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.
I direct you to post 245, where I corrected that typo. I have a lot of them, but hey, this is only the Internet. I’d like you to read the sentence as Allende’s in post 245 and tell me I don’t make sense.
Drug use and drinking alchohol are not bad in themselves, and for the same reason. Because they are vices, and vices are not crimes.
What illegal drug use do you partake in?
I think you’re debating vodka. Or the results thereof.
Show me the answers to these questions. Post your exact replies and see if they match. PS Lame and other teenage oneliners do not count.
Or are you on drubs and just thought you answered?
Either way, I am off to other endeavors. I’ll drop back later to laugh at what dodge you invented this time.
In the year you have been here as a freeper, have you noticed that flames over typos are a losing strategy?
In the year you’ve been here as a Freeper, have you noticed that accusing people of drug use and mental incapacitation is a losing strategy?
And lastly, In they year you have been here as a freeper, have you noticed that people that refuse to debate an issue like adults are rarely given credibility?
In the year you have been a Freeper, have you ever noticed that refusal to answer legitimate questions while changing the subject to divert attention from your failure is a losing strategy?
Why can’t you openly admit the statistics show that the majority of ‘drug’ related violence comes from alcohol? The numbers are there. But it makes your position very hard to justify. So you ignore the fact and just plow right ahead with the same old.
So its ok that drunks pound women into ICUs but not when a guy flying on Acid does?
That about right? Care to explain each of those carefully split hairs of yours?
If you want to compare the violence numbers based on drug type, lets do that.
Fact: W pregnant woman is 2 lives...hers and the childs. The unborn child cannot by definition choose or be responsible for anything.
Not arguable.
Fact: People have a choice. They can remain with said drug user and go down or exercise their right to not do so.
Not arguable.
Before this goes any farther and I waste my time explaining it, do we agree so far?
Libs pretend they are, but you and I know better. Abortion violates the rights of the person living inside them, and gay marriage is special status granted by the state and not private whatsoever.
Even now gay marriage is a state issue—so long as SCOTUS doesn’t find a right to it in their secret copy of the Constitution—and before Roe v Wade so was abortion. Assuming you want to keep one at the state level and return the other to the states, my question remains why drugs are special. Certainly it has nothing to do with the Constitution.
They’re called typos, jerk. I happen to be using an infernal Kindle, which is a bad idea. Anyway, your side has them to, so don’t be so holier than thou.
Actually I think I’m debating the same person from the other night who tried telling me that abortion was a conservative value as long as it increased our votes.
Ot the one that told me that we do not have a spending problem and that it was old people getting hip replacements that caused the defecit.
Yup, that’s what so called ‘conservatism’ has come to online.
Same tactics, different name.
In the year you have been here as a freeper, have you noticed that flames over typos are a losing strategy?
No
In the year you’ve been here as a Freeper, have you noticed that accusing people of drug use and mental incapacitation is a losing strategy?
No
And lastly, In they year you have been here as a freeper, have you noticed that people that refuse to debate an issue like adults are rarely given credibility?
Hell no
Why can’t you openly admit the statistics show that the majority of ‘drug’ related violence comes from alcohol?
I’m not defending alcohol..
Your ‘inarguable’ nonsense means:
Before this goes any farther and I waste my time explaining it, do we agree so far?
No.
Enough?
“jerk”
Ad hominem, you lose.
No, you missed half of them. But don’t bother. You have thrashed any credibility with those answers.
I am either debating a drunk or a flat out troll.
G’night.
There’s only one typo in that post, so you can’t fall back on that excuse. Did you even read it? Because I brought up both federalism concerns and the distinction between vices and crimes. Regulating the drug industry like we do food or anything else on the state level would be appropriate. Criminalizng drug possession or use is not, because like I said vices are not crimes.
Then there’s federalism. One big reason we cannot “keep it how it is” is the federal government lacks the power to carry on the Drug War. That power lies with the states, if it exists at all. The feds stole it, as they like to do. At least earlier prohibition was honest, in that it amended the Constitution to pursue its stupidity.
Do you think you’re being clever by capitalizing ‘drug wa’?
You’re not.
And second. Answer me this. Do you support a war on abortion? AKA War On Abortion?
Agh, War :(
But still, ‘War’. Do you support the ‘War on Abortion’? Or ‘War on Crime’?
None. I realize it is hopelessly silly to commit a typo in the very sentence I advised you to go back and check my corrected post. But such is my fallibility.
By the way, I argue with typo-ridden posts as if they were written appropriately. I wonder why you don’t extend the same courtesy. Or should I dredge through your history to find a sufficient number of mistakes and logical fallacies to throw back in your face so we can move on?
“I’m not defending alchohol.”
No, you’re defending the Drug War against claims that it is merely more of the same old prohibition, by maintaining a difference between alchohol and other drugs significant enough to require one and not the other be outlawed. Which makes this response evasive.
No, see, I was not attempting to win the larger argument through ad hominem attack, which is a fallacy. I was calling you a jerk because you are acting like one, which is a seperate issue. Same way you took time away from the real issue to attack my typos.
Now we are free to move back to the Drug War issue, having established your jerkdom and my bad typing.
That is not an attempt at cleverness, it’s a commonly accepted thing. You’ll see Wars on Blank capitalized all over the place. They are so designated because people see them as “the moral equivalent to war,” in that the state is mobilized to fight it like they would a war: on a grand scale and directed from the canter. You will also see capitalized the phrases War on Poverty, War on Hunger, etc. The War on Drugs has added credibility in this sense, involving as it does actual violence, bullets, troops, siege and occupation mentalities, etc.
No, I do not support a War on Abortion. That should be a state issue and treated like the rest of the criminal law. I do not support a War on Crime. That should be, again, a state issue, and not the moral equivalent of war.
You are really dedicated to illegal drugs right? This is like talking to a jihadist. You just can’t make any deals between them. You want drugs, badly. Severely. Legalized and in your system.
I think there needs to be laws against those chemicals that destroy a person worse than alcohol..
I am like a jihadist because I won’t budge from my antiprohibitionism. You, who think the War on Drugs should continue and won’t budge, are a rational, civilized person who comes to conclusions only after careful consideration and is open to all opposing ideas, though you don’t have to give into them to grant them free airing. Isn’t it burdensome always being the considerate one among the fanatics?
Who do you thing should be making them, according to your understanding of the Constitution?
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