Each state and some cities must take a 'granite-wall-stand' against illegal drugs. Our Judges must impose harsh laws and if need be our legislatures must enact those laws immediately. If I had my way, people who push drugs would face the death penalty first time arrested with no appeal...they deal in death so what's the difference, it is the same trigger for death. Otherwise, all Obama's "a clearer, more decisive response" is just so much hot air. Mexico? The drug cartels pretty much run that country so take them with a grain of salt...La Raza is culpable...
That's right. If we'd just try a little harder we could wipe out the problem of illegal drugs. We need more leaders like good old chairman Mao Zedong to turn this into a great country worth living in. If our government would just emulate his government, we'd cut the drug problem way down. Short of that it will all just be half measures that will never do much good. We need to get the people to all inform on each other, tow the party line or face execution or being sent off to reeducation camps. You're right about appeals too. We don't need no stinkin’ right of appeal. Shoot, we shouldn't be wasting a lot of time with trials either. If we suspect someone is using or dealing in illegal drugs, we could just shoot them in the back of the head or send them off the a reeducation camps just like the Chinese did. The drug problem would shrink down to almost nothing just like it did in China. Wouldn't it be great to live in a country like that? Of course the Chinese are seeing a resurgence in their drug problem because they've gotten too soft. Now they are talking about get tough again. Good old China. Why can't we be more like them?
I'm kidding of course. I'm from an area where they really are hard on people involved with illegal drugs, compared to much of the rest of the nation. They aren't executing people of course but selling any amount of a drug like cocaine or meth can get you life sentence in my state and the prosecutors and judges tend to be really hard on folks in drug cases. Most of the people going to prison in my area are going for drug crimes and they're getting long sentences. Selling a tiny bit of dope to another doper will get someone a lot more time than burglarizing homes in my area and every time we have arraignments in court we'll have along line of folks there on drug charges, more than any other type of charge. It doesn't make drugs expensive or hard to get in my area, but at least we can say we're tough on drugs.
It's all just half measures though. For us to ever make a real difference we're going to have to become something like Chairman Mao's China. The good people of this country, hopefully, will never stand for that. We'll look more and more like Mao's China as we slowly crank up the drug war, but long before we ever get to the point we'd need to get to to achieve the kind of results you are after the people of this country will have had enough.
We will never make illegal drugs go away. It's not possible to make them go away completely anywhere and it's not possible to put a big dent in the problem just by cranking up the drug war another notch and another notch until we finally reach the desired results and remain a free country that doesn't resemble Mao's China.
Pat Buchanan just did an article where he said we have to go Milton Friedman's way or Mao Zedong's way, legalization or Maoist solution. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2200610/posts I don't think we need to legalize all drugs. We just need to recognize the limitations of the drug war, recognize that we quickly reach the point of diminishing returns trying to arrest and incarcerate our way out of the problem if we aren't going to go all out with the Maoist solution. We just blow a fortune, overfill our prisons such that we don't have room to house people who really need to be there for the good of us all, and achieve no better results than we did before we cranked up the drug war the last few notches.
With the exception of marijuana, not many people are using illegal drugs in this country. It's a very small percentage of our population. Personally, I think we should just legalize pot because it doesn't cause that many problems for innocent people and because we completely failing in our efforts to make it hard to find and drive up the price such that people either can't afford to try it or can't afford to use it regularly. That drug is cheap on a per use basis and easy to find anywhere in this country. The likelihood that a pot smoker will get caught is slim and if he does get caught odds are he's going to get basically a slap on the wrist because that's just the way it works in most parts of the country now. People aren't deterred by the law and most who want to smoke it already smoke it. I think we'd have a lot more control over it if we regulated the industry and in so doing we'd deprive these Mexican cartels of most of their income. According to the ONDCP about 62% of their gross receipts from drugs bound for the U.S. About another 28% comes from cocaine but they're just the middlemen for that drug which must first be purchased and smuggled from South America before it is smuggled into this country. Take pot away from them and they will be smaller, less powerful, and far less of a threat in Mexico and here. http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/022208dnintdrugs
As for the other drugs it's just a problem we are going to have to manage and we should try to do it without breaking the bank and without turning into Chairman Mao's China. We could start by trying to use common sense and science to guide our drug policies rather than our emotions. When we let our fear and frustration take over all we get are more laws making more things criminal acts, increasing the punishments on existing crimes, using twisted logic to justify encroachments on constitutional protections, etc. We keep cranking it up and it costs us more and more financially and otherwise yet the drugs keep flowing just like they were before.