War On Drugs

I'm for legalization of all drugs.

But the question is if drugs would be legalized/decriminalized, what would happen to all the institutions and jobs dependent on them being illegal?

Prisons, lawyers, judges, police, dea, politicians, pharmaceuticals, doctors, etc.

I think it could be done, but my god we've dug ourselves into quite a hole.
 
I'm for legalization of all drugs.

But the question is if drugs would be legalized/decriminalized, what would happen to all the institutions and jobs dependent on them being illegal?

Prisons, lawyers, judges, police, dea, politicians, pharmaceuticals, doctors, etc.

I think it could be done, but my god we've dug ourselves into quite a hole.

Is that the Ron Paul method of population control?
 
Im not going to spend much time on this subject. No matter what truth I tell you, it wont change already made-up minds.
I have lived many years outside the USA. In that time I have had the opportunity to live in a country that doesnt enforce drug offenses. The laws are on the book, but not enforced. Drugs are also inexpensive and within the financial means of almost all......Drug related crimes have gone through the roof. Ive lived it, Ive walked the path.
This thing you speak of only looks good on paper. The stats get moved around to say whatever the pro-drug academics wish. You are reading and viewing only what they want you to know. Consider this, put it in the realm of possibility, and search for the truth.....OPEN YOUR :eek:
 
I'm for legalization of all drugs.

But the question is if drugs would be legalized/decriminalized, what would happen to all the institutions and jobs dependent on them being illegal?

Prisons, lawyers, judges, police, dea, politicians, pharmaceuticals, doctors, etc.

I think it could be done, but my god we've dug ourselves into quite a hole.

Einstein's theory of crazy was repeating the same failed thing over & over and expecting a different result wasn't it?

Good post.
 
Leaked paper reveals UN split over war on drugs
Latin American nations call for treatment strategy, claiming UN's prohibition stance plays into hands of paramilitary groups
Leaked paper reveals UN split over war on drugs | World news | theguardian.com

Major international divisions over the global "war on drugs" have been revealed in a leaked draft of a UN document setting out the organisation's long-term strategy for combating illicit narcotics.

The draft, written in September and seen by the Observer, shows there are serious and entrenched divisions over the longstanding US-led policy promoting prohibition as an exclusive solution to the problem.

Instead, a number of countries are pushing for the "war on drugs" to be seen in a different light, which places greater emphasis on treating drug consumption as a public health problem, rather than a criminal justice matter.
 
More casualties in the war on drug-using Americans
TheMoneyIllusion

I wonder how many dozens/hundreds of crimes each of these poor "victims" committed until they were caught on the crimes that put them away?
This is just one more self serving piece of journalism (so called)
Its would be laughable if it were not so sad that people will mistake this
for truth.
Doc, you can really digem up.
 
Yea but I also wonder the number of crimes that wouldn't have been committed IF this WAR never began and "drugs" of abuse especially marihuana were either, effectively controlled
(and I'm not referring to DEA scheduling) decriminalized or legalized.

This "WAR" had been a farce from the outset, which was destined for failure yet our government continues to throw money into a sinking ship! So WHY does this BULLSHIT CONTINUE?

Money! Many in our government and some foreign countries have a vested interest in drug interdiction.

Let's see how many "agencies" would be deemed unnecessary if proper drug control was initiated?

I counted EIGHT a while back!

But we couldn't have that!
The number of federal employees which be released on the "private sector" has been estimated to be around 50K!

Oh no we will continue to feed this beast conjured up by those who know nothing about drugs, drug use/abuse,
drug control etc!

Make no mistake about it this "war" is one many well intended government projects void of "checks or balances" that morphed into an uncontrollable beast that must be fed and we shall continue to feed it.

Damn utter stupidity!
 


The War on Drugs Is LostThe War on Drugs is Lost
Wm. F. Buckley Jr.



Last summer WFB was asked by the New York Bar Association to make a statement to the panel of lawyers considering the drug question. He made the following statement:

WE ARE speaking of a plague that consumes an estimated $75 billion per year of public money, exacts an estimated $70 billion a year from consumers, is responsible for nearly 50 per cent of the million Americans who are today in jail, occupies an estimated 50 per cent of the trial time of our judiciary, and takes the time of 400,000 policemen -- yet a plague for which no cure is at hand, nor in prospect.

Perhaps you, ladies and gentlemen of the Bar, will understand it if I chronicle my own itinerary on the subject of drugs and public policy. When I ran for mayor of New York, the political race was jocular, but the thought given to municipal problems was entirely serious, and in my paper on drugs and in my post-election book I advocated their continued embargo, but on unusual grounds. I had read -- and I think the evidence continues to affirm it -- that drug-taking is a gregarious activity. What this means, I said, is that an addict is in pursuit of company and therefore attempts to entice others to share with him his habit. Under the circumstances, I said, it can reasonably be held that drug-taking is a contagious disease and, accordingly, subject to the conventional restrictions employed to shield the innocent from Typhoid Mary. Some sport was made of my position by libertarians, including Professor Milton Friedman, who asked whether the police might legitimately be summoned if it were established that keeping company with me was a contagious activity.

I recall all of this in search of philosophical perspective. Back in 1965 I sought to pay conventional deference to libertarian presumptions against outlawing any activity potentially harmful only to the person who engages in that activity. I cited John Stuart Mill and, while at it, opined that there was no warrant for requiring motorcyclists to wear a helmet. I was seeking, and I thought I had found, a reason to override the presumption against intercession by the state.

About ten years later, I deferred to a different allegiance, this one not the presumptive opposition to state intervention, but a different order of priorities. A conservative should evaluate the practicality of a legal constriction, as for instance in those states whose statute books continue to outlaw sodomy, which interdiction is unenforceable, making the law nothing more than print-on-paper. I came to the conclusion that the so-called war against drugs was not working, that it would not work absent a change in the structure of the civil rights to which we are accustomed and to which we cling as a valuable part of our patrimony. And that therefore if that war against drugs is not working, we should look into what effects the war has, a canvass of the casualties consequent on its failure to work. That consideration encouraged me to weigh utilitarian principles: the Benthamite calculus of pain and pleasure introduced by the illegalization of drugs.

A YEAR or so ago I thought to calculate a ratio, however roughly arrived at, toward the elaboration of which I would need to place a dollar figure on deprivations that do not lend themselves to quantification. Yet the law, lacking any other recourse, every day countenances such quantifications, as when asking a jury to put a dollar figure on the damage done by the loss of a plaintiff's right arm, amputated by defective machinery at the factory. My enterprise became allegorical in character -- I couldn't do the arithmetic -- but the model, I think, proves useful in sharpening perspectives.

Professor Steven Duke of Yale Law School, in his valuable book, America's Longest War: Rethinking Our Tragic Crusade against Drugs, and scholarly essay, ``Drug Prohibition: An Unnatural Disaster,'' reminds us that it isn't the use of illegal drugs that we have any business complaining about, it is the abuse of such drugs. It is acknowledged that tens of millions of Americans (I have seen the figure 85 million) have at one time or another consumed, or exposed themselves to, an illegal drug. But the estimate authorized by the federal agency charged with such explorations is that there are not more than 1 million regular cocaine users, defined as those who have used the drug at least once in the preceding week. There are (again, an informed estimate) 5 million Americans who regularly use marijuana; and again, an estimated 70 million who once upon a time, or even twice upon a time, inhaled marijuana. From the above we reasonably deduce that Americans who abuse a drug, here defined as Americans who become addicted to it or even habituated to it, are a very small percentage of those who have experimented with a drug, or who continue to use a drug without any observable distraction in their lives or careers. About such users one might say that they are the equivalent of those Americans who drink liquor but do not become alcoholics, or those Americans who smoke cigarettes but do not suffer a shortened lifespan as a result.

Curiosity naturally flows to ask, next, How many users of illegal drugs in fact die from the use of them? The answer is complicated in part because marijuana finds itself lumped together with cocaine and heroin, and nobody has ever been found dead from marijuana. The question of deaths from cocaine is complicated by the factor of impurity. It would not be useful to draw any conclusions about alcohol consumption, for instance, by observing that, in 1931, one thousand Americans died from alcohol consumption if it happened that half of those deaths, or more than half, were the result of drinking alcohol with toxic ingredients extrinsic to the drug as conventionally used. When alcohol was illegal, the consumer could never know whether he had been given relatively harmless alcohol to drink -- such alcoholic beverages as we find today in the liquor store -- or whether the bootlegger had come up with paralyzing rotgut. By the same token, purchasers of illegal cocaine and heroin cannot know whether they are consuming a drug that would qualify for regulated consumption after clinical analysis.

But we do know this, and I approach the nexus of my inquiry, which is that more people die every year as a result of the war against drugs than die from what we call, generically, overdosing. These fatalities include, perhaps most prominently, drug merchants who compete for commercial territory, but include also people who are robbed and killed by those desperate for money to buy the drug to which they have become addicted.

This is perhaps the moment to note that the pharmaceutical cost of cocaine and heroin is approximately 2 per cent of the street price of those drugs. Since a cocaine addict can spend as much as $1,000 per week to sustain his habit, he would need to come up with that $1,000. The approximate fencing cost of stolen goods is 80 per cent, so that to come up with $1,000 can require stealing $5,000 worth of jewels, cars, whatever. We can see that at free-market rates, $20 per week would provide the addict with the cocaine which, in this wartime drug situation, requires of him $1,000.

My mind turned, then, to auxiliary expenses -- auxiliary pains, if you wish. The crime rate, whatever one made of its modest curtsy last year toward diminution, continues its secular rise. Serious crime is 480 per cent higher than in 1965. The correlation is not absolute, but it is suggestive: crime is reduced by the number of available enforcers of law and order, namely policemen. The heralded new crime legislation, passed last year and acclaimed by President Clinton, provides for 100,000 extra policemen, even if only for a limited amount of time. But 400,000 policemen would be freed to pursue criminals engaged in activity other than the sale and distribution of drugs if such sale and distribution, at a price at which there was no profit, were to be done by, say, a federal drugstore.

So then we attempt to put a value on the goods stolen by addicts. The figure arrived at by Professor Duke is $10 billion. But we need to add to this pain of stolen property, surely, the extra-material pain suffered by victims of robbers. If someone breaks into your house at night, perhaps holding you at gunpoint while taking your money and your jewelry and whatever, it is reasonable to assign a higher ``cost'' to the episode than the commercial value of the stolen money and jewelry. If we were modest, we might reasonably, however arbitrarily, put at $1,000 the ``value'' of the victim's pain. But then the hurt, the psychological trauma, might be evaluated by a jury at ten times, or one hundred times, that sum.

But we must consider other factors, not readily quantifiable, but no less tangible. Fifty years ago, to walk at night across Central Park was no more adventurous than to walk down Fifth Avenue. But walking across the park is no longer done, save by the kind of people who climb the Matterhorn. Is it fair to put a value on a lost amenity? If the Metropolitan Museum were to close, mightn't we, without fear of distortion, judge that we had been deprived of something valuable? What value might we assign to confidence that, at night, one can sleep without fear of intrusion by criminals seeking money or goods exchangeable for drugs?

Pursuing utilitarian analysis, we ask: What are the relative costs, on the one hand, of medical and psychological treatment for addicts and, on the other, incarceration for drug offenses? It transpires that treatment is seven times more cost-effective. By this is meant that one dollar spent on the treatment of an addict reduces the probability of continued addiction seven times more than one dollar spent on incarceration. Looked at another way: Treatment is not now available for almost half of those who would benefit from it. Yet we are willing to build more and more jails in which to isolate drug users even though at one-seventh the cost of building and maintaining jail space and pursuing, detaining, and prosecuting the drug user, we could subsidize commensurately effective medical care and psychological treatment.

I HAVE spared you, even as I spared myself, an arithmetical consummation of my inquiry, but the data here cited instruct us that the cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs. We have seen a substantial reduction in the use of tobacco over the last thirty years, and this is not because tobacco became illegal but because a sentient community began, in substantial numbers, to apprehend the high cost of tobacco to human health, even as, we can assume, a growing number of Americans desist from practicing unsafe sex and using polluted needles in this age of AIDS. If 80 million Americans can experiment with drugs and resist addiction using information publicly available, we can reasonably hope that approximately the same number would resist the temptation to purchase such drugs even if they were available at a federal drugstore at the mere cost of production.

And added to the above is the point of civil justice. Those who suffer from the abuse of drugs have themselves to blame for it. This does not mean that society is absolved from active concern for their plight. It does mean that their plight is subordinate to the plight of those citizens who do not experiment with drugs but whose life, liberty, and property are substantially affected by the illegalization of the drugs sought after by the minority.

I have not spoken of the cost to our society of the astonishing legal weapons available now to policemen and prosecutors; of the penalty of forfeiture of one's home and property for violation of laws which, though designed to advance the war against drugs, could legally be used -- I am told by learned counsel -- as penalties for the neglect of one's pets. I leave it at this, that it is outrageous to live in a society whose laws tolerate sending young people to life in prison because they grew, or distributed, a dozen ounces of marijuana. I would hope that the good offices of your vital profession would mobilize at least to protest such excesses of wartime zeal, the legal equivalent of a My Lai massacre. And perhaps proceed to recommend the legalization of the sale of most drugs, except to minors.

 
Im not doubting you, but name the EIGHT.
What is "proper drug control"?

Ive lived this drug laws not enforced thing. Not pretty.
The government will find another hole to throw the money down[:o)] Yes or No?
 
My list was certainly not exhaustive yet it did include divisions and sub-divisions within a particular "agency".

So give it the old college try and see what you come up with, THEN we shall compare notes, which I strongly suspect will exceed EIGHT without difficulty.

(Remember its not only AGENCIES but also their NAMED divisions and subdivisions which I included)

Oh incidentally, although I'm a registered "independent", I generally lean to the right side of the political spectrum. However there are a few issues which I vehemently disagree with conservatives on. No doubt his fool hearty, archaic and indiscriminate "drug war" is one of them.

It's been a enormous waste of money from beginning to end. WHY!!!! Because after some FIFTY YEARS and BILLIONS of dollars of tay payers money (mine/yours) it has yet to achieve it's intended "optimal" objective (anyone who says different is feeding the US citizenry a line OF SHIT or twisting known statistics for political gain) decreasing the prevalence or incidence of recreational drug use/abuse.

Best
JIMMY
 
My list was certainly not exhaustive yet it did include divisions and sub-divisions within a particular "agency".

So give it the old college try and see what you come up with, THEN we shall compare notes, which I strongly suspect will exceed EIGHT without difficulty.

(Remember its not only AGENCIES but also their NAMED divisions and subdivisions which I included)

Oh incidentally, although I'm a registered "independent", I generally lean to the right side of the political spectrum. However there are a few issues which I vehemently disagree with conservatives on. No doubt his fool hearty, archaic and indiscriminate "drug war" is one of them.

The name itself is a sham, so Ive always thought. "WAR ON DRUGS" If it were a war, and fought like a war. It would have done much more damage to the occupation. But its not a WAR, its just one more failed POLICE ACTION. Such a Vietnam, and like Iraq and Afghanistan became.
When we finished with Japan and Germany, These guys only wanted to know how high to jump. That's a war

It has been horribly fkup no doubt. But I can say 2 things for sure. Things would be worse with out it, and they would have thrown the money down some other hole.
Just a question/ not a smartass comment. I wonder which war has cost the most. War on drugs or the War on poverty.
 
How the hell did you derive at that conclusion?

This page is acting funny on me right now. This may post many times or not at all............The way I learn most things---By living and experiencing.-----I walk the path Mr. Oxbig. Theorizing is for others. I live with intention. Its been hard.

Theory is better, its easier and you dont have to live with the consequences:)
Read below.



Im not going to spend much time on this subject. No matter what truth I tell you, it wont change already made-up minds.
I have lived many years outside the USA. In that time I have had the opportunity to live in a country that doesnt enforce drug offenses. The laws are on the book, but not enforced. Drugs are also inexpensive and within the financial means of almost all......Drug related crimes have gone through the roof. Ive lived it, Ive walked the path.
This thing you speak of only looks good on paper. The stats get moved around to say whatever the pro-drug academics wish. You are reading and viewing only what they want you to know. Consider this, put it in the realm of possibility, and search for the truth.....OPEN YOUR :eek:
 
And how is that countries economy compared to the U.S. We can afford to fight a war on drugs, even though it is a waste, other countries can't. :banghead:
 
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President Obama Tells Clarence Aaron He Can Finally Go Home
President Obama Tells Clarence Aaron He Can Finally Go Home - ProPublica

President Obama has ordered an early release from prison for Clarence Aaron, who has spent twenty years there, hoping for mercy.

Aaron’s commutation is one of eight crack cocaine-related sentences commuted today. Obama said the sentences were meted out under an “unfair system” that among other things featured a vast disparity between crack and powder cocaine cases.
 
Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke
http://m.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/outrageous-hsbc-settlement-proves-the-drug-war-is-a-joke-20121213?print=true

Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who's ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a "record" financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank.

The banks' laundering transactions were so brazen that the NSA probably could have spotted them from space. Breuer admitted that drug dealers would sometimes come to HSBC's Mexican branches and "deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in a single day, into a single account, using boxes designed to fit the precise dimensions of the teller windows."

This bears repeating: in order to more efficiently move as much illegal money as possible into the "legitimate" banking institution HSBC, drug dealers specifically designed boxes to fit through the bank's teller windows. Tony Montana's henchmen marching dufflebags of cash into the fictional "American City Bank" in Miami was actually more subtle than what the cartels were doing when they washed their cash through one of Britain's most storied financial institutions.
 
How Colorado disrupted the Drug War
http://pando.com/2014/01/07/how-colorado-disrupted-the-drug-war/

Lost in the sound and fury were the questions America should be asking as our state moves forward. Questions like: Why shouldn’t adults be permitted to use pot? Is there really anything wrong with adults using mind altering substances? Is the unregulated black market for marijuana that’s been created by prohibition really safer than the highly regulated market that would be established via legalization? And how did politically moderate Colorado of all places end up defying all of the drug war’s vested interests and legalizing weed?
 
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