This is an interchange from the Exiles of the New York Times Immigration forum. My response is on top. Note my unique suggestion that we legalize drugs but treat as premeditated all crimes committed under the influence of both drugs and alcohol.
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As a statement of principle what the Colonel said is correct. The devil, as usual, is in the details. And here the detail is that our efforts to curb drug use are totally inadequate. I put it to you that what our society has actually chosen isn't to mitigate drug use so much as to make a show of mitigating drug use so we can feel good about ourselves--and to feed more and more tax dollars into an ever-increasing government bureacracy whose purpose has shifted at least in part from drug control to self-maintenance.
Moreover, I think you could make a powerful argument for the most basic role of government being the regulation of conduct between people. From this point of view, taking drugs is irrelevant. OTOH getting stoned and killing someone is totally relevant. That's why I've proposed that we legalize drugs but at the same time treat all crimes committed under the influence of a mind altering substance as premeditated--including alcohol.
The differential treatment of alcohol vs. other mind-altering substances, and of the drugs blacks and lower-class whites use vs. the ones legislators use, leads to a second key principle of governance in a constitutional democracy: equality under the law. All corrupt societies feature one set of laws for their nomenclatura (that was the privileged class in the Soviet Union), another for everyone else.
It is blatantly discriminatory to legalize one of most poisonous of mind-altering substances--alcohol--while making it a felony to use marijuana, arguably one of the least harmful of mind-altering substances. No one has ever died from a marijuana overdose. It's not possible. Alcohol ODs OTOH, happen all the time. At the very least we should treat both the same, or, better yet, regulate the aspect of all this that actually matters: what people do to other people. Laws don't just require government enforcement--they must also be seen as fair. The current situation diminishes respect for the law, just as Prohibition did.
BTW I don't have a dog in this fight. I'm married to a devout Mormon and haven't had a drink since 1983 or illegal drugs since 1969. My concern is applying our finite resources to controlling crime between people--including illegal immigration, which is the crime of trespassing and often ID theft. and the constant incursions of drug cartels so powerful they control governments in some countries, and of course human trafficking--which is always a crime against other people.
And remember I never advocated legalizing drugs for minors, who by definition cannot consent. That's also why there's no such thing as a child prostitute.
So to get back to the topic of this thread: IF we legalize or decriminalize drugs we both cut off most financing for the international cartels that keep crossing our borders AND we free up serious government resources to apply to control international criminal activity that involves incursions and to amp up drug programs for minors--which have had some success, actually, except for alcohol. BTW a good step for that would be to "decriminalize" alcohol--i.e. keep it legal but ban advertising, which glamorizes it.
No one loves our current drug laws and enforcement activities more than the drug cartels. The DEA guarantees the profitability of the international drug trade by keeping the price up. If marijuana and heroin cost the same as parsely and beer the drug cartels are out of business in America. And the job of controlling our borders becomes a lot safer.
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Here's the immigration forum entry I was answering:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[quote pid=965 author=colonel_sanders date=1176347179]The War on Drugs cannot be 'lost' unless one gives up. It also cannot be 'won' any more than the War against Rape or the War against Arson or the War against White Collar Crime or the War against Human Trafficking or the War against Pickpockets.
It is an ongoing struggle to mitigate the harmful effects of a nefarious activity and always will be.
The members of a society decide what behaviors are unacceptably harmful and they take steps to minimize those behaviors. Each different human culture makes those sorts of decisions in different ways and all human cultures do make those decisions.[/quote]
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As a statement of principle what the Colonel said is correct. The devil, as usual, is in the details. And here the detail is that our efforts to curb drug use are totally inadequate. I put it to you that what our society has actually chosen isn't to mitigate drug use so much as to make a show of mitigating drug use so we can feel good about ourselves--and to feed more and more tax dollars into an ever-increasing government bureacracy whose purpose has shifted at least in part from drug control to self-maintenance.
Moreover, I think you could make a powerful argument for the most basic role of government being the regulation of conduct between people. From this point of view, taking drugs is irrelevant. OTOH getting stoned and killing someone is totally relevant. That's why I've proposed that we legalize drugs but at the same time treat all crimes committed under the influence of a mind altering substance as premeditated--including alcohol.
The differential treatment of alcohol vs. other mind-altering substances, and of the drugs blacks and lower-class whites use vs. the ones legislators use, leads to a second key principle of governance in a constitutional democracy: equality under the law. All corrupt societies feature one set of laws for their nomenclatura (that was the privileged class in the Soviet Union), another for everyone else.
It is blatantly discriminatory to legalize one of most poisonous of mind-altering substances--alcohol--while making it a felony to use marijuana, arguably one of the least harmful of mind-altering substances. No one has ever died from a marijuana overdose. It's not possible. Alcohol ODs OTOH, happen all the time. At the very least we should treat both the same, or, better yet, regulate the aspect of all this that actually matters: what people do to other people. Laws don't just require government enforcement--they must also be seen as fair. The current situation diminishes respect for the law, just as Prohibition did.
BTW I don't have a dog in this fight. I'm married to a devout Mormon and haven't had a drink since 1983 or illegal drugs since 1969. My concern is applying our finite resources to controlling crime between people--including illegal immigration, which is the crime of trespassing and often ID theft. and the constant incursions of drug cartels so powerful they control governments in some countries, and of course human trafficking--which is always a crime against other people.
And remember I never advocated legalizing drugs for minors, who by definition cannot consent. That's also why there's no such thing as a child prostitute.
So to get back to the topic of this thread: IF we legalize or decriminalize drugs we both cut off most financing for the international cartels that keep crossing our borders AND we free up serious government resources to apply to control international criminal activity that involves incursions and to amp up drug programs for minors--which have had some success, actually, except for alcohol. BTW a good step for that would be to "decriminalize" alcohol--i.e. keep it legal but ban advertising, which glamorizes it.
No one loves our current drug laws and enforcement activities more than the drug cartels. The DEA guarantees the profitability of the international drug trade by keeping the price up. If marijuana and heroin cost the same as parsely and beer the drug cartels are out of business in America. And the job of controlling our borders becomes a lot safer.
-----------------------------------------------------
Here's the immigration forum entry I was answering:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[quote pid=965 author=colonel_sanders date=1176347179]The War on Drugs cannot be 'lost' unless one gives up. It also cannot be 'won' any more than the War against Rape or the War against Arson or the War against White Collar Crime or the War against Human Trafficking or the War against Pickpockets.
It is an ongoing struggle to mitigate the harmful effects of a nefarious activity and always will be.
The members of a society decide what behaviors are unacceptably harmful and they take steps to minimize those behaviors. Each different human culture makes those sorts of decisions in different ways and all human cultures do make those decisions.[/quote]
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