating and arresting kids for drug offenses. The criminalization of drugs, espec…
So like many horribly broken things, it’s a jobs program.