I think one of the big issues is the way the term 'drugs' is thrown around to encompass any illegal substance when some, quite clearly, are much more dangerous than others even if they were to be in a highly regulated state. Take Heroin for example. The addictive nature of Heroin is such that the need for more is the root cause of the social negatives attached to to the drug. Addicts will commit crimes simply to fund the next hit, this is well known. I don't doubt that many other drugs also cause this effect. I find this to be the major problem with the entire 'legalise drugs' debate and also the 'illegal vs legal' debate. How can we even attempt to resolve such an issue with such massive generalisation? It's like saying that serial killers and people with speeding tickets should receive the same level of sentencing, they're both law breakers after all. One area where this is highlighted for me is medicinal properties (yes, it's that old chestnut again), some quite clearly have real and/or potential positive properties when used sensibly. I personally know 3 people who do benefit from the use of cannabis as medicine (2 with MS and 1 with chronic rheumatoid arthritis who happens to be my wife). Yes, there are prescription drugs which doctors can give them in order to alleviate the effects of their illnesses, but the side effects of those are such that they become little more than zombies and vegetables. Yes, by mentioning that one of these people is my wife does raise the question of my bias and I will be the first to admit that I probably am a little biased (my father was(possibly still is, I don't know) an alcoholic which also adds to this) but when I see the positives every single day I find it hard to think negatively. Opiates quite clearly have medicinal benefits too, morphine is an incredible pain reliever and relatively safe when under extremely tight control. Can't say I've ever heard of alcohol having any wonderous medical properties outside of emergency sterilisation. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the entire debate is not quite as simple as 'this vs that'. I will leave my own opinions of that here at the end though. I feel that alcohol is a massive parasite on society, as are many illegal drugs, and that in order to start improving the way it effects our country, at least, we need much tighter and stricter controls which move with the times. Without trying to start a debate within a debate (although I accept that people may call me on it), this country (and probably most of the developed world) is degenerating with regard to responsibility and general common sense. Ultimately I don't think that people can be considered 'mature' until at least age 25 these days and controls on substances such as alcohol (and other things such as driving/fireworks/knives/firearms etc. but I digress) absolutely must follow this. The reason I think this is the negatives attached to alcohol, yes the stats say 1,000 deaths per million but, when violence/drink driving etc. are brought into that equation I would gladly bet that it's at least 10,000 and overall incidents/injuries etc. would probably be up into 50,000 plus.
And then brings the question, does a huge crackdown work? Try living in the US, we've tried having a "war on drugs." For years actually. All it's done is increase border tensions and foster a more volatile if not more profitable market. (the US is one of the top consumers of cocaine and other drugs) I mean unless you intend to enact the death penalty on possession (which would be frankly ludicrous) I don't see how a large crackdown would help. It would put a drain on resources though. And there is a deterrent, but the prison sentences are very very disproportionate (at least in the US) over here. Look at possession charges for certain drugs. It's a huge deterrent in the logical sense, but somehow people still do it. Why? The dilemma we face is how to deal with illegal substances and even legal substances. As far as I can tell either we allow the government an extensive amount of control and legalize the substances (and rehabilitation) or we crack down and impose disproportionate penalties. On one hand, legalizing would reduce the likelihood of a black market. On the other hand we have to deal with addicts and such. Then again, if we do crack down, the black market would only expand. It always does..
Yes there is: education! There's been numerous studies which have demonstrated that education is about 7 times as powerful as law enforcement in preventing drug abuse. The Rand corporation published that in the 80's, and that's a conservative think tank by anyones imagination. But it's obvious anyway. I support legalisation of all drugs to prevent the whole criminal black market and crime involved with the sale of illicit drugs. It's the only way to tackle the issue. For many people, it's a medical issue and they need help, not locked behind bars.
Would a crackdown work? No idea, its a sad state of affairs but maybe not it may be too late. Take your war on drugs and compare it to the UAE, they appear to have a better handle on it..... Death penalty for possession, no, but for dealing or trafficking, yeah sure might help.
What you're comparing to however also involves a nation that punishes any behavior deemed "indecent." I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to live there personally. As far as I can tell, the UAE has some pretty ridiculous laws on "decency" so saying that their "war on drugs" is effective would be misleading. Note that their society frowns heavily upon it. I highly doubt that intitating an entirely totalitarian and oppressive stance on drugs would actually alleviate our drug problems. Although to be fair, death penalty for trafficking and dealing may be plausible..
Yeah because the death penalty is such a good deterrent for murder isn't it? I mean there's much less murders in the States because it uses the death penalty compared with other industrial nations? Errr... no there isn't.
The idea of drugs becoming more and more understood and accepted is something we're getting to watch right now in the US with marijuana, particularly for you in California. Unfortunately, there's still a huge gap between usage/availability and understanding. With alcohol we know not to drive after drinking. We know (hopefully) not to drink too much because it's dangerous and no one enjoys dealing with someone who's black out drunk. We know not to drink too often because the effects of alcoholism are well portrayed. We also often see how proper consumption can be enjoyable and rewarding. The good and the bad, it's all deeply entwined in our culture. Marijuana is getting to that point, but it's still not there yet. Popular culture and society are still on the level of hippee/junky stereotyping and quick gags in comedy. If it was legalized tomorrow and, say, everyone over 18 could buy it what would happen? Let's say you've never used marijuana before: how much do you buy? How much do you smoke at once? Should you drive while high? Could you go to work high? School? Should you only smoke at home, or would it be fine to light up anywhere you can smoke tobacco? And another good question: are you deciding these things before or after you've started smoking? Our culture is completely lacking when it comes to defining common use. We definitely need the education to catch up to the use, certainly before complete legality. And though my rambling is all towards marijuana on the presumption that it'll becoming legal it does apply to any other illegal drug. Even if they stay illegal they will always be available, as long as they're available people need to understand what they do, and as a part of that why they should stay away from them for reasons other than "it's bad". But does a "war on drugs" actually mean anyone's cracking down on anything? On a large scale dealing with trafficking between countries, production, and inter-US transportation and sales there's an entire agency to deal with things. On a smaller scale I'm not so sure that anyone's actually done anything extra worth mentioning to stop drug use. The first things that came to mind reading through this thread was a sign I saw the other day that amazed me. It was posted by the Sheriff's department of a county with a fairly large drug problem. It offered a cash reward for reporting people producing, transporting or selling drugs. Being a vindictive and greedy little **** it caught my eye, until I noticed that they aren't interested in users of drugs. Being a massive country and this being one county your milage may vary massively, but in this one case there quite case I don't particularly feel deterred from doing drugs. And the reason is almost certainly the cost. To chase down every user of drugs would be a massive strain on police manpower and the jails would be overflowing within days. But that's the thing, it's not really a crack down when your priority isn't completely removing drugs but rather lessening drugs when financially beneficial. It would be interesting to see a real "all drugs must go" crack down but it just won't happen, the public isn't fully agreed on whether drugs should be illegal in the first place and even the opponents aren't sure how much money they want to spend stopping them. This inability to fully enforce the law is what makes me wonder if it wouldn't instead be better to try the legalization option.
I'm not advocating their whole judicial system, but their approach to illegal drugs appears to be working for them..
Maybe if they got their arse in gear and executed them it might work instead of leaving them on death row for 20 years. Are their executions televised? If not they should, that might help too.
In that case, why not drag them through the streets on a rack and then break them and then leave them there to rot and die? See, even if you had the most grotesque and inhumane punishment for crimes, they will ALWAYS be committed regardless. In the case of drugs, prohibition has demonstrated that it cannot reduce or prevent drug abuse, and thus other social policies must be considered.
I don't think it's as simple as emulating the UAE to stop the flow of drugs. There's more to it than just that. After all the culture over there is much different than the cultures here. That is not to say one gets superiority, but culture has a lot to do with interpretation of laws. And we rise again with the implications of the death penalty. That aside, it brings about issues not only involving drug control, but also our judicial system. How do we deal with this? I don't know, but I can only postulate. @Sloth: I agree, education is probably the most logical progression in terms of controlling drugs. You can legislate all you want, but people will still be inclined unless they know it's side effects. On the other hand, ideally you would want the citizens themselves to make that choice. I wouldn't say that it's the substances that cause the issue but more of the people.
1st paragraph; ok sounds good 2nd paragraph; Crime happens, fact of life, make the punishment harsh enough and it goes a long way to reducing it, just look at the DUI figures for Arizona over the past 15 years. But education is a must too. 3rd para, if prohibition doesn't work why are there not 40 million smack heads?
Their law is deeply routed in society and religion, which is maybe why a crack down here may not work. I don't believe their is one right answer, but I strongly believe that legalizing class A drugs is deffo not the path to take.
I'm liking the responses here... and also impressed that it's so far been an adult discussion without any over the top comments. Faith in the internet slightly restored! Maybe I didn't make myself quite clear.I wasn't sure where the 7 in a million thing came from, as I'd just seen in about but didn't have a reliable source, so I linked to a source that should be reliable showing a lower number of deaths per user compared to alcohol. I get it, you're anti drugs, so you disagree with me. We don't have to patronise each other though True, but the same could be said of any other drug related death statistics I agree. This goes for any drugs. Obviously people are gonna screw up occasionally, we're only human after all, but people who repeatedly end up in hospital or jail cells and cost the taxpayer a small fortune in treatment should be left where they fall. My thoughts exactly. A lot of people don't realise there's a difference between drug use and drug abuse. I'm a clubber, my drug of choice is ecstasy, I take it when I go out in the same way that the average sensible drinker has a few drinks. I don't take it every day, I don't even take it every weekend. Does this make me a drug abuser who'd rob my grandma to get my next hit? I think not. From my experience with other Ecstasy users, I'm actually part of the majority too... On the other hand I have run into people who take Speed, Ketamine, Ecstasy on an almost daily basis. They take it coz they're bored of being unemployed, to escape relationship issues, or they just can't function when they're not on it. Those are the drug abusers who give us recreational, sensible users a bad name. The question is, there's people who abuse alcohol too, yet generally, alcohol users don't get the same stigma attached to them as drug users. I do genuinely think leaglisation would bring alot of benefits. Hitting the cashflow of organised crime has been mentioned already. Another one, is harm reduction. A couple of people have made the argument that production would be regulated, users would know exactly what dosage they were getting and there'd be less risk of buying dodgy ****. Also though, if someone DID have a bad experience on something, they'd be more likely to seek help, as there'd be no fear of legal repercussions, so they'd have more chance of being properly treated. Drug awareness education could also focus on teaching people how to look after themselves properly, rather than just going "drugs are bad, m'kay?" Just to throw a completely different thought out there, what about legal highs? I remember 3 or 4 years ago, Ecstasy was incredibly difficult to get hold of, as anti-drug legislation led to safrole (required to make MDMA) being made illegal. The result? 4-MMC (or MCAT, meow, whatever you wanna call it). Similar effect to MDMA, but legal. There was no regulation, 13-14 year olds could easily go online and order it to be delivered right to their doors, legally. To me that's just wrong. A lot of clubbers turned to MCAT as a replacement, even though it was a relatively unknown substance and from experience seemed more toxic (purple blotches under your eyes, on your knees and elbows... to me that says there's something not right about it, hence I won't touch the stuff) Same thing happened earlier this year. Ketamine became incredibly difficult to get hold of because of factories abroad being shut down. Right around that time, MXE pops up on the club scene. Again, legal, cheaper than Ketamine and easily available to buy online by anyone with a bank card. Despite being legal, it was a lot stronger than Ketamine and there were a lot of people hospitalised because of it. Both examples of crackdowns on illegal drugs being followed by something much worse coming onto the market. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't right? I also hope I've made it clear that I'm not just a drug user who wants to be able to buy drugs from the local off license. It really makes little difference to me personally, I can still get what I want, legal or otherwise. What I'm more against is recreational drug users being branded as criminals, while people who drink themselves into a stupor aren't.
You're right to an extent. Legalizing randomly won't work. You can't suddenly say: all formerly illegal drugs are now legal! There's far too many ramifications (and prison sentences to revoke..and apologize) and the scale with which it would take to organize would be insane The logic here though isn't exactly perfect however. Recreational drug users obviously aren't the ones who are necessarily harming society, but we also have to factor in those who are addicted or reliant upon such substances. Think of it this way: it's not that we think recreational drug users are criminals, it's that they are because they're using substances that have been deemed illegal. That is not say that those users are good or bad, but there's a fine line between recreation and safety. It doesn't even have to be drugs, it could be video gaming, or gambling (which imo is even more debilitating given that it's usually tagged along by alcoholism and general irresponsiblity), the problem with legalizing (and with cracking down) is that it's an organizational disaster to try to enact one or the other.
Then you don't get it I'm afraid. I used to use a selection of class A's in my youth, I still enjoy a class B every now and again in my middle years. Shall we just say that the thought of the school bus driver, or teacher, or doctor or school crossing guard using C or H the night before being responsable for my daughters safety and the safety of hundreds of other kids does tend to colour ones judgement on the subject matter. I can not for the life of me see how you would legislate their use in such a way as to ensure people are safe when they have to see past their own well being.
How is that any different to them being an alcoholic and going to work after a heavy night on the bottle?
I don't think you are considering the fact that alcohol is widely available so of course it is going to have more prominent figures than class A drugs. As a percentile I would be willing to bet they are both pretty close in incidents vs overall users. What we don't want is to replace alcohol with drugs and find it to be the same or worse, better the devil you know Sent from my HTC Sensation XE with Beats Audio using Tapatalk 2
True, its a good point. But would we want to add to that problem by making those other drugs more available??
Why do you think it would add to the problem? I'm in a mid sized city in Scotland and I could have any drug I wanted in 1 hour - I know no drug dealers, I barely even know any people who smoke weed these days, but I could have anything I wanted in an hour. It's not like prohibition of "drugs" in any way limits their availability, so why do you think them becoming slightly more available would mean people would rush out and get them? Can you really imagine anyone you know just rushing out to go buy some heroin and shoot up in an alleyway if it were legalised?
