Legalizing Drugs And Opening The Border Will Only Worsen Our Nation’s Addiction Crisis

The Federalist ^ | January 5, 2021 | Jeffrey B. Stamm

[Kaslin]

More in the link

[dynachrome]

Legalizing drugs will make people easier to control. What’s a few extra deaths to the marxists?

[Texas Eagle]

Yyyeahhh. I think that’s the whole idea, kemosabe.

[Kaslin]

Exactly

[Savage Beast]

Do those afflicted by the decadence care?

Are they too drunk with decadence to understand?

Are they so blinded by the mass psychosis that now grips America that they have lost all contact with reality?

[100%FEDUP]

Like Sun Tzu wrote, imbed operatives in your enemy’s camp to help destroy them from within!

[1Old Pro]

Doctors know best, first do no harm. I believe the AMA endorsed Demented Biden. They’re so bad they can’t even notice that the guy is incapable of handling an unrehearsed question, good grief.

[Texas Eagle]

China is still trying to get even for that whole heroin addiction thing that devastated their country back in the early 1900s using the demonicRAT Party as their proxy.

Yo, China, that wasn't us. That was Great Britain. We kicked their asses out of this country for their destructive little practices. Go get them. Leave us alone.

[allendale]

That is exactly what the globalists want to do. In their perverted minds America must be destroyed for the planet to be saved.

[Semper Vigilantis]

chicom troops in Canada, chicom troops in Mexico...
The US is in a pincer movement waiting to be sprung if the traitors within cannot do as the CCP directs by way of locking down, poisoning and disarming the population.

[MikelTackNailer]

Legalizing drugs would render the cartels bankrupt and leave that industry to Americans.

[Kazan]

Legalizing drugs will make people easier to control.

You're out of your mind. How does the government control people that are high PCP, LSD or some other narcotic that makes one lose control of one's sense?

And, who the hell wants the government trying to control them?

Legalizing drugs means more addicts, more deaths due to homicide and negligent behavior and more durg-addicted citizens incapable of working.

[Scrambler Bob]

Meanwhile, Good Morning America is pushing “Dry January”, to help the health of people who have been drinking more during lockdown.

[zek157]

Have you ever looked into what happened in Portugal when they decriminalized possession in 1999?

https://www.statista.com/chart/20616/key-developments-since-portugal-decriminalized-drugs/

Might surprise you that 20 years later number of users and deaths are down considerably.

[retired but active]

I’d rather hang with a bunch of stoners than with a bunch of drunks...drunks will get you killed...😀

[Bob434]

Oh noooo, you are just being irrationally hysterical. So says the left

[LouAvul]

NOT ACCORDING TO FREEREPUBLIC’S STEENKING LIBERTARIANS! OPEN BORDERS! FREE SMACK AND COKE! IT’S THEIR UTOPIA!

[know.your.why]

A human being thats been high for months to years is much easier make dependent on the system not just the drugs. And then be USED as a WEAPON while in a semi-mindless state incapable of real rational thought. It knows few things more than 1)need to get high soon. 2)need to keep welfare 3)my ‘owners’ tell me that Trump is evil and to burn, riot, etc.

Thats why drugs are legalized!

[buffyt]

I think you are 100% RIGHT!

[nathanbedford]

Here is a reply from 11 years ago. Every point made is only more true today:

Should we decriminalize?

It seems to me the question is not whether you or I should care about what a third party puts into his body, that is afterall a moral judgment, rather, the question is whether the government should care about what someone puts into his body?

Clearly the government has a constitutional right to regulate and criminalize drugs just as it has the right to regulate food and ethical drugs. The question is not whether it's constitutional but whether it is good public policy.

Seems to me that if a government prohibition on the use of drugs actually eliminated drug use, few except perhaps some aging hippies and top models would argue vehemently against such laws which would redeem so many wretched lives. But experience has shown that government fiat does not eliminate drug use. So the real question is, does government prohibition reduce drug use? And if it does, is the price worth paying? It is not entirely clear that the laws against drug use actually reduce their use because the prohibition itself creates a financial incentive which works to subsidize its use. The government has never found a way to eliminate or reduce drug usage without inserting a profit factor. Worse, the more the government is effective in reducing the inflow of illegal drugs, the more it creates a counter incentive of increased profitability by the law of supply and demand. Perversely, since the drugs tend to be addictive there is a physical compulsion to seek more of the drug and, since government efforts to eliminate it inevitably raise its price, users who are in withdrawal are tempted to finance their habits by becoming dealers. So it is not clear whether the government's efforts to reduce drugs by prohibiting their use actually does more harm than good.

One of the prices we pay for our government's campaign against drugs is certainly a loss of liberty. I tend towards the Libertarian's view that it is none of the government's damn business what I put in my body. However, I recognize that such usage inevitably presents a risk to society. I do not want inebriated drivers plowing into my automobile whether they are drunk on alcohol or drugs. But society has learned a hard lesson, that it is better to make the drunk driving the crime but not the consumption of alcohol itself.

Another price we pay is a loss of privacy. Mandatory testing of both government and private employees is to some degree intrusive. Queries about drug use and application forms are equally intrusive. Undercover agents operating in public bathrooms is an affront to our dignity. Eavesdropping of telephone conversations is unquestionably an invasion of privacy. It is the reduction, or rather the presumed reduction, if any, in the amount of drug usage obtained by these intrusions worth the price?

We pay a great financial price as well. The war on drugs costs us billions of dollars annually in enforcement and incarceration costs. Is this money well spent?

There is an insidious price as well: corruption and its handmaiden, cynicism. Our police, our border agents, our judges, one might say the entire criminal justice apparatus has been infected with a corruption generated by the huge profits to be made-profits which are there only because the government by its policies has created them. Inevitably cynicism results in the whole of the people beginning to despise rather than revere the rule of law.

Because drugs are illegal, the price is high and profits are enormous. Yet we send our boys to fight in Afghanistan to deprive Taliban chieftains of their poppy fields which finance at least indirectly the very terrorism we fight against. Would it not be better simply to eliminate the profits in poppies by legalizing the drug? Can we ever hope to bring sanity to Columbia while we in effect subsidize narcos by billions of dollars a year? Is the damage to our foreign policy, like the damage to our precious rule of law, worth what benefit we get from criminalizing drugs use?

On balance, I have to throw my lot in with William F. Buckley and say that the war against drugs is lost and we ought to try a new tact.