Accept the facts–and end this futile 'war on drugs' - Johann Hari - The Independent »
Posted By gamahuche 1 week, 2 days ago in Health & FitnessThe proponents of the "war on drugs" are well-intentioned people who believe they are saving people from the nightmare of drug addiction and making the world safer. But this self-image has turned into a faith – and like all faiths, it can only be maintained by cultivating a deliberate blindness to the evidence.
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gamahuche
"I would rather be a square peg than fit in a pigeon hole" -
an essay which won me the "Lamb Essay Prize" at the Religious ...
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gamahuche1 week, 2 days ago
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I've observed the drug scene - from a certain distance - in almost of the countries that the writer speaks of. I believe that he partially discounts national characteristics in his analysis of how things play out.
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Holland and Portugal, though very different from each other, are relatively peaceful enclaves within Europe. Here in the Czech lands marihuana is generally ignored by the legal system - though a large shipment would undoubtedly be seized and be penalised.
Neither cocaine nor heroin have ever been big following but there is a nasty form of speed with the particularly ugly name of pervitin.. -
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gamahuche1 week, 2 days ago
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The big question: Does enforcement and penalisation cause more problems than it solves?
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And if it does how do we protect the most vulnerable individuals from themselves and from the criminal elements involved in much of the dealing scene?-
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Natureboy1 week, 1 day ago
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With respect to the criminal elements involved in the dealing scene, they are largely a result of the drug war. Much as organized crime was a huge part of the liquor scene during prohibition. Escalating the drug war limits supply and increases demand, making contraband traffic much more attractive to organized crime.
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Charlson1 week, 2 days ago
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gamahuche1 week, 2 days ago
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Yes.. this is the gist of his thesis - supported by these "facts" [some of which might be arguable]:
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FTA:
Fact One The drug war hands one of our biggest industries to armed criminal gangs, who unleash terrible violence across the country. When alcohol was prohibited in the US in the 1920s, it didn't vanish. No: armed gangsters like Al Capone stepped in and sold it – and they shot anybody who got in their way. Yet today, Wine Rack does not shoot up Threshers. Oddbins does not threaten to kill anybody who sees its staff selling wine. Why? Because it wasn't the booze that caused the violence; it was the prohibition. Once alcohol was reclaimed for legal businesses, the dealer-on-dealer violence swiftly stopped.
Where there is a huge profit to be made in a black market – it's 3,000 per cent on drugs today – people will fight and kill to control it. Arrest a dealer, and you simply trigger a new war for his patch, with the rest of us caught in the crossfire. In 1986, the Nobel-prize winning economist, Milton Friedman, calculated that there are 10,000 murders in the US alone every year caused this way. Legalise, and you bankrupt most organised crime overnight. With their profits in freefall, the gangsters don't suddenly become cuddly – but the huge financial incentives to remain a gangster wither fast. It's the drug war that keeps them in business, and legalisation that shuts them down. As Friedman said: "Prohibition is the drug dealer's best friend."
Fact Two Under prohibition, drug use becomes more hardcore. Before alcohol prohibition, most Americans drank beer and wine. After prohibition was introduced, super-strong moonshine became the most popular drink, as booze rapidly became 150 per cent stronger. Why?
The writer Richard Cowan called it "the iron law of prohibition": whenever you criminalise a substance, it gets stronger. Because they are smuggling and stashing a substance, the dealers condense their product to give the biggest possible kick while taking up the smallest possible space. It's at work today: it's why dealers invented crack in the 1980s. The researchers Matthew Robinson and Renee Scherlen found: "The increased deadly nature of drugs under prohibition led to 15,000 more deaths in 2000 [in the US alone] than [if] prohibition had not made drugs more dangerous."
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jordan111 week, 2 days ago
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IMO, the 'war on drugs' is more a war on 'pot', with far too much spent on that while dangerous drug trafficking flourishes. Americans will spend hours debating the cost of insuring people for health care, but barely a peep about the multiple billions spent on harassing people who smoke a drug less dangerous than alcohol which is legal. Makes no sense.
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earthlingerer1 week, 1 day ago
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Of course it is a war on pot... and pot users more than anything.
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It's easy to arrest some guy for pot. Well, easier than arresting a guy with hard drugs, and the gun used as insurance. Most cops go "chicken fertilizer" when they realize they're coming close to a dangerous, or big fish.
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MeanMrMustard1 week, 2 days ago
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Here is a debate that took place in the last several days between a retired judge and a drug warrior from the prohibitionist crowd.The prohibitionist is getting stomped.
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/11/08/national... -
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Newperson1 week, 2 days ago
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I like what jordan said. That is a good way to see this thing. I do not smoke pot. But to me smokeing pot is less harmful to our selfs and our family. I have never heard of police being called out to break up a fight where people were high on weed. I can't say that about booz.
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Ratskii1 week, 2 days ago
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The funny thing is that I've known people who could be called pot-o-holics. When they were unable to get marijuana because of tight enforcement, they just shrugged and went on with their lives. This is not what I would call addiction. It is very similar to my attitude towards beer. Nice when I can afford it, but I don't have to have it.
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toph19731 week, 2 days ago
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In this type of an economy it only makes sense to end prohibition on pot. Our jails would be much less crowded. The police would have more resources to go after the real criminals. I for one would be willing to pay a tax to the government to go buy a pack of joints. Many problems would be eradicated just by making a weed legal. End the madness now.
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Xaos1 week, 2 days ago
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The more Libertarian approach that was taken toward narcotics by our Government roughly 100 years ago appeared to be more effective than the path we chose to pursue in the late 1960's and early 1970's.
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I am not a drug user and in no way condone the use of drugs, however it takes no expert to see that our current methods are anything but effective.
Just like Prohibition did with alcohol, all the war on drugs has accomplished is making criminals rich. -
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Ratskii1 week, 2 days ago
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He has made one small step in telling the justice department to lay off medical marijuana prosecutions. I hope that if he becomes stronger (if the economy improves) he'll have the courage to do more. He's definitely not a Kucinich or Ron Paul though.
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oneironaut4201 week, 2 days ago
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Of the people who dropped this story, I would like to ask, why? Do you refute the facts listed in the article? Do you have evidence that is contrary to everything that indicates the WoD is a massive and costly failure? Or are you just dropping it because a bunch of liberals propped it, therefore, it must be bad?
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fjgalt1 week, 2 days ago
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There are billions of dollars at stake on both sides in the war on drug users. Neither the thousands of law enforcement personnel nor the criminals (including the mideast and other terrorists who finance their wars with drugs) want to see it end, no matter how many die, suffer, and lives are ruined in the effort.
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The scare tactic is that our children would become hopelessly addicted if drugs were legalized. Of course, how do we explain that humanity survived these past few million years without prohibitions of drugs. A century ago, heroin tablets, codeine and cocaine were freely sold in pharmacies until they were replaced with better drugs such as aspirin.
It is our right to own our bodies, to ingest whatever substances (food, drugs, medications, etc.) we determine is in our interests. The government has no right to deny us this fundamental right.-
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Natureboy1 week, 1 day ago
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"Neither the thousands of law enforcement personnel nor the criminals... want to see it end"
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Actually, some of the strongest opponents of the drug war are cops. And if you see what the drug war does to the police, it's easy to see why.
Unlike robbery, rape and murder, where virtually all citizens will come forward to tell police what they know, drug transactions are consensual. And that means that as long as its on the downlow nobody is going to tell the cops. So the police end up having to work closely with informants.
I can tell you how this works, because I've seen it first hand, and reported on it. The cops arrest somebody for a p!ssant quantity of weed or pills, or for misdemeanor theft or even violent crime, and then they offer to let them off the hook if they finger someone else. Those who will rise to this bait most readily are the ones with the badly bent moral compass. So they snitch somebody else out, who is in turn a nickel-and-dimer.The theory is that cops use snitches to work their way up the food chain; the reality is that they use snitches to bust a bunch of other end-users and nickel-and dimers to make their numbers look good.
What you ultimately end up with is cops working closely with the people they should be busting, and the lines get blurred. Here locally, some "confidential informants" who have been kept out of jail and on the streets by the cops turn out to be much more dangerous to the public than those they were snitching on. One, who was known to police and the public to be mentally unstable, eventually murdered a local man and set fire to the body. Another was arrested for beating his pregnant wife in front of his two-year-old son.
Eventually the cops operating in this mode can lose their moral compasses as well, and start using, pinching evidence on the way to the evidence locker, etc. It's bad for cops, it's bad for the public, and it needs to stop.
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MeanMrMustard1 week, 2 days ago
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Your tax dollars at work...disappearing with nothing to show for it...
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http://www.drugsense.org/wodclock.htm -
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lloydm651 week, 1 day ago
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Can we assume that if law enforcement doesn't work for drugs,then maybe it won't work against robbery,burglary,and maybe personal assault.Every one of these crimes happen every day despite law enforcement.So maybe we're kicking a dead dog,and just need to back off.
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