What happened before, during and after Prohibition?
Libertarians are just cute and fuzzy anarchists. They don’t have the foresight to realize their form of liberty will only liberate themselves from this mortal coil, because they have no one’s back and no one has theirs. Easily picked off.
human catastrophe is what we have now. Have you been shot at yet over this stupid war? I am living proof you don't need to have anything to do with the drugs to get shot at in this war.
Personally I am at the point if drug addicts want to kill themselves let them.
Agreed re: heroine. Selling that one should be the death penalty. Period.
My longest friend - who I lost for 7 years to drugs before he got clean - agrees.
Pot, though? Legalize it. No worse or less common than beer.
Heroine? Crack? Meth? Sell it, die. Again, period. These drugs don’t just hurt the person who uses them. They create pain and death to all around them.
Why not look at Portugal since 2001?
"...in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.
"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."
Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.
The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, 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."
But, by all means, keep up the slaughter here and in Mexico, the gang bangers here and there love you for your irrational prohibitionist stance. It gives them enormous profits. The police here love it too, civil forfeiture lets them rake in the dough for more toys as they trample the Bill of Rights.
“Rather than talking about legalization, we should be talking about making the penalties for selling drugs like heroin even more daunting.”
I don’t see how that would work. Drug dealers prefer it when fewer people get into the business, they fight wars to establish monopolies. If we dissuade a few people from getting into the business, then those who remain just consolidate more profits and power unto themselves. As long as there’s a demand, it won’t matter what penalties we assign, since the profits are too astronomically high for some risk takers not to decide to get into the business.
Unless you can somehow eliminate the demand for drugs, you’ll never cure the disease, you’ll only attack the symptoms, and probably quite ineffectually.
Poisons of many kinds are available at the retail level to anyone who wants to buy them.
Beat me to it.