Posted on 11/20/2004 10:12:36 AM PST by LesbianThespianGymnasticMidget
Simply eradicating the plants is not a solution.
I question whether any plan to eradicate cultivation will work. The incentive to grow a cash crop that far exceeds any other in terms of profit margin is almost impossible to overcome.
As long as there is high demand for the product, the supply will come from somewhere.
Take the profit out of it and they won't grow it. You can't win the drug war by making drugs illegal. Prohibition, like socialism, just doesn't work. Time to put our thinking caps on. Denial is not a river in Egypt.
Agreed. People in the US (and particularly trendy Hollywood and rock stars who feel obligated to use heroin) need to understand that there is a supply side and a demand side. I have seen a few, but clearly not enough of the PSA's that shove the link between drug use and funding of terrorism right in the face of the casual drug user. The same people who agitate n the side of relaxing drug penalties in the US are the ones insinuating that our government has something to do with narcoterrorism elsewhere - when more than any thing else it is their discretionary choice to buy these drugs that is causing enormous dislocations elsewhere in the world.
The addicts and recreational users in this country and the west are the guilty parties. Lay off the poor farmers and quit subjecting them to these poisons.
Only partially true. The people who grow opium crops are incredibly poor. They make very little from selling their crops on the market. They are not the ones profiting.
As I said before, the main reason they grow these crops is because in most cases, the land can not support any other types of crops. They are forced to grow it or die. Our only chance to stop the production is to help them with alternatives, such as non-narcotic plants.
The people growing it in Afghanistan, Burma, Laos, and other places are not making a profit. They barely make enough to stay alive.
Better the cash flow through Afghanistan (whose government is in our back pocket) than someplace like Burma or Laos.
It's so obvious that the approach we've been taking for the last 40 years hasn't done anything to curb the drug problem. It's built huge and powerful empires for those in power, but it's also robbed the taxpayer of billions. The war on drugs is like the war on poverty, the more money you put into it, the bigger the problem gets.
It's true they are not making the big bucks, that comes from refinement and distribution. But they are making enough to give them incentive to grow it. It's a subsitence level profit, but a profit non the less.
Of course, my comment was directed more towards those saying we need to take the profit out of it. It is hard to take the profit out of something when there is almost no alternative and little profit to begin with.
The Wa farmers in Burma are forbidden to refine opium in any way. If they did, they would get a lot more for it on the markets in Yunnan. Obviously, this rule is there for a reason. To keep the profits in the hands of others. Our battle is not with the growers but unfortunately, the US government can't see this and still views them as the problem.
That's the drug problem distilled to half a sentence. The market will supply demand, somehow, someway. The only way to block supply is to make it very, very expensive, in legal consequenses to the suppliers.
But that's impossible with our commitment to civil liberties and the restraint we put on law enforcement in the pursuit of those liberties. I recently watched an HBO series called 'The Wire'. One of the sub themes that became evident was the difficulty in convicting people that are involved in the drug trade. It's darn near impossible, and as soon as they get one person, two more take his place.
You can't stop the suppliers, you can't stop the cultivators, so the last decade or so has seen an effort to come down hard on the users. Now we have a prison system that is overloaded with people that serve serious time for simple possession. What effect has that had?
None. I'm starting to think there is no solution.
Spray the fields with mines. Heroin is also hazardous to health.
Maybe there is........shhhhhhhhhhhh.......whisper.......legalization?
Farmers don't produce heroin.
I guess I'm willing to entertain the idea as an alternative, but it wouldn't be a solution. You trade one set of problems for another. Which set of problems would be worse? Or do we already have all those problems along with the problems of prohibition?
I don't see it happening though. Two very powerfull political groups oppose it. One is the people that oppose it on moral grounds. The other is the drug dealers and the politicians they pay off.
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