Before I go any further I feel as if I must clarify something because a lot of Del's and Bob's responses (and others) are forgetting one HUGE premise about this debate (and no, not that it's a comparison to the homosexuality thread).
We're NOT TALKING ABOUT POT. We're not talking about alcohol! We're not talking about nicotine, fatty food, video games, shopping, gambling, or any other "unhealthy addiction." We're not even -really- talking about addiction, but it's fairly integral to why HARD DRUGS (that's what we're talking about) should be banned.
SO moving on...
What else is the drive to do drugs? What's the initial motivation?
The "
High." People want to feel "good" ... that's the catch. The rub. They want to escape their crappy existence, so they take Hard Drugs because it works... for a little while. But eventually you come to realize that you're not taking drugs just to feel good, but to keep from feeling bad. You have to take more and more as your resistance builds. You have to start breaking other laws to afford it.
Uh...? This is a really pathetic generalization of drug addicts. There are millions of functioning drug addicts — look at nicotine, alcohol, and caffeine — the three most popular drugs. Are all smokers "chicken**** scared of reality"?
See above, we're not talking about those, so it's actually quite an accurate "generalization" if you want to call it that. I just call it reality (but I don't expect everyone here to have the same experience as I, living in a crack house for instance.)
What are you trying to say, that drug addictions are sad? Uh, okay..? So? It's sad when I see divorces. It's sad when I hear of abortions. Doesn't mean jack though.
We're not just talking about "sad" like emo sad. Your responses tell me the only exposure you've had to drug culture is your typical High School or College pot-head. That's NOT what this topic is about. We're talking about crack fiends. You ever been face to face with one? You can see it in their eyes, they're ready to kill you for your wallet because it at least means they can buy more. Why else do you think cops are so on-edge working the streets? It's a literal war out there. Your stance seems to be one from a comfort zone, an intellectual position, which is fine, but ... it's inaccurate. You can't just reason this topic, you have to have some real-world experience, or at least research what it's like to be a crack addict, or a heroin junkie. And by research I don't mean watching some movie like Trainspotting. I mean something like
this.
I'm saying, "hey, this "crime" is not really worth our tax dollars to be a crime at all", and you say "Wow it's a crime therefore it's the law". Do you see where we've gone? You're assuming the law; I'm questioning it.
Well okay, but I did that because that's what you should have said, but you didn't even put quotes around "crime" you just made it seem really flippant so I guess I own you an apology. Fair enough. If you really think possession or distribution of hard drugs should be taken off the books, then my response is "no, it shouldn't." lol, I mean, I guess we both need to present cases here, but I think that's what we're doing, so this whole diatribe was really unnecessary, and my fault for being nit-picky. I just have to get used to your debate style is all.
The social ideology revolving around hard drugs is that they are illegal and bad. There's a stigma. Though we can see that there are plenty of things in our everyday society that show a comical amount of holes in that view of drugs: the prevalence of alcohol, its legality, and its influence on the population. I could go on, but the fact that alcohol is the number one "problem" means I don't have to.
Yes, this seems to be your central argument for why hard drugs should not be illegal. Thing is, despite there being similarities in alcoholism and crack addiction, they're still two very different substances. Alcohol, for one
has some redeeming qualities. Now it's true that the medical community has also employed the use of cocaine derivatives (read: not straight coke), but those applications are not illegal! Wine is often used in cooking. Alcohol is also central to dozens of social and cultural gatherings and practices, such as Holy Communion. There's a reason deeper than "everyone agrees" as to why alcohol is legal. In fact there's plenty of communities that are "dry" communities, such as the one I grew up in. No liquor stores, no beer can be bought, the only drinking allowed is in your home, private-owned clubs like the Knights of Columbus or the Elks Lodge, and literally one restaurant that was allowed to have a bar. So it's not as if EVERYONE thinks alcohol is "okay." It's more that alcohol is ingrained in our lives to the point that removing is impossible. This is not the case with hard drugs. Most people can live their whole lives and never once try a hard drug, let alone get addicted to it. Legalizing it would make it easier to get, and may actually change this equation in favor of more people doing something that's really bad for them. Remember one pipe's worth of crack can kill you. One beer is far less likely to be as lethal.
Well, you can use drugs in a way that doesn't hurt anyone. Let's say you're smoking marijuana in your own home, and you don't drive to work.
Again, we're not talking about pot. Pot is a completely different debate. Alcohol use is actually often cited as a reason to endorse pot use, using the same arguments that Del has. And that's fine. But it's NOT what we're talking about here, so this is a non-point. In fact I'd go so far as to say you can't use hard drugs in a harmless way. You'd have to stay totally locked in confinement, have the drugs delivered to you, be fed, watched after, etc etc. No, it's a dangerous drug, with dangerous side effects, and it involves partaking in dangerous practices, mainly interacting with hard drug dealers.
Well, we're making them enemies of the state. They didn't declare war on us, we declared war on them. However, that doesn't say that criminal gangs are good, but I'm just saying that we make the drug-dealers enemies of the state.
Actually, I disagree. Smuggling, you see, it's illegal. By smuggling things into the US, you are committing an illegal act -against- the US, and this makes you the US's enemy. We don't want the drugs here. But here, in the US, there is a giant population of users, so the Cartels want their drugs here. Conflict of interest = US vs Them, and they are VERY pushy.
So the invasion of Panama was a "paper war"? [URL0="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Just_Cause#United_States.27_justification_for_the_invasion"]Operation Just Cause[/URL], was motivated in part, by an attempt to combat drug trafficking.
The invasion of Panama was to get rid Noriega but that wasn't my point. You were somehow equating the war on terror with the war on drugs, and they're not the same war. if that's not what you were doing, then I misread.
Well, remember prohibition. Murder rates went much higher than before. I'm suggesting that violent crime would decrease if drugs were made legalised.
I don't see how. Violent crime related to drugs is typically involving users who can't legitimately afford their next fix, so they kill someone and steal their money so they can. Unless you're suggesting that crack would suddenly be dirt cheap, I don't see this equation changing. If that IS what you're suggesting, that it'd be cheap because the government is producing it, well that's not true. Again you can only really get a lot of these drugs from outside the US. Importing goods is expensive anyway, but especially drugs. It's not as if the Cartels would take a pay cut. They make good money, sure, but they're not going to accept tiny fractions of what they make now, just so crack addicts can get crack for cheap, so that violent crime can be reduced.
By legalising drugs, they would become cheaper, because the illegality artificially inflates their price.
What really inflates prices is greed. Making the drugs legal won't change this. You're assuming making hard drugs legal would suddenly change all these drug economic situations, and frankly, they wouldn't change. The only thing that'd change, is the penalty on users for taking drugs.
Well, lets put it this way. If the FDA approves the use of certain recreational drugs, it can regulate what is put in them. So heroin would be pure, instead of a mix of strange white powders.
Except the FDA's responsibility is to ensure things are safe for consumption. Hard Drugs are NOT SAFE FOR CONSUMPTION, in any amount, and regardless of how "pure" they've been refined. And no, it's not unsafe just like a big-mac is unsafe. It's unsafe -in the extreme- as in you can die just from snorting one line. Maybe one really has to take these drugs to understand how poisonous they are. But I should think people paid attention to the "just say no" ads in school, and somehow would already know that filth is deadly.
Actually, they'd loose a lot of their income, so they couldn't hire so many goons to go around killing each other. The stakes would be a lot lower, so they'd have less to fight about. The legal industry would undercut them by miles, and they'd have to go sell something else. We also wouldn't be fighting illegal drug dealers any more, because there wouldn't be any.
You've neglected the fact that these folks would still be the primary source of the drug. You're not going to start having coca plants growing in Kansas alongside the wheat, rofl. These are S. American Tropical plants. Unless you're proposing that the US send down teams of farmers to farm this stuff in place of the Cartels, but that would result in an escalation of war, they'd not give up their territory without a fight.
Dealinng with corruption would be one thing, but legalising drugs would mean the cartels loose lots of money. They can't sell heroin for it's grossly inflated price anymore. They loose their main source of income and wont be able to keep such a strangle hold of the country anymore.
Tar heroine comes from many other places, but one major place is Afghanistan. Legalizing the use of Heroine would entail legalizing the importation of it from there. We'd have to levy our trade sanctions.
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I see a lot of opinions in this topic, and from you gents, but I'm not seeing a lot of reality-based ideas. This isn't just flipping some switch and all of sudden there's crack bottles at your local walgreen's counter next to the packs of marlboro's. It's hard enough to argue for pot legalization, let alone hard drugs. At least with pot legalization there's enough going for it to make it seem plausible. You can grow pot in the US. No one dies from pot overdoes. Pot isn't terribly serious in terms of harmful side effects. None of these things can be said of Hard Drugs. The logistics, economics, health risks and social impacts are all too grave to warrant even considering legalizing it. Just because some euro-trash country got away with it doesn't mean it'd work in THIS country. Not until we've fixed a lot of other underlying problems. One day perhaps. But we're neither prepared, nor mature enough to handle something as dangerous as legal coke. We have too many ghettos, too many desperate people, too many back-stabbing people, too many profiteering people to allow it.
