Everyone wants to stop the drug war. Liberals want to further their libertine utopia. Libertarians champion the notion of freedom above all else. Conservatives worry about government profligacy. Others are concerned with incarceration of non-violent felons, group disparities in drug arrests, and just getting high, man.
Only the most hidebound social conservatives support the drug war as a means of maintaining societal calm. They argue that while we must limit government overreach, it does have the power to curtail noxious activities. And sure, drug use reduces to a personal choice, but it's one that has inexorable consequences for the rest of us via insurance rates, crime, border violence, and general cultural slothfulness.
However, one needn't be concerned with the viability of the above argument - namely the direction of the causative arrow between drugs and pathology. In fact, one only needs to consider a cost-benefit analysis between abject freedom and societal stability. In other words, should government implement laws that hinder our freedom yet have powerful ramifications for maintaining societal order?
I'd say yes, but the "powerful ramifications" don't derive from stopping drug use. Instead, just think about who gets caught doing and dealing drugs. In my experience, only two types of individuals ever get caught involved with drugs:
-really stupid people
-those are already engaged in some other type of criminal activity
Of course, there's a large overlap between the two groups. For the first, despite all the grousing about draconian drug laws, you have to be really dumb to get caught. Do the drugs in your own home with little fanfare. Simple as that. I've had tons of friends who smoke pot regularly, yet I've known only two people who ever got caught by the police and both barely graduated high school.
For the second, if you're involved with large quantities of drugs through dealing, shipping, or growing, it's highly unlikely that's all you're doing. Sure, some hippies in the Emerald Triangle peacefully grow pot in their backwards; yet they stand out amongst those that move lots of product. So we catch druggies moving large amounts of drugs and that's what we charge them with, but it's a proxy for all sorts of other much worse criminal activity associated with drugs. These involve physical violence, murder, and human trafficking.
In the end, I don't feel sorry for exceedingly stupid people involved in all sorts of bad goings-on. The drug war seems, perhaps accidentally, a eugenic initiative and that's why I support its ongoing existence.
33 comments:
Seems like it could just as easily be the other way around ... guys could get cachet for "sticking it to the man" or whatever they call it when they get away with a law that isn't really enforced in the first place. Females of childbearing age decide they need to sleep with those guys because of the aforementioned cachet. Babies happen, to be raised at the expense of the taxpayer.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just not sure myself.
The reason that drug dealers engage in physical violence is precisely because drugs are illegal. If anybody could grow weed, and if Chiquita Banana went into the cocaine business, Mexican cartels and the Hell's Angels would go out of business. Lower level urban shootings would also decrease quite a bit.
Drugs are actually pretty easy to get. I would think that most everybody who would do them under a legal system is already doing them. Might as well take away the means to fund gangs, and just punish the negative behaviour associated with drug use, such as burglary, etc.
The big question is, what would these drug dealers all do if they were put out business by legalization? What would the immediate generation of drug dealers do and what would subsequent generations of would-be drug dealers do?
Will they focus their energy on legal and productive activities? Or switch to different sorts of criminal behavior?
I tend to believe that they would shift towards legal and productive activity, but who knows.
Your argument is logical and seductive, but I don't agree. Yes, most of the people involved in the lower levels of the street drug trade are stupid (just watch a few episodes of "The Wire" if you want confirmation), but so what? Being stupid isn't a crime, and incarceration isn't going to raise their IQ's. And if many of them are committing other crimes, which is true, then they should be prosecuted for those crimes.
The same argument you make could be used to support the prohibition of alcohol, which was tried once with disastrous results. There were lots of Eliot Ness-style raids on breweries and distilleries. Many low-level bootleggers and other assorted hoodlums were rounded up and fined or sent to jail. But still the illegal booze flowed freely, generating enormous profits for organized crime. These profits were used to subsidize other criminal activities and to bribe law enforcement officials. And the kingpins usually got away, unless they were murdered by rivals.
So if prohibition didn't work for alcohol, an addictive, dangerous drug that causes thousands of deaths every year, why is it a good idea for other drugs?
What would drug decriminalization look like? Portugal may provide an answer. In 2001, that country abolished all criminal penalties for personal drug possession. How did that work out? -
Notably, decriminalization has become increasingly popular in Portugal since 2001. Except for some far-right politicians, very few domestic political factions are agitating for a repeal of the 2001 law. And while there is a widespread perception that bureaucratic changes need to be made to Portugal's decriminalization framework to make it more efficient and effective, there is no real debate about whether drugs should once again be criminalized. More significantly, none of the nightmare scenarios touted by preenactment decriminalization opponents — from rampant increases in drug usage among the young to the transformation of Lisbon into a haven for "drug tourists" — has occurred.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10080
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html
....
We need to do the same.
And what is "drugs" is declared and defined by government. For example AAS (androgenic anabolic steroids) are made illegal by government decree even though they do not cause addiction nor are unsafe or as dangerous as government claimed
So no its not eugenic, its the opposite. Drug war is just another way to deprive people of control over their own bodies and fates.
You are very hypocritical , you support government intervention in areas you like while complainig about big government in policies you don't like
Should the state sanction recreational drug use, its use will explode, just as happened with gambling.
And look what widespread government schooling has done to these young skulls full of mush. Most students would probably be smarter to just stay home and high.
The drug war is necessary.
1) People with heavy-duty drug habits cannot hold down jobs. Legalized drugs would cause a massive explosion of drug use around the country and swell the welfare rolls beyond what we have now.
2) Legalizing drugs will not take away the profits because it will not lower prices. This particular libertarian meme needs to die. Legalized drugs are lethal and will come under the control of product-liability laws. No legitimate corporation would risk its image and pocketbook to brand a product that kills people. Furthermore, no one is going to compete with criminal gangs who still have the option of using violence to get rid of their competition.
No...legalizing drugs would simply legitimize the revenue of existing criminal networks and provide a new avenue of money-laundering for other illegal activities.
3) Drugs are a physical piece of evidence, easily used to prove a crime. There are many people serving time in prison for drug charges that should be serving time for murder, but murder is hard to prove.
4) Legalizing drugs would make money for Democrats since that is just the kind of business they would go into.
5)Alcohol and smoking are comparatively benign. Heroin, meth and crack are not. Addictiveness to both smoking and alcohol is more the result from a lack of willpower and personal control...like getting fat.
6) Prohibition was disastrous because it was voted in by women. Anything women vote for is stupid and useless.
the drug war imprisons the stupid and the criminal but it doesn't sterilize them, so it's not eugenic you dummy
You could alternatively say that "The Drug War furnishes income to those who would not otherwise have it (feckless drug dealers who could not compete with for profit companies and could not otherwise gain employment) and enables them to have children (through social status signalling to attract mates - it seems quite unlikely that they support their children through their gains), therefore the DW is dysgenic".
(Not to mention that you can't support something simply because it has a eugenic effect - I mean shooting stupid and aggressive people in the face would be eugenic, but that would not be sufficient grounds to support it.)
And we all know that any dysgenic or eugenic effect of the DW are tiny, compared to the other array of dysgenic effects (and some eugenic effects) presently on offer in our society.
"The reason that drug dealers engage in physical violence is precisely because drugs are illegal. If anybody could grow weed, and if Chiquita Banana went into the cocaine business, Mexican cartels and the Hell's Angels would go out of business."
Uh, low life scum that are generally unemployable will still be unemployable and will go into another illegal activity that pays better than the legal work they are qualified for. Duh.
the drug war imprisons the stupid and the criminal but it doesn't sterilize them, so it's not eugenic you dummy
It is, because it denies them the opportunity to knock up women while incarcerated.
So you're saying that Willie Nelson is stupid?
I might be the only one on this board who admits to being confused about drugs, to wit: In the late 80's I regularly played basketball in Berkeley with a drug dealer, who carried a big wad around and was known as "T." Helluva nice guy, though a bit of a ball hog. Also used to play with quite a few brothers who smoked a lot. Again, very nice guys, no race problems at all. Interestingly, the most violent black assholes I knew in those years were middle-class types, the ones with AA jobs. The issue is separating drug sales/use from violence, and in this respect we're hamstrung by white leftists. What if cops could stop every car driven by a young male simply to look for weapons, drugs be damned? Voila! - tens of billions saved in medical, court and incarceration costs. I bet if you put the matter to a vote of black grandmothers, they'd overwhelmingly approve. But antiquated notions of "discrimination" prevent the common sense cure.
This is deeply authoritarian thinking. At the core of this argument is the belief that the government should be empowered to imprison people whether or not they've committed a crime, whether or not the government can convict them in a court of law.
If you don't believe using drugs should be criminal act, then you shouldn't want the government to imprison drug users. To want the government empowered in this way because drug use sometimes correlates with other behaviors that you don't like is naive power-worship.
Truth(er) said:
Drugs are a physical piece of evidence, easily used to prove a crime. There are many people serving time in prison for drug charges that should be serving time for murder, but murder is hard to prove.
Yes, forgot to add this. This is probably the best argument in line with the post.
Drugs are a physical piece of evidence, easily used to prove a crime. There are many people serving time in prison for drug charges that should be serving time for murder, but murder is hard to prove.
Yes, in many cases cops will only pursue drug charges against a perp because they have hard evidence and they know that drug charges will give sufficiently long sentences - hence there's no need to tack on assault, weapons possession, resisting arrest etc. since these charges probably won't add any additional jail time - they will merely add to the burdens of proof and paperwork. It kills me to see liberals yammer on and on about "nonviolent drug offenders" - I just answer with "Do black crack-infested neighborhoods really look safe to you?"
In fact, the longer sentences that came with the beginning of the drug trade were a factor in ending the rule of the traditional Italian mafias - instead of 2-year bids for prostitution, gambling or hijacking cigar trucks you were seeing small-time hoods looking at 15 years for heroin trafficking, and this was causing them to break the code of silence and testify more often.
I want to point out that the purpose of making drugs illegal was not about catching people in ancillary crimes. Drugs are destructive. They ruin lives. Contrary to any notion of "eugenics", the reality is that we do not live in a society that allows people to destroy themselves. We are not atomized individuals. Drug users have friends and family who would be beside themselves with grief and horror watching a loved one slowly self-destruct from drug use. The drug war is as much for them as it is for the drug abuser, society and those who adventurous enough to try it but for the sanction of the state.
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/7422
this bloggingheads debate between megan mccardle and mark kleiman largely 'proves' onestdv's point about how the drug trade laws impair the lower classes to the benefit of the middle class.
mark kleiman, who's a criminologist, makes the point that were the ban to be lifted, many more in the middle class would use drugs. this may or may not be bad depending on your point of view.
the drug trade prohibition has a historical analogy in the prohibition to alcohol, and most people wouldn't think to make the connection. indeed, mark makes the point that this is completely analogous to the prohibition against alcohol. many more in the middle class are now alcoholics than would be were the prohibition still in effect.
Doesn't there need to be a little more focus on the issue at hand? We have a "drug war," but marijuana is the only relevant substance to be disussed as it concerns legalization. The fact is that we already have easily available "drugs." And so the important question to be asked is whether radical liberal politicians get to define "drugs" for the rest of us based on nothing more than their own self-interest. A large aspect of the "drug war" is the war on marijuana. And this drug war is much different than the war on meth, crack, heroin or cocaine. And this war also elicits questions about another "drug war" that pits old grimey Viagra-poppers against elite athletes utilizing performance-enhancement technologies. Has anyone got any science on THC and its apparent performance enhancing ability to protect the brain from degeneration?
"This is deeply authoritarian thinking. At the core of this argument is the belief that the government should be empowered to imprison people whether or not they've committed a crime, whether or not the government can convict them in a court of law."
Exactly. This is the kind of law you don't need in Finland where the bottom 5% have an IQ about 80.
However, you do need them in countries that have a significant fraction of folks with an IQ equivalent to a Finnish 3rd grader.
I endorse everything Truth(er) said except point number six :)
I don't know whether it is eugenic; I have a completely different frame that sees that anything that keeps the most people on the straight and narrow is better; I reject the negative lens that focuses on how harm to the underclass is beneficial. I think such thinking is immoral and counter-productive. By this logic, we should be experiencing a better civilization after decades of legalized abortion and a scientific and legal regime that allows only for "wanted" children. That we are experiencing the opposite is not an accident.
Back to Truth(er)'s comments.
1. Agree. Most people are squares who adhere to the law though they won't admit this. Amongst many baby-boomers, the last generation of widespread smoking, is the attitude, "had cigarettes been illegal, I would never have smoked, had pot been legal, I would have taken it up".
2. Do the mafia and others traffic in illegal activities because a. their products/services happen to be illegal or b. they're sociopaths who will always be interested in the illegal whatever it is. How one answers this plays perhaps the biggest part in how one comes down on this issue.
Many libertarians point to the anarchy in Mexico as a casualty in the war on drugs. I have an alternate theory to throw out there. First, David Frum said years ago that the American ruling class has worried about Mexico experiencing an upheaval much like we're seeing now. At the time, he said said the American view was to see illegal immigration as a "pressure valve" to release those most likely to cause the volatility and strife.
Such a view sees the Mexican peasants as scum essentially. Is it correct?
What if, instead, the mass and continuing exodus of young men was *the* destabilizing factor? A critical number gone needed to protect the homes, villages, etc.? I suggest this is the case. The loss of prime-aged young and family men who would be the protectors and upholders of the law has created a vacuum that sociopaths and the desperate has filled.
6. Prohibition was too ambitious.
My big worry in the years ahead is that as the good times come to an end and people need to be smarter, wiser, more productive, etc., the government will be short-sighted and try to push more vice to collect the tax revenue.
The case study for 1STDV's argument is Netherlands.
Tusky
"However, you do need them in countries that have a significant fraction of folks with an IQ equivalent to a Finnish 3rd grader."
In other words, here's your clever plan.
-We gather up millions of dollars from everybody.
-We pay this money to the government so that they can intentionally make life more difficult for everybody, by criminalizing some arbitrary thing.
-The payoff: now that, thanks to our own government, life is harder, the more challenged Americans among us will fail at a greater rate, and we can now pay the government even more to house them in cages.
If you need someone to explain to you the stupidity of this plan you can ask a third grader.
" Do the mafia and others traffic in illegal activities because a. their products/services happen to be illegal or b. they're sociopaths who will always be interested in the illegal whatever it is. How one answers this plays perhaps the biggest part in how one comes down on this issue."
They do it for the money. They charge a risk premium for illegal activity. Also, they don't pay tax and aren't regulated. Pretty tempting, you know, if you are not a square and don't mind risk. Smarter people also earn a premium for taking risks in investments and other legal activities. It is just the risk of losing money, rather than the risk of jail or being killed by rivals. The point is to actually collect the risk premium. If that premium exists, some sort of risk taker will take the risk.
I'm not sure how we can speak with any certainty about taxing drugs. How can we say for sure they would be taxed to the point where people would feel like evading the taxes was worthwhile?
I got the impression that the legalizers believed in taxing them to just below the point where an adult would want be better off buying illicitly. This doesn't mean the tax + legal price would have to be lower than the black market price. They could be equal and people would by the legal stuff to avoid the possibility of prosecution for tax evasion. With the adult market channelled into legal channels, there would be less money flowing into organized crime, and pushers would be less popular socially because they couldn't plausibly claim to only sell to "adults who can handle their highs".
Also the legal stuff would be properly regulated for safety and, if I had my druthers, taxed on active ingredients.
By active ingredients I mean THC for hemp and, I guess, psilocybin for mushrooms. I myself would not favor legalizing anything else. Beyond that, I would regulate any smokeable drug like cigarettes, and any edible drug like food. That's regulation enough for me, but I know I'm in a minority on this issue, at least on the right side of the web.
B-Lode wrote:
"I got the impression that the legalizers believed in taxing them to just below the point where an adult would want be better off buying illicitly. This doesn't mean the tax + legal price would have to be lower than the black market price."
I don't understand how legalizing drugs solves any problem. I don't understand what taxation or regulation is supposed to do. What do you hope to accomplish through manipulating the price of drugs?
The drug War was not created to make life more difficult for the poor. It was created based on the boots-on-the-ground facts that drugs turn people into dysfunctional wrecks. At best, they cannot hold down jobs. At worst, they become criminals. This has to be dealt with at all angles.
It seems to me that what you people fail to understand is that "legalizing" drugs is not going to bring benign market forces to bear on reducing the return to criminality. Pfizer and Merck are not going to compete with the Crips and the Bloods for drug territory (how would the mechanics of that even work?) Ma and Pa storefronts are not going to open in Compton. There is not going to be an increase competition that would both lower profits and cause an increase in quality and customer service. It's madness to think otherwise.
Want to know what will happen? Well, let's reason by analogy. Germany legalized prostitution. Germany also has relatively benign drug laws. Organized crime controls all the legal brothels and the women are controlled by semi-legal drugs. The result? Sex trafficking: wholesale criminality that crosses international borders. And along with the movement of women, you have the movement of drugs, guns, you name it.
The simple act of legalizing prostitution in Germany has metastasized into a much bigger problem.
I don't think it's intentionally eugenic.
It's a job & income provider in Public Sector.
Otherwise what would useless
bureaucrats do for a living with no crimes to crack down on?
Not b/c they care duhh.
I see social liberals and social conservatives as two heads of the same beast. They both believe in government intrusion into daily lives to "make the world better" and can't stand to see someone else get away with something they see as morally repugnant. For liberals, it's people getting rich off of other's hard work (who cares if they enjoyed the work). For conservatives, it's people doing the sinful things like having non-Chritian sex or enjoying altered states of mind (who cares if it is their choice and doesn't affect their ability to contribute to society).
Neither see the bad affects of their efforts and keep building up their regulations and regulators, thinking that every failure calls for more action. So we end up with more jails and cops and more bureacracy and bureacrats.
Here is what I call a temporary measure. http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/11/rios_drug_war.html
This won't solve anything in the long run. Kids are just going to have more bullet holes to look at and remember the day a tank rolled through their street.
Truth(er) writes:
No legitimate corporation would risk its image and pocketbook to brand a product that kills people.
Here's two:
R. J. Reynolds.
Gallo (hint)
I'd contend that the purpose of the drug war was not to stop drug use per se, but rather the intelligent use of drugs. Go back to the 1950s-60s, and there was a considerable movement for using drugs such as LSD for expanding the consciousness (that's "thinking outside the box for today's audience). And drugs were pretty much bound up with the counter-cultural revolution -- tune in, turn on, drop out all that sort of thing. The drug war was pretty successful in squashing this movement. It also ended a lot of research into the positive effects of psychotropic drugs.
What you end up with is today's drug scene which is essentially dysfunctional. Meth addicts, drug gangs, paranoia because your kind may be smoking a joint. While all this today wreck a lot of havoc, it's not a threat to ruling elites. Another point to be considered is that the war on drugs allowed the government to tear up much of the Bill of Rights. And it also was a boon to the corporate sector with federal moneys for anti-drug PSAs, drug testing, and prison industries. Plus you remind your workers that you are the boss because you can force them to drop their pants on demand for their drug test.
Meantime, your average American watches the SWAT teams kicking down doors on the tube and feels secure. Little Johnnie/Jane is not smoking a joint, right?
Drug war also bans many ergogenics like anabolic steroids. That's not eugenic.
Also, imprisoning dumb people and having them live off the taxpayer's dime is not conservative.
Sorry for the bad link before.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/11/rios_drug_war.html
Seriously though ONE, if you're all for eugenics, you should be all for legalization. It's far more efficient to let drugs take out the dumb ones. If addiction is like mental illness, then IQ is one of the top predictors of successful. So the most likely people to find themselves dead in a ditch full of drugs are people with lower IQs.
Besides, it's not my fault if you get addicted to heroine. Why should the tax payer pay so much for cops and border patrol to try and keep it out of your hands?
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