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Stemming the flow of money to brutal drug lords is reason #1 to rethink the current drug policies. Glad to see that point spelled out so clearly. What's going

• paul 16y ago
  I don't know what the answer is for all drugs, but Marijuana should obviously be legal, so that's a good place to start. If we wait for the perfect answer to all questions, we'll never fix anything.
  • jbail 16y ago
    Well said. Thanks for standing up on a tough issue.
  • credo 16y ago
    jbail was referring to my comment which was posted a few minutes earlier than his. However, my question was a bit more pointed and I think you haven't addressed it. The justifications used in your post are equally applicable to cocaine and to other drugs. If different drugs have different answers, why didn't you (or why don't you) explain why your argument is limited to marijuana. OTH if you strongly believe in the philosophy outlined in your post, what is stopping you from endorsing similar initiatives for cocaine and why would cocaine potentially need a different answer ? [edit] I see a lot of good responses, but all of them special-case marijuana (e.g. marijuana is less addictive than heroin). This is fine, but Paul's post has flowery language about freedom and all of that language is applicable to heroin as well. Paul's post doesn't make the case for special-casing marijuana. On the contrary, if he denied the principles of "freedom" for cocaine, it would undermine his post which is all about "freedom" and nothing about marijuana being less dangerous than cocaine etc.
    • aero142 16y ago
      There is a trade off in this sort of policy. Prohibition leads to organized crime and violence in the black market. It also leads users into a world surrounded by crime and illegality and makes it harder to deal with addiction. On the other hand, legalization can make drugs more available and possibly enable more users. Hard drugs like meth and herion are extremely addictive and damaging. Many people never recover once addicted and seldom lead normal lives. Marijuana on the other hand does not share these traits to the same extreme. I think the tradeoff for marijuana is clearly on the legalization side. As for other hard drugs, the tradeoff is less clear whether society would be better off.
    • srbloom 16y ago
      I can't answer for the grandparent, but I would imagine it has to do with how he evaluates the dangerousness of these drugs relative to the consequences of their illegality.
    • VladRussian 16y ago
      >The justifications used in your post are equally applicable to cocaine and to other drugs. Cocaine was legal before it became illegal. What results il-legalization of cocaine have produced? More crime and more funding for crime organizations - check. What else? Look at the history of opium as well. And don't even start about LSD - the drug my reading about have discovered it having only positive benefits so far.
      • rick888 16y ago
        "Look at the history of opium as well." You mean the fact that it was legal in China about 500 years ago and it nearly created an entire country of addicts? Vicodin (another form of heroin) is legal, yet there is still a black market for it. I would also be interested to see "your reading" where LSD only had "positive benefits".
        • matwood 16y ago
          Vicodin (another form of heroin) is legal If you're using Vicodins legal status (requires prescription) as a comparison then pot and cocaine are already legal.
  • uuilly 16y ago
    The worst side effect of the drug trade is that it funds a worldwide network of highly capable smugglers. To them drugs are just an arbitrary material to be moved from point A to point B. Drug networks move terrorists, weapons, nuclear material, slaves and child prostitutes just as easily as they move bags of powder. But drugs are the smugglers' bread and butter. The other more harmful things are just the salt. But demand for the more harmful cargo is not sufficient enough to fund such a large and competent industry. I worked in the MIL/INTEL world for a long time and a staggering number of really nasty things turned up amongst bags of powder all over the world. Drug networks are like VPN for physical objects. And drug producers would happily abandon that protocol for FEDEX if they could. The remaining market for moving things we truly cannot live with would be reduced by many orders of magnitude if we gave up on the drug war.
    • xelipe 16y ago
      I like how everybody is an expert on the drug trade because we've all seen a 60 Minutes piece on violence in Mexico. Violence in Mexico is not a new trend and neither is the hysteria of violence spilling over. The fear of violence spilling in to the United States from Mexico was prominent one other time, during the Mexican Revolution. The current thread of drug related violence in Mexico is often attributed to the presidency of Felipe Calderon but it can actually be traced back to at least 25 years as it is evident in the culture of the narco that is prevalent there. We can shut down the drug cartels in Mexico, like we did in Columbia, but the drug trade will be next be passed to another country like a baton. The next country to be promoted as a drug state will be Afghanistan with it's fields of poppies fulling the growing heroin demand. I'm all for Proposition 19, but legalizing marijuana will not stop drug cartels just like legalizing prostitution does not stop the flow on human traffic.
      • uuilly 16y ago
        I was talking about Afghanistan, opium and RPG's. I was also speaking from personal experience not from TV experience.
        • 16y ago
  • sigzero 16y ago
    I always wonder what "legal" means in this case. I agree it should definitely be medically legal. I do not agree that it should be generally legal.
• kristofferR 16y ago
  This is a tough question. We all agree that marijuana should be legalized and sold in a regulated way, but what about the other, way more dangerous drugs? This may surprise you, even shock you, but heroin is actually legalized, and given out by the government, in a lot of European countries. Addicts visit a special office and get their daily fix administered by trained professionals. I think this is the way to do it for heroin. Heroin in itself is actually not as insanely dangerous as portrayed. Sure, it's a really really bad drug, but just like morphine, it can be administered safely. The most dangerous thing about heroin is actually not the heroin itself, but the contaminants and unclean administration. The high price of heroin creates a lot of crime, in places where it's not legalized the addicts either have to steal, prostitute or push drugs to afford their own usage. Stats have shown that legalizing and incredibly strictly regulating it reduces addiction, crime and recruitment of new users. Nobody sane wants to try heroin, almost all the recruitment are done by the addicts themselves pushing it to other unfortunate people. When they don't have to spend their days working on getting enough money to buy their next fix they actually can have normal jobs and working on escaping their addiction. I don't know how to handle other dangerous drugs such as cocain, meth, amphetamines and lsd. Mushrooms and MDMA should be legalized, but way stricter than marijuana.
  • carbocation 16y ago
    In parts of the US, we give out clean needles to addicts. We treat heroin addiction with opiates. This is very important. However, I think that many people these days underestimate how harmful heroin is per se. I'd really rather deal with the marijuana issue as separate from the heroin issue.
    • anthonyb 16y ago
      A lot of the danger with heroin stems from it being illegal. There's no steady supply, and no way to tell how strong it is. Many of the heroin deaths are from addicts going cold turkey for a while, and/or getting something much stronger than they're used to, and overdosing.
      • 16y ago
• itistoday 16y ago
  > Marijuana is clearly a big piece of the puzzle, but what about legalizing harder drugs like cocaine? All drugs should be legalized and regulated. Especially cocaine. You will not have peace on this Earth until that happens. The drug cartels will simply move onto the next forbidden fruit. Prohibition is, as Paul and many others point out, an assault on basic human rights and freedoms, and it carries with it a tax on society. Not just in terms of dollars wasted but in lives ruined. Education + Legalization. Erowid and scientific fact in every classroom instead of propaganda and lies. This is not exactly a difficult concept to grasp, and various parts of the world (like Portugal, Holland, etc.) are finally waking up to it, and their quality of life is improving because of it. Unfortunately, years of lies, fear-mongering, brainwashing and propaganda can be hard to erase.
  • lukifer 16y ago
    If you've seen firsthand what a drug like meth does to a person, it makes you think twice about the ideal that everyone has the right to put whatever they want into their body/mind. The fact is, not everyone has the good judgment to make responsible use of that freedom, and some drugs really are much nastier than others, causing deep harm to both the user and society. At the same time, we would be deluding ourselves to think that locking people up changes anything, whether we go after the supply or the demand. The best way to move towards a sensible drug policy is to start by admitting that there are no good solutions, and that the best we can hope to do is to minimize harm, both from the drugs themselves, and the cartels. (I agree, though, regarding drug education: Erowid has the capability to save far more lives than DARE ever could.)
    • mortenjorck 16y ago
      The key is to address it as a problem for mental health professionals rather than a problem for the criminal justice system.
    • itistoday 16y ago
      > If you've seen firsthand what a drug like meth does to a person, it makes you think twice about the ideal that everyone has the right to put whatever they want into their body/mind. The fact is, not everyone has the good judgment to make responsible use of that freedom, and some drugs really are much nastier than others, causing deep harm to both the user and society. I have, and not just for meth, but for heroin, and alcohol, and nicotine, and caffeine, and all sorts of other drugs. Have you seen first hand what it looks like when somebody takes a women and fucks her in front of her husband, then tortures her, and finally cuts her head off? What about a man being thrown alive into an acid bath? No? Would you like to see that? Can you imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes? Just head South of the border. Ask for the Zetas. Ask for the families of people who have been kidnapped and turned into slaves. This is the _reality_ of drug prohibition. Entire neighborhoods living in constant fear. Methamphetamine can cause some damage to the human body when abused. So can water. The difference between a hit of meth in your hand and a punk standing over your head with a rifle pointed at your temple should be obvious. The difference between a hit of meth in your pipe and the unrelenting human suffering that goes on in America's overflowing prisons should be obvious. It is the difference between personal choice and the consequences thereof, versus violence imposed upon you by another, completely out of your control. It is the difference between freedom and prohibition. I could kill myself by overdosing on a number of substances right at this moment, but I don't. It's because I know better, not because there's a law against it. It is far easier, cheaper and more humane to educate a population and provide them with the healthcare and counseling that they need than it is to deal with the horrors that are going on around you today due to prohibition. Compassion and understanding and freedom will lead to a better world. Prisons and prohibition perpetuate suffering.
• kqr2 16y ago
  In 2001, Portugal decriminalized drugs. Data since then seems to indicate that the policy was successful. rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.ht... http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/03/14/portugal/index.html http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/03/14...
  • slowpoison 16y ago
    Anybody comment on what the situation is in Amsterdam, where pot is legal, at least, in small quantities?
    • deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    • ugh 16y ago
      … as I understand it there are two main problems with the status quo. One is that under the old tolerance regime there’s still no way for a coffee shop to legally obtain the supply of marijuana you need to operate on the scale of a business. Consequently, de facto legalization hasn’t actually eliminated the black market and associated criminality. Secondarily, the main market for the coffee shops turns out to be drug tourists from abroad. That reduces the Dutch political constituency for keeping them open. And the two factors interact together to create a situation where there’s a strong case to be made that legal coffee shops (by bringing drug tourists from the UK and the US into shops that need to tap an illegal wholesale market to gain their supplies) increase the scale of organized crime in the Netherlands. – http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/10/coffee-shop-crackdown/ http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/10/coffee-shop-crackd...
• naveensundar 16y ago
  Marijuana is not a big piece of the puzzle. Research from RAND indicates otherwise Key findings include: 1) Mexican DTOs' gross revenues from illegally exporting marijuana to wholesalers in the United States is likely less than $2 billion; 2) The claim that 60 percent of Mexican DTO gross drug export revenues come from marijuana should not be taken seriously; 3) If legalization only affects revenues from supplying marijuana to California, DTO drug export revenue losses would be very small, perhaps 2–4 percent; 4) The only way legalizing marijuana in California would significantly influence DTO revenues and the related violence is if California-produced marijuana is smuggled to other states at prices that outcompete current Mexican supplies. The extent of such smuggling will depend on a number of factors, including the response of the U.S. federal government. 5) If marijuana is smuggled from California to other states, it could undercut sales of Mexican marijuana in much of the U.S., cutting DTOs' marijuana export revenues by more than 65 percent and probably by 85 percent or more. In this scenario, the DTOs would lose approximately 20% of their total drug export revenues. http://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/OP325/ http://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/OP325/
  • Empact 16y ago
    If you take the secondary effects of California legalization seriously - e.g. of policy changes in other sympathetic states, then it's a 20%+ cut in drug cartel revenue. How is that not a big piece of the puzzle? And say it's just the 4% cut from California. Do those incremental hundreds of millions of dollars not count as major?
  • srbloom 16y ago
    There is also the chance that legalization in California leads to legalization everywhere.
    • rsheridan6 16y ago
      And a chance that legalization of marijuana leads to legalization of other substances.
  • barrkel 16y ago
    Note the structural bias: RAND provides research focused on national security; they have a direct financial incentive for justifying the size of the security apparatus of the state.
• zeraholladay 16y ago
  I'm in no way implying you're making the slippery slope argument, but it seems to me there's a common fear-based subtext to this question in the America media. So, I'm going to try to address what I see as the slippery slope subtext. I don't think there's a slippery sloper from marijuana to cocaine, especially if marijuana is legalized. The slippery slope argument is like arguing there's a slippery slope from beer to cocaine -- addictive personalities aren't that simple. Further, any evidence implying a slippery slope from marijuana to harder drugs becomes less relevant after legalization, since marijuana users will then have fewer interactions with criminals and less exposure to harder drugs.
• sown 16y ago
  http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/10/oregon-county-decriminalizes-heroin-meth-cocaine-shoplifting/ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/10/oregon-county-decriminali...
• hristov 16y ago
  If you want to stem the money to the brutal drug lords, the first thing you should do is stop using drugs. It is very doubtful that the drug lords will just disappear with legalization.
  • rsheridan6 16y ago
    They would not be able to compete with regular businesses if the price weren't artificially high due to prohibition. We stopped seeing gangsters like Al Capone in the liquor business when Prohibition ended.
    • rick888 16y ago
      "They would not be able to compete with regular businesses if the price weren't artificially high due to prohibition. We stopped seeing gangsters like Al Capone in the liquor business when Prohibition ended." If we make all drugs legal and they start resorting to other illegal activities like kidnapping/ransom, can we make them illegal again?
      • emmett 16y ago
        Kidnapping and ransom are not fabulously profitable the way that the drug monopoly is. The drug trade is one of the world's largest import/export markets.
        • rick888 16y ago
          Tell that to the gangs in Mexico and the Philippines. I have a feeling that if drugs were legalized, and these did increase, proponents would blame it on something else.
• abc890 16y ago
  Actually, what's even more heartbreaking is people still continuing to use illicit drugs from countries like Mexico when thousands of Mexicans are dying to get them those drugs. Maybe they should wait on buying those drugs until they become legalized to stop the brutal killings of Mexicans. "what about legalizing harder drugs like cocaine" I'm guessing you've never lived with anyone who's been addicted to drugs.
• Symmetry 16y ago
  I'm personally sort of scared that Mexico will just give up on the drug war, and the US will retaliate by making cross-border trade really difficult, totally screwing over both economies.