You tried to access the address http://www.seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2002661006_sunstamper04.html, which is currently unavailable. Please make sure that the Web address (URL) is correctly spelled and punctuated, then try reloading the page.
legalize all drugs but ALSO close EVERY treatment center. If we are going the way of social darwinism, we need to do it right.
This should be fun to watch
Personally, I would decriminalize pot and hashish but certainly not methamphetamine.
Let Those Dopers Be
A former police chief wants to end a losing war by legalizing pot, coke, meth and other drugs
Norm Stamper | LA Times | 10/16/2005
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-legalize16oct16,0,4914395.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
Cops don't want to enforce nanny state laws... they want to protect the people they serve. The prime beneficiaries of the illegal status of drugs are smugglers and pharmaceutical companies, not the people that most cops sign up to serve. I have had cops in NYC tell me the same thing - their time is far better spent chasing rapists and murderers than junkies and college kids.
Could some informed individual show me the place in the Constitution where government is given the right to regulate recreational drugs?
While I prefer other forms of recreation, as I remember, the Founders were very sure that they had created a form of government which allowed for the fullest possible freedom for "Life", Liberty", and "the Pursuit of Happiness".
My cognitive dissonance alarm is ringing - Help, please.
Legalize them and tax them, worked just fine for alcohol....
legalize 'em all - just make penalties for misbehavior and mistakes while intoxicated rather dire and inescapable, and end all government funding and insurance liability for users (and I mean this for alcohol as well)
then... let fools perish and the cautious live as they will.
How about if we legalize them all......just in Seattle.
IDIOTIC AND IGNORANT
ALSO, UNWORTHY OF FREEREPUBLIC
Take the majority of the profit out of it and it will diminish to a minor problem. It will never disappear.
Crack kills.
The narcotics should be provided by the government, however you lose your right to vote.
Now he seems to be wearing the Peter Pan libertarian hat and wants every conceivable drug to be available to all while admitting that he has no way of predicting how high incidence of drug abuse will climb after legalization. Back when Roe v. Wade was handed down, proponents of legalized abortion maintained that legalization of abortion would increase its incidence minimally if at all. How wrong they were.
Stamper also advocates stepped up treatment, education and other publically funded programs for those who abuse drugs after legalization. Again, since he has no idea how many will be tempted into a drugged lifestyle following legalization, he has no idea how much this will all cost. He therefore has no idea whether we will realize the savings in tax dollars and police time that he claims legalization will provide. With or without legalization, abusers who get in trouble with the law will still have to be arrested and still have to be "educated," "treated" and supervised in these new, expanded social programs he wants us to finance.
Fortunately, we're not going to have to find out what Stamper's scheme will cost us, because the first federal legislator to sponsor a legalization bill that has any chance of passing will be assassinated by the drug lords.
Note: 'You' is used generically directed toward those that support violating persons unalienable rights.
If a person thinks they have been harmed by another person's act of possessing or using a drug or smoking then the person should take the drug possessor or smoker to court and convince an impartial jury. That way the "victim" may gain restitution for his or her pain and suffering.
You've never done that because you know that even if the judge didn't refuse the case as frivolous it would be highly improbable that you'd ever convince an impartial jury that the mere act of a person possessing drugs or smoking in "public" caused you harm.
Instead, you'll argue that drug possession and or use or smoking in "public" causes harm to society -- causes harm to the group. You'll take a communitarian stand. Of course, you'll have to turn a blind eye to reality. That is, for a group of people to exist there is a prerequisite that first the individual must exist.
Each time an individual is sacrificed -- in whole or in part -- the group suffers a loss. Protect the rights of the smallest minority -- the lone individual -- and the rights of all minorities and the majority are protected.
The federal government creates each year, on average, 3,000 new laws and regulations. Each one of those laws has people that support it and will argue why the new law is necessary. Proclaiming that without those new laws people and society will run headlong into destruction.
In reality virtually every person breaks one or more laws several times a year. Yet with every person violating the law people and society have not moved toward self-destruction. Instead, individuals and society have increasingly prospered.
Over the past several years and decades people and society increasingly prospered despite not having the supposed benefits of future laws yet to come. Today, people and society increasingly prosper despite not having the supposed benefits of next year's new laws or, new laws to come five, ten or fifteen years in the future.
Ninety-eight percent of the people do not knowingly initiate force, threat of force or fraud against any person or their property. They do not violate any person's unalienable rights. Though, through widespread ignorance most people negligently support government initiation of force/harm against persons and their property. See War of Two Worlds below.
Setting aside for the moment that government officials in all three branches of government violate laws, if it were possible to apprehend all lawbreakers next week, society would run headlong into destruction. It would come to a screeching halt.
As it is, a very small fraction of lawbreakers are ever apprehended for the laws they violate. The few that are apprehended and punished cause a drain on their lives, families and society. Meanwhile everybody else that violates the same laws, while semi free, also pay the price of having their brothers and sisters sacrificed for the greater good of society.
Parasitical elites in government know they can't apprehend but a tiny percentage of people that break the law. They know that everybody breaks the law and that people and society increasingly prosper despite massive lawlessness. But it's only massive lawlessness in regards to violating political agenda laws -- collective, groupthink laws -- unjust laws.
That 98% of people do not initiate force/harm against anyone, thereby people en mass demonstrate the validity of just laws against murder, rape, assault, kidnapping, theft and other acts of initiation of force
Who are winners? Who are the losers?
The beneficiaries are the politicians, bureaucrats and their automatons. They're parasites leeching off The People, the hosts. Value destroyers draining value producers.
In reality, the value producers are the winners. For they live by their own productive efforts whereas parasitical elites usurp unearned livelihoods off the efforts of value producers.
It really is a war, to the death, between two groups of people: 64
War of Two Worlds
Value Producers
vs.
Value Destroyers
Wow a cop who gets it. You need the carrot and the stick if you want to get someone to submit to your morality willingly.