Isn't there a distinction between "not enforcing drug possession laws" and "helping homeless drug addicts use drugs"? I think there is.
The U.S. has been trying to enforce drug possession laws for the last century. If that worked, we would long ago have declared Mission Accomplished in the War on Drugs. But despite the passage of thous…
Isn't there a distinction between "not enforcing drug possession laws" and "helping homeless drug addicts use drugs"? I think there is.
The U.S. has been trying to enforce drug possession laws for the last century. If that worked, we would long ago have declared Mission Accomplished in the War on Drugs. But despite the passage of thousands of laws, the funding of enforcement and punishment that must by now run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, we're just winding down, very slowly, from an opioid crisis that was created by an immensely profitable pharmaceutical company, several enormous pharmaceutical retailers (their names are known to you all), and tens if not hundreds of thousands of MDs: all the very businesses and people WHOM THE LAWS TRUSTED WITH REGULATING THESE POTENTIAL HARMFUL SUBSTANCES. If they couldn't prevent their own activities from becoming a lethal scourge, then who could? And the opioid scandal is merely the latest in a long line of various drug crises extending all the way back to the heroin epidemic of the 1950s.
I don't see how you could need better evidence than that this record the problem isn't whether some pathetic people do drugs on the streets. The problem is that there are unimaginable amounts of money to be made, illegally and legally, from drugs. Is there anything that can be done about that? Only two things: (1) Stop subsidizing criminal enterprises by prohibition. (2) Impose meaningful penalties on legal purveyors who violate stringent standards. (Yes, this means sending the Sacklers, and others of their ilk at all levels, to jail.)
Should I have added "education" and "treatment"? No. They don't work. As, once again, the status quo illustrates.
Agree. It's, for one, absurd that a "legal" drug pusher like Perdue was allowed to operate as it was (and many "Perdue clones" still are) to push opiods without consequence through the medical system and not face any personal consequences, while your average heroin street dealer selling dime bags of the stuff that their customers are most likely seeking as the alternative to the cost and difficulty to obtaining the "legal" stuff that likely got them hooked in the first place will face years in jail. There's no question heroin usage (and the follow up of Fentanyl) followed the absolute saturation of the American public of "legal" opioids to begin with. Heroin use was on the downswing before Oxy, spiked after. But our "War On Drugs" is only interested in prosecuting a certain "distribution/manufacture" angle that also allows it massive civil liberties breaches, massive amounts of unaccounted for money, and a subversive foreign policy that doesn't require actual Congressional Acts of War to prosecute outside of our borders. Oh, and of course there's money to be made. All the local policing units that got free military toys to play with, the (absolutely illegal) seizure of cash and assets from *suspected* drug dealers to be given out.. however.. lol..
And then there's the "squashed balloon" effect of prosecuting certain drugs that creates markets for other, and often worse, ones. Squashing cocaine led to crack (sells of quicker, more potent), squashing crack bred meth (can be produced domestically with domestically available materials, etc), squashing heroin bred Fentanyl, etc.
And so it goes. We refuse to learn anything from these prior passes at "Prohibition", and yet the "progressive" policies of enabling large tent cities in urban centers of open addicts is also terrible. I really wish we could learn from overseas examples, which is something progressives purportedly claimed to do, but they jump the shark almost all the time in service of this neo-"woke" BS that exculpates any sort of consequence or cost to these policies.
Isn't there a distinction between "not enforcing drug possession laws" and "helping homeless drug addicts use drugs"? I think there is.
The U.S. has been trying to enforce drug possession laws for the last century. If that worked, we would long ago have declared Mission Accomplished in the War on Drugs. But despite the passage of thousands of laws, the funding of enforcement and punishment that must by now run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, we're just winding down, very slowly, from an opioid crisis that was created by an immensely profitable pharmaceutical company, several enormous pharmaceutical retailers (their names are known to you all), and tens if not hundreds of thousands of MDs: all the very businesses and people WHOM THE LAWS TRUSTED WITH REGULATING THESE POTENTIAL HARMFUL SUBSTANCES. If they couldn't prevent their own activities from becoming a lethal scourge, then who could? And the opioid scandal is merely the latest in a long line of various drug crises extending all the way back to the heroin epidemic of the 1950s.
I don't see how you could need better evidence than that this record the problem isn't whether some pathetic people do drugs on the streets. The problem is that there are unimaginable amounts of money to be made, illegally and legally, from drugs. Is there anything that can be done about that? Only two things: (1) Stop subsidizing criminal enterprises by prohibition. (2) Impose meaningful penalties on legal purveyors who violate stringent standards. (Yes, this means sending the Sacklers, and others of their ilk at all levels, to jail.)
Should I have added "education" and "treatment"? No. They don't work. As, once again, the status quo illustrates.
Agree. It's, for one, absurd that a "legal" drug pusher like Perdue was allowed to operate as it was (and many "Perdue clones" still are) to push opiods without consequence through the medical system and not face any personal consequences, while your average heroin street dealer selling dime bags of the stuff that their customers are most likely seeking as the alternative to the cost and difficulty to obtaining the "legal" stuff that likely got them hooked in the first place will face years in jail. There's no question heroin usage (and the follow up of Fentanyl) followed the absolute saturation of the American public of "legal" opioids to begin with. Heroin use was on the downswing before Oxy, spiked after. But our "War On Drugs" is only interested in prosecuting a certain "distribution/manufacture" angle that also allows it massive civil liberties breaches, massive amounts of unaccounted for money, and a subversive foreign policy that doesn't require actual Congressional Acts of War to prosecute outside of our borders. Oh, and of course there's money to be made. All the local policing units that got free military toys to play with, the (absolutely illegal) seizure of cash and assets from *suspected* drug dealers to be given out.. however.. lol..
And then there's the "squashed balloon" effect of prosecuting certain drugs that creates markets for other, and often worse, ones. Squashing cocaine led to crack (sells of quicker, more potent), squashing crack bred meth (can be produced domestically with domestically available materials, etc), squashing heroin bred Fentanyl, etc.
And so it goes. We refuse to learn anything from these prior passes at "Prohibition", and yet the "progressive" policies of enabling large tent cities in urban centers of open addicts is also terrible. I really wish we could learn from overseas examples, which is something progressives purportedly claimed to do, but they jump the shark almost all the time in service of this neo-"woke" BS that exculpates any sort of consequence or cost to these policies.