Posted on 06/16/2010 9:58:48 AM PDT by logician2u
I'm confused. When I walk around busy midtown Manhattan, I often smell marijuana. Despite the crowds, some people smoke weed in public. Usually the police leave them alone, and yet other times they act like a military force engaged in urban combat. This February, cops stormed a Columbia, Mo., home, killed the family dog and terrorized a 7-year-old boy -- for what? A tiny quantity of marijuana.
Two years ago, in Prince George's County, Md., cops raided Cheye Calvo's home -- all because a box of marijuana was randomly shipped to his wife as part of a smuggling operation. Only later did the police learn that Calvo was innocent -- and the mayor of that town.
"When this first happened, I assumed it was just a terrible, terrible mistake," Calvo said. "But the more I looked into it, the more I realized (it was) business as usual that brought the police through our front door. This is just what they do. We just don't hear about it. The only reason people heard about my story is that I happened to be a clean-cut white mayor."
Radley Balko of Reason magazine says more than a hundred police SWAT raids are conducted every day. Does the use of illicit drugs really justify the militarization of the police, the violent disregard for our civil liberties and the overpopulation of our prisons? It seems hard to believe.
I understand that people on drugs can do terrible harm -- wreck lives and hurt people. But that's true for alcohol, too. But alcohol prohibition didn't work. It created Al Capone and organized crime. Now drug prohibition funds nasty Mexican gangs and the Taliban. Is it worth it? I don't think so.
Everything can be abused, but that doesn't mean government can stop it, or should try to stop it. Government goes astray when it tries to protect us from ourselves.
Many people fear that if drugs were legal, there would be much more use and abuse. That's possible, but there is little evidence to support that assumption. In the Netherlands, marijuana has been legal for years. Yet the Dutch are actually less likely to smoke than Americans. Thirty-eight percent of American adolescents have smoked pot, while only 20 percent of Dutch teens have. One Dutch official told me that "we've succeeded in making pot boring."
By contrast, what good has the drug war done? It's been 40 years since Richard Nixon declared war on drugs. Since then, government has spent billions and officials keep announcing their "successes." They are always holding press conferences showing off big drug busts. So it's not like authorities aren't trying.
We've locked up 2.3 million people, a higher percentage than any other country. That allows China to criticize America's human-rights record because our prisons are "packed with inmates."
Yet drugs are still everywhere. The war on drugs wrecks far more lives than drugs do!
Need more proof? Fox News runs stories about Mexican cocaine cartels and marijuana gangs that smuggle drugs into Arizona. Few stop to think that legalization would end the violence. There are no Corona beer smugglers. Beer sellers don't smuggle. They simply ship their product. Drug laws cause drug crime.
The drug trade moved to Mexico partly because our government funded narcotics police in Colombia and sprayed the growing fields with herbicides. We announced it was a success! We cut way back on the Colombian drug trade.
But so what? All we did was squeeze the balloon. The drug trade moved across the border to Peru, and now it's moved to Mexico. So the new president of Mexico is squeezing the balloon. Now the trade and the violence are spilling over the border into the United States.
That's what I call progress. It the kind of progress we don't need.
Economist Ludwig von Mises wrote: "(O)nce the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness ... (w)hy not prevent him from reading bad books and bad plays ... ? The mischief done by bad ideologies is more pernicious ... than that done by narcotic drugs."
Right on, Ludwig!
John Stossel is host of "Stossel" on the Fox Business Network. He's the author of "Give Me a Break" and of "Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity." To find out more about John Stossel, visit his site at johnstossel.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM moved to Mexico. So the new president of Mexico is squeezing the balloon. Now the trade and the violence are spilling over the border into the United States.
Huh. Looks like they took the "Report Abuse" button off. I guess you'll just have to ping a moderator.
You are once again assuming I hold a position I do not have.
I am not in the least bit interested in pinging the moderator. You are not bothering me.
OK. Then I guess we’re done.
Which means that 72% of those with "schizophrenia" and "substance abuse" haven't been convicted of violent crime. So even there preventive imprisonment of that group would have a high "collateral damage" rate.
My reason, though, for desiring the kind institutionalization (NOT the punitive imprisonment) of severely crazy people is not simply to prevent crime.
Imprisonment is still imprisonment in crucial aspects. It depends on the threat of violence, most notably, as opposed to offering to shelter and feed various "needy" people. In this it differs not from any number of government programs, all designed to help us "for our own good".
It is a kindness to them. They are dependent and helpless.
Their consent would then follow, as it does in homeless shelters and soup kitchens.
Just as I “forcibly” detain and shelter and care for my kids, or we “forcibly” detain and shelter and care for the senile and demented, and the severely mentally impaired - we need to do so for the crazy. They are just as needy of sane adult supervision.
There are many classes and degrees of "mental illness" and "helplessness" and "dependency" that our caring government would kindly provide for in various ways, if only we'd let them. They would of course be tailored to meed the needs and different levels of skills that we have. A lot of this should begin at the earliest ages, which is why it so important to increase funding for mental health professionals in government schools, and so on. Ahem.
As you see, your hypothesis was not validated.
“Imprisonment is still imprisonment in crucial aspects. It depends on the threat of violence,”
I agree that we must tread carefully. But we can’t just say the minors, the demented/senile, the mentally handicapped, and the crazy can only be made to stay in a safe place if they consent.
If they are too immature or too out of it to consent, they can’t consent, or won’t perhaps because they think you are Napoleon and they are Josephine.
You mention the government taking everyone over, but that would be last resort in any system I’d design. I just think mature caretakers need to be allowed to “imprison” in the sense of “keep even if against their will” their incapacitated or immature loved ones.
My Great Aunt did not want to be kept at home. She went senile. They had to hide her car keys and alarm the back door. She was “imprisoned.” But if she wasn’t “imprisoned” she drove like a lunatic and wandered lost for miles.
Eventually she went to a nursing home, and she is not allowed to leave there, either. She has not given her consent. Some patients there are tied down at intervals. What else can you do?
“As you see, your hypothesis was not validated.”
What hypothesis? That Libertarians support the legalization of recreational drugs, and Conservative don’t?
I think it is very well validated.
I’ve been refuting your statement that the sober people would wield influence while users/addicts wouldn’t.
I’ve given you several examples of extremely influential people who are/were addicts.
And then there are all the high functioning users in all walks of life.
My mother currently resides in a nursing home, and exhibits what they call "dementia". They are not allowed to restrain her or even force her to bath. So far she cooperates enough that they haven't evicted her, although sometimes I wonder if that might change.
She had fallen in her last residence, an "independent living" building, and broken her shoulder. From there to the hospital, and then to the rehab/nursing home. At the nursing home, moderate restraints would have seemed appropriate at first: she kept getting out of bed to walk alone to go the bathroom when she was first admitted, ignoring/forgetting the "demand" that she summon an aide to assist her, which stemmed from their concern that she might fall again.
I worried that she might just fall out of bed at night as well, and asked why the facility could not use a hospital bed with side rails that would confound her when she was especially fuzzy-headed and "force" her to ask for help. They told me that was against the law, a reaction to prior nursing home "warehousing" scandals.
So there's a bit of hypocrisy, it seems. I was prepared to restrain my mother to protect her from herself!
The more "libertarian" institutional response has worked out so far. They moved her to a more monitored room with a roommate and a mattress pressure alarm at first, and she hasn't so far fallen and broken anything, but who knows what the future holds.
As regards your Great Aunt, my first thought is that hiding her keys seems like a justifiable move, in the first priority to prevent injury to others.
But what about injury to herself? Is it not, as with my mother, justifiable to prevent these impaired individuals from hurting themselves, analogous to preventing children from hurting themselves?
Perhaps there is a way to thread the needle, to have a few classes of diminished legal autonomy that protect the real "children", without threatening to infantilizing all of us.
Court appointed guardianships? I'd like it to be a formal legal process, with the burden of restricting autonomy unmediated by psychiatric "experts".
If only society had intervened, Beethoven would have been saved from himself!
LOL.
I think the best answer is provided by good law. I am fairly content with the current laws regarding minors, the demented/elderly, folks in comas, and people born with mental disabilities whose parents get continual type custody after they turn 18.
Of course I could do some serious tweaking, like the removal of kids from parents on the say-so of a social worker, the Terry Shiavo type stuff - there need to be better safeguards.
I am not happy with the current laws regarding the insane.
I know there is a danger that someone could say “You’re crazy!” even if you aren’t, and then get control over you. Who decides who is crazy? Some liberals think I am crazy! Some atheists think believers are crazy!
I think I’d go with a jury type approach for the alleged insane. If desired, they could appear before a jury of their peers to obtain release from any mental institution. It’s the best idea I can keep up with. I don’t want to leave it in the hands of “professionals” alone, I’d feel safer with a jury of my peers.
Of course that makes it seem criminal, which it is not intended to be.
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