Legalizing Drugs as Solution to Crime?

1. It would certainly lower the price. Thusly, people would not have to steal from others to buy drugs.

2. Drugs could be distributed in a controlled environment. There would be a less violence, no double-dealing, or bad drugs passed on to consumers. And there would be a greater chance to reach people who came into legal clincs, to inform and educate them of the health risks.

3. Increase in tax revenue. Just like other legal drugs, the state could make tons of money off of them. Yet, taxes would have to be low enough to keep the black market out of business.

4. The black market would disappear over night and all the other crime associated with it.

5. With the black market gone, it would create an industry and employ people, creating capital and wealth, just like the tabacco and alcohol industries.

6. Local, state and federal governments would save billions of dollars, empty prisons, and divert manpower and resources to professional crime - like car thieves. The amount spent on the "war on drugs" at all levels of government is staggering. And all we are doing is paying the drug lords and organized crime a livelihood.

If the "war on drugs" had ever worked, I would say, "fine." But it hasn't. Look at what's happening on our borders, atm, with Mexico.

 

Well, we encouage people to sell alcohol. I have not watched any sports since I was a kid, including the Super Bowl, but I understand that Bud commercials and the like are a big part of the attraction. So we encourge some drug use already. While we have a tobacco industry, that seems to thrive fairly well, we don't encourage that drug use because it is so deadly.

We cerainly don't want a crack or heroine industry, but we should want to control these hard drugs through clinics. These people are serious addicts and need to under professional care, rather than tossed into the prison system, where they can learn to become even better at being criminals.

This kind of hard drug use is a health related issue and not issues of crime, at least that's how I see it. The lighter drugs are, IMO, no worse than the other drugs we already market as "legal," especially tobacco, which is highly addictive and can be fatal when abused. I certainly believe that people should be able to smoke if that's what they wish, but to say it's less dangerous than some other drugs that are illegal seems a strange thing to me.

 

Tal, I'm really not going to get into this with you. Throwing accusations and personal attacks at me while telling me to tone down my accusations and personal attacks is just a recipe for more bickering. I'm not playing that. I respectfully disagreed with you, and will continue to do so. As I said, I'm very interested to read and respond to further evidence should you post any. But again - the article you posted was not sourced, provided no specifics or clinical evidence, and could have been written by anyone. Therefore, it may well have refuted every claim I made, but since it was not sourced or substantiated, that doesn't mean very much. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to change a position I've formed over the course of several years based on that alone, nor would I expect you to either. I'd like to see something more compelling, that is all I was saying. I'm not accusing or attacking you any more than you are to me. I hope we can move on now.

Could you maybe recap more of what your city doctor concluded? Are there any academics that referenced or agreed with his findings? I'm not saying he's wrong, but since I know nothing about him it's hard for me to really judge.

@ Chandos,

I find your list very interesting, but do you feel that way about all drugs, or just pot? I'm personally in favor of keeping the harder, more dangerous drugs illegal despite the merit I see in the "let them hurt themselves, it's their choice" type of argument.

dmc's responses would have been similar to my own, so I won't retype. I'll just say ditto.

EDIT. Oh...

Don't go changing your position or anything, but I thought this was well said, Snook. I think you and I are on a fairly similar tack on this issue.

 

While legalization of M would do a lot of the things you listed chandos, it wouldn't reduce the black market completely.
Just look at the problem with black market cigarettes, due to the differing taxes. No, it will reduce it by a great deal but it wont stop it.
Still, i agree that the pros outway the cons.

 

I believe that most drugs should be legal, but controlled. What that means is that a drug like pot, should be an over-the-counter drug like tobacco. Other drugs like, heroine should be used under supervised care, only in a clinic. I think it would save lives and the overall cost to society would be far less. And the cost should be low enough to encourage users to buy from clinics. Put dealers out of business by making it no longer cost effective to sell. In the meantime, the users would be advised of the current damage they are doing to themselves by using hard drugs.

 

But is that realistic? Who would accept the social stigma of going to a clinic to use a highly-addictive recreational drug when they could find a way to sneak it home so no one knows? I would think the practice would still go deeper underground. And what legal argument would one make for running a business off of a practice that is as physically damaging as hard drugs? The case can be made that softer drugs - tobacco, alcohol, even pot - are relatively harmless in moderation. But the same cannot be said for heroine, for example. There really is no moderation with that - it's junkie or nothing.

@ martaug,

I agree as well. There's a black market in just about everything. The key with things like drugs - bad things we don't like but will never truly go away as long as people are willing to pay for it - is reducing them to an acceptable number, in my view. An "acceptable loss," if you will. Trying to get rid of them altogether is a losing game.

 

Thanks for providing more background, Tal.

I can see his reasoning and I can certainly re-evaluate my position. I never said he was making anything up (again, words in my mouth), just that without a legitimate study or peer review of his results, it's hard to see it as more than just his personal conclusion. While I can't discount his professional opinion, it is a fact that what one doctor claims to be concrete medical fact may be seen by others in his field as quackery. It's possible he's drawing the wrong conclusions from his experience, and a peer review would go a long way to settling it one way or another. I will concede that given his status in your country, I admit that he seems very credible. But I personally wouldn't rely on his findings alone. Your mileage may vary.

 

Good points, all. I can agree with everything you just said. I'm glad. It seems our worlds aren't that far apart on this.

 

Pot junkies?

Give me a break.

There's a difference between honest-to-god chemical addiction (heroin, tobacco, caffeine) and just habitual addiction (THC, WoW, knitting).

THC just doesn't work like that, and there's no way you can overdose from pot just by smoking / vaporizing / eating it. You'd not get an overdose before asphyxiation from the first two, and you simply don't have enough space inside you for the third.

Now, overdose and chemical addiction being impossibilities (and they really are, deal) there's plenty of things we don't know about cannabis and it really warrants further study. There are empirical observations suggesting it can cause mental health problems, for one.

Probation - and the end of it - would however suggest that a controlled, taxed method to distribute THC, psilocybin and other such "mild" drugs could have significant positive effects to society as a whole.

And likely a few unfortunates would get caught with health problems, but such is the way with substances not adequately researched.

Now, opiates. These cause real addiction and make true junkies that will kill to get their fix. Stuff that causes chemical addiction creates real junkies. THC is just an excuse.


And I don't think anyone here is suggesting legalizing drugs such as meth, cocaine, heroin or PCP (or any dissociative for that matter).

 

In first place, who said anything about making it accessible to kids? Tobacco is a controlled drug that is prohibited to kids. Do they get tobacco? Yes, but is it legal for them? No. Kids can't even get cough medicine. Look, when I was a minor, many years ago, marijuana was just about as easy to get as tobacco. The whole point is that just by making it illegal has not stopped a lot of people from using it. Is hard to get MJ? No. It's plentiful, and its widely used among people of all walks of life. That's the problem, it's so widely used that it can't be stopped. Now, that's not true of all drugs, but its true of MJ.

I don't believe for a minute that legalizing drugs will expand the drug using population. I wouldn't be surprised to see it go down. There are some people who will use it because it is illegal. That was the whole point of prohibition, to try to stop people from drinking by making it illegal. Did it work? The results speak for themselves.

No. Most people use MJ to get high. I don't know anyone who uses it for any other reason. I understand that there are some medicinal uses for it and it's even more stupid that it's not available to people who are sick. Yet, morphine or codeine are? What sense does that make?

Yes, but I don't know of anyone to whom that has ever happened, and I know a lot of people who use MJ. I have heard that notion before and I don't buy it. That's kind of like saying, "Let's not sell beer because people might start drinking Jack Daniels." I don't think a lot of people are interested in becoming heroine addicts.

There is no comparison, tobacco is much deadlier. Have you ever been in a cancer ward? I have as a visiter. I never want to be in one again. Smoke enough and it will kill you.

Well, there's no getting around that except to say that people talk on cell phones and cause accidents all the time. Do we outlaw phones? Nope. Can't even get them to pass laws against people who talk and drive at the same time, at least not in Texas (and using cell phones may even cause brain damage). People do all kinds of stupid stuff, like drink and drive. You can't stop people from being stupid. Can we outlaw everything that might potentially cause an accident if some people choose to be stupid? Believe me, just because it's illegal doesn't mean that there aren't people out there right now smoking pot and driving, even as I type this and you are reading it.

Let's go back to the "kids" for a moment. I have three kids myself (they are still very young). I can educate them, I can talk with them, I can check their clothes, backpacks, bedrooms, and try my best as a parent to discourage them from using drugs. That's my job as a parent. But let me ask you this: If your kid decides to try drugs, would you rather have them be able to walk into a clinic and buy them from a doctor, or would you rather have them try to get them from a drug dealer thug in some dark parking lot somewhere? There aren't any perfect solutions to the problem. But the current "solutions" are not working. That much should be painfully obvious.

 

Well, if you smoke your own body weight in it, you will die. That being said, smoking 160 pounds of MJ is... admirable, to say the least

The Northeast has begun the process. Connecticut has had laws banning cell phones while driving for some time, and Massachusetts is following soon. Not sure if that includes hands free devices (which, IMO, are just as dangerous... it is the distracting voice that seems to cause accidents, not using only one hand to drive - I always drive one handed.).

Haha, certainly if you get in a car accident because of talking on a phone. Not sure if you meant the irony there

 

I bet the Mexican government wishes it--and especially we--had never made growing/producing/selling drugs illegal.

A substantial portion of Latin America's dysfunction is a direct result of the criminalization of drugs. Is it really worth it?

Gangs are scary. The scariest gangs get their money from drugs. Decriminalize drugs and gangs stop being quite so scary.

 

Tal - In a nutshell you have a belief that making drugs illegal is a "barrier" between drugs and society. I don't share that view. I believe that it supports crime and costs lives because of the black market that it creates and the lack of proper professional care that addicts need. Almost all your comments indicate that because drugs are illegal that somehow people won't drive while on all kiinds of drugs. They do anyway. Or that somehow because a drug is legal that people will drive while on drugs. It is in fact, already illegal to drink and drive and we see how well that has worked. People drink and drive all the time. And it is illegal. The point is that anyone who is going to drive while on drugs is not going to give a crap about the law anyway.

We can build endless lines of prisons; you can send people away for years; you can break up families; you can give the mafia and the drug lords more business than they can handle; you can have people go without the healthcare they need to get well. You have rehab like a revolving door, with the same people going in and out all the time. In spite of all this waste, you can't stop people from doing what they are going to do anyway. The last 30 years of the "War on Drugs" proves just that. Now we have to send the army to our borders - The army! Show me where any of this has actually worked.

Oh, yeah. Texas is probably bigger than your entire country.

 

And it has the Alamo!

Sorry, just have to say something like that every time I hear about Texas

Marijuana is kind of scary in its own way, but I can see how legalizing it would be beneficial. I can say that smoking is a more dangerous health risk, but Marijuana has a stronger "high" which can cause some very dumb behavior on the part of the smoker. Now, I have little vested interests in this as I don't smoke, but most of my friends do (quite frequently) and I can say I've seen some very dumb and unsafe actions out of them while high. They may be happy, and chill and all that, but they still suck at driving while high... So in order for marijuana to be legalized, I think there would have to be some harsh penalties as far as DWI type stuff is concerned, because even if it isn't as dangerous as alcohol, dumb stuff really happens waaay too much.

Basically, my line of thinking is that if cigarette's and alcohol are legal, than why should marijuana- which is safer than tobacco, and less dangerous when "high" than alcohol- be completely illegal.

 

On this issue I think I have a similar view as Tal. I do not think cannabis is any more dangerous than alcohol or tobacco but that says more about the dangers of alcohol and tobacco than it says about the safety of cannabis.

Alcohol is a legal drug in todays society and look at the damages it causes. I am sure that alcohol alone causes more damage than all other drugs combined simply because the use is so wipespread. All the beatings, rapes, drunk drivings, heck a vast portion of all crime can be traced back to alcohol. Do we really want to introduce another drug to the possibility to be as widespread as alcohol? Now, I think the crime scale for cannabis use and possession should be low (fines and the like) but I do think we should struggle to keep the social stigma on it.

Cannabis may not be heroin but neither is it good for you, firstly it conservates your brain so if you start using it early your maturity and intellectual growth will be stunted and it generally makes people a bit slow. Secondly it is a catalyst for mental illness, I have seen quite a few cannabis induced psychoses and it is not pretty. Sure, most people can handle it but most people can handle alcohol but with widespread use the percentage who cannot handle it turn into quite a large number of people. I think it is more than enough to have one huge legal and accepted socially destructive drug in our societies, why introduce another one?

On the other hand society should not spend huge resources on combating cannabis use make it a misdemeanor of somekind but still keep it illegal because just that illegality does stop a whole lot of people from using it. I know it was a large part the reason why I never started using cannabis more than the two times I tried. It shouldn't be ok but neither should it be something you get sent to prison for. We can't get rid of alcohol and the damage it does is immense so I see no reason to oking another drug.