Posted on 01/04/2004 10:44:31 AM PST by patdor
Once we understand that the War on Drugs is an abject failure, the question arises, what can we do? What is the solution for ending the drug war?
The answer is very simple.
The core issues of crime and other social ills of the drug war come directly from the black market, not the drugs themselves. The black market is created by, and in fact encouraged by, the socio-economic effects of prohibition (called the “War On Drugs”).
As a result, the cure can only come by ending prohibition. But ending prohibition does not mean a sudden "free for all" of "legalization".
When alcohol prohibition was repealed, it was replaced by regulations and tax statutes that restricted distribution and maintained purity and dose (alcohol content by percentage). It also placed the methods of regulation for sale to the public largely in the hands of local and state governments, where it rightly belongs.
As a nation we are a very diverse culture. The values and cultural heritage of the east are different from the south and are quite different from the values of the west. The result is that federal level recreational substance laws fail in their ignorance of underlying social issues that are highly variable across the nation.
In other words, each state and locality should be afforded their own means of dealing with issues relating to drug abuse.
Thus, ending drug prohibition will be handled much like the end of alcohol prohibition - with the strict regulation and taxation of the manufacture, distribution, and sale of recreational substances.
The model of alcohol
For instance, comparative analysis of even the most pessimistic studies of marijuana show it to be safer and more benign than alcohol. Therefore it’s easy to see marijuana regulations mirroring those for beer and wine.
Hard alcohol is regulated more strictly than beer and wine, and certainly there are substances that should receive stricter regulation than marijuana. Soft drugs such as MDMA (Ecstasy), Psilocybin (Mushrooms), and Peyote, would need stricter regulation - along the lines of hard alcohol, which has significant restrictions on public use and distribution.
The very hardest of recreational substances, (i.e. the drugs with the highest physiological addiction rates, such as cocaine and heroin), would be regulated and distributed only by the government and directly to users. This distribution would seriously undercut, and virtually end, the black market for these drugs. This would greatly discourage the creation of new drug addicts.
It’s important to consider this last aspect of ending prohibition most thoroughly. It is the demonized “hard drug” user that the prohibitionists point to when declaring that the drug war must be continued.
(Excerpt) Read more at civilliberty.about.com ...
(Just had to get that out of the way)
Yes, rather than deal with harmful drugs abuse out in the open, like we do with cigarettes and drunk driving, we drive them into the shadows where they are beyond our reach. If we spend half as much educating against the physical effects of harmful drugs as we did pumping money into this game of one cat vs 100 mice, we'd see real trends away from drug use.
Cigarette use is on the decline, but it took a long time to educate free people away from making that choice. If you don't believe that free people, armed with the truth, can make good decisions for themselves, then our Republic is as good as dead. Bring on the nanny state, because freedom's too scary.
| Rank | Location | Receipts | Donors/Avg | Freepers/Avg | Monthlies | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 29 | South Carolina | 115.00 |
7 |
16.43 |
201 |
0.57 |
68.50 |
8 |
Thanks for donating to Free Republic!
Move your locale up the leaderboard!
I privately tell him why I feel that he is way off base, and he respects my opinion.
I'm afraid we are there now.
One of the clearest and most succint points I've come across in all the time I've been on FR. Hear hear!
The states can do whatever they want to, we still have states and dry counties where alcohol and drinking is regulated at the local level.
Make that the Libertine view.
The re-legalization of drugs will happen right after pornography, obscenity, blasphemy, abortion, fornication, adultery, homosexuality, promiscuity, and perversion are re-banned.
The American people overwhelming support interdiction and incarceration as the best remedies to control and reduce the spread of illegal drugs in America today. (Pew Survey, Feb.2001) The efforts by America's Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) is working well. Could it be better? Yes. But the legalization of illicit substances like marijuana, cocaine and heroin is not the answer. Increased law enforcement efforts are the answer. Education and drug treatment are also part of the equation. We have enough problems with alcohol in our society and shouldn't be opening the flood gates to drug legalization.
Correction: This is his first recent post.
I stand corrected. His first recent post.
(And now I'm off to play my Jim Croce "Bad Bad LeRoy Brown" MP3).
Simple. The same way you end the War on Murder, War on Rape, War on Armed Robbery, etc. Just make it legal. Heck, let's just wipe all criminal laws off the book. This whole "War on Crime" thing just isn't working. After all, we should just trust our fellow citizens to make only good choices, right?
And a great many of them are caused not by drugs, but by the war on drugs.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.