Einstein, insanity and the war on drugs
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- Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own -
Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. His definition fits America’s war on drugs, a multi-billion dollar, four-decade exercise in futility.
The war on drugs has helped turn the United States into the country with the world’s largest prison population. (Noteworthy statistic: The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population and around 25 percent of the world’s prisoners). Keen demand for illicit drugs in America, the world’s biggest market, helped spawn global criminal enterprises that use extreme violence in the pursuit of equally extreme profits.
Over the years, the war on drugs has spurred repeated calls from social scientists and economists (including three Nobel prize winners) to seriously rethink a strategy that ignores the laws of supply and demand.
Under the headline “The Failed War on Drugs,” Washington’s respected, middle-of-the-road Brookings Institution said in a November report that drug use had not declined significantly over the years and that “falling retail drug prices reflect the failure of efforts to reduce the supply of drugs.”
Cocaine production in South America stands at historic highs, the report noted.
Like other think tanks, Brookings stopped short of recommending a radical departure from past policies with a proven track record of failure such as spending billions on crop eradication in Latin America and Asia while allotting paltry sums in comparison to rehabilitating addicts.
Enter Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an organization started in 2002 by police officers, judges, narcotics agents, prison wardens and others with first-hand experience of implementing policies that echo the prohibition of alcohol. Prohibition, now widely regarded a dismal and costly failure of social engineering, came to an end 75 years ago this week.
As LEAP sees it, the best way to fight drug crime and violence is to legalize drugs and regulate them the same way alcohol and tobacco is now regulated. “We repealed prohibition once and we can do it again,” one of the group’s co-founders, Terry Nelson, told a Washington news conference on December 2. “We cannot arrest our way out of this problem.”
FROM AL CAPONE TO DRUG CARTELS
“In the 20s and 30s, we had Al Capone and his gangsters getting rich and shooting up our streets,” said Nelson, who spent a 32-year government career fighting drugs in the U.S. and Latin America. “Today we have criminal gangs, cartels, Taliban and al-Qaeda profiting from the prohibition of drug sales and wreaking havoc all over the world. The correlation is obvious.”
The before-and-after sequence is so obvious that the U.S. Congress passed a resolution in September noting that the 1933 repeal of alcohol prohibition had replaced a “dramatic increase” in organized crime with “a transparent and accountable system of distribution and sales” that generated billions of dollars in tax revenues and boosted the sick economy.
That’s where advocates of drug legalization want to go now, and some of them hope that the similarities between today’s deep economic crisis and the Great Depression will result in a more receptive audience for their pro-legalization arguments among lawmakers and government leaders.
The budgetary impact of legalizing drugs would be enormous, according to a study prepared to coincide with the 75th anniversary of prohibition’s end by Harvard economist Jeffrey A. Miron. He estimates that legalizing drugs would inject $76.8 billion a year into the U.S. economy — $44.1 billion through savings on law enforcement and at least $32.7 billion in tax revenues from regulated sales.
Miron published a similar study in 2005 looking only at the budgetary effect of legalizing marijuana, the most widely used illicit drug in the United States. That study was endorsed by more than 500 economists, including Nobel laureates Milton Friedman of Stanford University, George Akerlof of the University of California and Vernon Smith of George Mason University.
“We urge…the country to commence an open and honest debate about marijuana prohibition,” the economists said in an open letter to President George W. Bush, congress, governors and state legislators. “At a minimum, this debate will force advocates of current policy to show that prohibition has benefits sufficient to justify the cost to taxpayers, foregone tax revenues and numerous ancillary consequences that result from marijuana prohibition.”
The advocates of current policy, led by outgoing President George W. Bush’s drug czar, John Walters, never took up the challenge to discuss cost-benefit equations. His Office of National Drug Control Policy has focused, with the single-minded determination of a moral crusader, on doing the same thing over and over again.
But the United States is not alone in pursuing drug strategies that are based more on wishful thinking than on sober analysis. If you put faith in declarations by the United Nations, a “drug-free world” is an attainable goal and the war on drugs all but over.
In 1998, a special session of the U.N. General Assembly forecast that the illicit cultivation of the coca bush, the cannabis plant and the opium poppy would be eliminated or significantly reduced by the year 2008, a deadline that also applied to “significant and measurable results in the field of demand reduction.”
The clock is ticking towards midnight, December 31, 2008.
— You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com. For more columns by Bernd Debusmann, click here. —
Want to debate? Send in your written submissions to debate@thomsonreuters.com.
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I would be most interested to know how or why anyone at Reuters (?) decided that the “Best Comment” on the issues discussed in Debusmann’s fine article is the one at the top which reads, “it is a nice idea, but regardless of the fiscal results, this is not likely to happen. for a long time the message has been that drugs are bad even though the 2 most deadly ones are legal.”
For the commentator’s logic is at once more twisted than the characteristic logic of the Bush White House and more circular than the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol – moreover, perfectly reflects the very insanity of which Debusmann writes.
Notice, first, that the commentator is careful to interject the phrase, “regardless of the fiscal results” in his statement that drug legalization is not likely to happen. This is paralleled by use of the phrase “even though” in the following sentence. That kind of absolutist talk is characteristic of mindless fixation on an idea – an idea which wipes every other thought out of awareness. This is the mentality of the God-inspired moral crusader. Drug War ideology trumps every other consideration. No matter the cost in dollars or lives, no matter how many people are locked up, no matter how many families are shattered or careers ruined, no matter how many freedoms are lost, no matter what brutality the process entails, no matter how ineffective or even counterproductive it all is, the the moral crusade shall go on as before – to the end of time if necessary. And this is “even though” the deadliest drugs are legal ones. All of which has the ring of utter madness.
Debusmann’s point, however, is not that ending the Drug War is a “nice idea” but that it is a necessary idea, and inevitable: what works will in the end replace what doesn’t, whether anyone likes it or not. Why keep doing the same useless thing over and over again while expecting a different result? To those not motivated by Drug-War ideology, the moral crusade against drugs carries no weight. But even so, the commentator’s logic is that we are nevertheless doomed (programmed – as though by the cultural-software equivalent of a computer virus?) to repeat the same non- or counter-productive action or program forever simply because that is what we are doing, or been doing for a long time, which is approximately the definition of maximum unintelligence – or rock-bottom stupidity.
Almost beyond doubt, some such malicious cultural software-programming of the human brain is at work here: call it moral.crusade.DrugWar.exe
A very high proportion of the American people are, it seems, infected by it.
Once again, just listen: “for a long time the message has been that drugs are bad even though the 2 most deadly ones are legal.” The problem seems to be that a long time ago somebody decided that drugs are bad – and that we are consequently forced, willy nilly, to go on accepting this determination forever. We have no minds of our own; the decision was made generations ago and we just have to go on helplessly living by that decision. That is the message: moral.crusade.DrugWar.exe/DrugsAreBad
But who is the messenger? We don’t know. But this is nothing more than a maximally childish and stupid, even infantile, way of abdicating our own responsibility, and of hiding from ourselves the fact that it is ourselves, here and now, not some authority from the past, or from on High, who determines our destiny.
The problem of Americans today is that they have, in the mass, to a dangerously high degree, taken leave of both intellect and the senses, being all too willing to close their eyes, bury their heads in the sand, and just accept “authority.” If they are just now waking up from this sleep in significant numbers, the question is whether this awakening is not too late. They seem to need someone to do their thinking for them. Fortunately, they now have Barack Obama, who is competent to do just that if necessary, especially with the help of the minority of Americans who haven’t lost their brains and remain uninfected by the “program.”
Of course it has occurred to me that the stated “Best Comment” was chosen for that distinction because, ironically, it does so perfectly reflect the brain-dead state of the United States of America.
Once again, chalk it up to the mindless operation of (among others) the malicious program moral.crusade.DrugWar.exe
This is not quite a joke.
As a white male college educated to the post doctoral level and now at my 60th Birthday – I am shocked to learn that the US Policies regarding their “war on drugs” has not changed substantially in 20 years. Other than to pump up our prison populations – which very soon we are not going to be able to sustain financially due to the drain of money on both the state and federal levels – the fact that regulated and policed and taxed drugs sales would inject (by most conservative estimates) over $100 BILLION per year into our already tortured economy cannot continue to be ignored! The goal of a drug free world is no more obtainable than the goal of an alcohol free world was in the 1930′s. People will have their temporary escape from reality and their relaxations that can be induced chemically on demand. Period. No one or no thing is going to deny them access to those dubious pleasures at any cost! I’ve come to believe that the drive to have these things may be deeply rooted in the human genome itself and therefore not changeable by mankind. This need may have a purpose we do not fully understand and it may offer a benefit we are not fully aware of yet, also. We do not know because to date we have criminalized the use of these substances, forced their manufacture underground where there are no quality controls nor standardization of strength or dose in a given ingestion of susbtance – ie: you can have a “line” of cocaine that contains 1/60th of a gram of pure cocaine hydrochloride @ 50% strength, 10% strength or 5% strength. The exact amount ingested is not known by the user and this results in overdosage, deaths, heart attacks etc. And for NO REASON! If there were standard manufacturing controls, the buyer would know what amount of active ingredient was in each dose, and the other serious medical complications from (mostly) hit and miss dosage being administered each time the substance was used. We, at present, have no way of knowing how many heart attacks or strokes or other major medical events are the direct result of an unwanted and unintended overdose of a recreational drug. But the guess are as high as 30% of all admissions nationally are a result of unknown amounts being ingested by casual users. By contrast, when you purchase wine you know the alcohol content is about 7%. Beer about 4%, hard liquor varies by proof from 40 to 60 percent alcohol by volume. While admittedly some idiot kid will drink a quart of vodka and wind up in the ER, it is far less frequently this happens than with drugs – simply because with alcohol you know what you are getting in terms of active ingredient with every oz ingested. Not so drugs of any sort. And in the free enterprise world often time drugs are diluted with other substances ranging from baking soda to baby powder. Both of which can cause substantial harm if injected.
Bottom Line: The war on drugs is a looser. We cannot win because it ignores the law of supply and demand. And there will always be that demand at any price and with any risk. The degree of risk only serves to drive the price up and increase profit for the criminal elements who are now the supply and distribution arm.
Package it, properly, show dosing info on the package, for injection users supply a clean sterile single use needle with each prepackaged standardized dose, and regulate and tax the hell out of it! Suddenly you get the profit out of it for the criminals, you have a better safer product for the users and instead of risking arrest they’re putting away money for their weekend party usage like they do now for their booze usage on weekends. For those who become addicted there would be free and effective treatment available. Medically we can deal with drug dependency. But we cannot deal with it as long as it’s treated as a character flaw and not as a medical problem. We NEVER know who has a hyper-sensitivity to alcohol and once they have one drink can literally not stop drinking until they pass out. Yet we still manage to sell it to those who do not suffer from such a condition. Those who do quickly either learn to avoid it or run afowl of the law and wind up forced into treatment. The same thing could happen with any type of drug. There may be those who once they have that first hit of Coke cannot stop snorting it until they pass our or die from heart failure. Those two will quickly be identified and given the option of effective treatment to get them off of it permanently. Again, this is something that medical science is fairly adept at today, and drug treatment would, once it was decriminalized become better and better with each passing year. The VAST majority of drug users in America today are not the street junkies you see. Or the crack addicts you hear about letting their childern go hungry while they drift off into their own drug-befuddled world. The majority are respectable citizens who are casual users – week end warriors so to speak. They buy a bit for a party, or to share with a friend. They’er out drinking, dancing and using whatever substance of choice comes along – and when it wears off in the morning they’re left with nothing worse than a hangover and a need to feel better before Monday Morning comes along. Fairly innocuous stuff. Maybe we could redirect the efforts of the law enforcement to solving violent crimes. Robberies and rapes and assualts and murders should all decrease once drugs were legalized. The balance of trade would quickly drop into line as the other countries followed suit and started importing the American Packaged and designed brand names of marijuana, cocaine, and hash. The profit would be astronomical considering that the single dose would sell for about $10/at retail and would cost less than 10 cents to produce. Taxed at the rate of 50% there is still plenty of profit for the manufacturer and the distribution network.
For once in our history, can this country do something that makes sense? We get the police used correctly, we stop locking up petty criminals, we have the streets safe, the crime rate drops, and the economy gets one hell of a shot forward from the tax revenue. Morally, we are not supplying anything that inherently more dangerous than alcohol and we obviously seem to have no problem doing that! Come on Congress and Senators – it’s obvious that a solution is at hand. Now how about having the guts to offer it to your constituents.
Who makes an addict? By that I mean, are addicts created? A person doesn’t start out to be an addict. Someone provides the drugs to them the first time. IF not some misguided “friend” who wants to share his “personal nirvana,” then some addicted soul who is trying to ensure his own supply by selling drugs to another person. But behind the “friends” and small suppliers are BIG suppliers, those who reap huge profits from the drug trade.
By the laws of supply and demand, we have given these big dealers a huge incentive to continue their business. Drugs are cheaply grown and processed in poverty-stricken countries. They’re smuggled into the US and sold for a large profit.
What if the United States undercut the price of drugs? What if it was cheaper for an addicted person to go to a pharmacy and buy them or even receive them free? Where would the profit incentive be for the drug dealers? There wouldn’t be one. They would cease to exist, because no business can exist where there is no profit.
With addicts receiving their daily fix, they wouldn’t need to sell to thir friends, which would reduce their need to hook others to ensure their own supply.
Couple this with a national system to help addicts recover and a deeper anti-addiction education campaign, and you would see a great reduction in new addictions which would lead to less demand.
The United States spends enough on prisons to finance the free drugs to addicts. If given a choice, some would choose recovery instead.
If we break the cycle, we could win the war against drug use in this country. We are already spending the money, shouldn’t we put it into a plan that will eliminate the drug criminals instead of punishing the addicts?
why dont we put out drugs with additives that cause sickness and other such things to do several things:
A) identify these persons by the sickness
B) discourage use due to the sickness
C) make people less likely to try drugs
If you were to flood the market with these “bogus” drugs I think you could easily slow use. This however will not stop the problem as you need to cut off the supply which we have made no real attempt to do. Also on a side note there used to be a drug tracking blip near the Texas town of Palacios, but it was later removed with no reason (that i am currentloy aware of) given.
How sad. David Ferrel is an extremely angry man who would have been far more effective in his arguments if he would learn to leave out so very many angry slant words, innuendoes and down right unsubstantiated opinions and stuck to the facts. “Just the facts, just the facts.” I some times wonder if there is anything such as subjective truth. I really doubt it. Try again with a far more objective approach, David, and I, along with every other “thinking” american, are ready to listen.
The current recession can be viewed as a metaphor. We slow our buying a little and even the largest corporations stumble and talk of collapse. Take that thought to the illegal drug trade: The loss of demand from legalization would have an enormous effect on cartels… and nobody will bail them out.
If you want drugs to be controlled substances, you have to have control: clearly the way to have control is to be the seller. Being the seller you can undercut the illegal supply chain. You can control the farming. You can track usage redirect heavy users to treatment (remember you put the illegal markets out of business, they cannot build a supply chain on marginal users). You undercut extortion. You eliminate the Taliban’s revenues. You control the quality.
To be in control you have to sell, and you have to sell so cheap that no-one else can be in the business of selling. At that point, when you have truly a controlled substance you can start to make progress with educating and curing people. A lot less evil will be generated from start to finish.
Just do it, damn it. Stop this stupid “war on drugs” which is immoral, cruel, indefensible, and feeding the evil it supposedly opposes. If you really want good to be done, you have to do it right.
WOW, David Ferrell! I concure completely! By far, one of the very best, most intelligent, and well written replies I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. As for Debusmann’s article, it’s a mighty fine one, indeed and truly appreciate you bringing this back out into the public eye, no matter how risky & unpopular! Will this country ever realize how ludicrous the supposed war on drugs truly is and take note of the great successes of programs in other countries, like the Netherlands.
I think anyone with half a brain, will agree with what it being said in this article. I heard someone say once that, “America is not as addicted to drugs, as they are to Drug Way spending”. Too many Americans are employed by the Drug War to just end prohibition. This needs to be a gradual process, starting with the de-criminalization of all drugs and a severe cutback in DEA and local law enforcement spending on the Drug War.
Are you sure that’s a correct Einstein quote?
All you commenters in favor of legalizing or decriminalizing drugs and whining about wasted effort and wasted money – you are all completely and utterly wrong. Please take a few minutes to read what John Walters says in today’s Wall Street Journal. Listen to reason, people! Note the statistics Mr Walters cites, and the mountain of evidence that, as the headline has it: Our Drug Policy Is a Success.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB12284372 5720181453.html
I am completely in favor of the legalization of drugs & many effective arguments have been presented. My question is what will happen to the large numbers of dealers who would be forced to go “legit” after maintaining an existence on the other side of legality. Certainly there would be increased crime rates as these people search for alternate means of income. On the flip side, many dealers have a very strong business acumen & would probably end up as potentially corrupt “captains of industry” types.
Where will all the street dealers and gangs go?What sort of crime will they turn to for there money? It’s not just the legal world that doesn’t want legal drugs. Why can’t the people in power see this?
I was surprised to find out that we could save so much money. But there are a few things that haven’t been pointed out, such as the burden on the health care system would, in the United States, probably require government investment to decrease the overall burden. But I am Canadian so I probably think differently than most Americans when it comes to Health Care. There is also the trickle down effect of managing a society with more drug addiction problems. However I’m sure there would be a gigantic tourism boost. Also if all drugs were free would it also be possible to allow less security around buying perscription drugs? The issue comes with significantly more complications and benefits than this article discusses. I am, however, not at all surprised that politicians are afraid to talk about. The prejudice and demonization of drugs are still very prevalent in todays society. Who knows maybe they should be.
Just another example of ‘charged’ article. Bernd Debusmann give us known facts and pretends that no one before addressed them.
.
1. Drug consumption actually decline.
2. Bunch drug addicts will cost us more in hospitals than in prisons.
3. Alcohol is much less addictive than grugs.
4. Taliban & al Queada didn’t participate in drug trade until recently (Strict Islam don’t allows drugs). Only now they formed uneasy alliance with druglords.
etc.
PS
He seams to be high when he wrote this article
Well, its a nice idea, injecting $76 billion a year… but we could also stop our pointless war in Iraq thats costing $6 Billion a month.. and that would save us about the same amount… Think of how much BOTH would get us!
But the government HAS learned from Prohibition. In the eyes of many, Prohibition was a failure only because it stopped before several now prominent families became billionaires rather than just multi-millionaires. They’ve fixed that problem now, and have managed to keep the new Prohibition gravy train flowing for almost 50 years now! This War on Drugs is a complete success – at making money for certain segments of the business world.
I learned long ago that if something doesn’t seem to make sense, follow the money. Who gets the money from war on drugs?
Law enforcement (and, through them, arms manufacturers), criminal organizations (arms manufacturers again), and a privatized prison system (oh look, owned by the same companies who own arms manufacturers). That’s just one of many groups who profit greatly from the criminalization of anything resembling “drugs”. Don’t need to look much further than that really, although I’ve sure if someone dug deep they’d find a rich seam of slime if they didn’t suffer an unfortunate accident. But we’re never going to get that investigation, because the newspapers are also owned by corporations who profit from the American War on Drugs.
To think it all started with hemp.
The anti-hemp thing started with an American newspaper magnate and lumber baron in the late 1940s who didn’t like the look of the new mechanical hemp processing machine. That machine would allow hemp to be processed efficiently, rather than being the previously manually intensive labour that it was. That would have allowed hemp to compete with his pulp and paper lumber mills – couldn’t have that. So he found an obscure northern Mexican term for hemp, “marijuana”, and started his papers cranking out anti-marijuana stories. Initially, very few people realized that the “marijuana” he was talking about was also known as “hemp”, the same hemp that the US government was exhorting people to grow in their “Hemp for Victory” campaign. However, the people who would profit from a ban on hemp were the oil companies (hemp can produce tons of oil), the lumber companies (hemp fiber makes much better paper), the cotton industry (hemp fiber is easier to process and more durable than cotton) and the pharma companies (hemp has an over abundant storehouse of useful properties) It worked, his profits soared, certain people who benefitted directly from the hemp ban were put in place in the White House and other organizations (FBI, FDA, etc.) and the hemp industry was throttled before it had a chance.
From there it was easy to add a bunch of other drugs to the mix, but it all started with hemp.
As for addiction, it’s a medical problem, not a criminal problem. Certain countries used to deal with it that way, but after heavy handed lobbying by the USA, those countries have now fallen in line. Doesn’t fix addiction, but you can’t have people proving that the War on Drugs doesn’t do what its proponents claim it does by providing alternatives that DO work.
So much material, so little space.
Quote:
“Rather than an overall legalizing of drugs, I believe it might be done in small steps by beginning with marijuana, and prohibiting anyone using it from working at any job that involves public safety or having a driver’s license. That may make people who think they might begin to use drugs for recreation think twice.”
That is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard, and, not surprisingly, is the government’s current policy for workers in safety-sensitive positions.
What really needs to be developed is a test for impairment. Drug testing measures metabolites, not impairment on the job, and therefore reaches into a person’s private life unnecessarily.
In response to the Einstein reference in the article, here’s another quote from a famous person, if it hasn’t been quoted already. (Remember, “temperance” refers to a campaign to reduce the use of something undesirable to society.)
“Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.”
–Abe Lincoln
If smoke gets in your eyes, think tea. Hemp makes great tea, which does not hurt your lungs. Timely article. Thanks.
The time is coming. The propaganda the various government agencies and “non-profit” organizations have used is criminal in and of itself. Federal research money is only given to projects that claim they are researching the ills of cannabis. This was illustrated when Scientific American presented for consideration a research project to look into the health benefits of cannabis only to be turned down. SA turned around and changed the title and nothing else so the front page of this research proposal appeared to describe this study as one that was looking into the health hazards of cannabis and the study was funded. Studies around the world have shown that cannabis should not be illegal. There are numerous benefits from its use the out weigh the isolated incidents of allergic reactions. Peanuts are known to kill people but, we do not outlaw them. So, there must be more to this than just stupidity and ignorance driving our lawmakers to maintain this insanity.
The answer is Money. I do not need to go into the multitude of entities that are making money off of this black market. It is necessary for everyone to understand that they are influencing our lawmakers and are manipulating the grant process and the media in order to maintain the current flows wealth generated from and around this black market. The People of this nation need to let their Representatives know that if they do not stop the insanity it is tantamount to declaring they are a willing participant in this fraud.
So much could be done with a legal cannabis industry. Beside the obvious sale of the cannabis flower, cooking oil, seed, fuel, flour, paper, canvas, cloth, ethanol, beer and rope could be produced, sold and taxed. The cost savings in regards to prison costs and law enforcement costs coupled with the revenues from this multi-layered industry staying in this country instead of going to north and south of the boarder could create a very significant expansion in our current US economy.
Write your Congressmen! Go to http://WWW.Change.Gov and let the new Administration know you want this insanity to end.
To my knowledge, only one nation has ever successfully won their war on drugs. It was China, at the end of the Boxer revolution. China had been conquered by the Europeans, who legalized, and promoted opium consumption, for profit. English businessmen had vast opium fields in India and wanted a market. The Chinese addict population was estimated to be 1/3 of the people. It was a severe public health problem; there were few healthy workers. After the war, China imposed a death sentence on users, or sellers, normally public beheading. After hundreds of thousands of executions, and about ten years, the addict population fell to almost, but not quite, zero.
I do not accept the legalize, regulate, tax, cost, benefit philosophy. Man is cursed with a criminal element, who will kill to make profit. When Prohibition was repealed, it did not stop organized crime; they went into drugs, protection, prostitution, loan sharking, and other societally debilitating activities.
I do judge the war on drugs is nonsense. Our drug “czar” is a bureaucrat; real czars slaughtered people who resisted them. Our official should be called the drug talking head. Other nations rightly complain that we have outsourced the “war”, the killing, to their land while doing nothing effective inside America to limit demand. Like so many of our politician’s answers, we have a very unjust application of enforcement and punishment of our laws.
Finally, I knew, in the early 1970s, the neurosurgeon – PhD in statistics who did the definitive comparison between marijuana, and alcohol in a control dosage setting. In summary, he said that chronic usage of both drugs, renders the user of alcohol highly insensitive to the toxin, but highly sensitized to marijuana. Thus after a fun weekend, a sober driver of a car pool would be unaffected if someone in the back seat took a drink, but instantly buzzed if he, and their were smoking herb. Most people control their behavior, but most drugs make that impossible, in his view. He convinced me that this is not a moral issue, but a matter of prudent legislation. He favored controlling drugs.
My favorite recent inanity in this thread is Claude S. getting all caught up in the John Walters’ children’s logic. To claim “our” drug policy is a success is to ignore the utter indictment that the long view, adopted by LEAP, takes. Walters numbers are utterly misleading when a basic check is done against the same data sets the government uses. Jacob Sullum at Reason Online succinctly sums up Walters’ risible BS here:
http://reason.com/blog/show/130421.html
the comment about a test for impairment is spot-on. first of all, marijuana should be legalized. it is simply ludicrous that a drug so much safer than alcohol remains criminal while legal consumption of alcohol continues to kill countless US citizens every year. however, equally bothersome is the way in which marijuana users are unfairly persecuted when seeking employement. if i smoke a joint on the weekend, i can do my job just fine on Monday. but not according to a UI. according to a UI, a joint i smoked a MONTH ago renders me unfit to work! conversely, alcoholics show up to work drunk all the time and nobody bothers to test for that. the current system operates in the opposite direction of sense and reason.
Legalize It! Regulate It! that is the only way to bridge the 300 billion dollar tax gap from underground monies, to stop the violence and get all these people doing time for stupid half ass drug charges out of our prisons living of off our hard tax money. get them out of our prisons and stop putting them in there. we might as well take whatever drug offenders you’re going to put in prisons and put them in our homes, it costs us about the same amount of money and we would probably do a better job of reforming them than the great failure we call our prison “reform” system.
if the government legalized drugs we as tax payers would be a lot better off. alcohol is legal and there are still alcoholics. whether it’s legal or not people will do it, and commit crimes for it. we might as well save the people who don’t do it from having to take care of the people that do partake in it.
i completely agree with Jen. Habitual smokers are looked down upon by people who drink every night and smoke cigartettes every night. they are all hypocrites.
Mic Bearing: You have to develop a better sense for figuring out what is satire, irony and ridicule and what is serious…
Drugs are illegal because using them is immoral. Why is that so easy to overlook. If you ever lived in New York City, you may have learned about Rudy Giuliani brought down crime when he was Mayor.
Giuliani employed something called the “broken window theory” to fighting crime. Instead of overlooking smaller crimes, like petty drug use and drug sales, he went after them, with the expectation that locking up petty criminals will prevent them from committing more serious crime.
Drug abusers commit crime not just because of economic issues, but more so because of moral or social defects in their personality. They will commit other crime regardless of whether drugs are legal or not.
We are better off keeping drugs illegal, and using these laws to get people off the street before the commit more serious crimes.
I agree with legalizing drugs… however, I also believe that there are two things to take into consideration here.
1) Marijuana can expediate or draw out schizophrenia in a person predisposed to the mental illness. Therefore, there should be some restrictions to where it can be used. (Outside or in private residence only, for example.)
2) Yes, people are allergic to it, but they can easily avoid contact in most circumstances. There are people out there that are allergic to cigarette smoke and they seem to be doing just fine managing it.
However, in addition, it should be MANDATED that there are NO ADDITIVES to the product. To be honest, these additives are what make resisting cigarettes after use very difficult. Sure, the tobacco itself is addictive, but the toxins that they introduce make it even more so.
The marijuana (AND tobacco, to be honest) should be grown organically, without pesticides or impure fertilization. The reason marijuana can produce some bad side effects is directly linked to how it is grown, so it stands to reason that the same goes for tobacco.
Also, we need to get the extra toxins in the tobacco industry out of cigarettes – this is what generally causes the cancer, not the tobacco leaf. (Granted, inhaling smoke regularly probably is not all that healthy for you anyway, but why not make it less dangerous?)
>> Well, its a nice idea, injecting $76 billion a year… but we could also stop our pointless war in Iraq thats costing $6 Billion a month.. and that would save us about the same amount… Think of how much BOTH would get us!
AND while we’re at it, let get rid of public schools. After all, there just baby-sitting services anyway. Private schools are MUCH better at teaching because they can actually focus ON teaching, instead of focusing on mitigating law suits.
We could also save a TON of money if dispensed with all entitlement programs. That would certainly add to the coffers AND those who are currently participating in those programs would have the benefit of getting their dignity back from the government who is currently holding their self respect.
But if you REALLY wanted to save money, we could kill everyone who still is stupid enough to think that Iraq is illegal or pointless. With the added energy saving from that endeavourer alone, we could ALL be millionaires.
From my experience we really need to look at the supply and demand issue more closely. I really believe from my own experience that tons and tons of marijuana are available in our country on a daily basis. This would mean that literally train loads of the stuff has to be coming in everyday just to supply the demand. How can these “dealers” be more adept at shipping and distribution than some of our most successful companies? It is my firm belief that in order to meet the demand some of our most trusted officials have to be involved. Why would they change laws that make them so much money every day? This is the only logical conclusion I can come to for how the sheer mass quantity of this drug alone can be dispersed accross the country to every small town and city.
Where do you draw the line? Do you legalize a drug like meth? What about heroin? Drugs like this can quite litterally kill a person in just a few uses ~ do you legalize them as well?
People. Come on…. its pot, NOT that big of a deal. I’m 20 and a criminal justice/poli-sci major. I cannot wait for my shot at politics…
Check out the requirements for Schedule I drugs…tell me if marijuana REALLY fits any of them. You sound like a DEA agent yourself. Hopefully things will change because even Obama has admitted it is a massive waste of resources.
Look of the list of people who have admitted to smoking, look at the medical effects, look at how it is impossible to overdose…leave your education to yourself, not your dare officer or neighborhood cop. The DEA are the only people who actually enforce this crap. PLEASE, just look into it, I don’t care, do likesome of these other clowns did and Google it. Really look at both sides.
It is absolutely ridiculous to assume that marijuana users commit more serious crimes, more serious crimes like what, getting arrested for having a bong instead of a joint? You don’t hear about pot smokers breaking into houses to catch a fix, unlike people on your prescription drugs.
The serious crime argument is almost as bad of an argument that marijuana is a gateway drug, what about cigarettes and alcohol? Give me a fricken break. Who are you to speak for all of us: “we are better off” BETTER OFF HOW? How do you know what is better off for everyone, I didn’t know we were in the presence of the world’s greatest philosopher. Consider yourself propagandized, feed your own head. You’re an embarrassment.
We cant say this wont happen when it is so direly needed. We must pursue a policy of legalization in different formats without delay, and such policies can earn needed tax dollars.
The way out of this mess is in education. Just like we educate not to drink and drive we must educate not to abuse drugs. Making them illegal creates a market primed for corruption.
We owe a change to our neighbors and as Christians we have to think about the impact in Latin American and the Caribbean and elsewhere of our demand and our current War on Drugs.
Many Americans decidantly use illegal drugs flippantly ignorant to the destruction and saddness our approach brings to countries where the standard of living is so much lower, yet with populations who would do so much more for a better life for their families
The government and the laws make this drug a problem. Check out penn and tellers bulls**t: the war on drugs. Not the drug itself. And it is not solidified that it worsens mental diseases, the DEA is so against it they won’t even let us study it to figure out the REAL effects it has.
To all concerned
We all know the pro’s and con’s of this issue.except for the few who can’t or won’t take the time to look at the facts.I want to say to all of you please now is the time to do something anything. end this foolish war on drugs and help the USA at the same time.talk to your friends,get your friends to talk to their friends anybody and everybody you can think of and have them write your government representative. you have to speak and write now make sure they know that you will not vote for them unless they do something now.
I believe I read somewhere that prohibitions on marijuana began shortly after the prohibition on alcohol were lifted, and represented a move by alcohol companies to eliminate a competitor. And, the primary users of marijuana were african americans, and became another instrument of control.
The question to ask is: who benefits? Let me guess, alcohol producers, their lobbyist, and their politicians; DEA etc enforcement authorities; covert military operations that have used crop eradication and a war on drugs to funnel arms and money to 3rd world countries, usually supporting of course, butchers and dictators along the way.
The absurdity of the war on drugs is obvious; for that absurdity to continue must mean there is something else going on
I have several herniated disk in my back & neck, psoriatic arthritis as well survived four abdominal surgeries, with out marijuana I would never be able to sleep, it works well with neuropathic pain. It has greatly improved my ability to move around, my quality of life has been greatly approved.
December 5th, 2008
5:03 pm GMT Drugs are illegal because using them is immoral. Why is that so easy to overlook. If you ever lived in New York City, you may have learned about Rudy Giuliani brought down crime when he was Mayor.
Giuliani employed something called the “broken window theory” to fighting crime. Instead of overlooking smaller crimes, like petty drug use and drug sales, he went after them, with the expectation that locking up petty criminals will prevent them from committing more serious crime.
Drug abusers commit crime not just because of economic issues, but more so because of moral or social defects in their personality. They will commit other crime regardless of whether drugs are legal or not.
We are better off keeping drugs illegal, and using these laws to get people off the street before the commit more serious crimes.
- Posted by Jenny Ling Po
Well Jenny, I’m so happy you see drugs the way you do. Then I can count on you to support the re-implementation of alcohol prohibition and the prohibition of tobacco? I’m thinking about pushing for the prohibition of all drugs that kill people. This means most pharmaceuticals, NSAID’s, Aspirin, etc. Plus, don’t forget about the 100,000+ Americans killed by doctors and pharmacists mistakes they make with drugs each year. Oh yeah. Let’s not forget the drug that most Americans use and enjoy daily, caffeine. Yes, deaths have been attributed to caffeine. But, wait a minute, marijuana has never been proven to kill anyone, ever. Maybe, we should legalize marijuana on this basis. Oh, the U.S. Congress just congratulated itself for ending alcohol prohibition 75 years ago? I guess we’ll have to avoid trying to get alcohol prohibited again. This makes me sad as it’s the drug most often involved in violence. Plus, it’s turned a lot of people into alcoholics/addicts. I’m sure our congress knows what it’s doing. But, knowing how evil alcohol and tobacco are, how does congress justify letting adults buy and use such immoral drugs? That’s right, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution in September noting that the 1933 repeal of alcohol prohibition had replaced a “dramatic increase” in organized crime with “a transparent and accountable system of distribution and sales” that generated billions of dollars in tax revenues and boosted the sick economy. Congress is proud that they ended alcohol prohibition because it failed, except in creating even more evil than there was before prohibition. This means that congress made the mess by createing the Volstead act in the first place. Huh? So, why does congress believe in and continue to force marijuana prohibition on Americans when it’s createing even more evils? Maybe, I’ll have to support a regulated market for marijuana. After all, it worked when we re-legalized alcohol. Our weak economy sure could use the billions of tax dollars that would come from the legal sale of marijuana, too. Maybe you should support a regulated cannabis market too, Jenny. By the way, we’ve tried arresting and jailing our way out of the mess that cannabis prohibition has made. That’s why we’re the #1 prison nation on Earth and we’re building even more prisons to hold drug users. At the expense of building and funding schools. But, drug user’s get a college degree in crime in prisons. That way they can go out and do far more nefarious crimes than use drugs and they’ll have learned how not to get caught. So, that can’t be all bad, can it?
I have mixed feelings on drugs and prohibition, but one thing i do know is that alcohol is as much of a drug a marijuana. In fact, most people (of all ages) agree that pot is far less volatile than alcohol and many over the counter/legal prescription drugs. People who have never tried drugs shouldn’t have anything to say, because anything they do say is just speculation, or a reiteration of something someone else told them. Personally, I feel that, depending on the use of a drug like pot, it isn’t consistently immoral. Cancer patients use medical marijuana to help them eat and to take the pain away, and at the same time someone else can use a regulated dose of the same drug to help them with back pain, headaches, and many other ailments. Speaking from the vantage point of someone who has used marijuana as both a social and medical drug, the long-term/short-term effects don’t hold up to those of alcohol etc. With our current economic crisis, I can’t say that legalizing drugs like cannabis is a wrong move. Does anyone agree? I know for a fact that most habitual marijuana users would be willing to pay a tax to get what they need/want, so what’s wrong with that? Though, if the legalization were to actually take place we would need a firm set of rules and guidelines with consequences, like we have with alcohol.
Two 2008 reports, From Options to Action: A Roadmap for City Leaders to Connect Formerly Incarcerated Individuals to Work and Employment after Prison: A Longitudinal Study of Releasees in Three States, support the effectiveness of employment in reducing crime.
The benefits to the community of hiring the ex-offender are powerful. It is clear that if ex-offenders are employed, they are far less likely to commit crimes, including violent crimes. Businesses would be more likely to prosper without the fear of criminal acts. Another benefit would be the cost savings. The cost of incarcerating one federal offender for a year is $24,922 versus $3,621.72 for community supervision (July 2008). the average prison sentence at the closest federal prison to Delaware, in Fairton, N.J., is 120.5 months. Sixty-nine percent of the inmates at that institution are incarcerated for drug or firearm offenses. Many have landed there due in large part to lack of opportunities, dysfunctional backgrounds or situational factors that came together, causing the “perfect storm” in their lives. Studies, and experiences in other parts of the country strongly indicate that probation offices working with ex-offenders, in an evidence-based practice approach reduces recidivism. The cost of incarcerating an addict costs 10X more than treatment does. Add that to the fact, that many less people are likely to re-offend after treatment (vs. jail) and you can see how the savings would be quite significant. http://www.drug-addiction.com/addiction_ is_illness.htm
The Government uses it’s authority to frighten the masses into accepting the need to continue prohibition with scare tactics propaganda. They used distortion and lies to criminalize cannabis and have followed this pattern ever since to keep it illegal. What simple measure can we employ to test this fact? Alcohol prohibition didn’t work. So congress re-legalized it, knowing it’s an addictive and deady drug. Alcohol and tobacco combined kill 100′s of thousands of Americans yearly. These drugs are definitely immoral to use. But, they’re legal. While cannabis has never been proven to have killed anyone and it’s illegal. Alcohol prohibition didn’t work and cannabis prohibition will? When, in another 72 years? Sorry guys, our nation can’t endure the ever increasing evils of cannabis prohibition much longer. Just look at Mexico. That’s where most of our cannabis comes from and they’re locked in a war of survival with the drug cartels. Just because cannabis is illegal. This is going on right next door to us. How much longer before we too are in the same situation? All because prohibition is the devil we do know and legalized cannabis is the devil we don’t know. People, it’s time you did research independent of government propaganda. Then you’ll be shocked to learn the truth. Cannabis isn’t a devil at all. Cannabis was not a problem until prohibtionists made it into a problem. It’s a plant that in it’s natural, unadulterated state doesn’t kill and is less addictive than caffeine (NIDA). While alcohol promotes violence, can destroy the liver and kills, cannabis does not. While tobacco causes cancers and kills they user. Cannabis does not. The problem we’ve had is the U.S. Government will not allow an open discussion between itself and cannabis advocates. The reason for the wall of silence is the government knows that if we were allowed to confront congress a majority of Americans would demand a regulated market for the sale of cannabis to adults. Prohibtionists and drug cartels have something in common. They both fear the legalization of cannabis. Because, this will put a stop to them riding the gravy train. Before you prohibitionists get started about what prohibtion has accomplished. Please, visit this link and refute the fact that prohibition plays little role in teens decision to abstain from marijuana use http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=7748
Marijuana should be made just as legal as alcohol with the same restrictions etc. There’s no question about that. As for other drugs, I’m open to options.
Some drugs, under certain circumstances are NOT immoral. I believe that some hallucinogens such as LSD (uncut), peyote and ‘shrooms, under the guidance of an experienced shaman, psychiatrist or somebody like that, can help one contact the spiritual realm. Deride my beliefs if you will but I’m appalled that so many people are so arrogant that they think they should have the right to make my religious beliefs illegal!
Every year is a even bigger ‘banner year’ for cannabis seizures and arrests. Only 5-10% of all cannabis is interdicted. So, every year is actually a far biggger ‘banner year’ for cannabis traffickers. Cannabis is widespread, commonplace, socially accepted and it’s not going away. But, the cannabis prohibition industry insists on pushing that which hasn’t worked and has only made matters worse for 72 years. They justify the need to continue the war on cannabis users by pointing to ever increasing seizures and arrests, which actually only point out prohibition’s failure. What do you call it when someone has a bad habit which calls for ever increasing power and ever larger budgets to maintain a delusional state which ends up hurting the very body which created prohibition? Yes, it’s called addiction. Prohibtionists are addicts and they won’t be satisfied until they take away everone’s rights and assets and destroy this nation and themselves.
Who profits from jailing drug users? Prohibtionist elements like LEO’s, Prisons, politicians, alcohol & tobacco, pharmaceuticals, petro-chemicals and drug cartels all profit by keeping cannabis illegal. Who looses from keeping cannabis illegal? Tax Payers, broken homes, Police officers, innocents, parents, farmers, schools, teachers, students, and licensed merchants. Americans need to wake up and decide to organize and attend nationwide protest against prohibition. Anyone who says that cannabis prohibition fights crime and protects our society is completely wrong. Prohibition creates demand for the ‘forbidden fruit’. Prohibition makes it extremely profitable to meet the demand for cannabis and has made organized crime syndicates far more wealthy, powerful, corruptive, aggressive and deadly than they were during alcohol prohibtion. If prohibition is working. Why are drugs more available, more potent and less expensive than they were just 10 years ago? Why is it that 86% of teens say they can easily get cannabis within one hour? Why is it that teens say they can get cannabis easier than alcohol or tobacco? That’s because licensed merchants prevent the sale of alcohol and tobacco to kids 90% of the time. Licensed merchants would make it harder for the underaged to get cannabis, too.
It’s unbelievable that the United States social-economic denial has persisted for 50 years wholesale and across the board that prohibition of drugs in general is and has been a total failure. We as a nation are admittedly stupid to have carried this posture toward drugs out this far – this long. The “War on Drugs” was lost the day the day it was started. The rest of the world has watched the United States bash its collective head against the wall repeatedly every year for 50 years with the exact same approach to prohibition exacting the exact same resulting failure. Wholesale denial – wholesale failure – everytime. It’s a 100% equation. The greatest nation on earth? Think about it.
Ideally we need to trust only ourselves. In real world, most be people do not develop a sense of what is good and bad for themselves till 26 years old. I remember the pot heads, the coke abusers, the meth and so on and so on. Yes, not all pot smokers got messed up. But some did. In fact, I would say a good ten percent had psychotic problems for then on. So, what is the expense of free use? People deny that a good 30 percent of kids are depressed and looking for escape. Alcohol provided an escape till it was completely outlawed for kids. Then drugs came in. Alcohol is well known in society; I think we can deal with it. Drugs in general produce such bizarre and long lasting effects; society cannot deal with it. People who push drugs to children should be shot on site. This would cause no bribes nor corruption for no judge is involved. Yes, American judges are never watched like policemen. And yes, police raids are based on tips from rival gangs. Drug gangs make Bin Laden look grade school. Remember, under Ronald Reagan, American Express was tipped off by the Washington FBI that the NY FBI were going to make a bust of American Express for drug laundering. Oops, all the bad guys removed their money electronically to off shore banks. Wow, to think drug lords know how to use computers. Just last month, the FBI reported only 20 percent of agents had access to a computer. When politicians are elected who have an IQ above 100, then drug enforcement will take place. I have noticed that purple haze arising out of a lot Catholic Bishops because they are stuck in the 60′s with the rest of the American hemp users.
I am joining the LEAD Forums. I am going to tell these guys what I think of them. I think they’re tired of protecting us from drug addicts and dealers and expect for the average citizen to take care of it themselves. They only encourage vigilantism. Make the bust, guys!
To R. L. Hails Sr. P. E.
“Quote —
To my knowledge, only one nation has ever successfully won their war on drugs. It was China
—- unquote ”
Dear Mr Hails,
I was in China in 1998 having a little trip around the country and in the middle of nowhere (not in a city where it’s easier to find drugs) some chinese guy came to me and talked to me (didnt understand a word) and after 3 minutes gave me a 10 grams bowl of polen pot localy made, I was trying to tell him I quit a few years ago and didnt want it and the guy left scared without his pot nor my money, so your little post as strictly no value to me because I know your wrong.
Besides nowhere on this planet any prohibition ever worked, whatever substance was forbidden you will always find people consuming and/or trading, please wake up.
Besides studies made in a governmental propaganda environment arent at all legit to me, the ONLY country that did the job is Netherlands, and their studies show exactly the opposite of what you pretend. Basicaly I am sure your no drug user (good for you) but you shouldnt try to convince people over a partisan point of view.
Regards
Consider it from this perspective: You are effectively being denied the right to make decisions regarding your own consciousness and body.
Repeat that phrase ten times in your mind in order to really grasp in what kind of society you are living in:
“I am being denied full sovereignty over my own body”,
“I am being denied full sovereignty over my own body”
[...]
Therefore, you don’t own your body fully, because otherwise you would have the right to do whatever you want with it. The government tells you which aspects of handling your own body and mind are acceptable and which ones you will be incarcerated for. Consequently, the government has more sovereignty over *your* body than you do.
You want to alter you own consciousness? – We put you in prison!
You have the right to remain silent and keep the GDP going.
rumours-for years i’ve been told for the past 40 years that the tobacco companies have patented tm logos for pot when it is legalized-this goes back to the 60′s…if one can have assisted euthansia which is slowly becoming as popular as the calif. movement to legalize pot and then nationally; then, whats next? for GOD’S sake do something about the poppy out of afghanastan-that’s a killer…go figure!