Really. I know everybody likes to point to Holland and scream, "See! Some of them still take drugs!", and throw that up there as a "failure", but it ain't so. They have less drug use, and even better, much less Drug War.
Anyone who thinks cocaine is a soft drug is an idiot.
Looks more like anecdotes that contradict statistics.
"Debunk" means to expose and disprove. If the material in this article stands as acceptable proof, you're operating based on disturbingly low standards of proof.
Drugs are already readily available regardless of the law.
That's the point.
The drug lords are drug lords because drugs are illegal. Take the money out of drugs and you would wipe out a huge segment of organized (and otherwise) crime.
Al Capone (And Joe Kennedy) became very wealthy - and produced major crime of all sorts because of prohibition. It was a failure. It was a failure for all the same reasons as the WOD.
There are plenty of conservatives that see the collateral damage caused by the WOD as being far worse than the original problem being addressed.
A better solution is to teach our children not to use drugs and the reasons why. It starts at home. The government makes a lousy mom and/or dad.
Seems to me that what today's Europe proves is that relying on the government to solve social problems simply doesn't work. The War on Alcohol was fought almost a century ago in the US and showed clearly the gangsterism which results from outlawing a substance that people want.
Unfortunately, the present War on Some Drugs is being fought without the benefit of a Constitutional Amendment to permit it. As a result, there is no amendment to repeal in order to stop the madness.
There is no one anymore "conservative" than William F. Buckley, founder of The National Review magazine which was the founding of the modern American conservative movement, and he long advocated decriminalizing marijuana - not making it free and legal, just not creating an economy for the gangsters out of it and putting people in long-term incarceration for possessing more than an ounce.
His view, that we have created the crime environment, and it is winning, just as it won with prohibition.
This nation had the worst heroin and opium epidemic of its history, from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. It was fought, and quit successfully with large and consistent amounts of public education, in schools and the media and treatment in publicly supported clinics. We did not create a socially destructive criminal environment for it. It had been reduced to a minor social nuisance when we started enacting drug control laws in the 1920s.
Just imagine how many criminals there would be if tobacco was illegal, and how criminally profitable it would be.
We would be better off literally buying the entire drug supply in Columbia and Afghanistan - 100% of it, at prices the drug cartels could not afford. No supply, no crime. Then we'd just have to help the current addicts through their withdrawal.
Oh, I forgot, other drugs are being invented all the time.
Can't win. Just help the addicts try to get off and don't make a criminal mess out of whatever you do to suppress the use of bad substances. The crime environment you create is worse than the numbers of people who will not avoid the addictions. Those numbers are probably the same no matter what.
LOL anecdotal evidence debunks nothing.
How? It comes right out and says that Holland has much less drug use than we do.
If the caterwauling of moms was proof of anything, then we should let the Million Mom March disarm us.
It's a bad idea to start an article off with something as stupid as this: "Ever hear a liberal or libertarian say that we need to legalize “soft” drugs like cocaine and marijuana because they did this in Holland and it was wildly successful? You know: kids immediately lost interest in these drugs and stopped taking them?"
I've never heard anyone refer to cocaine as a "soft" drug. The rest of the article is short on facts. So at least one out of every 20 kids has experimented with coke or ecstasy? Note that there's no proof of this "fact" in the article. Also, how does that compare to other countries?
This article debunks nothing.
The Foreign Ministry, Justice Ministry, and Health Ministry issued a joint diplomatic press release which can only be called wry understatement:
The impression had been gained that Mr. McCaffrey was coming to the Netherlands to familiarise himself on the spot with Dutch drugs policy. The Netherlands would not exclude the possibility that if Mr. McCaffrey familiarises himself with the results of Dutch drugs policy, he will bring his views more closely into line with the facts" (Financial Times [London], July 16, 1998, p. 2).
And why were they upset, you ask...
Whatever the reason this fact eluded General McCaffrey and his staff, it did not elude the journalists to whom he spoke. In less than 24 hours, the world's media caught and corrected McCaffrey's mistake. They showed that he had arrived at his Dutch figure by lumping homicides together with the much higher number of attempted homicides, and that he had not done the same for the U.S. figures. Thus, the Drug Czar had compared the U.S. homicide rate with the combined rates of homicide and attempted homicide in the Netherlands. The correct Dutch homicide rate, the international press reported, is 1.8 per 100,000, less than one fourth the U.S. rate (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, July 13, 1998; Reuters, July 14, 1998).
It's a shame that he didn't link the article he referenced so others could read it for themselves.
Misconceptions about the Netherlands
The aim, as in many countries, is to reduce addiction to hard drugs and the crime associated with it. In the Netherlands, one way of achieving this has been to separate the markets for hard and soft drugs. The theory is that if soft drugs are brought out into the open and away from the criminal dealers, their use is far less likely to lead to hard drug addiction. Young people are free to try smoking a joint if they wish; they can do it openly and without coming into contact with criminals. The statistics show that under these circumstances, most young people do not form a habit. (Nuffic, the Netherlands Organization for International Cooperation in Higher Education, was established in 1952.)
Lots of interesting tidbits in there Doc.
Boy, they should have seen Holland 20 years ago. The place was drug city. It sounds like (from the stats) that it's improved quite a bit since then.