Shouldn't something be done about Mexico?

[-Jrabbit]

Good thing we can tell the drug dealers by their uniforms. What could go wrong?

[Ben Kenobi]

JR, wow. Terrible argument.

Maybe you should come here for awhile and see what the Cartels are doing. The problem isn't the Mexican government - the problem is the cartels operating on Mexican soil close to the American border. There are plenty of areas where the Mexican government doesn't even operate because the cartels have taken over.

Do you not see this, JR?

[rah]

I think he sees more clearly than you. How would you feel if the Mexican Government decided that we weren't doing enough to fight drugs in your town and sent their army in to battle them and some of your neighbors were killed as collateral damage?

[Kidlicious]

Good thing we can tell the drug dealers by their uniforms. What could go wrong?

Then just let them take over?

[Berzerker]

nope, just end the drug war

didn't somebody suggest that already?

[Kidlicious]

nope, just end the drug war

didn't somebody suggest that already?

Because it's hard to tell a drug dealer from a cop is not a good reason to make it legal to sell meth and crack cocaine.

[loinburger]

Why should drugs be made illegal, in your opinion? And for the love of god please try to provide a sane coherent answer, rather than your usual "it's obvious to me why drugs should be made illegal so everybody who disagrees with me must be dumb" because for ****'s sake you're a grown man and you should try to act like it

[C0ckney]

I reject ending the war on drugs for the same reason I reject your justification for molesting catholic school boys.

let me guess, it has something to do with george washington, hitler and giant arse dildos?

[Berzerker]

Because it's hard to tell a drug dealer from a cop is not a good reason to make it legal to sell meth and crack cocaine.

I didn't say anything about identifying drug dealers and cops, you asked if we should just let them take over and I said just end the drug war

the good reason(s) to allow meth and cocaine is the collateral damage caused trying to stop people from using meth and cocaine

you might be able to convince more people if the drug war was making a dent in consumption, but it doesn't and all we get as our reward is more crime

[Kidlicious]

I didn't say anything about identifying drug dealers and cops, you asked if we should just let them take over and I said just end the drug war

the good reason(s) to allow meth and cocaine is the collateral damage caused trying to stop people from using meth and cocaine

you might be able to convince more people if the drug war was making a dent in consumption, but it doesn't and all we get as our reward is more crime

Most people are convinced that drugs should be illegal (because it decreases consumption). Would people smoke less tobacco and drink less alcohol if those were illegal? I think so. I'm not saying that those should be illegal, because we should concentrate our efforts on hard drugs. Lets see how much marijuana consumption goes up in the states where it is legal now. Don't you think consumption of marijuana will increase in those states? I think so.

We can put a hurting on the drug cartel. That's a good thing to do. Will it have it's costs? Sure. Drugs aren't going to be legalized though. We can debate whether they should be and maybe someday they will be. But the question right now is whether or not we should pressure Mexico to step up the war and take it to the next level, not whether or not drugs should be legalized.

[ricketyclik]

Shouldn't the decision whether to take drugs or not be one's own?

[C0ckney]

Shouldn't the decision whether to take drugs or not be one's own?

even if we accept for the sake of argument that people using drugs are a problem, it takes a special kind of authoritarian ****bag to believe that this is a bigger problem than the violence associated with drugs and wholly caused by their illegality. the same sort of stupidity leads drug warriors to think that drug use is law enforcement problem rather than a public health one; it's a special kind of blindness and nastiness, rooted firmly in the belief that addicts should be punished, rather than helped.

[Kidlicious]

COckney, have you ever been to a drug treatment center and seen how it works?

Please keep talking out of your ass. It's amusing.

[C0ckney]

yes; i used to volunteer in one. our drug policies are a total failure and it's ill-informed people like you who help to keep things that way.

[kentonio]

Most people are convinced that drugs should be illegal (because it decreases consumption). Would people smoke less tobacco and drink less alcohol if those were illegal? I think so.

We have a hard test case for what happened when alcohol was made illegal. The savage rise in violent and non-violent crime that resulted should have provided all the data necessary to ensure we never made the same mistake again. Unfortunately because hard drugs were never socially acceptable as a pastime, governments seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking they would not result in the same outcomes. At this point though, how can you support the war on drugs? It's been nearly 50 years, consumed trillions of dollars and resulted in no real drop in drug usage. The only thing that causes particular types of drug use to drop, is when fashion or new substances mean people move from one drug to another in large numbers or you see natural fluctuations in overall drug use due to economic conditions.

We can put a hurting on the drug cartel. That's a good thing to do. Will it have it's costs? Sure. Drugs aren't going to be legalized though. We can debate whether they should be and maybe someday they will be. But the question right now is whether or not we should pressure Mexico to step up the war and take it to the next level, not whether or not drugs should be legalized.

Drugs aren't dependent on the cartels, they just industrialized the process and scale of imports. The issue isn't that there's a group of criminals trying to sell drugs, the issue is the hundreds of millions of people who want drugs in their lives to enjoy life more. You could completely seal off south america, and all you'd see is a huge rise in home and domestic growing of marijuana, a ton of new labs springing up manufacturing meth and synthetics like ecstasy, and a rise in imports from other countries.

People in general have pretty ****ty lives, and wanting to artificially alter consciousness to provide temporary highs is the result of that. When you have countless millions of people working hard, dirty, crappy paid jobs with no hope of a better future, lecturing them on how drugs are bad when they provide the one highlight to their miserable lives is about as likely to work as prohibition was, and for the exact same reasons.

The best thing government could do is research and manufacture safe non-addictive narcotics like ecstasy and just make them available everywhere. As we know though, it'll never happen because a lot of people would rather continue to bang their heads against a wall rather than look for an actual working solution.