LE uses that technique, but the bigger fish are so well insulated from processors, packagers, street dealers and users it goes nowhere. Profits are so enormous there are 20, 50 people standing in line to replace anyone in the business who is arrested.

How about we make USE of drugs a misdemeanor, but DEALING drugs a capital offense?

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"It's a good feeling to shoot a bad guy. Something you democrats would never understand. Americans are homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys!"

----Denny Crane

No dealer legitimacy equals no regulation with subsequent tax revenue nor reduction of ridiculous LE enforcement and incarceration costs. The logical viewpoint of drugs is the structure of the alcoholic beverage industry. In this instance misguided legislated morality has displaced logic.

I wholeheartedly disagree. Even today, illegal drugs are not as commonplace as alcohol has been for centuries. The reason prohibition failed was that it was an effort to criminalize that which was already deeply and WIDELY entrenched in our culture. That is simply not the case for most illegal drugs.

Arguing that our public policy has not been as effective as it COULD be in reducing the drug problem in this country is NOT the same as saying it cannot be effective at all.

Consider the arguments against it. That there are alot of people in prison for it. Well if we had a surge in rapes, and it resulted in 2% of the population in jail for rape, would that indicate something fundamentally wrong with our rape laws?

What about the tax code? If we prosecuted everyone who cheated on their taxes, there would probably be more people in prison for that than drug use. Does that argue for the legalization of tax fraud?

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"It's a good feeling to shoot a bad guy. Something you democrats would never understand. Americans are homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys!"

----Denny Crane

You're still viewing it as a morality issue, dismissing any reasonable discussion.

No, YOU are viewing it totally as a morality issue, making the patently FALSE assumption that there are no reasonable arguments in FAVOR of criminalization and that therefore anyone who opposes legalization are simply going on it as a moral issue.

Well first of all, only someone utterly devoid of morality can REASONABLY argue that morality cannot be a "reasonable" basis for public policy. Why don't we just reinstitute slavery? What are the objections other than moral?

Are you opposed to laws criminalizing beastiality? Consensual adult incest?

__________________
"It's a good feeling to shoot a bad guy. Something you democrats would never understand. Americans are homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys!"

----Denny Crane

Slavery is not a valid comparison to drug usage.

Neither bestiality or consensual adult incest have the widespread societal practice of drug usage nor do they consume the enormous amount of public resources required to maintain drug usage as an illegal act. Both would be described as minimal occurrences, one consensual and a hopelessly outdated blue law, the other requiring an act of force. Poor comparisons with self-administered drug usage for discussion purposes.

Until one accepts drug usage as a commodity utilized by a large portion of society at all levels and treats it as such by removing legislative moral judgment any discussion of legality becomes circular.

Why not, what makes drug policy a matter of "morality" but not slavery?

But that is not what you were arguing, you were dismissing drug laws on the grounds that they are MORALLY based. So to with beastiality and adult incest.

But one can make a perfectly REASONABLE, NON-Moralaity based argument against drug legalization BECAUSE of the impact on society of the large portion of society that use them.

What you have NOT established is that the segment of our society that uses them is SO large that it is not POSSIBLE to have reasonably effective anti-drug laws.

I would submit that we could dramatically reduce the drug trade (and therefore usage), while at the same time minimizing enforcement costs by making USAGE a misdemeanor and having much stiffer penalties against TRAFFICING.

But your "morality" argument is actually rather disingenuous, because by your own arguments above you do NOT consider whether a law's basis is "moral" rather than practical (for lack of a better word) that they are illegitimate and indefensible in a 'reasoned' manner, since you yourself have to resort to facts of a PRACTICAL nature to distinguish between those "morality" laws that you do or don't support. Furthermore, if you were honest with yourself, I think you would find that it wasn't "legislated morality" you have a problem with, but rather "legislated morality" that does not reflect YOUR moral values.

Why should slavery be illegal? I would say because it is morally wrong, what is your response (can you come up with one that is absent any subjective moral judgements?)

__________________
"It's a good feeling to shoot a bad guy. Something you democrats would never understand. Americans are homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys!"

----Denny Crane

In order to effectively stop drug use, one would theoretically have to eliminate the demand. Your proposal would attempt to eliminate supply, but wouldn't address demand. The demand would create supply one way or another. My guess is that if you implemented the policy you propose, we might see some fall in the use of drugs such as marijuana/cocaine/herion, but we would see a sharp increase in their legal, perscribed counterparts (valium/oxycontin/adderall, etc). Additionally, you would still have people willing to assume the risks of selling them, since doing so would become more profitable as some dealers dropped out. A third effect that I think you'd see is human ingenuity in making existing drugs less detectable, more potent, and newer - getting more "bang" for the buck, since the penalties were stiffer. This is exactly how drug prohibition brought us crack and crystal meth. If you're going down for a long time selling it, it pays to make your supply "go further" by selling drugs that are more addictive, and require less of the illegal ingredient augmented by cheap, harmful substitutes.

Trying to stop people from getting intoxicated is pissing into the wind. Even if you somehow vaporized all cocaine/heroin/meth from the planet, they'd just be replaced by the narcotics we give children to ease their pain and force them to "pay attention" in class.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

That's an easy one. In the context of rights, slavery violates the rights of an individual, and using/abusing drugs violates no one's rights.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

Not quite so easy, aren't the concept of "rights" themselves morally based? You COULD argue that on the one hand drug use doesn't harm anybody but the person using them...although that isn't the case in a society which has largely accepted that the costs of individuals foolish and self-harmful choices will be born by the society at large; whereas slavery harms another. But absent a MORAL belief that denying someone their freedom is wrong, what is the practical basis for opposing it. In fact, one could make a very strong PRACTICAL case in FAVOR of allowing it if we leave the fact that it is MORALLY wrong out of the equation.

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"It's a good feeling to shoot a bad guy. Something you democrats would never understand. Americans are homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys!"

----Denny Crane

I'm not addressing any morality of the situation (I see now that I came into the middle of a conversation with context that I didn't read at first).

The first part of what you say here is an excellent argument for gun control Foolish individuals harm society, therefore freedoms must be restricted.

As to the rest of it, I'm leaving morality out of the equation, since individual morality is just that - individual morality. I don't consider drug use to be immoral, but I consider enslaving someone to be immoral. However, I don't view my personal take on morality as a substantive basis for legislation. But, I think that you can make a logical distinction. A certain (libertarian) paradigm for running a nation might be to declare a set of rights, and set up laws to protect those rights. Thus anyone violating the rights of another would be punished accordingly, but any activities that violated no one's rights would be permitted (or at least not prosecuted). This doesn't touch morality - it's just a heuristic for administering laws.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

But I could counter that while DRUG usage is inherently harmful, gun OWNERSHIP is not. Anyone who has ever used a gun to DEFEND themselves (and there are many) can attest to that.

Well, two points. The "public" doesn't have moral views, what is often referred to as "society's" moral views is simply the reflection of the moral sentiments of the majority of INDIVIDUALS, so in that sense it is ONLY the overall collected morality of individuals which forms the basis for public policy.

Even in the libertarian argument, you cannot escape the fact that any particular "right" deemed by the majority of society worthy of protection by law is based on the moral sentiments of the majority of individuals.

Fortunately our nation's concepts of rights are NOT based on a pragmatic argument, but rather that they come from a HIGHER (rather than an indivdiual basis) power:

Quote:

...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men...

The founders of our nation properly understood that "rights" are of a fundamental moral nature, not simply a pragmatic matter of public policy.

Now, we can argue what IS or IS NOT funamenatly immoral, but that is a different matter entirely from whether or not what is or is not moral is a legitimate basis for public policy.

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"It's a good feeling to shoot a bad guy. Something you democrats would never understand. Americans are homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys!"

----Denny Crane

Marcus,

First of all, I will address your idea of making selling drugs a capital offense. China does that. They execute at least 100 people a year for selling and trafficking drugs, but guess what? It hasn't helped.

Do you really want for the US to be like China? What about the people who are set up by drug dealers, or by police? No, I don't think it happens every day, but it does happen.

"Since the beginning of the 1980s, the problem of drugs has been dealt with by the government and the party, but it has never been resolved," said Yang Fengrui, secretary-general of the National Narcotics Control Commission. "Although we've made a lot of achievements, the spread of drug problems remains serious," said Yang. "Heroin use is down in some areas, but the use of new drugs such as ecstasy, marijuana and others is increasing. The situation in the Golden Triangle still does not allow for optimism," he said.

Asia: China Says Drug War is Failing

Now, look at what crimes you compared drug use to. All of those crimes have victims. Drug use has no victims. Sure, people get high on drugs and then commit crimes, but it is not the drugs fault, even though some people will say otherwise. Many people do drugs without committing any other crimes.

One of the reasons the biggest drug dealers are rarely prosecuted is because they are protected. Protected in part by the CIA.

Go ahead and type these words into google and start reading.........

"CIA PROTECTS LARGEST DRUG DEALERS"

I DARE YOU.

China is a very different society than our own. There is strong historical evidence that stronger criminal penalties for certain types of crimes has a significant long-term impact on the levels of such crimes.

Well, I realize it is quite fashionable amongst liberals to concern themselves with how we look compared to the rest of the world (for good or ill). But I for one look only to what I think is right or justifiable. Just because 99.9% of China's laws are immoral and wrong, making it an evil government overall, does not mean that EVERY law in that country is morally indefensible.


But this is an argument that can be made against any and all punishment for crimes. It is even a reasonable argument against the death penalty (although one I disagree with), but for the sake of argument, what if I were to say that the penalty for selling or trafficing drugs would be life in prison without the possiblity of parole? OK then?

Actually, so long as we live in a society which FORCES many of us to pay for the mistakes of others (such as health treatment for the consequences of drug usage) there are "victims".

WOW, you "dare" me. Like I would be afraid to look into what is in fact an utterly irrelevant point. The issue is whether or not we SHOULD prosecute these people, and if so, what the penalty should be. Whether there are times for a variety of reasons--often perfectly reasonable and defensible--that we do NOT fully enforce the law against certain individuals is hardly a legitimate argument AGAINST it being criminal in the first place.

There is not a single law anywhere that is always fully enforced. Ever hear of plea bargains? Sometimes...actually many times in capital cases someone obviously guilty will enter into a plea bargain in order to get life in prison rather than death, and the government ways the various factors (cost of trial, incarceration, appeals, likelyhood of actually getting the death sentence if going to trial, etc.) in deciding whether to accept.

In the case of the CIA, yes, sometimes we deal with bad people for a greater national security interest. Sometimes this is unwise, othertimes it has been tremendously wise. We routinely "protected" drug dealers through the CIA at some points in history because they were useful in helping us against other, greater threats to our nation.

That a society sometimes has to make a tradeoff between the lesser of two "evils" is not an argument in favor of not recognizing the lesser of the two as "evil", albeit a justified and neccesary one.

I think you will find that if you do your own search, you will find references to the Contras in many of the top search results. Whatever the societal harm from drugs may be, quite frankly it was dwarfed by the potential harm represented by the global spread of communism in the later half of the 20th century.

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"It's a good feeling to shoot a bad guy. Something you democrats would never understand. Americans are homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys!"

----Denny Crane