Let those dopers be

[bemildred]

By Norm Stamper, Norm Stamper is the former chief of the Seattle Police Department. He is the author of "Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing" (Nation Books, 2005).

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But no, I don't favor decriminalization. I favor legalization, and not just of pot but of all drugs, including heroin, cocaine, meth, psychotropics, mushrooms and LSD.

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I've never understood why adults shouldn't enjoy the same right to use verboten drugs as they have to suck on a Marlboro or knock back a scotch and water.

Prohibition of alcohol fell flat on its face. The prohibition of other drugs rests on an equally wobbly foundation. Not until we choose to frame responsible drug use — not an oxymoron in my dictionary — as a civil liberty will we be able to recognize the abuse of drugs, including alcohol, for what it is: a medical, not a criminal, matter.

As a cop, I bore witness to the multiple lunacies of the "war on drugs." Lasting far longer than any other of our national conflicts, the drug war has been prosecuted with equal vigor by Republican and Democratic administrations, with one president after another — Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush — delivering sanctimonious sermons, squandering vast sums of taxpayer money and cheerleading law enforcers from the safety of the sidelines.

LA Times

[mike_c]

1. woooohooooo-- kicking and recommending....

Tell it, brother.

[China_cat]

2. Rendering the jails so full of people

whose only crime is smoking a little weed (and who got a harsher sentence than the guy in the next cell who raped 3 women and killed one) that there's no more room for those who truly belong there.

[Mabus]

5. No shit

We're adopting a dog because its owner, a sixty year-old man, has been sentenced to 20 years for drug possession.

[Angry Girl]

3. The USA will NEVER decriminalize non-pharma drugs

FIrst, if marijuana were legal, big pharmaceutical companies would lose billions of dollars because they would no longer be able to market 85% of their crap (think anti-depressants, tranquilizers, sleeping aids, anti-nausea drugs, appetite-inducers, etc...).

Second, if marijuana were legalized, the U.S. government would have no reason to poke their noses into not only the lives of its citizens but also other countries, where they can conduct shady business under the guise of the "drug war" (since marijuana is found everywhere - except the Artic and Antarctica, I think).

Third, if marijuana, a pretty harmless herb, is outlawed, then they can hardly decriminalize any other drugs that actually have a mortality rate associated with their use.

[bemildred]

4. Yes, many illegal drugs are cheap and effective as medicines

in the proper dose, and ridiculously cheap and easy
to manufacture.

[lvx35]

9. Yeah, that cuts to the heart of it right there. I've got to bitch.

Pharma is set up to make $$$. They don't want cures that you take once, they want treatments you have to take for the rest of your life, because its worth more. This is a failure of privitized medicine, and its blatant...Take treatment of depression. There are a lot of drugs which change one's state of mind after the experience, many phenylethylamines have this property...They can break long periods of depression. But to deploy this would be useless because it works after one treatment. So pharma MUST develop drugs like wellbutrin that you have to take for the rest of your life, and the withdrawal symptoms of which make the original symptoms worse.

[foo_bar]

14. and racism, curiously

Even the word "marijuana" was meant to evoke anti-Mexican terror:

Hearst cleverly utilized his immense national network of newspapers and magazines to spread wildly inaccurate and sensational stories of the evils of cannabis or "marihuana," a phrase brought into the common parlance, in part due to frequent mentions in his publications.

The sheer number of newspapers, tabloids, magazines and film reels that Hearst controlled enabled him to quickly and to effectively inundate American media with this propaganda. Hearst preyed on existing prejudices by associating cannabis with Mexican workers who threatened to steal American jobs and African-Americans who had long been the subject of white American venom (see accompanying articles). An ironic side-note: much of this racism had already been perpetrated by the propaganda of Hearst, an unabashed racist. The American people had already developed irrational hatred for these racial groups, and so readily accepted the ridiculous stories of their crazed crimes incited by marihuana use.

http://www.reefermadness.org/propaganda/essay.html

[McKenzie]

6. that has always been my position

sure, it'll cause some social issues but we already have big problems with the public sector drug called alcohol. Or maybe the "illegal" drugs are part of the public sector supply chain too.

Fighting the war on drugs is doomed to failure because the profits are just so vast. The amount of police time and public money, in effect the opportunity cost, spent tracking down a zillionth of the total supply is largely pointless. A few big hauls get intercepted but there is still a flood of the stuff coming in. Why? Because it makes megabucks.

If drugs are out in the open:

1. The profit motive is removed at a stroke so the organised crime element gets cut out of the loop.

2. People won't acquire criminal records for doing something that is remarkably similar to something that is already legal...drinking bloody alcohol and then getting violent, becoming addicted, killing people in traffic accidents etc.

3. The undesirable effects can be managed using a little bit of the huge amount of public money that is wasted on the futile "war" on drugs. And there would probably be a fair bit of change left over to spend on other stuff at that.

Keeping drugs illegal is pointless and doomed to failure if the aim is to stop the trafficking. The undesirable effects are already there in any case, with the added problem of the diversion of law enforcement resources towards a futile exercise, at the expense of other areas of law enforcement. The only winners are the drug barons. The sheer amount of money that the world trade generates is staggering.

Drink alcohol, get pissed and people make jokes about the sorry sight of someone utterly smashed out of their box. The bloody stuff causes mayhem at weekends and is a major cause of violence. I've walked past cannabis cafes in Amsterdam and I doubt if I could pick a fight with the clients if I tried..."Hey bubba, wanna rumble" "Ummm...naaahhh, maybe later maaaannnn".

Ok, it's a bit more complex than my simplistic interpretion. However, there are two facts that can't be challenged:

1. It's hypocrisy to allow alcohol to be legal whilst criminalising other drugs that do remarkably similar things, including the creation of addicts.

2. As long as drugs are illegal there will always be a huge interest from organised crime which suggests we should ask ourselves whether there is a simpler, and less costly, solution.

[_TJ_]

7. What an adult puts in their body is their own business n/t

[SteppingRazor]

13. Exactly my take on this...

The government simply shouldn't have the right to tell you what to do with your own body. On that basis alone, all drugs should be legalized, since I don't think the government has the right to make them illegal in the first place.

[Mnemosyne]

8. Truth!

:kick:

[slay]

10. We must end these harmful WARS - War on Drugs, War on Porn, etc

This guy couldn't be more right. Jail is for rapists and murderers - NOT substance users. It's the illegality that causes so many problems, not the drugs themselves. I especially feel that marijuana and psychedelics, which have NO physical addictive properties, should be classified as completely different from physically addictive substances like cocaine and heroin. As an adult, it is my right and my choice as to what I put in my body, not the government's.

[dutchdemocrat]

11. Works here in Holland

Soft Drugs are legal (tolerated), coffee shops pay taxes. Jails are not full of drug 'criminals'.

[Laelth]

12. Sanity.

Nice to hear the voice of reason every once in a while ... music to my ears.

-Laelth