Since we began the war on drugs, when Nixon was in office, not only are we wasting 70 billion a year with an economy in shambles, but you add things like this recent 20% homicide rate increase, the 62% of U.S. cities having increased gangs’ fighting over control of the drug market, which is a direct cause of the illegal market that drug laws create, are all bad enough.
https://vimeo.com/139590083 –This is the current situation with drugs here in the U.S.
vimeo.com/139591770 —Law Enforcement Against Prohibition- Sep. 9th, 2015
The breaking point to me, is the fact that we not only create this violence and organized criminal organizational violence with our prohibition of recreational drugs, but we empower it, and surprisinly encourage it as well, with prohibition. People just don’t get it, legalizing drugs is not about the drugs, it’s about the crime, violence, gangsterism, terrorism, and the complete empowering and enabling of these things that the illegal marketplace of them causes. Enough is enough.
I’m all for…..If at 1st you don’t suceed, try, try again………but don’t be a damn fool about it.
Drugs are inherently a problem for the individual that takes them, but they are a much bigger problem for society, precisely because they are illegal.It is there illegality that makes them costly, and drives people by desperation to get the money by any means and anybody else’s expense. The mere cost of production of drugs can be very inexpensive.
If an addict could support his addiction for a few dollars a week, he would still be an addict, but he would not have to steal, mug, or kill other people to support his habit. Neither would drug pushers have the financial incentive to try to get children hooked on drugs, if there was no big money in it.
Drug raids are good politics, but they don’t make a dent in the problem.
The ban on drugs, like alcohol prohibition, has become a financial bonanza for organized crime, and it’s profits have financed the corruption of law enforcement agencies, politicians, and judges. Drugs can be dangerous things, and those who sell drugs, do so completely free of any regulation, control, or standards of product, business, marketplace, age they can sell to, etc. Drug dealers would not have the financial incentive to try and get children hooked on drugs, if there was no big money in it.
The years that preceeded prohibition saw private citizens take the law into their own hands, entering saloons with axes, to destroy bottles of liquor. It was ego boosting, moral exhibitionism. When the crusaders finally succeeded in getting their prohibition bill added to the U.S. Constitution, it was their crowning triumph, and the nations tragedy.
Organized crime blossomed, so did the corruption of the whole political process. When national prohibition ended, many localities passed their own bans on liquor. Bootleggers sometimes financed the campaigns to ban liquor. Their profits depended on liquor’s being illegal.
Legalization would similarly destroy the profits of today’s drug pushers. There is no way that they can compete with drugs that can be mass produced cheaply by big pharmaceutical companies.
This country had a fairly consistent murder rate when prohibition of alchohol started in 1920. Within a few short years, that murder rate had sky-rocketed and tripled, and stayed there, until 1933, when prohibition ended. It then, finally started to decline, taking it 4 years, in 1937, to level back off at the same level it was at in 1920, before prohibition started. We gave people back the reason they were killing themselves and each other.
This is not a complete solution. No where is it written in stone that there are always answers in the back of the book. What we can do as a society, is to cut our losses. It is bad enough that some people destroy their own lives with drugs. We don’t need to add vast numbers of innocent victims, who are robbed, or murdered by addicts, who are trying to get money for a fix.
Like alcohol, drugs can be regulated for content, age required for purchasing, driving under the influence, etc. But this is just one more area where we have to recognize that government has it’s limits. Ignoring those limits is not only reckless arrogance, but dangerous. We finally learned that painful lesson from prohibition, we need to remember it, when it comes to drugs.
Crusaders cannot accept the fact that they are not god, that they have neither the right, nor the competence to run other people’s lives, and a crusading mentality can easily make things worse.
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