How America Lost the War on Drugs

Rolling Stone ^ | Novermber 27th, 2007 | Ben Wallace-Wells

[damondonion]

The so-called "war on drugs" is an abysmal failure and should be ended. The dollars worth of drugs one druggie uses a day is costing him hundreds of dollars a day and since he is dealing at a 10% fence, he's having to commit thousands of dollars a day worth of crime to get the hundreds to buy the dollars worth of drugs.

That is a dollars's worth of chemicals being translated into several thousand dollars worth of crime times the number of those idiots out there times 365, all through the magic of stupid laws.

No nation on Earth including ours can afford that. A rational drug policy would:

• Legalize marijuana and anything else demonstrably no more harmful than alcohol on the same basis as alcohol.
• Provide heroin, crack cocaine, and other highly addictive substances at cost at govt. centers to present addicts while keeping those items illegal for sale on the street, i.e. take every dime out of that business for criminals.
• Provide major criminal penalties for the sale of LSD, PCP, and other Jeckyl/Hyde formulas.
• Provide major penalties for selling any kind of drugs to children.

Do all of that, and all meaningful drug problems and 70% of urban crime would evaporate in two years. In fact you could do that and keep the present prison system intact. You could end the war on drugs and declare a war on fraud on the same day. Every druggie thrown out of prison would be one more prison cell available for a democrat.

But all of that is basically an ideal solution; given no other choices, we'd be better off to legalize it all than to go on doing what we are.

[SatinDoll]

I KNOW my facts. I lived there.

[TKDietz]

I lived in Europe for several years too. Just living somewhere doesn’t mean you know and understand the laws though. Even a citizen of a country who has lived there all his life wouldn’t necessarily know all criminal the laws in his country, and it is not likely that a sailor who spent a few years in a foreign country would know all of their criminal laws either. If you had have read the page I linked you too for the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction you could get a general idea of the state of drug laws in Spain today and a brief history explaining what happened with their drug laws in the past. The EMCDDA was set up by EU nations to monitor drug use and drug laws, enforcement, etc., throughout the EU nations. The data they collect is provided to them by the governments of the respective member nations. Personally, I am inclined to believe information about a country’s drug laws reported by the government of that country rather than the word of some guy who happened to stay in that country for a while while he was in the Navy. Drug possession was not recriminalized in Spain. You are just plain wrong.

[Little Ray]

I dislike HOV lanes for the opposite reason. Lots of exits don’t have any ramps on the left - there you are zippin’ along, then your exit comes up - and you gotta cross five lanes of traffic to get there!

[VirginiaConstitutionalist]

Control the border and you’ll stop a lot of drugs from coming in.

We can't even keep drugs out of prisons. I get the sneaking suspicion a lot of the higher-ups pushing the "border fence" movement stand to make a buck off it.

The "border fence" will be our Springfield Monorail.

[elkfersupper]

Control the border and you’ll stop a lot of drugs from coming in.

But then the effort to keep the rest of us from eating Big Macs would fail miserably.

[elkfersupper]

Declare open season on every known drug pusher posturing politician and the people will eliminate the supply perceived problem in 10 days,

There, all fixed.

[AxelPaulsenJr]

Only problem with the artice it is too long. Not sure most pot head’s attention span is that long.