That question doesn't have to be decided now. We can look at the effects of Prop 19, and see what the results suggest about legalizing cocaine, heroin, or even pseudoephedrine.
Exactly. Even if you are a complete anti prohibition believer, you will probably take route. In other words, even if you decided to legalise everything, a good strategy would be to start with marijuana, see the effects, add some more drugs to the list, etc.
The harmful effects of prohibition exist irrespective of the drug. History has shown that they are largely of the same character (but perhaps different in scale) for cocaine, heroin, alcohol, etc.
You take a substance out of the hands of professionals and place it into the hands of criminals. The quality of the substance goes down. The number of dead bodies goes up. The truth about the drugs themselves gets completely distorted with lies and propaganda instead of becoming common knowledge.
Legalization should go hand-in-hand with education and healthcare reform. If you get those elements right, you'll have a much more functioning society. Fewer drunk drivers, fewer overdoses, and no drug cartels to speak of.
"Legalization should go hand-in-hand with education and healthcare reform. If you get those elements right, you'll have a much more functioning society. Fewer drunk drivers, fewer overdoses, and no drug cartels to speak of."
What healthcare reform? Are we going to pay for the health care of addicts now? If you become an addict you should have to also deal with the consequences. Education should concentrate on telling kids not to touch drugs because most likely, they will fuck up their life. Pot may not be chemically addicting or as harmful as cigarettes, but it ruins your ambition and can be even worse for kids or even younger adults that should be figuring out what they want to do in life.
I also don't think it will get rid of the drug cartels. They will just have a legal way of funding their operations. It will only make it easier for them to make money.
Stemming the flow of money to brutal drug lords is reason #1 to rethink the current drug policies. Glad to see that point spelled out so clearly. What's going on in Mexico is truly heartbreaking.
Marijuana is clearly a big piece of the puzzle, but what about legalizing harder drugs like cocaine?
EDIT: Removed the question because I saw another HN'er posted it. Then added it back when Paul responded so it'd make sense in context.
I don't know what the answer is for all drugs, but Marijuana should obviously be legal, so that's a good place to start. If we wait for the perfect answer to all questions, we'll never fix anything.
jbail was referring to my comment which was posted a few minutes earlier than his.
However, my question was a bit more pointed and I think you haven't addressed it.
The justifications used in your post are equally applicable to cocaine and to other drugs. If different drugs have different answers, why didn't you (or why don't you) explain why your argument is limited to marijuana.
OTH if you strongly believe in the philosophy outlined in your post, what is stopping you from endorsing similar initiatives for cocaine and why would cocaine potentially need a different answer ?
[edit] I see a lot of good responses, but all of them special-case marijuana (e.g. marijuana is less addictive than heroin). This is fine, but Paul's post has flowery language about freedom and all of that language is applicable to heroin as well. Paul's post doesn't make the case for special-casing marijuana. On the contrary, if he denied the principles of "freedom" for cocaine, it would undermine his post which is all about "freedom" and nothing about marijuana being less dangerous than cocaine etc.
There is a trade off in this sort of policy. Prohibition leads to organized crime and violence in the black market. It also leads users into a world surrounded by crime and illegality and makes it harder to deal with addiction. On the other hand, legalization can make drugs more available and possibly enable more users. Hard drugs like meth and herion are extremely addictive and damaging. Many people never recover once addicted and seldom lead normal lives. Marijuana on the other hand does not share these traits to the same extreme. I think the tradeoff for marijuana is clearly on the legalization side. As for other hard drugs, the tradeoff is less clear whether society would be better off.
I can't answer for the grandparent, but I would imagine it has to do with how he evaluates the dangerousness of these drugs relative to the consequences of their illegality.
>The justifications used in your post are equally applicable to cocaine and to other drugs.
Cocaine was legal before it became illegal. What results il-legalization of cocaine have produced? More crime and more funding for crime organizations - check. What else?
Look at the history of opium as well. And don't even start about LSD - the drug my reading about have discovered it having only positive benefits so far.
It may be legal, but not in the sense that access to it is unrestricted. I can't think of a situation where it is possible for a black market to exist for a legal and unrestricted product.
Not that I'm arguing for or against just enjoying seeing the opinion of other HN readers.
What researchers should do is look at the prevalence of black markets in states where pot is easy to get legally. In CO pot is easier to get legally than anything else other than alcohol or tobacco. I wonder what that has done for COs black market for pot.
> If you're using Vicodins legal status (requires prescription) as a comparison then pot and cocaine are already legal.
I believe in legalization, but this this is false (in the US at least). Pot is a Schedule I prohibited substance, Cocaine is a Schedule II prescription drug, and Vicodin is Schedule III. Each schedule carries with it a large difference in how available and legal a drug is.
"legal" is a spectrum, and vicodin is much more legal than pot or cocaine are.
While that is true on a federal level it is quite a bit different on a state level. In CO for example, pot is very simple to get legally. You can tell a doctor you have head aches, back pain, whatever and quickly get a pot card. When it comes to pot it is legally easier to get than an endless prescription of vicodin. At one point they had 'doctors' onsite at the pot dispensaries, but I think they may have recently changed that part.
You are right that cocaine is more strictly controlled than either of the other substances, but the original point I was making is that you can't use vicodin as an example of a legal substance when it's not freely available.
An entire country of addicts was nearly created by a Big, i'd say Huge, Business + Government Corporation - Britain's East India Company. These and other addictive substances have existed through the history of human species. They become a huge problem only when big money and/or big power gets involved.
>Vicodin (another form of heroin) is legal, yet there is still a black market for it.
that your statement doesn't make sense - Vicodin is legal for prescribed purposes. People having Vicodin prescription don't buy it at black market. Vicodin is illegal for all other situations, and in these situations people go to black market.
Erm , no it wasn't. Opium was illegal in China which is part of the reason that China ended up at war with Britain where it was legal. Its totally unfair to use that as an argument for legalization since the problem was more complicated than that, but its also unfair to use it as an argument against legalization.
Everybody will have different answers, but when you change even one side of the cost/benefit equation, the answer can change.
For me, the cost of marijuana prohibition is too high and the benefits too low. Based on what I've seen in my life in those around me, I do think smoking marijuana a lot is a bad idea. I can't scientifically determine if it makes you spacey or if spacey people are drawn to it, but it doesn't seem to be a good sign overall. But, there are a lot of other equally dangerous or even more dangerous things that we don't legally prohibit, and while I think it's probably bad for you, it's not that bad for you. Consistent alcohol abuse certainly seems worse.
The other deciding factor for me personally is the addictiveness of a drug. Marijuana may be addictive, but I've seen people successfully quit, even without seeming to exert that much will power. I am much less inclined to legalize the drugs that snare you on the first hit, for two basic reasons: First, the very fact that they do ensnare you, and second, because if we legalize them today, the drugs that could be designed under a legalization regime are even more dangerous. I don't think I want to release the full power of a free-market economy on the task of producing a chemical that makes you feel good (and better yet requires repeated purchases); that's just asking for trouble.
Careful observers may note that tobacco as it stands now pretty much fails my test for legalization. As a practical matter it would have to be grandfathered in, but yes, I actually do think nicotine's demonstrated ability to snare you physiologically on the first hit is actually pretty dangerous and may really be on the wrong side of my personal legalization line.
well, of course recent research has linked the highly modified strains of marijuana (ie, very high THC, reduced companion and modifying compounds) with schizophrenia and other disorders. This has fatal consequences, as I can attest to. See: http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/natureofthings/2010/downside...
This study smells of FUD. Has there been on overall spike in schizophrenia that one would expect? What's the sample size? What's the hypothesis on the mechanism (just saying correlation isn't good enough)? Etc.
It also has little to do with the debate over prohibition, since prohibition has done little to curb consumption but certainly incentivized stronger strains.
It's not a perfect solution, but it's a significantly better state of being than what it is currently, as he said in his blog article. Marijuana is a large part of the market, so it will be a significant chunk. Marijuana is also more practical for people to say yes to than drugs such as heroin. One step at a time.
I have been saying for a while that we should just legalize all drugs, for excalty the same reasons outlined in Paul's post. I don't care what people do to their own bodies as long as it isn't harming anyone else. However, I can see a lot of anti-drug organizations and charities popping up to educate people on the dangers of heroin, etc. Hopefully that will give us the maximum freedom while also providing some good drug education to reduce the amount of heavy drug addictions.
The worst side effect of the drug trade is that it funds a worldwide network of highly capable smugglers. To them drugs are just an arbitrary material to be moved from point A to point B. Drug networks move terrorists, weapons, nuclear material, slaves and child prostitutes just as easily as they move bags of powder. But drugs are the smugglers' bread and butter. The other more harmful things are just the salt. But demand for the more harmful cargo is not sufficient enough to fund such a large and competent industry.
I worked in the MIL/INTEL world for a long time and a staggering number of really nasty things turned up amongst bags of powder all over the world. Drug networks are like VPN for physical objects. And drug producers would happily abandon that protocol for FEDEX if they could. The remaining market for moving things we truly cannot live with would be reduced by many orders of magnitude if we gave up on the drug war.
I like how everybody is an expert on the drug trade because we've all seen a 60 Minutes piece on violence in Mexico. Violence in Mexico is not a new trend and neither is the hysteria of violence spilling over. The fear of violence spilling in to the United States from Mexico was prominent one other time, during the Mexican Revolution. The current thread of drug related violence in Mexico is often attributed to the presidency of Felipe Calderon but it can actually be traced back to at least 25 years as it is evident in the culture of the narco that is prevalent there.
We can shut down the drug cartels in Mexico, like we did in Columbia, but the drug trade will be next be passed to another country like a baton. The next country to be promoted as a drug state will be Afghanistan with it's fields of poppies fulling the growing heroin demand.
I'm all for Proposition 19, but legalizing marijuana will not stop drug cartels just like legalizing prostitution does not stop the flow on human traffic.
Afghanistan is actually much simpler than Mexico, making the case for either decriminalizing opium or at least doing the Italian red cross plan of buying all the opium produced much more significant than it is in Mexico, as I'm sure you're aware.
Drug smuggling out is fairly widespread and finances bad stuff; very little else is smuggled in or out, except for a bit of quasi-legitimate reimport of stuff on the Pakistan border to get around absurd Pakistani tariffs on stuff like cars, and moving fighters across the Pakistan border.
Child (or general human trafficking) isn't a viable market: Afghanistan can't afford to smuggle children in, and Afghan children mainly are consumed in the domestic market. ("woman for breeding, boy for pleasure, melon for sheer delight"). Very few Afghan women become prostitutes outside of Afghanistan or Pakistan (unlike Iraqi women in the neighboring states/Gulf).
There aren't many migrant workers moving across the borders either, mainly due to a lack of an economy in any of the neighboring states. Iran and Pakistan have a fair number of refugees, but they are fairly static, and don't actually work in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iran.
Eliminating opium as a profit source would eliminate the weird choice between befriending farmers as local allies AQ/Taliban vs. destroying opium (and thus making those farmers into enemies or enemy sympathizers for purely economic reasons), and would definance most of the Taliban (if not AQ, still financed via Saudi recreational jihadis).
Mexico has decriminalized possession of drugs for personal use[1]. The most noted country to do so is Portugal. But this alone does not address the drug trade.
Touché in regards to the commend on moonshine. But it is well document that The Netherlands, who have a long standing liberal view on prostitution, are a leading destination of human traffic[2].
[2]'s only example is a case where women were brought to the Netherlands then sent to neighbouring countries for prostitution. If this is the norm, then it's not unreasonable to think the liberal laws are merely a low-risk funnel for traffickers rather than increasing demand for sex workers.
> We can shut down the drug cartels in Mexico, like we did in Columbia, but the drug trade will be next be passed to another country like a baton. The next country to be promoted as a drug state will be Afghanistan with it's fields of poppies fulling the growing heroin demand.
So American, lets just go and make a mess where nobody called us. Anyway, if you were so successful shutting down the cartels in Colombia, how come it is still the world's leading producer of Cocaine[1]?
Why? Drug cartels move tons of drugs at a time, and have the mechanisms to move them across borders relatively unnoticed. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that they would be able to move other things too.
Smuggling children is probably just as easy as smuggling thousands of pounds of coke, which happens regularly.
The largest cocaine bust was on the order of 48,000 pounds. Drug smugglers, on the high end of things, have access to submarines and secret tunnels that cross nation boundaries.
Child trafficking happens, and it the overlap between the major drug movers and the child traffickers is significant -- because they are both serving black market commodity on the level of distributors.
There are, however, a whole lot less people out there interested in buying children compared to the number interested in buying pick-a-substance. The reduced amount of profit available to high-level black-market distributors when you take away the market for drugs would, in my opinion, make it harder to find people willing to smuggle children.
Smuggling people is actually easier than smuggling drugs (well, adults, either as migrant workers or prostitutes; children are kind of borderline depending on the country).
In a lot of places (US Southwest especially), the penalties for drug smuggling are far higher than for escorting groups of people -- if you get caught, you might go free if it's just a group of workers. The humans can transport themselves on foot. The humans can be held hostage afterward and you can try to extort more money from their family; if a $20k kilo of coke is held for ransom, no one is going to pay more than the discount to an alternative kilo for it.
Detection and logistics, mainly. Weapons are a special case, since if we're still talking mainly about the US/Mexico border, I would expect that weapons do not move in the same direction as drugs, and expertise in smuggling one way across a border may not translate to smuggling the other way.
Nuclear material will require at least some shielding to avoid detection, and it would seem to me that a well-implemented detection system would notice abnormally quiescent cargo as well. That would mean that you have to carefully tune shielding to present the right level of radioactivity, rather than just piling on more to make it as low as possible.
Smuggling people of any kind requires life support; there are a lot of tactics you wouldn't be able to use without losing them. For some types of human cargo, the smugglers might find some losses acceptable, but angering terrorists by losing a container of their buddies might not be healthy. In any case, it seems that there's already a lot of people walking across the border into the US, and I'd expect that if there were an obviously safer or more reliable way, they'd use that. Lots of assumptions, there, of course.
The way I understood it, all your objections are covered by the fact that drugs are moved in several ton bundles for a while.
Consider the cargo container. A large metal box. It'll hold several tons of drugs, or just as easily 50lbs of radioactive material and 1 ton of shielding. Or 5 people and several jugs of water.
I'm not saying there are no potential solutions to the problem. I'm saying it's not "just as easy". With some of those types of smugglers mentioned, you have to keep them quiet (but more or less unharmed, I would expect) as well as alive, for at least days, and maybe months if there's a snafu. Or accept that some containers aren't going to make it.
It's not clear to me what the challenges are with smuggling radioactive material, or how good detection protocols are. That doesn't mean I can't think of any, or solutions to same, but it means that I expect there are at least some consequences I'm not thinking of, and it's certainly not as easy as some sealed, inert cargo.
Which is a fantastic reason to get it legalized. If there's profit, there will be a business around it, which can then be regulated as any other food / drug business can be.
This is a tough question. We all agree that marijuana should be legalized and sold in a regulated way, but what about the other, way more dangerous drugs?
This may surprise you, even shock you, but heroin is actually legalized, and given out by the government, in a lot of European countries. Addicts visit a special office and get their daily fix administered by trained professionals. I think this is the way to do it for heroin.
Heroin in itself is actually not as insanely dangerous as portrayed. Sure, it's a really really bad drug, but just like morphine, it can be administered safely. The most dangerous thing about heroin is actually not the heroin itself, but the contaminants and unclean administration. The high price of heroin creates a lot of crime, in places where it's not legalized the addicts either have to steal, prostitute or push drugs to afford their own usage. Stats have shown that legalizing and incredibly strictly regulating it reduces addiction, crime and recruitment of new users. Nobody sane wants to try heroin, almost all the recruitment are done by the addicts themselves pushing it to other unfortunate people. When they don't have to spend their days working on getting enough money to buy their next fix they actually can have normal jobs and working on escaping their addiction.
I don't know how to handle other dangerous drugs such as cocain, meth, amphetamines and lsd. Mushrooms and MDMA should be legalized, but way stricter than marijuana.
In parts of the US, we give out clean needles to addicts. We treat heroin addiction with opiates. This is very important. However, I think that many people these days underestimate how harmful heroin is per se.
I'd really rather deal with the marijuana issue as separate from the heroin issue.
A lot of the danger with heroin stems from it being illegal. There's no steady supply, and no way to tell how strong it is. Many of the heroin deaths are from addicts going cold turkey for a while, and/or getting something much stronger than they're used to, and overdosing.
Plenty of harm would still be done by heroin even if you could eliminate the issues of dosage, purity, and (legal) access. Would making those extrinsic changes that you suggested make being a heroin addict less dangerous? Yes. You'd prevent many of the stochastic events such as overdose, tainted product, and dealer-associated violence.
Would those things make heroin less harmful? In many important ways, no. There are simply some hazards of being a heroin addict that are intrinsic, not extrinsic. I still don't think that a heroin addict, even in the protected situation you're describing, would likely be a top candidate for "Parent of the Year," for example.
Is legal heroin better, on balance, than a rational needle-exchange program and a generous rehab program? I don't know, but I can guarantee that politically coupling that to marijuana legalization would simply kill marijuana legalization.
So what, exactly, are these terrible effects? Wikipedia lists collapsed veins, pneumonia, suppressed liver function and infection as long term risks. Which seem pretty bad until you look at the long term risks of alcohol: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_effects_of_alcohol
Talking about the direct health risks of heroin is like talking about the speed of a missile that is coming at you. Sure, a high-velocity object will kill you, but even if someone brought the thing in on a wheelbarrow, it's still packed with explosives and will do its job quite well.
This is why I'm not talking about heroin's direct health risks and instead focusing on the bigger picture. Heroin's terrible effects are a consequence of physiology and behavior, not necessarily of cellular toxicity. The way that heroin makes people feel is so powerful that it outcompetes all other motivators. Therefore, heroin has the habit of dominating the lives of its users, enslaving them to itself and its pursuit.
The addictive potential of alcohol is nothing like that of heroin.
Yeah, so it's more addictive than alcohol. But if you can get a clean, dependable supply for relatively little money, the risks are not that bad. Certainly not enough to completely ban it or describe it with the hyperbole that you do.
Because you don't seem to have an accurate idea of what heroin is or does, and you're not basing any of your argument on fact, other than the "heroin is very addictive" part.
In my opinion, the fact that it's so addictive makes it more of a candidate for legalisation or at least greater availability, not less. If you have a population of addicts who will do anything for a fix, and the only people who will supply it to them are hardened criminals who are also into prostitution, extortion, theft, etc. what do you think will happen?
I'm basing my arguments on my experience taking care of heroin addicts in inner-city Baltimore. What exactly are you basing your arguments on?
And note that while you are arguing that we should legalize heroin, I'm not taking a position on that. I'm merely arguing (1) that legalization is not going to happen politically so you shouldn't weigh down the marijuana legislation with this, and (2) that heroin is intrinsically devastating even when you remove the drug dealers, etc. Point #1 is based on my hunch, but I doubt many would disagree, and point #2 is based on my experience. Do you have evidence or experience that contradicts mine, or are you just speaking hypothetically?
> I'm basing my arguments on my experience taking care of heroin addicts in inner-city Baltimore.
Nice. Maybe try leading with that next time, instead of "Heroin is a wheelbarrow full of rockets." or something, hey? :)
I'm not arguing point #1 - I'm arguing that your point #2 is flawed. Your experience likely biases you in that direction, since you will have seen the absolute worst cases of addiction, instead of someone like a lawyer or executive who can afford to have a heroin habit without it bankrupting them, or who isn't addicted.
What is the definition of a "dangerous" drug? If it's addiction you are talking about, I would be willing to bet that most people who try drugs, even the supposedly highly addictive ones, probably do not become the hopeless addicts that people like to point to when talking about the dangers of drugs. My guess is that people try them for a while or off and on on a recreational basis and it would be a rather minor part of their life.
I think most people would define it as the class of drugs that tend to turn people into addict shells of human beings and in the process inflict a bunch of damage on that person's family, friends and society at large: cocaine, heroin, meth and associated derivatives.
Now, criminalization may be counter-productive, and I'm inclined to think it is. But let's recognize what we're dealing with, here, it's not just freedom and rainbows.
Is there hard data on what percentage of people who try these drugs become addicted? I think we need to start there. In school we were told of the many supposedly devastating effects marijuana use had but I see now that was clearly a misinformation campaign designed only to scare us from trying it. We never got anything else and I am guessing most people are basing their opinions on similar misinformation or anecdotes.
Data's pretty tough on it, I think, hard to get people to self report unless it's addicts showing up for a $20 study. Anyone who knows better, feel free to chime in.
"In school we were told of the many supposedly devastating effects marijuana use had but I see now that was clearly a misinformation campaign designed only to scare us from trying it."
It's not a good idea for any kid to try marijuana. It's funny because now it's the exact opposite. There is all kinds of misinformation on how it has absolutely no drawbacks. Most people won't even admit there is a possibility of addiction.
It may not be as bad as they say, but it is definitely a mind-altering drug that can destroy your ambition in life and make it very difficult to succeed.
Pretty much all of my friends that started smoking pot (even the ones that were really smart) all have dead-end jobs and dropped out of school. This and all of the stupid shit that they have done while high make me never want to touch the stuff.
I'm not advocating any kid or anyone try anything or be told they should. I'm advocating a policy of drug legalization based on facts, not fear or the assumed "common sense" of the current prevailing religious hedegmony. In any case you are confusing correlation with causation.
"I'm not advocating any kid or anyone try anything or be told they should. I'm advocating a policy of drug legalization based on facts, not fear or the assumed "common sense" of the current prevailing religious hedegmony. In any case you are confusing correlation with causation."
No, I'm not. I've seen a change that went directly from productive and ambitious individual to not giving a fuck only wanting to get high asshole. No confusion here. The pot is what did it. When some of those people quit, the were themselves again.
"I'm advocating a policy of drug legalization based on facts, not fear or the assumed "common sense" of the current prevailing religious hedegmony."
Ok, as long as we actually outline the adverse health effects of pot and mention stories like mine. You seem to eager to brush these things under the carpet. I feel that pot advocates don't want "facts", they want the public to be told that pot is alright to use. Pretty much all advocacy sites are completely biased and only told about the rainbows and kittens. Even people telling the truth about pot on here are immediately down voted.
All of the people I know, myself included, whoever smoked pot went on to become successful, well-adjusted people in society. Do I take that as evidence that people should smoke pot in order to become well adjusted, successful citizens? Of course not. Correlation != causation. There are many factors why someone would drop out and end up just wanting to get high/play video games/surf the net/etc. Underlying depression can often be masked by substance abuse for example. The substance can cause an effect but it can't control you. As for getting the facts out there and basing policy decisions on them I want all the facts to be known, positive and negative.
Opioid addicts would be pretty harmless if they didn't have trouble getting their drugs, but some drugs just make people act crazy, and they could get more they'd just act crazier.
> Marijuana is clearly a big piece of the puzzle, but what about legalizing harder drugs like cocaine?
All drugs should be legalized and regulated. Especially cocaine.
You will not have peace on this Earth until that happens. The drug cartels will simply move onto the next forbidden fruit. Prohibition is, as Paul and many others point out, an assault on basic human rights and freedoms, and it carries with it a tax on society. Not just in terms of dollars wasted but in lives ruined.
Education + Legalization.
Erowid and scientific fact in every classroom instead of propaganda and lies.
This is not exactly a difficult concept to grasp, and various parts of the world (like Portugal, Holland, etc.) are finally waking up to it, and their quality of life is improving because of it.
Unfortunately, years of lies, fear-mongering, brainwashing and propaganda can be hard to erase.
If you've seen firsthand what a drug like meth does to a person, it makes you think twice about the ideal that everyone has the right to put whatever they want into their body/mind. The fact is, not everyone has the good judgment to make responsible use of that freedom, and some drugs really are much nastier than others, causing deep harm to both the user and society.
At the same time, we would be deluding ourselves to think that locking people up changes anything, whether we go after the supply or the demand.
The best way to move towards a sensible drug policy is to start by admitting that there are no good solutions, and that the best we can hope to do is to minimize harm, both from the drugs themselves, and the cartels.
(I agree, though, regarding drug education: Erowid has the capability to save far more lives than DARE ever could.)
> If you've seen firsthand what a drug like meth does to a person, it makes you think twice about the ideal that everyone has the right to put whatever they want into their body/mind. The fact is, not everyone has the good judgment to make responsible use of that freedom, and some drugs really are much nastier than others, causing deep harm to both the user and society.
I have, and not just for meth, but for heroin, and alcohol, and nicotine, and caffeine, and all sorts of other drugs.
Have you seen first hand what it looks like when somebody takes a women and fucks her in front of her husband, then tortures her, and finally cuts her head off?
What about a man being thrown alive into an acid bath?
No? Would you like to see that? Can you imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes? Just head South of the border. Ask for the Zetas. Ask for the families of people who have been kidnapped and turned into slaves.
This is the _reality_ of drug prohibition. Entire neighborhoods living in constant fear.
Methamphetamine can cause some damage to the human body when abused. So can water. The difference between a hit of meth in your hand and a punk standing over your head with a rifle pointed at your temple should be obvious. The difference between a hit of meth in your pipe and the unrelenting human suffering that goes on in America's overflowing prisons should be obvious. It is the difference between personal choice and the consequences thereof, versus violence imposed upon you by another, completely out of your control. It is the difference between freedom and prohibition.
I could kill myself by overdosing on a number of substances right at this moment, but I don't. It's because I know better, not because there's a law against it. It is far easier, cheaper and more humane to educate a population and provide them with the healthcare and counseling that they need than it is to deal with the horrors that are going on around you today due to prohibition.
Compassion and understanding and freedom will lead to a better world.
No dispute whatsoever. I'm 100% in favor of decriminalization for these reasons and more; that's different than full-blown legalization, though. Remember the law of unintended consequences.
And in fairness, at least some of the gangsters you describe would continue to perpetrate horrors even if all vice laws were eradicated overnight. There's still plenty ill-gotten gains to be derived from extortion, human trafficking, organ harvesting, etc.
I suppose what I'm saying is that decriminalization is necessary, but not sufficient, for an effective drug policy. Remember that part of Portugal's successful program is getting as many addicts as possible into (state-funded) rehab/treatment. As the cops stand down, we also need the doctors to stand up.
> I'm 100% in favor of decriminalization for these reasons and more; that's different than full-blown legalization, though. Remember the law of unintended consequences.
Decriminalization is neutered legalization. We should stop coming up with excuses for sending people to prison. Prisons don't create model citizens, they are a breeding ground for suffering and are a waste of human potential. Their existence is symptomatic of a poorly functioning society.
If someone wants to buy marijuana, then it only makes sense for there to be someone who sells it. Otherwise you still have a problem.
Legalization is combined with regulation so that you don't have the problem of major corporations funneling millions of dollars into advertising campaigns targeting children (as we learned with cigarettes).
This is a problem that most programmers should be familiar with. It's a function minimization problem. Minimize suffering(x).
> As the cops stand down, we also need the doctors to stand up.
Yes, if there were a mantra to chant, it might be: legalization, education, and rehabilitation. You have to have all of them to get the best result.
> Prisons don't create model citizens, they are a breeding ground for suffering and are a waste of human potential.
Couldn't agree more; in fact, this is a problem far above and beyond drugs alone. I dare say that prisons likely have the lowest efficacy of any social program in the history of the world. :P
That aside, prohibition being evil and ineffective doesn't change the fact that drugs are dangerous. The worst ones are capable of altering a person's judgment and personality, and creating harm to others. Taking prohibition away solves the problem of prohibition; it does very little for the problem of addiction.
(For that matter, I'm also in favor of socialized mental health care, which could be a highly effective harm reduction technique for drug addiction and alcoholism, but for some reason you get labeled a freedom-hating commie for suggesting such things.) :P
Cars are dangerous. Sky diving is dangerous. Walking across a busy street is dangerous.
Having just lived through one of my parents going totally and utterly mad having taken absolutely no drugs whatsoever and having seen the vast majority of my friends at some point in their life taking 'dangerous' drugs let me tell you with total and utter certainty that there is nothing at all dangerous about marijuana, ecstasy, lsd, cocaine or speed. Well certainly compared to driving a car or going out for a drinking binge.
An extremely temporary sensation of happiness or fun is nowhere near as dangerous to a person as a manic or depressive episode, the latter two being states of mind being entirely brought on by your own brain with absolutely no 'dangerous' drug being involved.
And this is even before we mention alcoholism, ocd or the plethora of other brain diseases our own bodies can inflict on us.
In order to combat illnesses of the brain, your doctor will prescribe drugs which are fundamentally more brain altering than many of your 'dangerous' drugs. My mother can barely read a sentence in a paper at the moment. Most of my friends got degrees from universities after their 'dangerous' drugs.
And the next argument that blows your utterly preposterous and medieval argument out of the water is that brain altering drugs are on sale today.
Caffeine, Alcohol, Tobacco, probably even Chocolate and Sugar. And this is before we consider the addictive drugs that are pumped into burgers, fries, milkshakes, sweets and all the dodgy fast food being sold today across the world. Oh, sorry, I mean 'food additives'. Of course they're totally safe because McDonald's paid your senator to say so.
History is the only precedent that makes them acceptable.
That anyone can be sent to prison for owning any 'dangerous' drug, especially when up to 50% of the population have at some point taken them, is an utter travesty of freedom and common sense. Worst still is that the poorer communities pay the price, locked away for ridiculous amount of years compared to the widely published and yet bizarrely low sentence celebrities arrested for drug offences.
This is a war of false morality, waged by middle class people who themselves have in all probability at some point actually taken these drugs and yet still vote with 'hard-on-drugs' politicians. They are hypocritical fools.
My saying that drugs are dangerous is different than saying that drugs are inherently bad. I consider recreational drug use to be akin to mountain climbing: a safe, healthy hobby which will fucking kill you in you're not careful. :P
Anyway, you're arguing with the wrong guy. :) Drugs should not have anything to do with the criminal justice system, period. But to say that drugs aren't a problem worth taking seriously is ridiculous; not because drugs are evil, but because people are people. Alcoholism is a real problem. So is compulsive gambling, manic depression, and yes, drug addiction. We can take proactive steps to deal with that problem without turning people into criminals.
"If someone wants to buy marijuana, then it only makes sense for there to be someone who sells it. Otherwise you still have a problem."
Should we legalize child porn (there is a demand)?
There are many things that have demand, but shouldn't be legalized. I'm not saying pot is one of them, but you aren't making a very good convincing argument.
"This is a problem that most programmers should be familiar with. It's a function minimization problem. Minimize suffering(x)."
Who's suffering? People that want to put drugs in their body? It's something you choose to do. You aren't born with a joint in your mouth.
"As the cops stand down, we also need the doctors to stand up."
Why can't pot smokers just admit that the reason they want pot legalized is so they can get high? It has very little health benefit. It might help people with cancer/eye problems, but those people are in the minority.
If there is no down side to becoming an addict, we will have more addicts. If you know that the government will just "rehabilitate" you, more people will be willing to try thinks like heroine and cocaine. If you know that it will basically ruin your life, you might think twice about it.
Opiates were legal in China at one point in time...until nearly the entire country was addicted. Why can't we just learn from the past instead of continuing to repeat mistakes?
The argument isn't convincing if you rephrase it as "If there is even the tiniest amount of demand for something, it should be legal."
That isn't at all what he said, though. He was talking about the issue of partial decriminalization vs. full legalization+regulation.
The real argument is, "If we believe something is benign enough to make partaking in it legal, it is yellow-bellied inconsistency to make providing it illegal."
"The real argument is, "If we believe something is benign enough to make partaking in it legal, it is yellow-bellied inconsistency to make providing it illegal.""
Most of the proponents will never admit that smoking pot has adverse health effects. Everything seems to be rainbows and unicorns when it comes to pot. I want to see some real long-term studies, not from high times magazine.
Why can't people admit that they don't give a damn about the 'health benefits' and just want to get high? It's very cowardly to get it decriminalized under the guise of health.
Inhaling smoke into your longs that may or may not cause memory loss and paranoia can't be healthy. Pot changes people that smoke it regularly. It never fails. All of my friends that smoke it regularly have had absolutely no ambition in their lives and are still in pretty much the same positions they were in high school (it's been 11 years). Before the pot, they had dreams and goals.
If we ever have government run health care, regular drug users either shouldn't be covered or have to pay a ton more. I shouldn't have to pay for you mistakes.
Maybe you just have a lot of deadbeat friends? Some of the most intelligent and successful people I know are regular pot smokers, and many intelligent and successful people will tell you the same (just read the darn thread). You should try doing some research and expanding your horizons before making blanket generalizations about topics you don't understand.
Most of your comment has literally nothing to do with the topic (I didn't discuss health impacts at all, much less claim that pot is completely harmless). The small portion that does touch on the topic completely misrepresents or outright ignores what I said. I think you should examine your thought processes on this topic, because you seem to have some strong feelings that prevent you from discussing it rationally. I'm not saying you're right or wrong in your opinion — just that your responses seem more like a strongly felt emotional reaction than a thoughtful examination of the facts and arguments presented to you.
I think there's a valid point: we're not totally free agents. There might be some chemicals that are too addictive. For example, the cigarette companies refined tobacco to make it more addictive, enslaving millions to an addictive carcinogen. Decriminalization of harder drugs might be a better method, since it partially removes profit motive for production and refinement but doesn't incentivize use.
"Compassion and understanding and freedom will lead to a better world.
Prisons and prohibition perpetuate suffering."
I'm all for drug legalization as long as I, as a taxpayer don't ever have to pay (if we do ever have a public health care plan) for anyone that decides to become a drug addict. I say decides, because the consequences of doing these drugs might just mean you become an addict. This means you won't get covered if you become addicted.
Also, businesses should have the ability to fire a drug addict at any time. Even if it doesn't directly affect productivity.
You are free to make any choice you want in this world, but I shouldn't have to pay for your mistakes.
As it is, people are still suing the cigarette companies for getting cancer (even though it's been well known for 50+ years that smoking causes cancer). We also need to have tort reform.
But you are paying, for drug enforcement and imprisonment. Plus increased taxation, because people who are incarcerated generally aren't working steady jobs, but are stamping licence plates or something stupid like that.
> Also, businesses should have the ability to fire a drug addict at any time. Even if it doesn't directly affect productivity.
Would you fire someone who drank? or smoked? or was obese? They're equally addicted.
"But you are paying, for drug enforcement and imprisonment. Plus increased taxation, because people who are incarcerated generally aren't working steady jobs, but are stamping licence plates or something stupid like that."
Generally, those people would otherwise have low-paying jobs and wouldn't be contributing very much anyway. The people in prison aren't your daily pot smoker. They are dealers and people who committed crimes while under the influence of an illegal substance.
50% of the population already doesn't pay federal taxes. If we are going to go after revenue, we should start with this.
"Would you fire someone who drank? or smoked? or was obese? They're equally addicted."
Smoking cigarettes and obesity don't get you high, which has profound effects on your state-of-mind. If someone drinks on a daily basis and comes in hung-over..then yes. All of these also shouldn't be under the same category as "discrimination" because they are choices you make (freedom can have consequences) not uncontrollable qualities that you are born with.
> The people in prison aren't your daily pot smoker. They are dealers[....]
That distinction has become meaningless. Anyone who gets caught with more than the "intent to distribute" threshold (which apparently isn't a lot) is simply presumed to be a dealer.
"That distinction has become meaningless. Anyone who gets caught with more than the "intent to distribute" threshold (which apparently isn't a lot) is simply presumed to be a dealer."
It's more than just quantity:
"Anyway, several things can determine intent, including quantity. Other factors might include quality, packaging, what type of area the person was in and the time of day."
I love the bias on HN. Anyone that has anything negative to say about your precious weed gets down voted. If you really believe in this, you need to come to terms with the fact that there are negative health effects to smoking weed.
Rather than whine about it, perhaps you should examine why you got voted down. There's only one comment of yours in the thread that's rated less than 0, besides this unsubstantial one.
I'd wager you were voted down for proposing that employees could be let go "[e]ven if it doesn't directly affect productivity", and then you subsequently abandoned it when you defended cigarettes and alcohol by taking purporting to take their effects into account.
If you're going to propose something like that, at least stick to it, and especially don't whine about it when people don't like that you've created an inconsistent system.
"It is far easier, cheaper and more humane to educate a population and provide them with the healthcare and counseling that they need than it is to deal with the horrors that are going on around you today due to prohibition."
This is a seemingly simplistic statement to something a lot more complex. Your brain doesn't care if you get counseling. It just wants its next high. If you can't get that next high from a computer game, you'll certainly want it from something more powerful (and in most cases, harmful). I'm surprised you haven't mentioned the neurological effects of using drugs like cocaine.
If you could walk into the drugstore and buy mushrooms, marijuana, 2CB, 2CI, LSD, DMT, adderol, MDMA, heroin and cocaine, how many people do you think would still be playing around with meth?
In some circles (truckers and construction workers), use of meth can directly translate into less sleep and therefore more money. And yes, I still think recreational meth users would also still exist. Never underestimate the self-destructive capacity of addictive behavior/personality.
First off, very few people would use heroin if opium were legal. But even ignoring that, heroin is one of the safest drugs there is. There are virtually no longterm negative effects on physical or mental health[1], and it's almost impossible to accidentally O.D. on, especially if you're doing it with folks who have access to naloxone. Of the 500k+ current users, there are only ~200 deaths per year from heroin[2], and a good chunk of those are suicides. In other words, it's perhaps 25x safer than smoking American cigarrettes.
[1] C.f. The Consumer Union Guide to Licit and Illicit Drugs.
The idea that anyone has the right to regulate someone else's life based on morality is deeply puritanical. It may seem like a different problem when posed in the form of a highly addictive and often destructive behavior such as meth use but it's still the same fundamental issue.
How much harm does being homeless do to society? How much harm does having a bad credit score do to society? Smoking cigarettes? Listening to thrash metal? Rock climbing? Eating a cheeseburger? Being HIV positive? What's the proper response to these sorts of things?
History has shown us in no uncertain terms that it is impossible to protect people from themselves. And every attempt to do so will fail utterly. Will result in more harm to the individual and more harm to society than the problem attempted to be addressed. There are good ways and bad ways to deal with the problems that, say, meth addiction creates. The wrong way is to try to regulate what people can put into their own bodies, that road leads to addicts who can't seek help because of fear of jail, it leads to no-knock militarized police raids, it leads to a criminal justice system increasingly cut-off from the populace. It leads to corruption, to gang violence, and to tragedy of epic proportions. There are too many examples from history to pretend otherwise.
Nobody is trying to protect people from themselves- they are trying to protect themselves, those close to them, and those unable to protect themselves. You may try to argue drugs are a purely personal experience, but anyone who had an alcoholic for a parent will tell you otherwise.
And note how little prohibition did to stop the existence of alcoholic parents. They were still around, but you had to deal with Spatz Columbo running around too, shooting up the place.
If you want to fix the alcoholic parent problem, create a society that reacts to them in a compassionate manner instead of throwing people in prison.
"If you want to fix the alcoholic parent problem, create a society that reacts to them in a compassionate manner instead of throwing people in prison."
Why, so we can continue to enable them? If you coddle someone and are compassionate, people will never stop.
Yes, but you can still start by being compassionate. Being kind and loving isn't necessarily enabling. It may very well become it, but it isn't always enabling. Tough love is not generally the first step, and every single case is different and must be treated as such. Please remember this.
"Tough love is not generally the first step, and every single case is different and must be treated as such. Please remember this."
If you look at any documentary about addicts (or hear real doctors talking about it), it's the step families are FORCED to take because every other method just results in the addict thinking they can continue.
"Being kind and loving isn't necessarily enabling."
If I tried to be kind to my addict friends and tell them in a sweet voice that what they are doing is hurting themselves, they would tell me to fuck off. People aren't stupid. They know that being addicted to Meth, Coke, or Heroin is shitty and unhealthy.
Tough love is the kindest and most loving thing you can do for an addict. It just might save their life. If they know that the result of being an addict will mean that you might not talk to them again, they will think twice about shooting up.
These are details I did not know. I suspected it would come to that point in most cases, but perhaps not all. It was because of those "not all" cases that I wanted to give some people the benefit of the doubt, at least for the first. If it's an "all", or at least very close to it, as you're suggesting, then I understand the need and revoke those parts of my statement.
Perhaps, dear sir, you could recognize that there is an entire spectrum of possibility that falls outside of the choices "coddle them" and "stomp on their necks with boots until they stop".
"Perhaps, dear sir, you could recognize that there is an entire spectrum of possibility that falls outside of the choices "coddle them" and "stomp on their necks with boots until they stop"."
The only way people ever stop is when they hit "rock bottom" and realize the terrible choices they are making. This usually means going to jail for at least a little while.
Nobody is trying to protect people from themselves- they are trying to protect themselves, those close to them, and those unable to protect themselves.
It's not too often you see such a blatant contradiction in the same sentence.
> The idea that anyone has the right to regulate someone else's life based on morality is deeply puritanical
I'm saying nothing of morality, and speaking only of practicality. Absolute personal freedom is a beautiful ideal, in the same sense as world peace or the eradication of hunger; we should strive to achieve those ideals using every tool at our disposal.
But people (and societies) are extremely complicated, and in practice, one person's freedom can mean that another's is taken away. My freedom to play loud music at 3am removes your freedom to sleep soundly through the night. The premise of a social contract exists to seek a balance that maximizes freedom for everyone. Just because it doesn't always work isn't a reason to abandon the idea outright.
On the issue of drugs specifically, I think it's simply naive to pretend that easy and legal access to hard drugs won't have profound unintended negative effects on those besides the users themselves. I think we need custom-tailored policies for each drug that seek to strike a balance between personal freedom and the good of society (which is code for "the freedom of everybody else to not be fucked with by drug addicts").
If it means you will be blowing smoke around and potentially having a negative effect on me or my family, lots.
"Being HIV positive"
If you don't tell your partners and spread it around, it could have devastating effects on many peoples' lives.
"The wrong way is to try to regulate what people can put into their own bodies, that road leads to addicts who can't seek help because of fear of jail, it leads to no-knock militarized police raids, it leads to a criminal justice system increasingly cut-off from the populace."
I seriously doubt addicts have to worry about jail. Have you ever seen the show "Intervention"? If the laws were as bad as you say in the US, the police would be waiting outside the homes of those people. Many of them are illegal drug addicts (and the show explains exactly which drugs they are taking).
The pro-marijuana movement is less about freedom and is more about trying to legitimize a mind-altering substance.
"It leads to corruption, to gang violence, and to tragedy of epic proportions."
Correlation != Causation. This seems to come up in every article except when it comes to drug related stats. It doesn't lead to corruption and gang violence. Those people would be just as corrupt and in gangs without drugs.
Also, it's your freedom and choice to put substances into your body..with or without laws. The tragedy is only brought on by the user and is most likely a symptom (the reason they got into drugs in the first place) of other problems. Most of the drug users I know had messed up childhoods/family life.
I also don't think we should make it any easier for an addict..because we will just end up with more people who won't really care about becoming addicted because there will be no consequences (IE: the government pays for your rehabilitation).
>If the laws were as bad as you say in the US, the police would be waiting outside the homes of those people.
Nope. There are many other possibilities. The law could be that bad, but enforcement could be inconsistent. The law could be that bad, but certain classes might be relatively immune. And so on.
And correlation is different from causation, but in this case, it's deductively provable that prohibition acts as fuel for these things. It's not merely correlated in some indirect way.
"Nope. There are many other possibilities. The law could be that bad, but enforcement could be inconsistent. The law could be that bad, but certain classes might be relatively immune. And so on."
Nope. Intervention is on national television. A cop somewhere has to be seeing it. If it was as bad as you say, those people would be arrested asap. and certain classes might be immune? Please. the people on the show are from different classes.
"it's deductively provable that prohibition acts as fuel for these things."
So you are making the argument that the prohibition of drugs causes someone to form a gang? Why do people decide to do drugs in the first place?
Pot for example gets you high. It allows you to forget, for a short time, any of the bad things happening in your life and gives you a temporary happiness. Anyone that needs to do this has problems. It's those same bad problems at home that make gangs so enticing. Gangs provide family, a support network, and power.
Could you explain to me in what ways your argument differs from that of prohibition of alcohol? If you can't, do you support a return to the prohibition of alcohol?
P.S. My comment about corruption was not meant to address the "corruption" of individuals who join gangs, rather it was meant to describe the corruption of the criminal justice system, society, and the political process that prohibitions causes.
"P.S. My comment about corruption was not meant to address the "corruption" of individuals who join gangs, rather it was meant to describe the corruption of the criminal justice system, society, and the political process that prohibitions causes."
Ahh, because if drugs were allowed, we would see virtually no gang activity in the US. We should check out Portugal and Amsterdam to see if all of the gangs just decided to disban because drugs are legalized.
"If you've seen firsthand what a drug like meth does to a person, it makes you think twice about the ideal that everyone has the right to put whatever they want into their body/mind."
It's been stated in other replies, but it bears repeating: this argument is nonsense. You can use the exact same reasoning to argue for banning anything that has ever caused harm to people (which is pretty much everything, ever).
Just make sure all the dangerous stuff can only be administered in licensed venues by trained professionals.
Make users fill out a 12 page disclaimer before they are served. Make sure that the centers are decorated as tastefully as the average welfare office.
The hardcore addicts will flock to the centers, which will kill the street trade. But casual users and people looking to experiment won't bother; and they won't be able to find street dealers, as the dealers can't make a profit off the addicts anymore.
"Just make sure all the dangerous stuff can only be administered in licensed venues by trained professionals."
Has that stopped dealers from selling Vicodin? Extacy was also legal at one point and it didn't stop anyone from using it as a club drug.
"The hardcore addicts will flock to the centers, which will kill the street trade. But casual users and people looking to experiment won't bother; and they won't be able to find street dealers, as the dealers can't make a profit off the addicts anymore."
There will always be a black market..even if it's legal. This is because many people won't want to have to go to a doctor...and it will still be the most convenient.
I also would be interested to see how a doctor can ethically give you a prescription for a substance that does absolutely nothing to benefit you.
I also would be interested to see how a doctor can ethically give you a prescription for a substance that does absolutely nothing to benefit you.
This is not what is meant by legalization. There would not be a black market because doctors would not prescribe these drugs, you would be able to buy them at your local, licensed convenience store (with proof of ID).
Is there a black market for alcohol or caffeine? If there is it's so tiny that somehow I've never encountered or heard about it. The same would be true for heroin, cocaine, etc.
"This is not what is meant by legalization. There would not be a black market because doctors would not prescribe these drugs, you would be able to buy them at your local, licensed convenience store (with proof of ID)."
The community kind of screwed themselves on this one. They got "medical marijuana" semi-legal. Now you are trying to tell me that it's not really good as a medical device and that we should sell it like alcohol? Why not just tell us the truth to begin with: It has very little medical benefit and the only reason you want it legal is to get high.
I also can't stand behind a community that puts out propaganda making it seem like marijuana has no adverse health effects.
If it's all about freedom and all this kind of stuff then why are we regulating it? It seems silly to have "trained professionals" that "administer" hits of meth, crack, etc. I mean, really, is that what you envision? How stupid is it to have some licensure board to certify people on helping people do drugs that are extremely dangerous for them? What are they certifying? Anyway, if the point is all this hoopla about freedom then isn't regulation running the oppposite way of that? What if I feel you are destroying my rights by forcing me to feel out some silly paperwork that some bureaucrat deamt up before I do some heroin? To me it seems like people throw up "regulation" to make their vision of the world seem less silly.
In 2001, Portugal decriminalized drugs. Data since then seems to indicate that the policy was successful.
rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.
… as I understand it there are two main problems with the status quo. One is that under the old tolerance regime there’s still no way for a coffee shop to legally obtain the supply of marijuana you need to operate on the scale of a business. Consequently, de facto legalization hasn’t actually eliminated the black market and associated criminality. Secondarily, the main market for the coffee shops turns out to be drug tourists from abroad. That reduces the Dutch political constituency for keeping them open. And the two factors interact together to create a situation where there’s a strong case to be made that legal coffee shops (by bringing drug tourists from the UK and the US into shops that need to tap an illegal wholesale market to gain their supplies) increase the scale of organized crime in the Netherlands.
No, you just need to avoid doing it in a half-hearted manner. In the case of Holland, why shouldn't there be drug tourism? Why is it any worse than, say, coffee tourism? or wine and food tourism?
Because the people drawn to drug tourism are more irresponsible, shallow, and opportunistic than your average tourist. Not always, sometimes not outrageously so, but in general. If you've been to Amsterdam, you might have noticed this, as I did.
So? Lots of people are irresponsible, shallow and opportunistic. I've seen Americans complaining loudly about prices and the lack of English while touring Italy, but nobody seems to want to ban the Duomo.
I was surprised Amsterdam seemed to maintain a clean, moderate, respectable attitude during daylight hours. I noticed the city is an insanely wealthy and beautiful place. I would guess they are making a ton of money off tourists.
the main market for the coffee shops turns out to be drug
tourists from abroad
That's not true. Although a number of coffee shops in Amsterdam and in cities close to the borders with Germany and Belgium primarily sell to tourists, there are many more coffeeshops that just sell to the local users.
Anybody comment on what the situation is in Amsterdam
Just a note of caution - while looking at what other places do definitely brings information to the table, you can't always say "if place A does X, doing X in place B will make it like place A".
The classic example of this is alcohol. Alcoholic beverages are not prohibited, but if you walk through an Italian town center at 11pm on a Friday night you won't see the scenes of public drunkeness and alcohol-fueled disorder that you see, say, in an English town center at the same time.
While I don't necessarily disagree with the larger point, in these kinds of policy area there is a level of unpredictability as to what will happen when a previously controlled substance is legalised, because patterns of consumption are convolved with local social norms.
Considering most police forces in Europe complain about too much work and lack of resources, I doubt that. No idea what the situation is like in the US.
The situation in the US now and in Portugal then is very different. Everything from the culture and structure of society, to the motivations behind the reform and the actual reform itself are different. The decision by the socialist government in Portugal was based on pragmatism, born out necessity, rather then ideology. The idea was that, instead of further victimizing the addicts, they would be able to get help. As the law no longer would stand between those in need and the resources of the government. That's why it still isn't legal to sell drugs in Portugal and why you as an addict can be called to mandatory counseling. I'm not saying on reform or the other is better, but they are still very different.
Marijuana is not a big piece of the puzzle. Research from RAND indicates otherwise
Key findings include: 1) Mexican DTOs' gross revenues from illegally exporting marijuana to wholesalers in the United States is likely less than $2 billion; 2) The claim that 60 percent of Mexican DTO gross drug export revenues come from marijuana should not be taken seriously; 3) If legalization only affects revenues from supplying marijuana to California, DTO drug export revenue losses would be very small, perhaps 2–4 percent; 4) The only way legalizing marijuana in California would significantly influence DTO revenues and the related violence is if California-produced marijuana is smuggled to other states at prices that outcompete current Mexican supplies. The extent of such smuggling will depend on a number of factors, including the response of the U.S. federal government. 5) If marijuana is smuggled from California to other states, it could undercut sales of Mexican marijuana in much of the U.S., cutting DTOs' marijuana export revenues by more than 65 percent and probably by 85 percent or more. In this scenario, the DTOs would lose approximately 20% of their total drug export revenues.
If you take the secondary effects of California legalization seriously - e.g. of policy changes in other sympathetic states, then it's a 20%+ cut in drug cartel revenue. How is that not a big piece of the puzzle?
And say it's just the 4% cut from California. Do those incremental hundreds of millions of dollars not count as major?
Note the structural bias: RAND provides research focused on national security; they have a direct financial incentive for justifying the size of the security apparatus of the state.
I'm in no way implying you're making the slippery slope argument, but it seems to me there's a common fear-based subtext to this question in the America media. So, I'm going to try to address what I see as the slippery slope subtext.
I don't think there's a slippery sloper from marijuana to cocaine, especially if marijuana is legalized. The slippery slope argument is like arguing there's a slippery slope from beer to cocaine -- addictive personalities aren't that simple. Further, any evidence implying a slippery slope from marijuana to harder drugs becomes less relevant after legalization, since marijuana users will then have fewer interactions with criminals and less exposure to harder drugs.
If you want to stem the money to the brutal drug lords, the first thing you should do is stop using drugs. It is very doubtful that the drug lords will just disappear with legalization.
They would not be able to compete with regular businesses if the price weren't artificially high due to prohibition. We stopped seeing gangsters like Al Capone in the liquor business when Prohibition ended.
"They would not be able to compete with regular businesses if the price weren't artificially high due to prohibition. We stopped seeing gangsters like Al Capone in the liquor business when Prohibition ended."
If we make all drugs legal and they start resorting to other illegal activities like kidnapping/ransom, can we make them illegal again?
Kidnapping and ransom are not fabulously profitable the way that the drug monopoly is. The drug trade is one of the world's largest import/export markets.
Tell that to the gangs in Mexico and the Philippines. I have a feeling that if drugs were legalized, and these did increase, proponents would blame it on something else.
Actually, what's even more heartbreaking is people still continuing to use illicit drugs from countries like Mexico when thousands of Mexicans are dying to get them those drugs. Maybe they should wait on buying those drugs until they become legalized to stop the brutal killings of Mexicans.
"what about legalizing harder drugs like cocaine"
I'm guessing you've never lived with anyone who's been addicted to drugs.
I'm personally sort of scared that Mexico will just give up on the drug war, and the US will retaliate by making cross-border trade really difficult, totally screwing over both economies.
Why are all these donations happening so late? It's four days until the election. Half the electorate has already voted, and the rest are tuning everything out by now. Prop 19 is failing and it's too late for advertising to make a difference. Where were all these deep pockets a month ago?
I don't think it's too late. There are always voters who base their decision on the last information they receive. Last-minute ads can influence those people.
I agree with your point (I also agree on YES on 19, although I'm not allowed to vote here in CA).
I'm guessing the late run of donations is because latest polls show there is a 50/50 chance of this passing, whereas a few months ago it looked like it was unlikely.
You either put up $100k earlier on to make a wider political statement regardless of the chances of outcome or you put up $100k to help create tip the balance when it looks like things could go either way...
You are allowed to man phone banks for get out the vote efforts, and are allowed to drive people to the polls, however. These multiplicative effects are likely to do more than just voting.
So, I hold a non-immigrant visa and I've made a personal decision not to actively electioneer or participate in anything electoral in the US or California.
Most people agree it was disgusting and inappropriate for people based in other states to phone-bank Californian voters over Prop 8, and the same logic kind of applies to me given that I'm non-immigrant (but living here for 4.5 years).
I also don't like it when non-citizens get involved with politics and elections in my home of UK and so I have to abide by that when the boot is on the other foot.
The laws of the state you're in affect you directly. I personally think it's entirely fair game. The logic for people out of the state doing so appears different enough for me to distinguish.
> I also don't like it when non-citizens get involved with politics and elections in my home of UK and so I have to abide by that when the boot is on the other foot.
Then why are you even commenting here? There is no bright line between discussing likely consequences here and more general advocacy.
Your position is up to you but it is strongly against the ethic of the society you have chosen to join. In America, everyone in the community has a voice and right to participate. We even tolerate rallies by illegal immigrants.
Democracy is too important to be limited to just citizens. If you live here and you have ideas worth listening to, you have a responsibility to participate. We'd like to have you at the phone bank, or driving old people to the polls on election day, or writing letters to the editor.
Just bear in mind that prohibition remains official federal policy for now, and that immigration is also federal. Immigration officers evaluating visa renewal, adjustment or naturalization have wide latitude to make decisions affecting a person's future in the US, and may not agree with your inclusive vision of civic life.
Electoral activities in particular are tricky. Voting or claiming US citizenship without the right to do so is almost always a felony, and can easily result in mandatory deportation and permanent exclusion (mandatory as in not subject to discretionary or judicial review). Campaigning is generally not illegal, but would probably attract unusually close scrutiny during review. Mistaken decisions can be appealed, but that's a long and expensive process.
I understand and agree with the substance of what you're saying, but 'the ethic of the society' and the letter of the law don't always match up. In immigration matters, the burden of proof is almost always on the non-citizen rather than the government. So he's not just making excuses.
> Democracy is too important to be limited to just citizens.
The founding fathers and US Constitution beg to differ on that point. In fact, franchise was initially limited to a subset of the citizenry. We have a representative republic, not mob rule.
Ad buys. If you start the ads too soon you give the opposition a chance to raise money to produce and run ads. It's also possible the donations just weren't announced until now.
Damn, I really hope Prop 19 passes. I'm not even American, but a passage would mark the start of the end of the dreadful war on marijuana around the world. Other states would follow, then Latin America (the former Mexican President said "May God let it pass" about Prop 19), countries in Europe (Netherlands, Spain, Denmark) and slowly it would be legalized around the world. Defeat would be a major setback.
I urge all Californians who're reading this to do their absolute best to make it pass in these last vital days. Join the phone banks, make sure all your friends are voting, campaign at universities. It could make a large difference, larger than you probably think.
Other states would follow, then... countries in Europe (Netherlands, Spain, Denmark)
It already is legalized in Netherlands and decriminalized (I believe) in Spain and Denmark, as well as UK (although that's about to change back I hear).
The european approach (de facto decriminalization) doesn't solve most of the problems americans are concerned with. Basically, the last link or two (user and/or retail supplier) are decriminalized, but the rest stay illegal.
This keeps production and supply in the hands of actual criminals that deal across countries. The legalized links are operated by borderline criminals and shady people.
It makes life better for the consumer (I have no problems with this), solves a lot of the policing issues but doesn't tackle solve organised crime, quality issues etc. If you are only interested in legalising marijuana, this policy doesn't create the wall between soft & hard drugs either. That is, marijuana stays in the "drugs" category and doesn't enter the alcohol category (where regular users will be appalled at the thought of their adult children using, for example, marijuana).
I really wish I lived in CA so I could vote for this. We had a similar initiative here in WA, but they didn't get enough signatures to put it on the ballot.
I am a firm supporter of Prop 19, but I have one major concern: that as cannabis laws are eased in the US, gangs and criminals that used to make their living from pushing cannibis will start pushing harder drugs (like cocaine), causing an increase in violence (as more people fight for a smaller market) and heavier drugs getting pushed on school children.
I suspect (though I haven't researched further) that the recent crime uptick in northern Mexico is due to the easing of cannabis laws across America over the past few years, and that it'll just get worse after Prop 19 is passed.
Personally, I think the solution is to legalize all drugs, and to put the money that we're spending on the war on drugs into medical treatment and education. It's obviously a difficult situation, but I'm glad to see that we're making progress.
"Personally, I think the solution is to legalize all drugs, and to put the money that we're spending on the war on drugs into medical treatment and education. It's obviously a difficult situation, but I'm glad to see that we're making progress."
So we make it easier for someone to become an addict and then pay millions to treat them? I also fail to see how education is going to work. The education people need is to tell them to stay away from drugs in the first place.
Simply telling kids to stay away from drugs is a paternalistic approach that doesn't work, particularly when you consider that teenagers tend 'rebel' against advice from authority. Genuine education would inform without bias, and allow people to make informed, safe choices.
I haven't studied Prop 19 at all, but my guess is that its primary purpose is to get democrats to the polls. It's just like all the 'defense of marriage' propositions that were on the ballot when Bush was trying to get reelected to get republicans to the polls.
If so, that's quite a way for a libertarian to waste $100k.
edit: I love the open debate. Yeah, legalizing pot is definitely the most pressing problem facing our nation, so let's downvote anybody who says differently. HN is turning into Reddit.
Consider how many people are stuck in cages for no good reason over this. If some organization other than the government were kidnapping that many people, solving that problem would be a high priority.
Besides, the opportunity cost is zero to not lock these people up. It's not as if some other problem is going unsolved in favor of taking this law off the books.
"Consider how many people are stuck in cages for no good reason over this. If some organization other than the government were kidnapping that many people, solving that problem would be a high priority."
Consider how much money the government is stealing from its citizens for no good reason. If some organization other than the government were doing this, solving the problem would be high priority..
The reason it's not high priority is because those people knowingly used an illegal substance and got caught. I also think you are over-estimating the amount of causal drug users in prison.
> knowingly used an illegal substance and got caught
That can be a reason to believe they should remain imprisoned, but not a reason to believe they should be released but it's not a priority to do that anytime soon.
> over-estimating the amount of causal drug users in prison
It's possible. The drug war has vastly increased prison populations, but it's hard to come by unbiased statistics about how many of those people committed any non-victimless crimes.
I recommend that people never use sarcasm in an online discussion, because the inversion makes it hard to check ones logic before clicking reply.
For example, just what is the most pressing problem? Well, the answer is pretty obvious: people get old and die.
What is also obvious is that we don't know what to do about this. More funding for research on Alzheimer's disease looks correct, but beyond that it gets very unclear.
So immediately you reject sarcasm it leaps out at you that "most pressing problem" in the simple sense of "most important" isn't a good criterion. You need to be thinking about whether a problem can be fixed or not. Repealing bad laws is a very attractive focus for activism because it is such a practical step; it will actually work.
Your own errors can only leap out at you before you click reply if you state your position directly. Once you give in to the lure of sarcasm, you bind yourself to smug stupidity.
I'm sorry, but this thread is really just politics. I know Paul Buchheit's own submission of Paul Buchheit's article about why Paul Buchheit donated some money to a political cause has Buckley's chance of being deleted, but, y'know, it really is just political advocacy on a subject unrelated to anything other than politics. I hate to be a dick here, Paul, but, y'know.
you really can't see the potential start-up opportunities that will come forth through the legalization of a substance that millions of people use worldwide?
well at least i know you won't be my competition. keep on keeping on man.
You really want think creating a drug based startup is a good idea? Who would buy it? No one would advertise on it. No users would pay for it. And it would be morally questionable. But if that's what floats your boat...
No, but buying up drug based domains in the event that it becomes a legal market doesn't sound too bad.... cough oregoncannabis.com oregonbud.com cough
Yes I think starting a cannabis related startup is a good idea. I live in Colorado where we have over 100,000 medicinal patients and a dispensary on every other street in the Denver area. Combine that with a staggering amount of people that consume cannabis recreationally, unaffiliated with the medicinal program, and you can see how there's a pretty enormous market in this state alone. Now take into consideration the relative size of California and the fact that every single one of its citizens of legal age could potentially be buyers of this product.
Do you have any idea the amount of shops that are going to be offering cannabis products? You don't think, I don't know, that THOSE people would like to advertise? Or the glass blowers that make a living making pipes, bowls, etc? Or the vaporizer manufacturers like http://silversurfervap.com or the web developers that make most of their money designing sites for dispensaries in medicinal states? What about grow light suppliers like http://www.sunlightsupply.com or the nutrient companies like http://www.generalhydroponics.com/ or the full hydro/grow stores like http://www.thebigtomato.com/ ?? Consider the seed banks like http://www.cannabis-seeds-bank.co.uk/ that will be bringing their business to California. Think of the apparel companies that sell cannabis related gear. Think of the music industry when it finally adopts weed in out in the open. Think of the electricians that specialize in wiring grow rooms from small all the way up to the warehouse sized ones that dispensaries run around here.
Edit: You know what, I'm not even done. Here are some more people that "wouldn't advertise" -- cannabis edible makers and drink makers like http://www.keefcola.com/ , online communities like http://www.icmag.com , cannabis breeders like DJ Short, companies that sell point of sale software to dispensaries, credit card processors, etc etc etc.
This is so much bigger than you'll ever know, and it makes me sad that you have such a negative attitude towards it. This is bigger than the gold rush and bigger than silicon valley.
And we're only talking about California. Think of when the next state adopts it. And the next. And the next.
I also find it ironic that you think nobody would "buy" a cannabis related startup when this very thread is about a very wealthy individual investing $100,000 already, and the law hasn't even passed yet. Imagine the projects he's got his eyes on for when it actually DOES pass.
Mark my words, if legalization takes hold you're going to see your first cannabis entrepreneur break the Forbes 400 in a very short amount of time.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
For me, it's all connected. The SF area is one of the most innovative places in the world because in it's also one of the most free places in the world.
It's a part of it though. Why can someone who is 20 in the US get married, have children, join the military, and vote, but not drink a beer?
I agree with hugh3 in any case. This is an article about politics, and no matter how much we may want to cheer paul on, I am not really sure it's germane, and that it might encourage others to submit things they feel 'rah rah!' about.
While there are many fine features of the Bay Area, as someone starting a business here who has spent most of my life living elsewhere, I don't see any greater freedom. If you are concerned with obeying the law as written rather than merely avoiding it as enforced, I think it has the least freedom and most regulation of anywhere I've lived in the US. That said, perhaps there are social values associated with lax enforcement?
what the bay area does have is a lot of people that believe changing the world is possible. and they know how to get things done. and its still free enough to innovate
I resent seeing stuff like this on Hacker News. Sorry for the angry rant, but I am extraordinarily opposed to this Proposition, with the strongest fiber of my very being, and to see this be the top story on hacker news, which I come to for entrepreneurship stuff, just makes me pissed. :(
I don't want politics on Hacker News. Get. It. Off. Please. Thanks!
I find conversations about the black market in general to be an interesting topic on the desires of society versus the realities of society and how we attempt to reign in human behavior.
My personal stance is that governments need to admit that the black market is a fundamental condition of humanity, and trying to stamp it out is impossible. However it is the governments responsibility to monitor the black market and prevent it from becoming too large, and the only way of doing that is to legalize the most popular activities found within the black market.
If America legalized prostitution, marijuana and cocaine today, i would guess that the black market would be put on life support here in the states.
There are already anti-smoking laws in place that prohibit you from smoking in many (all?) public places (at least in SF). Worrying about your freedom to breath clean air isn't in any way related to prop-19, it's about smoking in general which for the most part has already been dealt with.
In SF you are allowed to smoke cigarettes outdoors most places except near public doorways. You are definitely allowed to smoke while you "walk around town"
15 years ago you could smoke in bars and restaurants too. Next year may see restrictions on smoking in beaches and parks, although I have my doubts about how effective that will be.
If you drink alcohol on the street other than at a licensed outdoor event, a police officer can make you throw it away or issue a citation resulting in a fine. This seems pretty effective overall.
Smoking is officially illegal almost everywhere in San Francisco. The ban was extended this year to include most places previously exempt. If you are smoking anywhere besides on a curb in front of a parking garage, you're probably violating the law.
Except as permitted under Proposition 215 and SB 420 laws, persons age 21 and older may:
use marijuana in:
a non-public place such as a residence or
a public establishment licensed for on site marijuana consumption.
The most powerful CA union - prison guards union.
More convicts - more power to the union. Most of the convicts are war on drugs victims, with majority - marijuana related.
Man. Prison guard unions. Those don't seem like a great idea. I guess having that right to unionize is out there, but in this case it certainly doesn't seem right.
They aren't that direct. Look at least an inch deep beyond the surface, What they do, whom they support. For example, in the Oakland mayor race among the 2 front runners, one favors more police cuts vs. cuts in public programs (like after school, etc...) while the other would cut 180 degrees differently. Question: whom the union supports? Hint: whose policies would allow for higher yield and harvesting of more inmates? Bonus question: why would the union support anybody in the Oakland mayoral race?
They will generally have a diatribe about "evil corporations are poisoning us with HFCS/Vaccines/GM food/etc..." Meanwhile they are saying that the federal government shouldn't regulate what someone puts in their body.
Personally I'd like to err on the side of freedom, but all the same there are real risks out there. We can't expect society/government to take care of all dangers, then turn around and say "I should be able to take whatever I want!"
Or to put it more bluntly imagine medicare costs if we legalize all drugs. Imagine the emergency rooms?
I think that people who think this way tend to smoke pot, not the other way around. There are plenty of fully functional pot smokers without conspiracy theories.
This is like sitting in a bar listening to the same sob stories repeated week after week at a local dive bar and saying all drinkers are defeatist losers.
"I think that people who think this way tend to smoke pot, not the other way around. There are plenty of fully functional pot smokers without conspiracy theories."
Smoking pot makes many people paranoid. This is fact. It's not that far of a stretch to imagine that these people are conspiracy theorists.
"This is like sitting in a bar listening to the same sob stories repeated week after week at a local dive bar and saying all drinkers are defeatist losers."
When you hear the above from many different groups of people in different parts of the US/world that smoke pot, it really makes you wonder.
If people are allowed to buy, sell, and even grow their own drugs legally they will no longer have to participate in a black market that often benefits Mexican drug cartels.
Well I'm not sure if they can grow it. But, isn't that mean you're going to provide a legal way for the cartel to make money? Now they can sell in legal market, and sure more people will be able to consume it since it's legal now, and the cartel will make 'more' money?
My previous question is actually to find out what kind of measurement, precaution or whatever it is, to make sure that Prop19 will cripple drug cartels, without creating another problem.
> If we are always held back by our own fears and self-limiting beliefs, then we aren't really free.
Similarly, if we are controlled by our desires, we're not really free. An addict is not really free because he can't control himself.
> Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Drugs are definitely not essential.
> prohibition also provides a multi-billion dollar subsidy to violent criminal organizations that threaten our physical safety and security
Crime networks exist not because of strong government or strict laws; they exist because of moral corruption in the society. A strong government, strongly connected coherent society with powerful social moral values actually reduce the size and power of crime networks.
Hats off to this fellow for promoting freedom and liberty. I am glad that people are slowly starting to realize we don't have a right to tell others what they can do with their bodies. If 19 passes it will be one tiny prick in the side of the petty tyrants who believe they have a right to force others to follow their views.
Right on. The drug war is a huge waste of money and lives and foreign policy capital. It needs to end.
I really feel drug rules (not laws) need to be set at the neighborhood level by simple majority vote.
That way you can live where the limits suit you and you don't need to try to control what the whole country does.
Freedom is not just about allowing everyone to do anything. Its also about people being able to make the living arrangements that suit them without having to impose their choices upon others.
Its too much work anyway, always fighting these battles. Lets call a truce and go our separate ways together.
I don't know what the answer is. But whenever a topic like this comes up, I can't help but think about Prohibition and how it failed to stop people from drinking alcohol and, instead, just created powerful crime lords. Ultimately, it was repealed (but only after Capone and the whole legendary Chicago gangland era).
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadWould you vote yes on a future proposition that legalizes all drugs ?
You take a substance out of the hands of professionals and place it into the hands of criminals. The quality of the substance goes down. The number of dead bodies goes up. The truth about the drugs themselves gets completely distorted with lies and propaganda instead of becoming common knowledge.
Legalization should go hand-in-hand with education and healthcare reform. If you get those elements right, you'll have a much more functioning society. Fewer drunk drivers, fewer overdoses, and no drug cartels to speak of.
What healthcare reform? Are we going to pay for the health care of addicts now? If you become an addict you should have to also deal with the consequences. Education should concentrate on telling kids not to touch drugs because most likely, they will fuck up their life. Pot may not be chemically addicting or as harmful as cigarettes, but it ruins your ambition and can be even worse for kids or even younger adults that should be figuring out what they want to do in life.
I also don't think it will get rid of the drug cartels. They will just have a legal way of funding their operations. It will only make it easier for them to make money.
Marijuana is clearly a big piece of the puzzle, but what about legalizing harder drugs like cocaine?
EDIT: Removed the question because I saw another HN'er posted it. Then added it back when Paul responded so it'd make sense in context.
However, my question was a bit more pointed and I think you haven't addressed it.
The justifications used in your post are equally applicable to cocaine and to other drugs. If different drugs have different answers, why didn't you (or why don't you) explain why your argument is limited to marijuana.
OTH if you strongly believe in the philosophy outlined in your post, what is stopping you from endorsing similar initiatives for cocaine and why would cocaine potentially need a different answer ?
[edit] I see a lot of good responses, but all of them special-case marijuana (e.g. marijuana is less addictive than heroin). This is fine, but Paul's post has flowery language about freedom and all of that language is applicable to heroin as well. Paul's post doesn't make the case for special-casing marijuana. On the contrary, if he denied the principles of "freedom" for cocaine, it would undermine his post which is all about "freedom" and nothing about marijuana being less dangerous than cocaine etc.
Cocaine was legal before it became illegal. What results il-legalization of cocaine have produced? More crime and more funding for crime organizations - check. What else? Look at the history of opium as well. And don't even start about LSD - the drug my reading about have discovered it having only positive benefits so far.
You mean the fact that it was legal in China about 500 years ago and it nearly created an entire country of addicts?
Vicodin (another form of heroin) is legal, yet there is still a black market for it.
I would also be interested to see "your reading" where LSD only had "positive benefits".
If you're using Vicodins legal status (requires prescription) as a comparison then pot and cocaine are already legal.
Right..so why fight for other forms of it then?
Also, it didn't stop people from selling it on the black market (like so many proponents would like you to believe)
Not that I'm arguing for or against just enjoying seeing the opinion of other HN readers.
I believe in legalization, but this this is false (in the US at least). Pot is a Schedule I prohibited substance, Cocaine is a Schedule II prescription drug, and Vicodin is Schedule III. Each schedule carries with it a large difference in how available and legal a drug is.
"legal" is a spectrum, and vicodin is much more legal than pot or cocaine are.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_Substances_Act#Sched...
You are right that cocaine is more strictly controlled than either of the other substances, but the original point I was making is that you can't use vicodin as an example of a legal substance when it's not freely available.
An entire country of addicts was nearly created by a Big, i'd say Huge, Business + Government Corporation - Britain's East India Company. These and other addictive substances have existed through the history of human species. They become a huge problem only when big money and/or big power gets involved.
>Vicodin (another form of heroin) is legal, yet there is still a black market for it.
that your statement doesn't make sense - Vicodin is legal for prescribed purposes. People having Vicodin prescription don't buy it at black market. Vicodin is illegal for all other situations, and in these situations people go to black market.
For me, the cost of marijuana prohibition is too high and the benefits too low. Based on what I've seen in my life in those around me, I do think smoking marijuana a lot is a bad idea. I can't scientifically determine if it makes you spacey or if spacey people are drawn to it, but it doesn't seem to be a good sign overall. But, there are a lot of other equally dangerous or even more dangerous things that we don't legally prohibit, and while I think it's probably bad for you, it's not that bad for you. Consistent alcohol abuse certainly seems worse.
The other deciding factor for me personally is the addictiveness of a drug. Marijuana may be addictive, but I've seen people successfully quit, even without seeming to exert that much will power. I am much less inclined to legalize the drugs that snare you on the first hit, for two basic reasons: First, the very fact that they do ensnare you, and second, because if we legalize them today, the drugs that could be designed under a legalization regime are even more dangerous. I don't think I want to release the full power of a free-market economy on the task of producing a chemical that makes you feel good (and better yet requires repeated purchases); that's just asking for trouble.
Careful observers may note that tobacco as it stands now pretty much fails my test for legalization. As a practical matter it would have to be grandfathered in, but yes, I actually do think nicotine's demonstrated ability to snare you physiologically on the first hit is actually pretty dangerous and may really be on the wrong side of my personal legalization line.
It also has little to do with the debate over prohibition, since prohibition has done little to curb consumption but certainly incentivized stronger strains.
I worked in the MIL/INTEL world for a long time and a staggering number of really nasty things turned up amongst bags of powder all over the world. Drug networks are like VPN for physical objects. And drug producers would happily abandon that protocol for FEDEX if they could. The remaining market for moving things we truly cannot live with would be reduced by many orders of magnitude if we gave up on the drug war.
We can shut down the drug cartels in Mexico, like we did in Columbia, but the drug trade will be next be passed to another country like a baton. The next country to be promoted as a drug state will be Afghanistan with it's fields of poppies fulling the growing heroin demand.
I'm all for Proposition 19, but legalizing marijuana will not stop drug cartels just like legalizing prostitution does not stop the flow on human traffic.
Drug smuggling out is fairly widespread and finances bad stuff; very little else is smuggled in or out, except for a bit of quasi-legitimate reimport of stuff on the Pakistan border to get around absurd Pakistani tariffs on stuff like cars, and moving fighters across the Pakistan border.
Child (or general human trafficking) isn't a viable market: Afghanistan can't afford to smuggle children in, and Afghan children mainly are consumed in the domestic market. ("woman for breeding, boy for pleasure, melon for sheer delight"). Very few Afghan women become prostitutes outside of Afghanistan or Pakistan (unlike Iraqi women in the neighboring states/Gulf).
There aren't many migrant workers moving across the borders either, mainly due to a lack of an economy in any of the neighboring states. Iran and Pakistan have a fair number of refugees, but they are fairly static, and don't actually work in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iran.
Eliminating opium as a profit source would eliminate the weird choice between befriending farmers as local allies AQ/Taliban vs. destroying opium (and thus making those farmers into enemies or enemy sympathizers for purely economic reasons), and would definance most of the Taliban (if not AQ, still financed via Saudi recreational jihadis).
Sounds like an argument for legalizing drugs.
> legalizing marijuana will not stop drug cartels just like legalizing prostitution does not stop the flow on human traffic
Why not? Legalizing alchohol did seem to stop the flow of moonshine.
Touché in regards to the commend on moonshine. But it is well document that The Netherlands, who have a long standing liberal view on prostitution, are a leading destination of human traffic[2].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_liberalization [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_the_Netherlands...
So American, lets just go and make a mess where nobody called us. Anyway, if you were so successful shutting down the cartels in Colombia, how come it is still the world's leading producer of Cocaine[1]?
[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
who said that it is the cartels who produce the cocaine nowdays? How about government for example?
Taken literally, this seems extremely unlikely.
The largest cocaine bust was on the order of 48,000 pounds. Drug smugglers, on the high end of things, have access to submarines and secret tunnels that cross nation boundaries.
Child trafficking happens, and it the overlap between the major drug movers and the child traffickers is significant -- because they are both serving black market commodity on the level of distributors.
There are, however, a whole lot less people out there interested in buying children compared to the number interested in buying pick-a-substance. The reduced amount of profit available to high-level black-market distributors when you take away the market for drugs would, in my opinion, make it harder to find people willing to smuggle children.
In a lot of places (US Southwest especially), the penalties for drug smuggling are far higher than for escorting groups of people -- if you get caught, you might go free if it's just a group of workers. The humans can transport themselves on foot. The humans can be held hostage afterward and you can try to extort more money from their family; if a $20k kilo of coke is held for ransom, no one is going to pay more than the discount to an alternative kilo for it.
Detection and logistics, mainly. Weapons are a special case, since if we're still talking mainly about the US/Mexico border, I would expect that weapons do not move in the same direction as drugs, and expertise in smuggling one way across a border may not translate to smuggling the other way.
Nuclear material will require at least some shielding to avoid detection, and it would seem to me that a well-implemented detection system would notice abnormally quiescent cargo as well. That would mean that you have to carefully tune shielding to present the right level of radioactivity, rather than just piling on more to make it as low as possible.
Smuggling people of any kind requires life support; there are a lot of tactics you wouldn't be able to use without losing them. For some types of human cargo, the smugglers might find some losses acceptable, but angering terrorists by losing a container of their buddies might not be healthy. In any case, it seems that there's already a lot of people walking across the border into the US, and I'd expect that if there were an obviously safer or more reliable way, they'd use that. Lots of assumptions, there, of course.
Consider the cargo container. A large metal box. It'll hold several tons of drugs, or just as easily 50lbs of radioactive material and 1 ton of shielding. Or 5 people and several jugs of water.
It's not clear to me what the challenges are with smuggling radioactive material, or how good detection protocols are. That doesn't mean I can't think of any, or solutions to same, but it means that I expect there are at least some consequences I'm not thinking of, and it's certainly not as easy as some sealed, inert cargo.
This may surprise you, even shock you, but heroin is actually legalized, and given out by the government, in a lot of European countries. Addicts visit a special office and get their daily fix administered by trained professionals. I think this is the way to do it for heroin. Heroin in itself is actually not as insanely dangerous as portrayed. Sure, it's a really really bad drug, but just like morphine, it can be administered safely. The most dangerous thing about heroin is actually not the heroin itself, but the contaminants and unclean administration. The high price of heroin creates a lot of crime, in places where it's not legalized the addicts either have to steal, prostitute or push drugs to afford their own usage. Stats have shown that legalizing and incredibly strictly regulating it reduces addiction, crime and recruitment of new users. Nobody sane wants to try heroin, almost all the recruitment are done by the addicts themselves pushing it to other unfortunate people. When they don't have to spend their days working on getting enough money to buy their next fix they actually can have normal jobs and working on escaping their addiction.
I don't know how to handle other dangerous drugs such as cocain, meth, amphetamines and lsd. Mushrooms and MDMA should be legalized, but way stricter than marijuana.
I'd really rather deal with the marijuana issue as separate from the heroin issue.
Would those things make heroin less harmful? In many important ways, no. There are simply some hazards of being a heroin addict that are intrinsic, not extrinsic. I still don't think that a heroin addict, even in the protected situation you're describing, would likely be a top candidate for "Parent of the Year," for example.
Is legal heroin better, on balance, than a rational needle-exchange program and a generous rehab program? I don't know, but I can guarantee that politically coupling that to marijuana legalization would simply kill marijuana legalization.
This is why I'm not talking about heroin's direct health risks and instead focusing on the bigger picture. Heroin's terrible effects are a consequence of physiology and behavior, not necessarily of cellular toxicity. The way that heroin makes people feel is so powerful that it outcompetes all other motivators. Therefore, heroin has the habit of dominating the lives of its users, enslaving them to itself and its pursuit.
The addictive potential of alcohol is nothing like that of heroin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_dependence#Addictive_...
In my opinion, the fact that it's so addictive makes it more of a candidate for legalisation or at least greater availability, not less. If you have a population of addicts who will do anything for a fix, and the only people who will supply it to them are hardened criminals who are also into prostitution, extortion, theft, etc. what do you think will happen?
And note that while you are arguing that we should legalize heroin, I'm not taking a position on that. I'm merely arguing (1) that legalization is not going to happen politically so you shouldn't weigh down the marijuana legislation with this, and (2) that heroin is intrinsically devastating even when you remove the drug dealers, etc. Point #1 is based on my hunch, but I doubt many would disagree, and point #2 is based on my experience. Do you have evidence or experience that contradicts mine, or are you just speaking hypothetically?
Nice. Maybe try leading with that next time, instead of "Heroin is a wheelbarrow full of rockets." or something, hey? :)
I'm not arguing point #1 - I'm arguing that your point #2 is flawed. Your experience likely biases you in that direction, since you will have seen the absolute worst cases of addiction, instead of someone like a lawyer or executive who can afford to have a heroin habit without it bankrupting them, or who isn't addicted.
Now, criminalization may be counter-productive, and I'm inclined to think it is. But let's recognize what we're dealing with, here, it's not just freedom and rainbows.
It's not a good idea for any kid to try marijuana. It's funny because now it's the exact opposite. There is all kinds of misinformation on how it has absolutely no drawbacks. Most people won't even admit there is a possibility of addiction.
It may not be as bad as they say, but it is definitely a mind-altering drug that can destroy your ambition in life and make it very difficult to succeed.
Pretty much all of my friends that started smoking pot (even the ones that were really smart) all have dead-end jobs and dropped out of school. This and all of the stupid shit that they have done while high make me never want to touch the stuff.
You must be a heck of an outlier.
Haha, the beauty of NOT smoking pot and fucking up your life.
No, I'm not. I've seen a change that went directly from productive and ambitious individual to not giving a fuck only wanting to get high asshole. No confusion here. The pot is what did it. When some of those people quit, the were themselves again.
"I'm advocating a policy of drug legalization based on facts, not fear or the assumed "common sense" of the current prevailing religious hedegmony."
Ok, as long as we actually outline the adverse health effects of pot and mention stories like mine. You seem to eager to brush these things under the carpet. I feel that pot advocates don't want "facts", they want the public to be told that pot is alright to use. Pretty much all advocacy sites are completely biased and only told about the rainbows and kittens. Even people telling the truth about pot on here are immediately down voted.
Here are a few horrific pages from a book about meth that illustrate what I'm talking about: http://books.google.com/books?id=qYOFM6aXSyEC&lpg=PA42&#...
All drugs should be legalized and regulated. Especially cocaine.
You will not have peace on this Earth until that happens. The drug cartels will simply move onto the next forbidden fruit. Prohibition is, as Paul and many others point out, an assault on basic human rights and freedoms, and it carries with it a tax on society. Not just in terms of dollars wasted but in lives ruined.
Education + Legalization.
Erowid and scientific fact in every classroom instead of propaganda and lies.
This is not exactly a difficult concept to grasp, and various parts of the world (like Portugal, Holland, etc.) are finally waking up to it, and their quality of life is improving because of it.
Unfortunately, years of lies, fear-mongering, brainwashing and propaganda can be hard to erase.
At the same time, we would be deluding ourselves to think that locking people up changes anything, whether we go after the supply or the demand.
The best way to move towards a sensible drug policy is to start by admitting that there are no good solutions, and that the best we can hope to do is to minimize harm, both from the drugs themselves, and the cartels.
(I agree, though, regarding drug education: Erowid has the capability to save far more lives than DARE ever could.)
I have, and not just for meth, but for heroin, and alcohol, and nicotine, and caffeine, and all sorts of other drugs.
Have you seen first hand what it looks like when somebody takes a women and fucks her in front of her husband, then tortures her, and finally cuts her head off?
What about a man being thrown alive into an acid bath?
No? Would you like to see that? Can you imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes? Just head South of the border. Ask for the Zetas. Ask for the families of people who have been kidnapped and turned into slaves.
This is the _reality_ of drug prohibition. Entire neighborhoods living in constant fear.
Methamphetamine can cause some damage to the human body when abused. So can water. The difference between a hit of meth in your hand and a punk standing over your head with a rifle pointed at your temple should be obvious. The difference between a hit of meth in your pipe and the unrelenting human suffering that goes on in America's overflowing prisons should be obvious. It is the difference between personal choice and the consequences thereof, versus violence imposed upon you by another, completely out of your control. It is the difference between freedom and prohibition.
I could kill myself by overdosing on a number of substances right at this moment, but I don't. It's because I know better, not because there's a law against it. It is far easier, cheaper and more humane to educate a population and provide them with the healthcare and counseling that they need than it is to deal with the horrors that are going on around you today due to prohibition.
Compassion and understanding and freedom will lead to a better world.
Prisons and prohibition perpetuate suffering.
No dispute whatsoever. I'm 100% in favor of decriminalization for these reasons and more; that's different than full-blown legalization, though. Remember the law of unintended consequences.
And in fairness, at least some of the gangsters you describe would continue to perpetrate horrors even if all vice laws were eradicated overnight. There's still plenty ill-gotten gains to be derived from extortion, human trafficking, organ harvesting, etc.
I suppose what I'm saying is that decriminalization is necessary, but not sufficient, for an effective drug policy. Remember that part of Portugal's successful program is getting as many addicts as possible into (state-funded) rehab/treatment. As the cops stand down, we also need the doctors to stand up.
Decriminalization is neutered legalization. We should stop coming up with excuses for sending people to prison. Prisons don't create model citizens, they are a breeding ground for suffering and are a waste of human potential. Their existence is symptomatic of a poorly functioning society.
If someone wants to buy marijuana, then it only makes sense for there to be someone who sells it. Otherwise you still have a problem.
Legalization is combined with regulation so that you don't have the problem of major corporations funneling millions of dollars into advertising campaigns targeting children (as we learned with cigarettes).
This is a problem that most programmers should be familiar with. It's a function minimization problem. Minimize suffering(x).
> As the cops stand down, we also need the doctors to stand up.
Yes, if there were a mantra to chant, it might be: legalization, education, and rehabilitation. You have to have all of them to get the best result.
Couldn't agree more; in fact, this is a problem far above and beyond drugs alone. I dare say that prisons likely have the lowest efficacy of any social program in the history of the world. :P
That aside, prohibition being evil and ineffective doesn't change the fact that drugs are dangerous. The worst ones are capable of altering a person's judgment and personality, and creating harm to others. Taking prohibition away solves the problem of prohibition; it does very little for the problem of addiction.
(For that matter, I'm also in favor of socialized mental health care, which could be a highly effective harm reduction technique for drug addiction and alcoholism, but for some reason you get labeled a freedom-hating commie for suggesting such things.) :P
Having just lived through one of my parents going totally and utterly mad having taken absolutely no drugs whatsoever and having seen the vast majority of my friends at some point in their life taking 'dangerous' drugs let me tell you with total and utter certainty that there is nothing at all dangerous about marijuana, ecstasy, lsd, cocaine or speed. Well certainly compared to driving a car or going out for a drinking binge.
An extremely temporary sensation of happiness or fun is nowhere near as dangerous to a person as a manic or depressive episode, the latter two being states of mind being entirely brought on by your own brain with absolutely no 'dangerous' drug being involved.
And this is even before we mention alcoholism, ocd or the plethora of other brain diseases our own bodies can inflict on us.
In order to combat illnesses of the brain, your doctor will prescribe drugs which are fundamentally more brain altering than many of your 'dangerous' drugs. My mother can barely read a sentence in a paper at the moment. Most of my friends got degrees from universities after their 'dangerous' drugs.
And the next argument that blows your utterly preposterous and medieval argument out of the water is that brain altering drugs are on sale today.
Caffeine, Alcohol, Tobacco, probably even Chocolate and Sugar. And this is before we consider the addictive drugs that are pumped into burgers, fries, milkshakes, sweets and all the dodgy fast food being sold today across the world. Oh, sorry, I mean 'food additives'. Of course they're totally safe because McDonald's paid your senator to say so.
History is the only precedent that makes them acceptable.
That anyone can be sent to prison for owning any 'dangerous' drug, especially when up to 50% of the population have at some point taken them, is an utter travesty of freedom and common sense. Worst still is that the poorer communities pay the price, locked away for ridiculous amount of years compared to the widely published and yet bizarrely low sentence celebrities arrested for drug offences.
This is a war of false morality, waged by middle class people who themselves have in all probability at some point actually taken these drugs and yet still vote with 'hard-on-drugs' politicians. They are hypocritical fools.
Anyway, you're arguing with the wrong guy. :) Drugs should not have anything to do with the criminal justice system, period. But to say that drugs aren't a problem worth taking seriously is ridiculous; not because drugs are evil, but because people are people. Alcoholism is a real problem. So is compulsive gambling, manic depression, and yes, drug addiction. We can take proactive steps to deal with that problem without turning people into criminals.
Should we legalize child porn (there is a demand)?
There are many things that have demand, but shouldn't be legalized. I'm not saying pot is one of them, but you aren't making a very good convincing argument.
"This is a problem that most programmers should be familiar with. It's a function minimization problem. Minimize suffering(x)."
Who's suffering? People that want to put drugs in their body? It's something you choose to do. You aren't born with a joint in your mouth.
"As the cops stand down, we also need the doctors to stand up."
Why can't pot smokers just admit that the reason they want pot legalized is so they can get high? It has very little health benefit. It might help people with cancer/eye problems, but those people are in the minority.
If there is no down side to becoming an addict, we will have more addicts. If you know that the government will just "rehabilitate" you, more people will be willing to try thinks like heroine and cocaine. If you know that it will basically ruin your life, you might think twice about it.
Opiates were legal in China at one point in time...until nearly the entire country was addicted. Why can't we just learn from the past instead of continuing to repeat mistakes?
That isn't at all what he said, though. He was talking about the issue of partial decriminalization vs. full legalization+regulation.
The real argument is, "If we believe something is benign enough to make partaking in it legal, it is yellow-bellied inconsistency to make providing it illegal."
Most of the proponents will never admit that smoking pot has adverse health effects. Everything seems to be rainbows and unicorns when it comes to pot. I want to see some real long-term studies, not from high times magazine.
Why can't people admit that they don't give a damn about the 'health benefits' and just want to get high? It's very cowardly to get it decriminalized under the guise of health.
Inhaling smoke into your longs that may or may not cause memory loss and paranoia can't be healthy. Pot changes people that smoke it regularly. It never fails. All of my friends that smoke it regularly have had absolutely no ambition in their lives and are still in pretty much the same positions they were in high school (it's been 11 years). Before the pot, they had dreams and goals.
If we ever have government run health care, regular drug users either shouldn't be covered or have to pay a ton more. I shouldn't have to pay for you mistakes.
Prisons and prohibition perpetuate suffering."
I'm all for drug legalization as long as I, as a taxpayer don't ever have to pay (if we do ever have a public health care plan) for anyone that decides to become a drug addict. I say decides, because the consequences of doing these drugs might just mean you become an addict. This means you won't get covered if you become addicted.
Also, businesses should have the ability to fire a drug addict at any time. Even if it doesn't directly affect productivity.
You are free to make any choice you want in this world, but I shouldn't have to pay for your mistakes.
As it is, people are still suing the cigarette companies for getting cancer (even though it's been well known for 50+ years that smoking causes cancer). We also need to have tort reform.
> Also, businesses should have the ability to fire a drug addict at any time. Even if it doesn't directly affect productivity.
Would you fire someone who drank? or smoked? or was obese? They're equally addicted.
Generally, those people would otherwise have low-paying jobs and wouldn't be contributing very much anyway. The people in prison aren't your daily pot smoker. They are dealers and people who committed crimes while under the influence of an illegal substance.
50% of the population already doesn't pay federal taxes. If we are going to go after revenue, we should start with this.
"Would you fire someone who drank? or smoked? or was obese? They're equally addicted."
Smoking cigarettes and obesity don't get you high, which has profound effects on your state-of-mind. If someone drinks on a daily basis and comes in hung-over..then yes. All of these also shouldn't be under the same category as "discrimination" because they are choices you make (freedom can have consequences) not uncontrollable qualities that you are born with.
That distinction has become meaningless. Anyone who gets caught with more than the "intent to distribute" threshold (which apparently isn't a lot) is simply presumed to be a dealer.
It's more than just quantity:
"Anyway, several things can determine intent, including quantity. Other factors might include quality, packaging, what type of area the person was in and the time of day."
http://forums.officer.com/forums/showthread.php?77095-Intent...
If you are by yourself or with a few friends smoking a joint, the cops won't really bother you.
I'd wager you were voted down for proposing that employees could be let go "[e]ven if it doesn't directly affect productivity", and then you subsequently abandoned it when you defended cigarettes and alcohol by taking purporting to take their effects into account.
If you're going to propose something like that, at least stick to it, and especially don't whine about it when people don't like that you've created an inconsistent system.
This is a seemingly simplistic statement to something a lot more complex. Your brain doesn't care if you get counseling. It just wants its next high. If you can't get that next high from a computer game, you'll certainly want it from something more powerful (and in most cases, harmful). I'm surprised you haven't mentioned the neurological effects of using drugs like cocaine.
[1] C.f. The Consumer Union Guide to Licit and Illicit Drugs.
[2] Not counting polydrug deaths.
How much harm does being homeless do to society? How much harm does having a bad credit score do to society? Smoking cigarettes? Listening to thrash metal? Rock climbing? Eating a cheeseburger? Being HIV positive? What's the proper response to these sorts of things?
History has shown us in no uncertain terms that it is impossible to protect people from themselves. And every attempt to do so will fail utterly. Will result in more harm to the individual and more harm to society than the problem attempted to be addressed. There are good ways and bad ways to deal with the problems that, say, meth addiction creates. The wrong way is to try to regulate what people can put into their own bodies, that road leads to addicts who can't seek help because of fear of jail, it leads to no-knock militarized police raids, it leads to a criminal justice system increasingly cut-off from the populace. It leads to corruption, to gang violence, and to tragedy of epic proportions. There are too many examples from history to pretend otherwise.
P.S. http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi3582329113/
If you want to fix the alcoholic parent problem, create a society that reacts to them in a compassionate manner instead of throwing people in prison.
Why, so we can continue to enable them? If you coddle someone and are compassionate, people will never stop.
If you look at any documentary about addicts (or hear real doctors talking about it), it's the step families are FORCED to take because every other method just results in the addict thinking they can continue.
"Being kind and loving isn't necessarily enabling."
If I tried to be kind to my addict friends and tell them in a sweet voice that what they are doing is hurting themselves, they would tell me to fuck off. People aren't stupid. They know that being addicted to Meth, Coke, or Heroin is shitty and unhealthy.
Tough love is the kindest and most loving thing you can do for an addict. It just might save their life. If they know that the result of being an addict will mean that you might not talk to them again, they will think twice about shooting up.
The only way people ever stop is when they hit "rock bottom" and realize the terrible choices they are making. This usually means going to jail for at least a little while.
It's not too often you see such a blatant contradiction in the same sentence.
I'm saying nothing of morality, and speaking only of practicality. Absolute personal freedom is a beautiful ideal, in the same sense as world peace or the eradication of hunger; we should strive to achieve those ideals using every tool at our disposal.
But people (and societies) are extremely complicated, and in practice, one person's freedom can mean that another's is taken away. My freedom to play loud music at 3am removes your freedom to sleep soundly through the night. The premise of a social contract exists to seek a balance that maximizes freedom for everyone. Just because it doesn't always work isn't a reason to abandon the idea outright.
On the issue of drugs specifically, I think it's simply naive to pretend that easy and legal access to hard drugs won't have profound unintended negative effects on those besides the users themselves. I think we need custom-tailored policies for each drug that seek to strike a balance between personal freedom and the good of society (which is code for "the freedom of everybody else to not be fucked with by drug addicts").
If it means you will be blowing smoke around and potentially having a negative effect on me or my family, lots.
"Being HIV positive"
If you don't tell your partners and spread it around, it could have devastating effects on many peoples' lives.
"The wrong way is to try to regulate what people can put into their own bodies, that road leads to addicts who can't seek help because of fear of jail, it leads to no-knock militarized police raids, it leads to a criminal justice system increasingly cut-off from the populace."
I seriously doubt addicts have to worry about jail. Have you ever seen the show "Intervention"? If the laws were as bad as you say in the US, the police would be waiting outside the homes of those people. Many of them are illegal drug addicts (and the show explains exactly which drugs they are taking).
The pro-marijuana movement is less about freedom and is more about trying to legitimize a mind-altering substance.
"It leads to corruption, to gang violence, and to tragedy of epic proportions."
Correlation != Causation. This seems to come up in every article except when it comes to drug related stats. It doesn't lead to corruption and gang violence. Those people would be just as corrupt and in gangs without drugs.
Also, it's your freedom and choice to put substances into your body..with or without laws. The tragedy is only brought on by the user and is most likely a symptom (the reason they got into drugs in the first place) of other problems. Most of the drug users I know had messed up childhoods/family life.
I also don't think we should make it any easier for an addict..because we will just end up with more people who won't really care about becoming addicted because there will be no consequences (IE: the government pays for your rehabilitation).
Nope. There are many other possibilities. The law could be that bad, but enforcement could be inconsistent. The law could be that bad, but certain classes might be relatively immune. And so on.
And correlation is different from causation, but in this case, it's deductively provable that prohibition acts as fuel for these things. It's not merely correlated in some indirect way.
Nope. Intervention is on national television. A cop somewhere has to be seeing it. If it was as bad as you say, those people would be arrested asap. and certain classes might be immune? Please. the people on the show are from different classes.
"it's deductively provable that prohibition acts as fuel for these things."
So you are making the argument that the prohibition of drugs causes someone to form a gang? Why do people decide to do drugs in the first place?
Pot for example gets you high. It allows you to forget, for a short time, any of the bad things happening in your life and gives you a temporary happiness. Anyone that needs to do this has problems. It's those same bad problems at home that make gangs so enticing. Gangs provide family, a support network, and power.
P.S. My comment about corruption was not meant to address the "corruption" of individuals who join gangs, rather it was meant to describe the corruption of the criminal justice system, society, and the political process that prohibitions causes.
Ahh, because if drugs were allowed, we would see virtually no gang activity in the US. We should check out Portugal and Amsterdam to see if all of the gangs just decided to disban because drugs are legalized.
It's been stated in other replies, but it bears repeating: this argument is nonsense. You can use the exact same reasoning to argue for banning anything that has ever caused harm to people (which is pretty much everything, ever).
Just make sure all the dangerous stuff can only be administered in licensed venues by trained professionals.
Make users fill out a 12 page disclaimer before they are served. Make sure that the centers are decorated as tastefully as the average welfare office.
The hardcore addicts will flock to the centers, which will kill the street trade. But casual users and people looking to experiment won't bother; and they won't be able to find street dealers, as the dealers can't make a profit off the addicts anymore.
Has that stopped dealers from selling Vicodin? Extacy was also legal at one point and it didn't stop anyone from using it as a club drug.
"The hardcore addicts will flock to the centers, which will kill the street trade. But casual users and people looking to experiment won't bother; and they won't be able to find street dealers, as the dealers can't make a profit off the addicts anymore."
There will always be a black market..even if it's legal. This is because many people won't want to have to go to a doctor...and it will still be the most convenient.
I also would be interested to see how a doctor can ethically give you a prescription for a substance that does absolutely nothing to benefit you.
This is not what is meant by legalization. There would not be a black market because doctors would not prescribe these drugs, you would be able to buy them at your local, licensed convenience store (with proof of ID).
Is there a black market for alcohol or caffeine? If there is it's so tiny that somehow I've never encountered or heard about it. The same would be true for heroin, cocaine, etc.
The community kind of screwed themselves on this one. They got "medical marijuana" semi-legal. Now you are trying to tell me that it's not really good as a medical device and that we should sell it like alcohol? Why not just tell us the truth to begin with: It has very little medical benefit and the only reason you want it legal is to get high.
I also can't stand behind a community that puts out propaganda making it seem like marijuana has no adverse health effects.
Because that's not true... It has _tons_ of well documented medicinal benefits, and many people enjoy it recreationally.
rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.ht...
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/03/14...
– http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/10/coffee-shop-crackd...
Just a note of caution - while looking at what other places do definitely brings information to the table, you can't always say "if place A does X, doing X in place B will make it like place A".
The classic example of this is alcohol. Alcoholic beverages are not prohibited, but if you walk through an Italian town center at 11pm on a Friday night you won't see the scenes of public drunkeness and alcohol-fueled disorder that you see, say, in an English town center at the same time.
While I don't necessarily disagree with the larger point, in these kinds of policy area there is a level of unpredictability as to what will happen when a previously controlled substance is legalised, because patterns of consumption are convolved with local social norms.
For the police union it is "lost" money, not "saved".
Although not always, it seems. Wikipedia lists a fair about of support from police unions. (And longshoremen, FWIW.)
Key findings include: 1) Mexican DTOs' gross revenues from illegally exporting marijuana to wholesalers in the United States is likely less than $2 billion; 2) The claim that 60 percent of Mexican DTO gross drug export revenues come from marijuana should not be taken seriously; 3) If legalization only affects revenues from supplying marijuana to California, DTO drug export revenue losses would be very small, perhaps 2–4 percent; 4) The only way legalizing marijuana in California would significantly influence DTO revenues and the related violence is if California-produced marijuana is smuggled to other states at prices that outcompete current Mexican supplies. The extent of such smuggling will depend on a number of factors, including the response of the U.S. federal government. 5) If marijuana is smuggled from California to other states, it could undercut sales of Mexican marijuana in much of the U.S., cutting DTOs' marijuana export revenues by more than 65 percent and probably by 85 percent or more. In this scenario, the DTOs would lose approximately 20% of their total drug export revenues.
http://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/OP325/
And say it's just the 4% cut from California. Do those incremental hundreds of millions of dollars not count as major?
I don't think there's a slippery sloper from marijuana to cocaine, especially if marijuana is legalized. The slippery slope argument is like arguing there's a slippery slope from beer to cocaine -- addictive personalities aren't that simple. Further, any evidence implying a slippery slope from marijuana to harder drugs becomes less relevant after legalization, since marijuana users will then have fewer interactions with criminals and less exposure to harder drugs.
If we make all drugs legal and they start resorting to other illegal activities like kidnapping/ransom, can we make them illegal again?
"what about legalizing harder drugs like cocaine"
I'm guessing you've never lived with anyone who's been addicted to drugs.
Apparently a very large fraction of voters actually make their decision while in the voting booth!
I'm guessing the late run of donations is because latest polls show there is a 50/50 chance of this passing, whereas a few months ago it looked like it was unlikely.
You either put up $100k earlier on to make a wider political statement regardless of the chances of outcome or you put up $100k to help create tip the balance when it looks like things could go either way...
You are allowed to man phone banks for get out the vote efforts, and are allowed to drive people to the polls, however. These multiplicative effects are likely to do more than just voting.
Most people agree it was disgusting and inappropriate for people based in other states to phone-bank Californian voters over Prop 8, and the same logic kind of applies to me given that I'm non-immigrant (but living here for 4.5 years).
I also don't like it when non-citizens get involved with politics and elections in my home of UK and so I have to abide by that when the boot is on the other foot.
> I also don't like it when non-citizens get involved with politics and elections in my home of UK and so I have to abide by that when the boot is on the other foot.
Then why are you even commenting here? There is no bright line between discussing likely consequences here and more general advocacy.
Democracy is too important to be limited to just citizens. If you live here and you have ideas worth listening to, you have a responsibility to participate. We'd like to have you at the phone bank, or driving old people to the polls on election day, or writing letters to the editor.
Electoral activities in particular are tricky. Voting or claiming US citizenship without the right to do so is almost always a felony, and can easily result in mandatory deportation and permanent exclusion (mandatory as in not subject to discretionary or judicial review). Campaigning is generally not illegal, but would probably attract unusually close scrutiny during review. Mistaken decisions can be appealed, but that's a long and expensive process.
I understand and agree with the substance of what you're saying, but 'the ethic of the society' and the letter of the law don't always match up. In immigration matters, the burden of proof is almost always on the non-citizen rather than the government. So he's not just making excuses.
The founding fathers and US Constitution beg to differ on that point. In fact, franchise was initially limited to a subset of the citizenry. We have a representative republic, not mob rule.
I urge all Californians who're reading this to do their absolute best to make it pass in these last vital days. Join the phone banks, make sure all your friends are voting, campaign at universities. It could make a large difference, larger than you probably think.
It already is legalized in Netherlands and decriminalized (I believe) in Spain and Denmark, as well as UK (although that's about to change back I hear).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cannabis#United_Kin...
Under Labour they reclassified it as class C for a while but then put it back to class B in 2009.
This keeps production and supply in the hands of actual criminals that deal across countries. The legalized links are operated by borderline criminals and shady people.
It makes life better for the consumer (I have no problems with this), solves a lot of the policing issues but doesn't tackle solve organised crime, quality issues etc. If you are only interested in legalising marijuana, this policy doesn't create the wall between soft & hard drugs either. That is, marijuana stays in the "drugs" category and doesn't enter the alcohol category (where regular users will be appalled at the thought of their adult children using, for example, marijuana).
I suspect (though I haven't researched further) that the recent crime uptick in northern Mexico is due to the easing of cannabis laws across America over the past few years, and that it'll just get worse after Prop 19 is passed.
Personally, I think the solution is to legalize all drugs, and to put the money that we're spending on the war on drugs into medical treatment and education. It's obviously a difficult situation, but I'm glad to see that we're making progress.
So we make it easier for someone to become an addict and then pay millions to treat them? I also fail to see how education is going to work. The education people need is to tell them to stay away from drugs in the first place.
If so, that's quite a way for a libertarian to waste $100k.
edit: I love the open debate. Yeah, legalizing pot is definitely the most pressing problem facing our nation, so let's downvote anybody who says differently. HN is turning into Reddit.
Besides, the opportunity cost is zero to not lock these people up. It's not as if some other problem is going unsolved in favor of taking this law off the books.
Consider how much money the government is stealing from its citizens for no good reason. If some organization other than the government were doing this, solving the problem would be high priority..
The reason it's not high priority is because those people knowingly used an illegal substance and got caught. I also think you are over-estimating the amount of causal drug users in prison.
That can be a reason to believe they should remain imprisoned, but not a reason to believe they should be released but it's not a priority to do that anytime soon.
> over-estimating the amount of causal drug users in prison
It's possible. The drug war has vastly increased prison populations, but it's hard to come by unbiased statistics about how many of those people committed any non-victimless crimes.
For example, just what is the most pressing problem? Well, the answer is pretty obvious: people get old and die.
What is also obvious is that we don't know what to do about this. More funding for research on Alzheimer's disease looks correct, but beyond that it gets very unclear.
So immediately you reject sarcasm it leaps out at you that "most pressing problem" in the simple sense of "most important" isn't a good criterion. You need to be thinking about whether a problem can be fixed or not. Repealing bad laws is a very attractive focus for activism because it is such a practical step; it will actually work.
Your own errors can only leap out at you before you click reply if you state your position directly. Once you give in to the lure of sarcasm, you bind yourself to smug stupidity.
well at least i know you won't be my competition. keep on keeping on man.
I would if it would connect with my target group.
Yes I think starting a cannabis related startup is a good idea. I live in Colorado where we have over 100,000 medicinal patients and a dispensary on every other street in the Denver area. Combine that with a staggering amount of people that consume cannabis recreationally, unaffiliated with the medicinal program, and you can see how there's a pretty enormous market in this state alone. Now take into consideration the relative size of California and the fact that every single one of its citizens of legal age could potentially be buyers of this product.
Nobody would advertise on it? The Denver Post disagrees with you mightily ---> http://www.denverpost.com/news/marijuana ... oh yeah, the Westword Magazine disagrees with you too ---> http://www.westword.com/directory/marijuana-dispensaries/
Do you have any idea the amount of shops that are going to be offering cannabis products? You don't think, I don't know, that THOSE people would like to advertise? Or the glass blowers that make a living making pipes, bowls, etc? Or the vaporizer manufacturers like http://silversurfervap.com or the web developers that make most of their money designing sites for dispensaries in medicinal states? What about grow light suppliers like http://www.sunlightsupply.com or the nutrient companies like http://www.generalhydroponics.com/ or the full hydro/grow stores like http://www.thebigtomato.com/ ?? Consider the seed banks like http://www.cannabis-seeds-bank.co.uk/ that will be bringing their business to California. Think of the apparel companies that sell cannabis related gear. Think of the music industry when it finally adopts weed in out in the open. Think of the electricians that specialize in wiring grow rooms from small all the way up to the warehouse sized ones that dispensaries run around here.
Edit: You know what, I'm not even done. Here are some more people that "wouldn't advertise" -- cannabis edible makers and drink makers like http://www.keefcola.com/ , online communities like http://www.icmag.com , cannabis breeders like DJ Short, companies that sell point of sale software to dispensaries, credit card processors, etc etc etc.
This is so much bigger than you'll ever know, and it makes me sad that you have such a negative attitude towards it. This is bigger than the gold rush and bigger than silicon valley.
And we're only talking about California. Think of when the next state adopts it. And the next. And the next.
I also find it ironic that you think nobody would "buy" a cannabis related startup when this very thread is about a very wealthy individual investing $100,000 already, and the law hasn't even passed yet. Imagine the projects he's got his eyes on for when it actually DOES pass.
Mark my words, if legalization takes hold you're going to see your first cannabis entrepreneur break the Forbes 400 in a very short amount of time.
Without these I don't think that you can consider SF one of the most free places in the world.
I agree with hugh3 in any case. This is an article about politics, and no matter how much we may want to cheer paul on, I am not really sure it's germane, and that it might encourage others to submit things they feel 'rah rah!' about.
good luck with your business.
I don't want politics on Hacker News. Get. It. Off. Please. Thanks!
</angryrant>
My personal stance is that governments need to admit that the black market is a fundamental condition of humanity, and trying to stamp it out is impossible. However it is the governments responsibility to monitor the black market and prevent it from becoming too large, and the only way of doing that is to legalize the most popular activities found within the black market.
If America legalized prostitution, marijuana and cocaine today, i would guess that the black market would be put on life support here in the states.
edit: yay hackernews! Just downmod me because your liberal hippy viewpoints disagree. The chances of prop19 passing are 0.
If you drink alcohol on the street other than at a licensed outdoor event, a police officer can make you throw it away or issue a citation resulting in a fine. This seems pretty effective overall.
Sounds ripe for corruption.
Well, with your taste to great ideas you'll have fun looking at this one as well http://www.correctionscorp.com/ :
"CCA's 19th Annual Chairman’s Charity Golf Classic hosted nearly 300 golfers and donated almost $150,000 to nonprofit organizations in Middle Tennessee. "
They will generally have a diatribe about "evil corporations are poisoning us with HFCS/Vaccines/GM food/etc..." Meanwhile they are saying that the federal government shouldn't regulate what someone puts in their body.
Personally I'd like to err on the side of freedom, but all the same there are real risks out there. We can't expect society/government to take care of all dangers, then turn around and say "I should be able to take whatever I want!"
Or to put it more bluntly imagine medicare costs if we legalize all drugs. Imagine the emergency rooms?
This is like sitting in a bar listening to the same sob stories repeated week after week at a local dive bar and saying all drinkers are defeatist losers.
Smoking pot makes many people paranoid. This is fact. It's not that far of a stretch to imagine that these people are conspiracy theorists.
"This is like sitting in a bar listening to the same sob stories repeated week after week at a local dive bar and saying all drinkers are defeatist losers."
When you hear the above from many different groups of people in different parts of the US/world that smoke pot, it really makes you wonder.
How is this Prop19 will 'surely' change everything? Especially related to drug cartel.
My previous question is actually to find out what kind of measurement, precaution or whatever it is, to make sure that Prop19 will cripple drug cartels, without creating another problem.
Moreover the profit margins go way down because you are no longer covering the risk of arrest to those growing and supplying the drug.
Similarly, if we are controlled by our desires, we're not really free. An addict is not really free because he can't control himself.
> Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Drugs are definitely not essential.
> prohibition also provides a multi-billion dollar subsidy to violent criminal organizations that threaten our physical safety and security
Crime networks exist not because of strong government or strict laws; they exist because of moral corruption in the society. A strong government, strongly connected coherent society with powerful social moral values actually reduce the size and power of crime networks.
I really feel drug rules (not laws) need to be set at the neighborhood level by simple majority vote.
That way you can live where the limits suit you and you don't need to try to control what the whole country does.
Freedom is not just about allowing everyone to do anything. Its also about people being able to make the living arrangements that suit them without having to impose their choices upon others.
Its too much work anyway, always fighting these battles. Lets call a truce and go our separate ways together.