decline reported in Afghan poppy crop

[Ben Kenobi]

One thing that would be effective, is to bring back some element of shame.

Would a dealer want to sell drugs, if he got caught, and had to walk the streets for a day with a sign that read, I'm a convicted dealer?

And anyone could take a shot at him, while the cop escort looked the other way?

[Berzerker]

Ben

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?

Yes

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

Why? We harm ourselves in all sorts of ways and it isn't immoral.

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.

That would be for the addict to decide. There's a big difference between murdering someone and harm people do to themselves. You're effectively blaming someone else for human nature and I know you don't even blame God for that.

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.

Property crime rates now are based on drug prohibition. One goal of the prohibitionists is to drive up the cost of drugs in the hope of placing drugs out of reach for many people, it doesn't work. But it does result in more people stealing etc to raise the money for drugs. Strange argument there, Ben, it doesn't help your position. I'd much rather see an addict get what they need for cheap than see them robbing people... Furthermore, if drugs were cheap many impoverished peoples around the globe would stop growing the drugs because other crops would become viable. You can see from the article how this works, Afghan farmers gave up poppy production based on the belief they will be compensated for the loss they incur by switching to less profitable crops.

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

Those drugs are private property.

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?

The adult is free, the child is not - age of consent is a relevant concept. Are you a communist? If not, why are you reducing our lives to one of production for the state? And just because something is legal does not mean I am encouraging it. I don't like sport hunting but I oppose banning it, that doesn't mean I want to encourage shooting animals for fun. I want to encourage freedom, what you do with it is your concern, not mine.

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

Who said it would disappear? Tobacco was both legal and promoted by Hollywood.

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.

Did I say that? I said drug addiction is a fact of life, i.e., it exists and all the gnashing of teeth won't eliminate it. We see drug use all over the world in a variety of forms.

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?

Because the massive black market that develops to supply the banned drug creates violence as alcohol/drug dealers have no legal recourse to settle disputes. When did we last hear of alcohol dealers having shootouts over marketshare? Prohibition!

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

The "criminals" aren't just evading laws, they're evading laws by recruiting minors to take their place.

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

Perhaps, but one reason why drugs are so expensive is because of the difficulty in delivering drugs to consumers. The country was awash with booze in the 1820s, not much difficulty there.

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

By informing people about drugs and using social pressure, the same tactic successfully used whenever a drug problem arose in the past when drugs were legal.
That way we avoid the black market violence so we don't compound the problem.

[Berzerker]

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

People are different now? Nope... But if US history is irrelevant, and I doubt you'd argue that if addiction was much higher when all drugs were legal, then we can look at countries that have legalised or decriminalised drugs. Portugal and the Netherlands have either legalised pot or ignore it and they have lower teen consumption rates than the US. But when this was pointed out to Kid he dismissed it by arguing that those people are different than us, the same argument you just employed.

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

Its only a poor argument if the law has no other effects. That isn't the case, there are other effects. Minors recruited into the drug trade and gangs is just one. Black market violence is another...

One thing that would be effective, is to bring back some element of shame.

Would a dealer want to sell drugs, if he got caught, and had to walk the streets for a day with a sign that read, I'm a convicted dealer?

And anyone could take a shot at him, while the cop escort looked the other way?

You're a Christian, did Jesus tell Luke to walk the streets with a sign like that so people could take shots at him? What was Jesus' punishment for administering booze to already drunk people?

[Geronimo]

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.

use of any of the illegal drugs I know anything about is certainly stupid but how on earth could it possibly be construed as 'immoral' unless you get your 'morals' out of religious texts or some other arbitrary guide?

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Geronimo


use of any of the illegal drugs I know anything about is certainly stupid but how on earth could it possibly be construed as 'immoral' unless you get your 'morals' out of religious texts or some other arbitrary guide?

Producing, selling, and taxing drugs is immoral. I never said taking them was, although it's a bad thing to do to yourself.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by 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.

I don't know anything about Portugal. I imagine that one reason could be their changing demographics.

Evidence like this isn't conclusive. You can't control the other factors. I don't know how the enforcement and treatment was before legalization, and I don't know anything about treatment after the fact either. I suppose that maybe no one does.

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?

No, but why would people get medical marijuana (besides the fact that they need it, which most of them don't). It's actually more expensive. The only reason can be because of a shortage in some areas of the black market.

Drug dealers need to be incarcerated.

Why?

They cause harm to society. They are immoral people.

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?

Which is why crackheads don't feed their children.

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?

Go talk to someone who runs a shelter.

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.

I just don't believe this. Using a lot of drugs is going overboard in the first place. As far as light drugs, it's pretty obvious when someone is going overboard.

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.

You are the first person to ever bring this point up to me. The one time my pot was laced with something was in another country. I've heard about bad pot being out there, but it doesn't happen too much.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


The law should never be used to uphold some sort of moral or ethical code.

Wha wha wha whaaaaat?!

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Berzerker
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...

That's not how it worked out at all. Nice little story though.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Oerdin
I prefer the Taliban approach which is to simply shoot everyone who grows poppies.

And uses cocaine?

[Kidlicious]

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

[lord of the mark]

post something about AFGHANISTAN, and go away, and soon the polytubbies arguing their philosophies about drugs - sheesh

Look guys, the opiates from the Afghan poppies feed the markets in Russia, Iran, Europe, etc. The political and financial consequences to Afghanistan of legalizing poppy cultivation would be immense - it aint gonna happen - fugedaboutit. Only choice is tolerate ILLEGAL cultivation or crack down. If you tolerate illegal cultivation, money is gonna flow to warlords, Taliban, and the culture of lawlessness there will be encouraged. Ergo, a decline is a GOOD thing, and SOME govt measures make sense. How hard to crack down given the economic and political realities is another thing.

[Kidlicious]

LotM is right. Cracking down WILL reduce the supply and the revenue going to the warlords.

[Ned]

Oh, the insanity.

[RGBVideo]

Re: National pride in Afganistan, loyalty to Karzai: If this is true, it's good news.

Re: Drug situation overall: I don't believe in wars against drug producers. What we need is a war against the unpatriotic and undesirable drug consumers, the junkies. Every kid who even wants to use drugs is a symptom of a failed education system -- it should have nothing to do with how easily he can get 'em. Healthy society doesn't need any stuff like that.

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?

Nothing wrong with just hurting yourself, but junkies have been proven to commit overwhelmingly more violent crimes than normal citizens. They are a threat which must be confronted.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Kidicious
Wha wha wha whaaaaat?!

You don't find, for example, the laws of Iran problematic?