7 ms·

"...the impossibility of winning the “war” against theft, burglary, robbery, and fraud has never been used as an argument that these categories of crime should

• Nursie 12y ago
  Well given these are crimes against another person, rather than 'crimes' against oneself, that argument is a load of bollocks!
  • mibbitirc 12y ago
    Drug usage goes hand in hand with theft. Once you're addicted to drugs, you have to steal to pay for that habit. It's hardly a victimless crime.
    • tmp-20150107 12y ago
      > Once you're addicted to drugs, you have to steal to pay for that habit. Not at all. Of course, you could just get a job that pays enough to support your habit? Software Engineering works for me, for example, and has allowed me to maintain a twenty year heroin habit, almost.
      • girvo 12y ago
        I did the same for six years, though I'm clean now. The people I used to run with were all well paid, too, though that's more a function of how expensive heroin is in Australia.
    • girvo 12y ago
      What do you base that on? Because I think you'd be very surprised to see the number of people who take drugs, and the fact that most of them do not resort to theft for their habit.
    • Nursie 12y ago
      I started writing a sensible reply to this and couldn't It's outrageous. 'Drug use goes hand in hand with theft' Do you know how ignorant that sounds? Caffeine and alcohol are drugs, do they go hand in hand with theft? Is everyone legally smoking weed in Colorado a thief too? 'Once you're addicted to drugs, you have to steal to pay for that habit.' Not all drugs are addictive. Most are less addictive than alcohol, nearly all are less addictive than tobacco. The vast majority of drug users are not addicts. In any sensible country those people who do get addicted would receive help and maintenance doses of their drug and wouldn't need to turn to crime. See Switzerland and their heroin programs. 'It's hardly a victimless crime.' It's exactly a victimless crime. If someone steals stuff to support a habit THAT is the crime with the victim. Not drug use. FFS.
      • aquadrop 12y ago
        Reality steps in and it's bad. In Russia drug addicts were (and still are, to lesser extent) responsible for very large if not largest portion of crime, especially burglary and theft. It is a major problem, it is there and you can't go around it. And usage isn't punishable here, only distribution. So, don't dismiss parent comment so easily. 'Caffeine and alcohol are drugs' - yes, alcohol comes hand in hand with theft and other crimes. 'It's exactly a victimless crime' - it's victimless short term, but if it's hard drugs addict, there will be victims sooner or later. They will do nasty things just to get next dose. And I support claim that war on drugs is wrong, and you can't win it (for economical reasons). But usage should be controllable.
        • Zak 12y ago
          In Russia drug addicts were (and still are, to lesser extent) responsible for very large if not largest portion of crime, especially burglary and theft. <snip> And usage isn't punishable here, only distribution. So, don't dismiss parent comment so easily. This would likely not be the case if cocaine cost about the same, or even ten times as much as sugar. The high price of drugs is a direct result of laws against their production and distribution. I expect addicts stealing to support their habits would be much less of an issue with legal drugs, even if there were moderately high taxes on them to offset the costs of treating addicts.
    • forgotpasswd3x 12y ago
      > Once you're addicted to drugs, you have to steal to pay for that habit. You most certainly don't.
    • ValleyOfTheMtns 12y ago
      Uh... no. Taking drugs is a victimless crime. Stealing isn't. One doesn't necessarily lead to the other.
    • emiliobumachar 12y ago
      >Once you're addicted to drugs, you have to steal to pay for that habit. How much does generic-brand sugar cost? A dollar per kilo? Two? Cocaine should cost about that, definitely less than ten times that, if it was manufactured at scale by corporations in a competitive market, and one didn't need to compensate everyone in the distribution network for the risk of being arrested or killed. Your stereotypical addict on the streets should be able to get as much as they "need" from panhandling for an hour a week. A tragedy, but a contained one. Instead, they need twenty bucks for the next dose, precisely because of the war on drugs. Think about that.
    • tomjen3 12y ago
      In a free market cocain and heroin should cost about the same as OTC generic drugs. That means your 1000 usd/day heroin habit is now a lot less than a coffee run to starbucks.
      • tmp-20150107 12y ago
        Looking at the official NHS pricelist for May 2015, 100 10mg Diamorphine (Heroin) tablets cost GBP 24.09 which is a lot cheaper than street prices... I'm guessing a GBP 80 (1/16 oz) per day habit could drop to around GBP 10-15 (not really sure about purity, but assuming adulterated to 10% would mean 0.1g street Heroin is equivalent to one of these pills, so that would be the equivalent of 10g or over 1/4 oz which would be GBP 160 probably)
        • tomjen3 12y ago
          Account for mass production and that should drop quite a lot.
        • Nursie 12y ago
          There is widely considered to be a shortage of opiates for medical services around the world, and this is in part due to the very, very strict controls on growth and distribution of the product. This is in part why the cost is as high as you say there. We seem to be getting a lot of stuff wrong in this area....
  • Lawtonfogle 12y ago
    Where do we draw the line? Say you buy a drug that comes from a cartel that uses kidnapping, rape, and murder to hold their power. It is possible for the drug to have been produced safely, but it wasn't in this case and you are feeding the market. Is the government preventing the drug from being created relevant? What happens if, given a safe production option, those purchasing it do not do their due diligence in checking the source. Are they still not creating a market where the object produced with harm is to be sold, further promoting the harm? Consider a alternate example. Say you downloaded a few megabytes of data. In this case, the bytes were produced by actions involving a child being abused, but it would've been possible to produce them with a photorealistic CGI application.
    • Nursie 12y ago
      >> Where do we draw the line? Always a tough question :) >> Say you buy a drug that comes from a cartel that uses kidnapping, rape, and murder to hold their power. It is possible for the drug to have been produced safely, but it wasn't in this case and you are feeding the market. There are indeed lots of moral questions here. As someone who tends to buy things that are free-range, organic, fair trade etc. I fully agree that one cannot divorce the action of purchase from the background process. This is one (of many) reasons I'm not going to be buying any cocaine or heroin any time soon. The argument put forward above is that stopping the war on drugs just because we can't win is equivalent to stopping the 'war' on (for example) burglary. Burglary by its very nature, in the commission of the act itself, creates victims. People whose house was broken into and whose stuff is gone. Drug taking does not create these victims in the act of taking drugs itself. So I would argue that yes, the government preventing the drug from being created and sold openly is very relevant - it is the government regulations that support the extremely lucrative black market as well as the consumers. The cartels, the violence, they could not exist without our laws propping them up. This is where the comparison with Burglary really breaks down - legalising burglary leads to a world where there is no deterrent to breaking in to someone's house and taking their stuff. A worse world, I hope you'll agree. Legalising cocaine, for example, would make most of those horrible side-effects go away at the expense of (probably) increased drug-related healthcare costs in the developed world. I think that's a better place to be. >> What happens if, given a safe production option, those purchasing it do not do their due diligence in checking the source. What happens with, say, coffee? Some people choose ethical brands. One hopes that there are minimum standards of human rights applied to workers on any product coming in to the country (no slave labour, no blood-diamonds...), and AFAICT there are no coffee cartels using kidnap, rape or murder to protect their hold on the coffee market.
• InclinedPlane 12y ago
  Prosecuting theft and jailing thieves leads to a safer society with a lower incidence of theft. There is no indication that drug prohibition causes a significant reduction in use, and many indications that it leads to a society that is far less safe.
• oska 12y ago
  It has often been pointed out that taking prohibited drugs is a victimless crime. Your examples of theft, burglary, robbery and fraud are not.
  • kefka 12y ago
    And many of our jobs are in automation research and implementation. Our work puts dozens, if not thousands of people out of work. When driverless vehicles are finalized, that work will put millions of people out of a job. Is it a crime? No. But it sure very negatively impacts people. Why not illegalize implementation of automation?
    • yavi 12y ago
      I think you're drawing a false parallel, and I hope you're not serious. An action which has a victim is not necessarily a crime, and an action which is deemed a crime does not necessarily have a victim. Note that this is a practical distinction, not an ideological one. In a pure ideological social-contract style system one could argue that the basic definition of a crime should be an action which infringes on the rights that we as a society agree to possess. On a very basic level, illegalizing things because they 'negatively impact people' would bring capitalism to a grinding halt.
  • _yosefk 12y ago
    Speeding is also a victimless crime until an accident happens. I don't have a strong opinion about this, I'm just saying it's more complicated than victimless crime, war that cannot be won, etc. For each such talking point there's a counter-point. What will actually happen once you legalize a given substance I don't know. The article I linked to has a lot of arguments against legalization, which, judging by the comments, the commenters didn't bother to skim through.
    • Nursie 12y ago
      >>The article I linked to has a lot of arguments against legalization, which, judging by the comments, the commenters didn't bother to skim through. It's a long article, and it contains ungrounded assertions like this - "Addiction to, or regular use of, most currently prohibited drugs cannot affect only the person who takes them—and not his spouse, children, neighbors, or employers." This is ... well it's just wrong. Many people regularly use alcohol in moderation, there's no reason to think that regular, moderate use of cannabis and various other currently illegal drugs would be any worse when alcohol has one of the worst harm and addiction profiles of any drug. So I'm not convinced I want to take the time to answer it, as it's not really honest. --edit-- I've read more of it now, it's full of preconceptions and assertions like this one, no grounding in facts. It's not a good set of objections.
• ukigumo 12y ago
  But theft, burglary and robbery are all crimes against property while drug consumption is about personal health, be it alcohol or tobacco or un-taxed drugs.
• MichaelGG 12y ago
  Why'd they give up on the war against homosexuality, then, too? Or the war on mixed race marriages? Or universal suffrage?