Official: War on Drugs at 'Tipping Point'

Yahoo ^

[uncbob]

The HBO show the WIRE shows the drug war in all its glory and how stupid it is especially the captain using the bag anology for booze

Now he is esentially legalizing it in his district by getting it to move into an isolated area

What really is the irony is almost every segment one or more of the cops gets blotto on booze after spending the day fighting SOME DRUGS

[festus]

Well if a senior us official said it then it must be true.

I mean if you can't trust senior us officials who can you trust ??????????

[SteveMcKing]

With the WoT in full swing, I don't think the feds are screwing around anymore when it comes to drugs. Hopefully the gloves are off, finally, and someone's gonna get hurt. Good.

[Wolfie]

Why Drug Cops Can't Win"

[Balto_Boy]

The DEA has been getting billions of our tax dollars for the past 2 decades at least. If they have been "screwing around" and the "gloves" have not "been off", then what have we been paying for?

[pooh fan]

Give me a break. You can't compare a TV show to real life...no matter how much your live resembles Jerry Springer, Survivor or Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire.

[Charlotte Corday]

When you have seen the emotional trauma in the eyes of a child trying to come to grips with a parent who is getting high, it can no longer be considered a "private" problem.

And putting that parent in jail helps, exactly, how??

[rmmcdaniell]

I worked for three months in an addiction treatment center, which taught me clearer than anything, that looking at drug alcohol use as a non-issue because it is something someone does in private could not be further from the truth. No man is an island. When you have seen the emotional trauma in the eyes of a child trying to come to grips with a parent who is getting high drunk, it can no longer be considered a "private" problem. When you have seen the physical and emotional scars that spouses of drug users alcoholics carry, it is hard to argue that it is a "private" problem.

Nothing but rehashed prohibitionist nonsense. Same crap, different century.

[SteveMcKing]

then what have we been paying for?

Cops' overtime pay in order to run D.A.R.E. and other afterschool programs that don't work.

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

Yep. Why don't we just relegalize slavery? After all, drug addiction is just another form of it.

[TKDietz]

According to the National Survey on Drug Abuse & Health cocaine use is on the rise again and has been the last few years. As for price, I don't know about the rest of the country but at least where I live the price has dropped considerably over the last few years according to narcotics officers I have spoken to and clients I represent as an attorney. Price here has dropped to a little over half what it cost twenty years ago and purity is up from where it was back then. That may just be a local phenomenon.

[Ken H]

While the Drug Policy Alliance has been pushing false numbers and false logic on the mainstream for years,

What are some examples?

Is the war on drugs expensive? Yes. is the War on drugs difficult? Yes. But is it worth it? Absolutely.

What is the supply/demand situation in late 2004 compared with 1989, when Dr. William Bennett was appointed as the first drug czar?

IOW, has supply been reduced and has demand fallen since this was made a cabinet level position?

[eno_]

and availability has even surged in some areas

Maybe adult use of Ritalin is displacing coke. Why buy nose candy when insurance will pay for your zoom zoom.

[eno_]

but i would rather have full prison cells than full morgues

You should look into the relative lethality of even hardcore needle drugs versus alcohol addiction. You might change your mind about the effectiveness of prisons keeping the morgues empty.

[eno_]

The DEA has been getting billions of our tax dollars for the past 2 decades at least

Make that 35-70Billion per year, depending on how much local law enforcement and prisons you factor in. Over 20 years that adds up to hundreds of billions - several times what it cost to fight Operation Iraqi Freedom and run the occupation.

[eno_]

a couple million more in funding

They'd be done with a couple million before the morning donut.

[lemura]

The smugglers can afford large losses because the difference between manufacturing costs and street value are enormous.

Like most things in economics, the pricing mechanism is very rational. Similar to how Pepsi/Cokes costs are governed in large part by marketing and advertising expenses (ie the costs of selling flavored water), illegal drug prices merely factor in such elements as loss rate, risk, etc. to determine a 'fair' street price.

Where the economic pricing mechanism fails in the case of the WOD is that it doesn't accurately reflect the **total** societal costs, such as direct support payments (ie taxes), corruption, erosion of civil liberties, habituated reduced willingness to restrain gov't, etc.

[bvw]

. When you have seen the emotional trauma in the eyes of a child trying to come to grips with a parent who is getting high, it can no longer be considered a "private" problem.

Look, the drug problems a person has are hidden from social remediation for ONE reason, that reason weighty beyond all others. The criminal risk.

We see user abuse problems coming forward only long after they are amenable to less-than-heroic measures only becuase the substances are illegal. Were they legal, was the dread risk of severe financial pemalty and imprisonment removed, we would see them sooner.

And you know it.

Patients wouldn't lie to their doctors, doctors wouldn't close one eye in evaluating them.

[lemura]

habituated reduced willingness to restrain gov't

How come no one has ever put together a master 'tin foil' conspiracy theory centered around the notion that the WOD is merely a tool to corrupt the independent spirit of Americans to enable an eventual enslavement via government control?

In other words, while good citizens have been passionately debating the various pros/cons of the WOD, the smart money has been secretly and patiently working away in the background, chuckling at the rubes who only see the surface level elements, and all the while completely missing the grand strategy. Hmmm, could make a good book.

[Zon]

But, but, but... wasn't a central theme to ending alcohol prohibition because prohibition had created so much abuse and violent crime.

If we return to alcohol prohibition abuse and violent crime will increase. Yet somehow, in delusional people's minds drug prohibition doesn't cause an increase in abuse and violent crime.