Posted on 07/05/2005 9:30:27 AM PDT by Sensei Ern
For many years, I have been a strong opponent of legalizing drugs. As you read this, remember that I am still against drug legalization, but I have more sympathy for the opposing argument.
The reason I have been opposed to drug legalization is to protect children. I grew up in a home that was one step up from a crack house..at least we had heat and food. I know first hand what can happen when a child lives in those conditions.
As a counter, I have always felt that use of tobacco and alcohol should be legal for those of a responsible age.
The reason I am considering a change is because of the pain I went through this last month. Four weeks ago, I had a root canal done on a tooth...it was Friday. Once the Novocain wore off, I was in serious pain because the doctor was inexperienced and left a partial root. I experienced pain worse than listening to Rosanne Barr sing the National Anthem. He forgot to write a prescription.
I called the emergency number only to be told I could see the doctor on Monday. TWO WHOLE DAYS IN EXTREME PAIN! I had some 800mg Ibuprofen in the medicine cabinet. That only took away enough pain to convince myself to not commit suicide to stop the pain.
On Monday, I was given a prescription of Tylenol 3 with Codeine and an antibiotic. That took away the pain. Until it ran out. Again, extreme pain. Another dentist did another root canal...and again did not get the whole root. I made sure he gave me a prescription for the pain, before I left the office.
Finally, when that ran out, and another dentist completed the root canal, the pain has subsided.
To be in the kind of debilitating pain I was in, cannot be described. Bill Cosby once talked about taking your bottom lip and pulling it over your head...that comes close.
I have always been an advocate of personal responsibility. That conflicted with knowing that some of the drugs offered today are so dangerous that they needed to be regulated. Then, I thought back about how things were a hundred years ago. The doctor prescribed a treatment, and you either made it yourself, or went to the pharmacist, who mixed up the more potential drugs.
Back then, the only regulation was, could you afford the cost? Drugs were available, and the pharmacist would determine whether you were abusing. If you OD'd on a drug from abuse, you died and life went on for others. But, you could get drugs if they were needed, and you did not have to wait until Monday. You didn't need to wait for approval from anyone to use a drug.
That is enough about that for the moment.
If drugs were to be legalized, they should be regulated like alcohol and cigarettes...have a legal purchasing age. Also, if you do harm to another while under the influence of anything, you should be held personally responsible...to the fullest extent, especially capital punishment for causing a death. If you are taking drugs to get high, strap yourself into a chair and sleep it off.
If drugs were immediately legalized, we could expect some immediate effects. For one, the drug addicts would run out and by everything, and we would have a rash of overdosing for about a month. The rest of us could then go on with our lives, only mourning the loss of a relative, instead of daily living with the horror of a drug addict in our lives.
Currently, I believe law enforcement should be stronger. But, I could be moved to undecided if I heard good arguments for the opposite.
--Pray for our troops --Pray they have wisdom to do the right thing --Pray they remain courageous --Pray they know we love and support them --Pray they get the equipment they need to do the job --Pray for their safe return home to a hero’s welcome
Finally...someone who thinks like I do! IMHO,
Conservatism = less intrusive, smaller Government
Liberalism = more intrusive, larger Government
This is the barometer I use on EVERY decision (within reason), even when the issue is against the popular FR opinion. I've gone through a lot of asbestos underwear because of it!
Which hasn't happened at all. The WOD's imho, has been a huge failure, a waste of taxpayer's money. Drugs are still available everywhere in the country. Meth labs are a rural favorite, kids are getting high in every city and town in this country. And we're still throwing money at it, like it's working. Maybe initially, it did some good, but now, forget it. Like I said earlier, until the government can develop a way to earn money from changing the way it is now, nothing will change. And we'll still have these interesting drug war threads.
No, I am arguing that by taking certain actions (abusing drugs), you have forfeited some of your right to "own your body", not because of your health, but because the health and welfare of other citizens is effected. Does my right to swing my fist end where your nose starts? No rights are absolute; they end where they start to adversely infringe on the rights of others. Drug abusers do this constantly.
The problem with drugs is that, with a great many of them, there is a loss of control over one's actions. How do you simultaneously allow people to do something that deprives them of control of their actions, and hold them responsible for those same actions? Either you have to place drug users out of the protection of society, or society has the right to defend itself from the behaviors of the drug users. Either Society isolates the users, or they isolate themselves while abusing. I have no faith in the druggies voluntarily isolating their own damage.
"If the consequence of indiscriminate drug use was unemployment without legal recourse, cirrhosis of the liver without government medicaid, dying in an alley without anyone stopping to look, mandatory attempted murder charges against anyone driving a vehicle with ANY intoxicant in their system, etc., then I might have more sympathy to their cause. But as long as society has to carry the burden of the dregs of druggies, it also has the right to try to abate the problem in any way the society collectively decides."
You opinion is exactly how I feel.
I have to disagree with you about the cigarettes. I read a thread a couple months ago about killings over black market cigarettes in NY City. I'll see if I can dig that up, but I don't recall the title.....
I'd rather beat the tar out of either, take their keys and put them in the back seat to sleep it off.
Man guilty in bootleg cig killing
A Brooklyn Supreme Court jury took only an hour to convict Jermaine Cox, 28, of second-degree murder in the death of 19-year-old Cody Knox in November 2003 because the teen was selling illegal cigarettes for $4 a pack, instead of the usual street price of $5.
All vice laws are unconstitutional.
I had root canals done on my two front teeth when I was six. I managed to live through the pain without a desire to legalize all drugs.
With artificial price supports from the feds, coke importers make billions. You've got forest rangers changing from guarding picnic baskets from Yogi to getting to play Miami Vice in South Dakota, assembling SWAT teams for cash crop pot growers on BLM land. Meth manufacture has been a gift from the Gods for Middle-American LEOs. Not only can they get the payoffs like their bros on the borders receive, but they can pitch the line that they need to get federal funding to buy updated toys to "battle this New Threat."
Hundreds of thousands of people depend on illegal drugs for a livelihood. Legalizing drugs would bankrupt the entire Industry.
Past month prevalence of marijuana use (ages 12+) 2001: US- 5.4%; Netherlands- 3.0%
US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, National Household Survey on Drug Abuse: Volume I. Summary of National Findings (Washington, DC: HHS, August 2002), p. 109, Table H.1.
Trimbos Institute, "Report to the EMCDDA by the Reitox National Focal Point, The Netherlands Drug Situation 2002" (Lisboa, Portugal: European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, Nov. 2002), p. 28, Table 2.1.
The rate of heroin addiction in the US is about twice as high as in the Netherlands:
"The number of [heroin] addicts in the Netherlands has been stable - at 25,000 - for many years. [about 0.17%]
Source: Netherlands Ministry of Justice, Fact Sheet: Dutch Drugs Policy, (Utrecht: Trimbos Institute, Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction, 1999),
http://www.minjust.nl:8080/a_beleid/fact/cfact7.htm
"There were an estimated 980,000 hardcore heroin addicts in the United States in 1999, 50 percent more than the estimated 630,000 hardcore addicts in 1992." [about 0.34% ]
--www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs07/794/heroin.htm
Uh... the fact that very very few people commit property crimes to buy a $5 six-pack?
If cigarettes were made illegal tomorrow, I doubt you'd see people who were purchasing black market cigarettes raping women and throwing them out windows because they were under the influence of tobacco. It's a nice effort, but your comparison is not valid.
I wasn't talking about crimes committed under the influence, I was talking about crimes committed to get funds to purchase. And if cigarettes were made illegal tomorrow, I guarantee you'd see a jump in property crimes as desperate addicts tried to afford the suddenly much more expensive price of their addictions.
As for the "raping women and throwing them out windows" crap, you've got a vastly overinflated idea of the power of drugs... and you're committing a very basic fallacy in that you're assuming that rare abuses justify prohibition. Hey, people use cars to escape from crimes... let's ban cars! After all, if criminals couldn't use getaway cars, there'd be fewer crimes, wouldn't there? Who cares about the tremendous societal costs such a ban on motor vehicles would impose?
The pharmaceutical cost of heroin is about $0.02 per dose.
Do you honestly think it would sell for anywhere near that?
Heck no. It'd sell at the price determined by the free market... you know, supply, demand, competition, all that sort of thing. Do you honestly think that the free market price wouldn't be much, much lower than the black market price? Do you honestly think that black markets don't result in tremendously overinflated prices, especially when billions of dollars are spent on enforcement?
You honestly think they faded away when prohibition ended?
I honestly think that Prohibition-related crime disappeared when Prohibition ended. That's pretty much a tautology.
Read the rest of my post, dear, and you'll see where your mind went blank. It seems you still haven't been able to focus long enough to read the entire post.
I'm not your "dear", and my mind isn't blank. Yours, however, is badly clouded. You seem to think that 1) drugs take control of everybody who uses them and forces them to do bad things, and 2) prohibition is a good way to deal with the illusory problem, no matter the cost.
Do you think all the little gang members will go back to school, study hard and become productive citizens?
Some of them will. The ones who chose to remain criminals will find fewer criminal opportunities, and much less income with which to fund their activities.
Sure. It fits your logic. Instead of trying to stop burglars, cops should instead go after all the fences, because then the burglars wouldn't have anyone to sell to, right? Your house being broken into is strictly small time, not worthy of police attention when they have bigger fish to catch.
What is your solution to get drugs off the streets that will be effective and permanent?
There is no more an effective and permanent solution to street drugs than there is for mugging, theft and black marketeering will always exist. The answer certainly isn't to ignore it. The ACLU wouldn't like my approach. Something along the lines of injecting the convicted street dealer with all the drugs found on him at the time of arrest.
I have had eight. My teeth would be a great candidate for extreme makeover. They look like a thirty-two piece jigsaw puzzle with four pieces missing.
I think it is the Englisg blood in my ancestory.
And a particularly bad one. A ludicrously, hilariously bad one. You estimated that three times more people would die of overdose than die in the entire United States of all causes in a year.
Often, as a young child, I wished my brothers would OD because they were destroying my family. Any finances my mom saved were wasted in bail payments. Much of anything of value we had was "stolen" (my brothers claimed it was stolen, but I suspect they sold it for drug money).
Do you realize that this only bolsters the anti-prohibition case? Your mother's finances were wasted on bail money because the drugs your brother used were illegal. Had they been legal, your brothers wouldn't have been arrested, and no bail would have been necessary. Your family's possessions were fenced for drug money because drugs sell at black market prices... ridiculously overinflated. If your brothers were into booze rather than narcotics, they could have easily afforded their drug of choice through a regular income rather than having to steal.
Yes, I thought about mentioning the increased restrictions on cigarettes that are pushing them ever-closer to a flourishing black market. This, again, proves the anti-prohibition case. There was a killing in New York over black market cigarettes. Not free market, black market. Why is there a black market in the first place? Because of government-imposed restrictions that push the price of legal cigarettes higher and higher, until it becomes profitable to operate a black market.
Black markets are inefficient, because there are added transaction costs involved with smuggling and illicit distribution... among other things. Weapons must be purchased and enforcers hired to defend one's turf against competitors. Law enforcement officials must be evaded or bribed. A black market cannot compete with a free market, but as governments impose transaction costs of their own, eventually the black market becomes profitable and we start seeing illegal dealers on our streets, killing their enemies and any innocents who get in the way, perverting our justice system, and imposing tremendous costs on society.
Based on those numbers, 3% was way too low.
Yes, but is this because it is so much more prevalent and easily available?
My concern is that if all other drugs were as easily obtained, their use, and the problems associated with them would skyrocket, while the problems associated with the war on drugs, would fall.
The choice that has to be made is: which is worse?
I don't claim to know the answer. It may not be possible to know. But it would be wrong to think that drug use would remain at current levels if it were legalized.
We do. The punishments that society inflicts for abuse (not USE, but ABUSE) of alcohol is paltry. I would treat the operation of vehicle with ANY amount of alcohol in system as attempted manslaughter, with permanent revocation of driving privileges the LEAST of the punishments. I would treat any assaults made while under the influence as automatically being aggravated assaults. I would treat public intoxication as of yore: 3 days in the public stocks. Or at least publication of their photo in the paper.
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