decline reported in Afghan poppy crop

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Ramo

It doesn't increase demand. It increases supply. Lower costs increase supply. That intern increases drug use and addiction which creates all kinds of nasty externalities.

The demand function has to be drastically changed with legalization. Surely you can see that.

No. I don't see that at all. Explain. No one here has told me how that is except to say that drugs are glamourous, which is absurd to me.

And prohibition causes far more nasty externalities: massive incarceration and inner-city violence, in addition to rampant drug use anyways.

Drug dealers need to be incarcerated. Violence is caused by drugs. It doesn't matter if they are legal or not.

and it's the moral thing to do.

I smoke pot from time to time. How is it moral for the state to lock me up?

I didn't say it was. If you sell pot however, I think you should do some time. Is that all you propose to legalize, because I assumed that you wanted to legalize all drugs.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Solomwi


Why, when putting a drug dealer in prison does absolutely nothing to stem the flow of drugs to the consumers? At least in the corner store, you know where and who he is.

Of course you know where he is. You put him there. You should put him in prison where he belongs, not on the corner.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Ramo
And some empirical evidence to back up my points (since economics without empiricial evidence is masturbation):

Portugal has not a significant increase in drug use after it decriminalized its drugs (hard as well as soft).

Why haven't they? You have to have reasons to back up your statistics when you are talking about economics, because there are always contributing factors. Just because they haven't had an increase in Portugal, doesn't mean that we wouldn't have one here. Marijuana is now decriminalized for medical use now in California. Do you know how many people are itching to get some medical marijuana here? They're beating down the doctor's doors. All you do when you legalize it, and have doctors selling it is legitimize it.

[Solomwi]

Originally posted by Kidicious


Of course you know where he is. You put him there. You should put him in prison where he belongs, not on the corner.

Once you put him in prison, you no longer know who the drug dealer is, and have to start all over.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Solomwi
Once you put him in prison, you no longer know who the drug dealer is, and have to start all over.

You assume that people are waiting in line to deal drugs. That's not the case. People deal drugs regardless of the number of other drug dealers there are on the street.

[Solomwi]

Originally posted by Kidicious


You assume that people are waiting in line to deal drugs. That's not the case. People deal drugs regardless of the number of other drug dealers there are on the street.

No, I merely state that the drug market, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Regardless of how many dealers you put in prison, their customers are going to find another one with whom to do business. It doesn't have to be somebody moving to the front of the line. It can be the guy who's been dealing on the next block. The simple truth is that putting a dealer away does nothing to the availability of the product.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Solomwi


No, I merely state that the drug market, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Regardless of how many dealers you put in prison, their customers are going to find another one with whom to do business. It doesn't have to be somebody moving to the front of the line. It can be the guy who's been dealing on the next block. The simple truth is that putting a dealer away does nothing to the availability of the product.

You pay no attention to the principles of economics. Each potential dealer will deal for a certain price. Each potential buyer will buy at a certain price. If you take one dealer you cut the supply. You don't cut it by the amount that that dealer would otherwise sell, but you cut it none the less.

[Solomwi]

No, you don't cut the supply one little bit. You may disrupt it minutely and temporarily, but the drugs that would have gone through him to a customer on the street are now just going to go through somebody else, and still get to the customer on the street. That's a basic reality.

If what you say were true, why hasn't the incarceration of so many dealers put a dent in the supply? They're interchangeable conduits, not suppliers.

[Ramo]

Why haven't they? You have to have reasons to back up your statistics when you are talking about economics, because there are always contributing factors.

Alright, then you tell me why Portugal's drug use hasn't gone up.

Just because they haven't had an increase in Portugal, doesn't mean that we wouldn't have one here. Marijuana is now decriminalized for medical use now in California. Do you know how many people are itching to get some medical marijuana here? They're beating down the doctor's doors. All you do when you legalize it, and have doctors selling it is legitimize it.

Do you have any evidence that pot use has gone up in California?

Drug dealers need to be incarcerated.

Why?

Violence is caused by drugs. It doesn't matter if they are legal or not.

Which is why the liquor industry is still controlled by violent gangs?

Drug use is very transparent. Go down to where the homeless people stay. Most of them are drug addicts. If you want to legalize drugs you're going to create more homeless than Reagan did.

Any empirical evidence? At all?

Why do you need a decriminalized environment to treat drug addiction? By the way have you ever been treated for drug addiction?

If it weren't crminalized, one could be more open with it, which means that your friends and family could more easily help you when you go overboard. And no, I haven't.

How often are lighter drugs laced with heavier drugs? It happened to me once actually. It was fun.

It hasn't happened to me, but only 'cuz I smoke occasionally. Most people who I know who have used drugs for a fair amount of time have had that happen.

I didn't say it was. If you sell pot however, I think you should do some time. Is that all you propose to legalize, because I assumed that you wanted to legalize all drugs.

I don't sell pot, but I don't see what's necessarily wrong with that. Why should people who sell pot be incarcerated?

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Kidicious
Making what is immoral legal is never a good solution to the problem. In fact it is not solution to the problem. Not that there is one. Maybe if the govt did the right thing more often people would respect the law.

The law should never be used to uphold some sort of moral or ethical code. Besides, what's so illegal in taking drugs? Tobacco is legal, and nicotine is more addictive than cocaine and heroin.

[Berzerker]

Kid

Making what is immoral legal is never a good solution to the problem. In fact it is not solution to the problem. Not that there is one. Maybe if the govt did the right thing more often people would respect the law.

First, why is drug use immoral? Second, why is forcibly taking our money to imprison millions of people moral? You know, just claiming someone is immoral doesn't mean you get to commit even greater immorality in the name of stopping what you claim is immoral. Here's what you advocate - I use a drug in my home and in response you commit robbery on a massive scale (yeah, its legal) to hire people to break into my home to put me in a cage all because you think I'm immoral.

What the hell? Screw them. Put them on the welfare rolls until they can find some other productive work. That **** ends up in our children.

You know many children using heroin? Maybe there wouldn't be as many if it was legal for adults. And that productive work will be sticking their hands out for more goodies just like how N Korea uses the threat of nuke production to get all sorts of stuff at our expense.

Looks like there was an over supply last year. So the decrease might be only one time.

Yes, inspite of the Bushies trying to blame drug users for funding terrorists, the Taliban were actually waging a drug war because of their religion. We knocked them out and poppy production spiked.

Like I said. I'm willing to pay a high price to take a little drugs of the street.

No, you're willing to force us to pay a high price in the hopes of reducing drug use. It hasn't worked. Why? Because there's too much money to be made in the illegal drug trade and millions of people want to get high.

The best thing to do with drugs is sell them to your enemy.

Apparently Mao agreed.

Using drugs is glamourous?

It can be, the forbidden fruit phenomenon and Hollywood glamorised tobacco use. In old movies we see plenty of people smoking and the tobacco industry even paid Hollywood to promote the use of their drug.

What is the true cost of drug use? Is it the criminal activity of drug dealers, or is it the result of drug addiction?

Drug addiction is a fact of life, many people want to get high. So in the attempt to prevent drug use we ban drugs and create a massive black market. When was the last time alcohol dealers were having shootouts over marketshare? I suggest you look at homicide rates for the 20th century if you think drug wars are so smart.
They peaked twice, during alcohol prohibition and then again during the past 35 years of the Nixon-Reagan drug wars. When alcohol prohibition ended the homicide rate dropped 13 years in a row to half the level under prohibition. Rates stabilised until Nixon's drug war and the rate doubled again only recently dropping down closer to non-drug war periods.

Here's something to think about, in the early to mid 1980's Reagan and Congress followed by many states increased penalties for adults convicted of "trafficking". What do you think happened? Many adults sought to avoid the harsher penalties by recruiting minors who were exempt from the harsher penalties into the drug trade. As a result gangs exploded, minors joined gangs in record numbers and the juvenile crime rate skyrocketed.

Drug use is very transparent. Go down to where the homeless people stay. Most of them are drug addicts. If you want to legalize drugs you're going to create more homeless than Reagan did.

Then we must have had millions of homeless people before the 1900s because all drugs were legal in this country up until the late 1800s (with the feds jumping in after 1900). So, were addiction rates higher when all drugs were legal? According to you the rate should have been thru the roof. It wasn't...

Just because they haven't had an increase in Portugal, doesn't mean that we wouldn't have one here.

So you demand evidence, evidence is given, and you ignore it because it doesn't jive with your belief. So why ask for proof in the first place?

You assume that people are waiting in line to deal drugs. That's not the case. People deal drugs regardless of the number of other drug dealers there are on the street.

By waiting in line he meant once you remove a drug dealer someone else is ready to jump in to grab their marketshare. We've seen the process over and over, the cops break up a drug ring, there is a war among nearby drug dealers who try to move in, someone wins the war and things settle down until the cops bust up the next drug ring and the cycle continues.

[Ben Kenobi]

I've seen a few friends of mine, back home, start grow ops because there is no other work for them.

The problem is twofold. Not only are drugs profitable, one can make so much more money off of them, than one can through other work. That's what makes it attractive to everyone along the chain, be they producers or sellers.

So until profitable work can be found, many of these folks will continue to cultivate drugs.

If grow ops were less profitable, they would be less attractive, and there are two ways to do this. The first is to institutionalise the problem through legalising it, and taking the money to fund programs that are supposed to help people get off the drugs.

The second, is to try to reduce the consumption of these drugs, so that there is less demand. If there is less demand, then growing drugs will be that less profitable.

How many people have had their lives ruined because they couldn't control themselves with alcohol? How many would rather go without food than their cigarette?

I don't think legalisation has done anything to curb the problems faced by these two drugs to society, rather it has made both that much more serious. The same will be true of these other drugs.

I think there are much better ideas we should try to reduce consumption before we give up on these people altogether.

[Berzerker]

In the 1820s America had a severe problem with booze and people spoke out and consumption was reduced dramatically. Tobacco consumption has also declined significantly once Hollywood stopped pushing tobacco in its movies and there was a concerted effort to reduce tobacco use thru information. But since you gave only two responses and legalisation is a no go, how do you plan on reducing consumption while drugs are illegal? More jails?

Here are the options:

1) legalise drugs and deal with the consequences.

2) Ban drugs and deal with both the consequences of drug addiction AND the violence stemming from the black market.

(2) might be viable if we ignore the immorality of the drug war and we see a significant reduction in consumption. But we have never seen that reduction while drugs are illegal. In fact, addiction rates today are comparable to when all drugs were legal inspite of the chicken little predictions of prohibitionists.

As for Kid wondering how prohibition promotes the use of harder drugs, before Nixon began his drug war, traffickers dealt mainly with pot but that drug is hard to conceal. The crackdown on pot led many traffickers to switch to more concentrated, more easily hidden drugs like cocaine and then heroin. So a dealer who was selling pot tells his customers he now has cocaine because of the crackdown on pot. Thats how the war on pot led to the proliferation of harder drugs...

[Ben Kenobi]

First, why is drug use immoral?

Berzerker, do you believe that we have the right to do whatever we want to ourselves, even if such actions are detrimental to our own well-being?

I would think it immoral to persist in such actions when one has knowledge of the harms that they do to oneself.

Second, why is forcibly taking our money to imprison millions of people moral?

It is one thing for a drug user to harm himself. Quite another for the person who profits from selling and producing drugs to harm another person.

If I were to shoot someone in the head, I would be arrested. If I sold them a bag of smack, which they became addicted to I would get at most a slap on the wrist. Yet, many could argue the point, that a quick death from a bullet to the brain, is better than an entire life plagued by drug addiction.

You know, just claiming someone is immoral doesn't mean you get to commit even greater immorality in the name of stopping what you claim is immoral. Here's what you advocate - I use a drug in my home and in response you commit robbery on a massive scale (yeah, its legal) to hire people to break into my home to put me in a cage all because you think I'm immoral.

In case you don't know, a very high proportion of all property crimes are committed by addicts feeding their habit. So to draw a distinction between the two is disingenous.

One would think, if one favoured protection of private property, that you would approve stiff penalties against those who sell drugs.

You know many children using heroin? Maybe there wouldn't be as many if it was legal for adults. And that productive work will be sticking their hands out for more goodies just like how N Korea uses the threat of nuke production to get all sorts of stuff at our expense.

Why does it matter if a child is addicted or an adult? Is one somehow worse than the other? How is the productivity of a nation going to improve, if you encourage people to use drugs?

It can be, the forbidden fruit phenomenon and Hollywood glamorised tobacco use. In old movies we see plenty of people smoking and the tobacco industry even paid Hollywood to promote the use of their drug.

Yes, but was tobacco legalised? Just because a drug is legalised, doesn't mean that this effect is going to disappear.

Drug addiction is a fact of life, many people want to get high.

No, it is not a fact of life. I am not going to say to a junkie on the street, that the only thing he can ever hope for in his life is to remain a junkie.

I suggest you look at homicide rates for the 20th century if you think drug wars are so smart.
They peaked twice, during alcohol prohibition and then again during the past 35 years of the Nixon-Reagan drug wars. When alcohol prohibition ended the homicide rate dropped 13 years in a row to half the level under prohibition. Rates stabilised until Nixon's drug war and the rate doubled again only recently dropping down closer to non-drug war periods.

Okay. Assuming these numbers are correct, what is your theory for the correlation between the two? Why should prohibition have any effect on the number of homicides?

Here's something to think about, in the early to mid 1980's Reagan and Congress followed by many states increased penalties for adults convicted of "trafficking". What do you think happened? Many adults sought to avoid the harsher penalties by recruiting minors who were exempt from the harsher penalties into the drug trade. As a result gangs exploded, minors joined gangs in record numbers and the juvenile crime rate skyrocketed.

Good point. That criminals evade laws, is not a good argument against those laws.

Then we must have had millions of homeless people before the 1900s because all drugs were legal in this country up until the late 1800s (with the feds jumping in after 1900). So, were addiction rates higher when all drugs were legal? According to you the rate should have been thru the roof. It wasn't...

I would suspect, that in 1900 drug distribution was a little bit more difficult than today.

By waiting in line he meant once you remove a drug dealer someone else is ready to jump in to grab their marketshare. We've seen the process over and over, the cops break up a drug ring, there is a war among nearby drug dealers who try to move in, someone wins the war and things settle down until the cops bust up the next drug ring and the cycle continues.

Good point. So how can we think outside the box to discourage these dealers?

[Ben Kenobi]

But since you gave only two responses and legalisation is a no go, how do you plan on reducing consumption while drugs are illegal? More jails?

No, I agree that there are better ways to tackle this then just relying upon enforcement.

1) legalise drugs and deal with the consequences.

I look at the costs of society to the legal drugs, and this is a spectre that I would like to avoid if at all possible.

(2) might be viable if we ignore the immorality of the drug war and we see a significant reduction in consumption. But we have never seen that reduction while drugs are illegal. In fact, addiction rates today are comparable to when all drugs were legal inspite of the chicken little predictions of prohibitionists.

Apples and oranges. The world has changed since 1900, why should we think that the situation that applied then applies today?

As for Kid wondering how prohibition promotes the use of harder drugs, before Nixon began his drug war, traffickers dealt mainly with pot but that drug is hard to conceal. The crackdown on pot led many traffickers to switch to more concentrated, more easily hidden drugs like cocaine and then heroin. So a dealer who was selling pot tells his customers he now has cocaine because of the crackdown on pot. Thats how the war on pot led to the proliferation of harder drugs...

So again, because criminals evade the law, we should toss out the law. That's a poor argument.