Posted on 01/08/2013 10:59:00 AM PST by Kaslin
Forty-odd (exceedingly odd, I might add) years ago, who would have envisioned a national war against drugs? Nobody took drugs -- nobody you knew, nobody but jazz musicians and funny foreign folk. Then, after a while, it came to seem that everybody did. Drugs became a new front in the war on an old social culture that was taking hard licks aplenty in those days.
I still don't understand why people take drugs. Can't they just pour themselves a nice shot of bourbon? On the other hand, as Gary S. Becker and Kevin M. Murphy argue, in a lucid piece for the Wall Street Journal's Review section, prison populations have quintupled since 1980, in large degree thanks to laws meant to decrease drug usage by prohibiting it; 50,000 Mexicans may have died since 2006 in their country's war against traffickers, and addiction has probably increased.
Becker, a Nobel laureate in economics, and Murphy, a University of Chicago colleague, argue for putting decriminalization of drugs on the table for national consideration. The federal war on drugs, which commenced in 1971, was supposed to discourage use by punishing the sale and consumption of drugs. It hasn't worked quite that way.
"[T]he harder governments push the fight," the two argue, "the higher drug prices become to compensate the greater risks. That leads to larger profits for traffickers who avoid being punished." It can likewise lead "dealers to respond with higher levels of violence and corruption." In the meantime, Becker and Murphy point out, various states have decriminalized marijuana use or softened enforcement of existing prohibitions. Barely two months ago, voters in Colorado and Washington made their own jurisdictions hospitable to the friendly consumption of a joint.
The two economists say full decriminalization of drugs would, among other things, "lower drug prices, reduce the role of criminals in producing and selling drugs, improve many inner-city neighborhoods, [and] encourage more minority students in the U.S. to finish high school." To the Journal's question, "Have we lost the war on drugs?" 89.8 percent of readers replied, "Yes."
One isn't deeply surprised to hear it. National tides seem presently to be running in favor of abortion and gay marriage -- two more elements of the culture wars that began, contemporaneously, with the battle for the right to puff pot. Swimming against powerful tides is no politician's idea of a participatory sport. Conceivably, armed with practical (i.e., $$$$$$) reasons for decriminalizing drugs, advocates of such a policy course will prevail. We can then sit around wondering what all the fuss was about.
What it was about -- you had to have been there to remember now -- was the defense of cultural inhibitions. Sounds awful, doesn't it?
As the counterculture saw things, inhibitions -- voluntary, self-imposed restraints -- dammed up self-expression, self-realization. They dammed up a lot more than that, in truth: much of it in serious need of restraint and prevention.
The old pre-1960s culture assigned a higher role to the head than to the heart. Veneration of instincts risked the overthrow of social guardrails that inhibited bad, harmful and anti-social impulses. The drug culture that began in the '60s elevated to general popularity various practices, modes, devices, and so forth that moved instinct -- bad or good, who cared? -- to the top of the scale of values. There was a recklessness about the enterprise -- do whatever turns you on, man! -- incompatible with sober thought: which was fine with an era that had had it, frankly, with sober thought.
Drugs are very much a part of our time and culture, which is why the war on drugs looks more and more like a losing proposition. The point compellingly advanced by Becker and Murphy may win out over the next decade. If so, the drug gangs may disappear, the prisons disgorge tens of thousands. Will things in general be as good as they might have been had the culture walked a different path 40 years ago -- the path of civilized "inhibition"? Ah. We get down here to brass tacks.
Agreed, WHEN TAKEN TO EXCESS.
But not at all, for some of the drugs you want to completely ban while leaving alcohol legal. Hypocrite.
Drunkenness is basically against the law.
They don’t come into your house to see if you’re drunk - they need probable cause
And if they do happen to have probable cause to enter someone's house, and they find him drunk, can they arrest him for being drunk? If not, it's clearly false that "Drunkenness is basically against the law" as you claim.
Your experience is nonrandomly selected and so can't trump research. Did you test those crazies for pre-existing psychiatric conditions?
THE WORD IS NOT "TYPO", YOU STONER JERKWAD RETARD, THE WORDS ARE "TYPOGRAPHICAL ERROR"!!! You are probably high as hell on heroin right now, you Special Olympics kid. GOD I hate you!!!!1!! Awwww Hell no
My experience is repeated over a million times as I attend the rooms of Narcotics Anonymous and hear the exact same war stories from veteran after veteran. Crack and meth people are very unpredictable and very dangerous. Dismiss my experience and the experience of my fellows as much as you care too, but you are dead-ass wrong. Period.
My experience is repeated over a million times as I attend the rooms of Narcotics Anonymous
Still nonrandom.
But hey, look like an idiot all you want. Shit, dawg, it might actually be funny to have someone so whacky that they defend crack and meth use on this basis!
Now you're making statistical claims (which is progress of a sort); let's see the statistical evidence.
defend crack and meth use
Nobody's doing that - you're hallucinating.
Because most of America hadn't discovered it yet. It is with the advent of 'patent medicine' snake oil salemen, that America first started having much more widespread addiction problems. As a result, laws.
Stop hallucinating.
That is simply not true. I am however the world’s foremost expert on reloading ;)
Truth be told I was just watching some porn and got distracted....
Drug War mythology.
You say it is 'Drug War Mythology'. Prove your claim.
You cannot believe your lying eyes, according to JustSayNoToNannies. You must, instead, believe a (clearly flawed) government report.
The real question with the WOD isn't whether or not drugs are bad. They are (including alcohol). The question is whether or not we're prepared to tear up the constitution in an effort to tell people in a supposedly free society what substances they may or may not put into their own bodies. I'm in favor of cracking down hard on the secondary behaviors that do actual harm to others. Let's declare war on violent criminals and thieves. Declaring war on a THING is a road to nowhere.
I agree with this, however, I would attach consequences to using, so as to propel some who would, to recover. I would also triple-fund recovery institutions and defund prisons.
You can cite all the personal exceptions you wish, I too have known hundreds of dopers and the only one who ever excused it besides the desire to get high, was she “liked the taste” )which in itself was BS.
My point is the motivation to get high, alone, is enough to make drugs abusive, dangerous, and thus illegal, by law and by logic. As a society we have to accept generalizations, and make for exceptions in certain cases (say e.g. medical MJ). The legalization argument falls on its face by trying to comapre it to alcohol or that some users do just fine and there are a host of reasons why that argument fails. We tried banning alcohol, it didn’t work. We did fine as a culture without dope, and it is part of the reason why the culture has degraded in 40 years. Put this crap in front of people as it was with me, and we are dumb enough to try it, to “fit in” or to “escape reality” or to hear the triangle in rock music, whatever. The reality is, this stuff is bad for us as individuals and as a culture and nation. If a few people like your acquaintances can’t sit at home and get high, then so be it. It’s a small price to pay in comparison to the evils that result. And yes, I have plenty of examples of friends who effed up their lives starting with dope and I bet you do too.
End of rant.
“As a result, laws.”
You think that’s how it happens? Bad stuff pops up, then the government steps in to solve it? You must get better acquainted with government.
What corrupts your experience scientifically, as well as the previous poster’s, is that there are no controls. Firstly, trailer parks and NA aren’t Anytown, USA. You are more likely to be dealing with crazy people to begin with. More importantly, alchohol and crack/meth are unequal, in the sense that one is legal and the others not. Might not people with mental health problems be more likely to take crack or meth than random Americans? Thirdly, I assume you never watched the same people only drink booze one night and only take meth another. Nor, as an alternative, compared a person you knew to be mentally healthy and a person you knew to be demented on the same substance with similar doses.
Anyway, even if meth a.d crack are worse than alchohol the question is are they worse enough to be criminal? Because alchohol is pretty dang bad, and despite all the anecdotal evidence you’ve built up about it over your life you can’t be unaware of its deleterious effects. Maybe, just maybe, the only anecdotes you built up around meth and crack is so because, like during Prohibition, its illegality increases its consumption. We haven’t been able to build up how to be social meth- or crackheads. Also, craziest or addicts are more likely to risk using them than regular people.
Even with thousands of years of social drinking alchohol is a menace to those who abuse it. It isn’t quite fair that it gets a free pass. But such was the terrible price we paid to find out Prohibition was a failure. Would that we shift that knowledge over to the boogiemam drugs, and especially pot.
We don’t do fine without dope, though. The War on Drugs is an obvious failure, and is a much more spectacularly wasteful and violent assualt on our rights than Prohibition. It’s just that you won’t admit it, unlike previous generations. That has something to do with how central alchohol is to civilization, and how tertiary opium, amphetamines, marijuana, etc. have been. Moreso we have become a nation of simpering, begging, frightened little sheep.
There are already consequences to using. Nature provides those. Especially if they are as dangerous as you say. I don’t know why we don’t rely on them to do our work for us.
Well, we’ve abandoned personal responsibility for most problems in our civilization. Why wouldn’t more funding for “recovery” be our solution?
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