This is topic Which drug users are our enemies? in forum Books, Films, Food and Culture at Hatrack River Forum.


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Posted by The Silverblue Sun (Member # 1630) on :
 
Which drug users are the enemies of society?

<<<THOR>>>
 

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Posted by Frisco (Member # 3765) on :
 
Well, there's nothing I hate more than being roused from a deep sleep at 4:30am by an automatic coffee maker.
 

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Posted by Chaeron (Member # 744) on :
 
Lazy undisciplined potheads, worthless hippie scum enthralled to their demonic weed. We should not rest until every one of these people is removed from decent society and placed in prison where they belong.

*lets out his line a bit*
 

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Posted by Chaeron (Member # 744) on :
 
Glad to see the old thor is back.
 

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Posted by Kama (Member # 3022) on :
 
Why, Thor?
 

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Posted by AmkaProblemka (Member # 6495) on :
 
It depends on what you define as enemy.

Any user who spends a significant enough time using, acquiring, or worrying about acquiring drugs that they cannot be a productive citizen. Also a drug user is an enemy if such behavior hurts their friends and family, most especially children.

You cannot do anything in isolation. Everything you do contributes to a culture. If that culture diminishes the society, then any individual practicing aspects of that culture is responsible in part for that harmful impact. That makes them an enemy to society.

This is why I never buy the "it only affects me" argument or the "two consensual adults" argument. Inevitably, such individual behavior is reflected in the culture of our society.
 

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Posted by prolixshore (Member # 4496) on :
 
I don't call them enemies, I call them criminals, which is defined as someone who is breaking the law.

--ApostleRadio
 

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Posted by Chaeron (Member # 744) on :
 
Of course, not all laws are just.
 

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Posted by prolixshore (Member # 4496) on :
 
And yet, I believe that if you want a law changed, you should by all means work toward that change in every way possible, within the confines of the law. Once it has been changed, feel free to smoke your pot, drink at a younger age, or whatever cause it is you have wanted. Until then, knock it off, and if you don't, don't be surprised and call yourself a victim when you get in trouble.

--ApostleRadio
 

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Posted by Chaeron (Member # 744) on :
 
"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."
- Henry David Thoreau

I'd say there's something to be said for civil disobedience. Were the actions of Dr. King immoral as well as illegal? Did he not have a right to call himself a victim when he was arrested?

If you don't think so, you may need to re-evaluate your statement.

By all means, articulate reasons why you support criminal prohibition of certain drugs; however, to claim that it is never right to violate the law is to have a childish understanding of the relationship between law and morality.
 

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Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
 
My enemy is a woman so desperate for her next crack fix she sells her daughter to a man in order to get it.

My enemies are parents so doped up they can't care adequately for their children, and the kids go hungry or wander around in diapers that haven't been changed.

My enemy is the person so stoned he can't drive and veers into a lane and injures someone who was only trying to come home from work.

My enemy is the person so desperate for a fix they steal, even murder for money.

My enemy is a man addicted to painkillers, who fakes injuries and illnesses in order to get more prescribed, tying up precious resources that are better spent taking care of people with actual emergencies.

My enemy is the addict that will attack fire department rescue vehicles in order to steal the morphine they keep on board, necessitating the rules that now no morphine can be carried at all. Should I ever be in need of such pain relief, the paramedics can't give it to me, because they're no longer able to carry it.

My enemy is the addict who doesn't know the above, and shoots the rescue personnel anyway, so he can steal their drugbox.

My enemy is the addict that robs pharmacies at night, looking for meds, putting the phamaracists in danger, and increasing prices for everyone so that security measures can be put in place.

That's all I can come up with at the moment, but I'm sure I can think of others.
 

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Posted by miles_per_hour (Member # 6451) on :
 
You are.
 

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Posted by Irami Osei-Frimpong (Member # 2229) on :
 

quote:

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Any user who spends a significant enough time using, acquiring, or worrying about acquiring drugs that they cannot be a productive citizen. Also a drug user is an enemy if such behavior hurts their friends and family, most especially children.

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quote:

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You cannot do anything in isolation. Everything you do contributes to a culture. If that culture diminishes the society, then any individual practicing aspects of that culture is responsible in part for that harmful impact. That makes them an enemy to society.

This is why I never buy the "it only affects me" argument or the "two consensual adults" argument. Inevitably, such individual behavior is reflected in the culture of our society. [Emphasis added.]

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This seems like circular reasoning to me. (Or more correctly, begging the question). You haven't established that behaviors between cosensual adults have a harmful impact on society.

[ September 17, 2004, 03:28 PM: Message edited by: Icarus ]
 

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Posted by Maccabeus (Member # 3051) on :
 
Icky, all that's necessary to the argument is that such actions have some effect on society--which is something that isn't proven, but seems fairly obvious. (Consensual sex produces children, for instance, who unless you keep them abusively locked away will interact with society.) Nor do I think it's reasonable to expect that all such effects will be positive or neutral. The real question is whether we can tell which kinds of actions are harmful. Invading Iraq seemed like a perfectly moral, defensible thing to me when we started, and look where that got us.

(In fact, lately, it seems that everything I do or say based on my morals has come to a bad end. I'm terribly confused.)
 

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Posted by prolixshore (Member # 4496) on :
 
Chaeron, i could have predicted your response and replied to it before you even made it, but I decided to go ahead and let you make the connection between drug use and civil rights and/or slavery (whichever you had decided to use) just so I could point out that there is a HUGE difference between the illegality of substances such as pot and the wholesale discrimination and loss of basic human rights for a group of people based on something they had no choice in.

Now, if you cannot see that difference, then perhaps YOU should re-evaluate your stance. As for me, I'm quite ok with my positions as stated.

I do not care if pot, cocaine, ecstasy, whatever, become legal. Once they are legal then feel free to knock yourself out with em. Won't bother me a bit. Until then, they are illegal, and the use of them will continue to make you a criminal by the definition of criminal. Criminality and morality do not always go hand in hand, but I really don't see a good connection between our friend Thor and Mr. King.

Civil disobedience in response to a law as unfair as slavery or discrimination against an entire race based on their skin color is a lot different than calling a law unjust because you wanna smoke some pot. The correct response to that one is to work to change the minds of the legislatures, which (if you look at canada, california, and alaska) seems to be on the horizon anyway.

--ApostleRadio
 

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Posted by AmkaProblemka (Member # 6495) on :
 
Irami,

It seems that you have ideas about conservative people that are merely opinions, and fairly ill informed ones at that.

I would tend to think that my second sentence, that of a person who causes harm to their family through their use of drugs is far more tenable as a description of who is an enemy to society than someone who is merely a non-productive citizen.

And the question regarded specifically drug users, not every kind of evil in this world. To say that because I think drug users are, in general, harmful to society does not mean that I think other kinds of evil (such as the harsh discipline you seem to have assumed I would support simply because I am morally conservative) are acceptable.

As to what harm I think the culture of two consensual adults has already done to society, let me list them:

[*]increased spread of STDs

[*]Increased incident of single mothers who must struggle to provide for their children

[*]Children who have no father (usually) or no mother. (Please don't tell me that if the remaining parent is good, it is all peaches and cream. I am married to a man who has a great mother, but whose father left their family. While that might have been for the better because his father was abusive, we both agree that I had the better time of it with two loving parents. My father has pretty much adopted my husband as a son, and it has been good for both of them.

[*]Children whose custodial parent has multiple (often live in) partners

On a different level, just because both adults are consensual does not mean that they are on equal terms. One may feel great commitment and love for their partner and feel like this is a confirmation of that love, while the partner may feel like this is just easy and great sex and will run away as soon as they percieve any depth of attachment. In this case, someone is going to get very hurt.

Morally conservative views towards when and where sex is appropriate does not have the correlation you seem to draw with oppression of women or children, nor does it mean that anyone wants life to be like a mid-century sitcom. Indeed, I think women and children are more oppressed under a culture where promiscuious sex is acceptable behavior.

I mean, which is more degrading to women: "Leave it to Beaver" or "Deep Penetration XTREME"?
 

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Posted by Chaeron (Member # 744) on :
 
Prolixshore, you misundstand me. I was using Dr. King as an example of civil disobedience as a legitimate means to an end. Read my post again. The only connection I am claiming to make is that criminality and immorality are not necessarily one and the same, which you seem to imply in your earlier post. The only conection which I make between Thor and King is that of civil disobedience.
 

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Posted by Danzig avoiding landmarks (Member # 6792) on :
 
I am.

After all, they declared a war upon me.
 

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Posted by Frisco (Member # 3765) on :
 

quote:

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I mean, which is more degrading to women: "Leave it to Beaver" or "Deep Penetration XTREME"?

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quote:

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This is why I never buy the "it only affects me" argument or the "two consensual adults" argument.

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You would get along really well in France.
 

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Posted by dkw (Member # 3264) on :
 
Civil disobedience is an act of public protest. Doing something illegal for your own gratification and hoping you don’t get caught is not in the same category.
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
If you do it in public, it is.
 

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Posted by dkw (Member # 3264) on :
 
Maybe. I think it depends on your definition of "public."
 

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Posted by Book (Member # 5500) on :
 

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Good question. Do you mean the original Deep Penetration XTREME, or Deep Penetration XTREME II: Revenge of the Donkeys?

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You are now my personal god

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Your own personal Jesus Christ.

 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
O.K. I understand what you're saying.
 

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Posted by J T Stryker (Member # 6300) on :
 
Storm Saxon: Would buying a keg and drinking it on your high schools front lawn fall under the same catagory?
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
Not unless they said you could, because then they can be charged for letting you drink on their property.

By they way, you, I'm not saying teenagers *should* drink.
 

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Posted by J T Stryker (Member # 6300) on :
 
dkw: only fools use fake IDs, I have discovered, if you hand them your real ID, the one with the red letters that says your under 21, some bar tenders will buy you a drink, and only a few won't serve you.
 

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Posted by dkw (Member # 3264) on :
 
Whatever. My point is, if you're doing it with the intention of getting away with it, not getting caught, then it is not in the same category as civil disobedience.
 

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Posted by Danzig avoiding landmarks (Member # 6792) on :
 
If you are under 18 you should smoke pot while you will be able to get away with it. You will have the rest of your life to drink alcohol legally, and alcohol is harder on your brain and liver anyway.
 

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Posted by Chaeron (Member # 744) on :
 
Actually, smoking cannabis in BC is an increasingly popular form of civil disobedience. I personally smoked it publically as part of a protest on more than one occasion.

The founder of the Marijuana party is currently in prison for an act of civil disobedience outside a police station in Saskatoon. He's taking the case before the Supreme Court, and there is a small but significant chance that the court will rule in his favor. The court's chief justice has repeatedly opined that the current cannabis laws are unjust, inconsistent with the facts, and ineffective in accomplishing any goals. She has stopped short of calling the laws unconsitutional. This is most likely because of a peculiar article of our constitution: the Notwithstanding Clause. This clause can be used by the legislature (federal or provincial) to draft a law in open violation of the constitution's civil rights (excluding voting and mobility rights), on the condition that it expires in 5 years. This would almost certainly be used if the courts were to rule against prohibition. Not out of public outcry--a slim majority of Canadians support legalisation, and a wider support decriminalisation--but out of fear of conflict with the United States.

More evidence of the growing political movement for drug reform is the New Democratic Party. This party currently holds a balance of power in parliament due to the minority government status of the Liberals after the recent election. They favor the immediate switch to a legal and regulated market for cannabis.

Interestingly enough, this is the very position advocated by the only two independent comissions ever to consider the issue for the federal government. The first, the Le Dain comission, was created by Trudeau to consider the issue. Despite his social liberalism, Trudeau ignored this comissions advice when its findings were too publically controversial, despite the strong consensus for the findings and recomendations made in the final report. The second inquiry was a senate study on the issue, which also recommended a legal and regulated market. This finding was unusal as the senate is typically a rather conservative body. Once again, this report was ignored.

Nixon once comissioned a similar study. When it also recommended legalisation, he discarded it in disgust and proceeded to declare a war on drugs.

Despite calls for change, politicans are simply escalating the failed policies of prohibition. Civil disobedience at this point is becoming increasingly essential for anyone who hopes to have the law changed.
 

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Posted by Chaeron (Member # 744) on :
 
The 21 drinking limit does make little sense. Why would someone who is expected to register for selective service, and who has the right to vote, be denied the full rights granted to adults, including the right to drink.?
 

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Posted by Snowden (Member # 1660) on :
 
Danzig,

Richard Selzer wrote essay in Mortal Lessons about the recuperative powers of the liver.

Amka,

I'm not a self-perpetuating baby factory, whose goal is to make more babies who will make more babies until the sun burns out. I'm a thinking, acting, person, in a sense, and end unto itself, and that's deeper than my ability to produce viable material offspring. A person's family is a special thing, but it isn't something you attend to like an automoton in a factory. The entire world isn't centered around a family. Everything you do isn't with respect to your family. I'm a great believer that you can live a fulfilling life without offspring, and further, you can raise offspring who all have jobs doing something else and kept your nose to pumping out baby grindstone that your life has passed you by and you've denied your being, your causa finalis, because you've spent too much time attending to your causa materialis. brief explanation.

At this time people usually trot out some sort of evolutionary primal instinct argument, so let's pretend that that's what happened here. Just flip the argument. We don't behave like animals, in some ways. In some ways, animals behave like people. I think it's nice that some animals behave like people. We can dress them up like people and it's even cuter, but animal behavior doesn't inform us any more than our behavior informs them, and we have all sorts of experiences in our big brain that inform us more.

Now if families are God's plan and God's end. Well, then, that's something that only the Lord can deal with.

Your problems with drugs are tied to problems drugs can have in families. That's fine. Your problems with sex deals with the family. That's fine, but it assumes that the family is in jeopardy or even that there is a family involved. That's a stretch. Funny enough, this looks similar to a sketch of my argument to be wary of mere trade educations.

Once again, I don't want to legalize anything. I think the world would be a better place if we stop growing opium and building nuclear bombs.

[ September 17, 2004, 07:08 PM: Message edited by: Snowden ]
 

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Posted by Danzig avoiding landmarks (Member # 6792) on :
 
The liver is indeed an amazing organism, and can take a lot of punishment, but better to do no damage, right?

I think the world would be a much better place if everyone smoked opium, and used MDMA one or two times.
 

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Posted by AmkaProblemka (Member # 6495) on :
 

quote:

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I'm not a self-perpetuating baby factory,

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Is that what you are implying I am?

Wow.

Whether you choose to have children or not is of no concern to me. But it isn't about families so much as about the impact the discussed behaviors have on innocent children.

It is about children EVERYWHERE. They don't choose the environment they get to live in. We choose that, and most of the time we do a piss poor job of it.

I went to a meeting yesterday at an inner city school. I'm not just blowing hot air.

KIDS ARE SUFFERING BECAUSE OF SELFISH CHOICES.
 

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Posted by Danzig avoiding landmarks (Member # 6792) on :
 
Every time I light up, a little kid gets cancer.

Every time I pop an Adderall, a crack baby is born.

Why will I not think of the children?

[ September 17, 2004, 07:26 PM: Message edited by: Danzig avoiding landmarks ]
 

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Posted by AmkaProblemka (Member # 6495) on :
 
And if you think it is not your problem because, hey, you don't intend to have kids, what does that say about your 'informed' morality?

You really have no idea of who I am, and your statements are some of the most bigoted I've come across.
 

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Posted by Danzig avoiding landmarks (Member # 6792) on :
 
There is a reason you do not see upstanding drug users, and it is because drugs are illegal. If someone was to start a non-profit community building organization of responsible drug users, the pigs and narcs would use it to arrest everyone crazy enough to join.
 

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Posted by AmkaProblemka (Member # 6495) on :
 
My argument, Irami, is that there is an entire culture involved, and you vote for the shape of that culture by your actions, whether you have a family or not.
 

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Posted by Frisco (Member # 3765) on :
 
And I think he's upset that you're voting to sterilize the country for the family, without considering that a lot of people without one (and some of those with them) prefer the freedoms and believe that losing those freedoms would be more diminishing to society than the "evils" themselves would.

*shrug*
 

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Posted by Chaeron (Member # 744) on :
 
Oh, won't someone PLEASE think of the children?!
 

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Posted by FlyingCow (Member # 2150) on :
 
Chaeron and JT, if civil disobedience is your goal, then go get yourselves arrested.

Neither drinking underage or smoking marijuana are acts of civil disobedience - they are instead simply violations of the law. If you want to be civilly disobedient, you must not simply flout the law. You must do it in such a way as to draw attention to yourself and your cause.

MLK Jr. didn't march on a backroad in Wyoming with no one around to witness it. And Thoreau didn't advocate breaking the law in private, but actually going to prison for your ideals. To be civilly disobedient, the public's eye must be drawn to the injustice of your arrest.

Don't claim you're being civilly disobedient unless you're posting after having been arrested for your beliefs. It's disingenuous.

At least Danzig doesn't need any pretense to break the law. He knows he's "getting away with it" and that suits him. He feels more people should break the law and "get away with" what they can. It isn't civil disobedience, it's a selfish desire for personal gratification.

For those who think their breaking the law is civil disobedience, you're wrong unless you're calling attention to your act and willing to go to jail for your beliefs. If you're doing anything different, you are simply placing your own desires above the law, which makes you simply a criminal.
 

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Posted by Chaeron (Member # 744) on :
 
FC, read my post again, goddamnit.
 

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Posted by Little_Doctor (Member # 6635) on :
 
Well of course the only bad drug dealers are the ugly ones!!

<---Is not very good looking himself.

<---Is not a drug dealer
 

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Posted by AmkaProblemka (Member # 6495) on :
 
I do not believe that the legislation of morality would help anything, and that has not been what I proposed. You complain that people like me force our morality on you. But the only way you have such reminders is if you seek it out by coming to a forum where you might find disagreement to your value system or going to a church or turning the channel on to some religious network.

People like me have to watch commercials that go against our morality. We have to walk past video and magazine covers that continually assault our values. Romantic movies that are considered tame and 'have a good message' these days usually show us the people have finally found they are in love by depicting their having sex. And sometimes we are ambushed by soft porn in movies and books where it has no point in the plot. Rather than needing to seek out media that thrusts a different morality down our throats, we must actively turn away most media and desperately search for alternatives, which are very few, especially if we can't stand the religious networks ourselves.

People want to watch a movie or television show that supports their world view. So they vote with their consumer dollar. Popular music also tends to uphold a world view of casual sex and even drug use.

Because people want their social environment to support their behavior, they choose to support these things. And so their actions have impacted society.

'Then write letters and complain,' you say, 'This is media's fault, not mine.' The media industry doesn't care about people like me, they care about the money they make. And clearly there are more of you than of me.

All I propose is that you need to be accountable for the consequences of your actions, and that those consequences affect far more people than just the individuals directly involved in the action.

Here is more direct argument than viewer -> media -> viewer impact: If you watch porn, and prefer porn where you don't have to see them deal with the inconvenience of condums because that just isn't sexy, then you are voting with your consumer dollar to put porn stars at risk. If the porn industry could make more money by making sure all their actors were engaging only in safe sex, then they would do that. But unsafe sex is far more profitable, and they will not give work to actors who insist on a safe work environment.

If me insisting on such culpability bothers you, then you have to ask yourself why.
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
Amka, the basic flaw that I see in your argument is that you haven't proven that illegalization of 'drugs' as it currently stands is better for families, have you?
 

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Posted by Frisco (Member # 3765) on :
 
I understand the words and sentences, Amka, but can't figure out what you're saying with them.

Are you wanting the moral majority (of the media viewers) to cater to the minority, using censorship and removing freedom of speech to create a world where a child could never be bombarded with an image contrary to the beliefs of a conservative minority?

Seems to me that it'd be easier to just turn off the TV and learn not to look at the magazines.
 

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Posted by AmkaProblemka (Member # 6495) on :
 
Frisco,

What I want and what is reality is two different things. I cannot force what I want because that involves the free choice of other people.

What I want is for people to see the destructiveness of some choices in their personal lives and in the lives of others, and choose not to make those choices.

But I don't control that.

All I can do is endeavor to show people the consequences of their actions and hope they make a choice to be less destructive.

I honestly believe that illegal drugs and the entire culture surrounding them is destructive to self, family, and society. I feel the evidence backs me up. No insistance that it can be used responsibly makes up for the fact that most criminal and neglegent behavior involves illegal drugs.

I honestly believe that such social norms as no fault divorce, promiscuity, and a general attitude of refusing to deal with the consequences of actions (deadbeat parents, bankruptcy, scapegoating, etc) is harmful to the individual, families, and society.

But people continue to engage in these actions and there is not a lot I can do about it except to rage at the machine and engage in damage control where I can.

Storm,

Before we do anything about the legalization about drugs, we need to make some indepth and unbiased studies as to what the affect would actually be. If the result would be to decrease the use of drugs, then I would agree with that policy.

As to how illegal drugs harm families: A person regularly using drugs is less likely to make responsible choices such as safer sex. A woman, under those circumstances, can easily get pregnant. She might not realize or might not care that she is pregnant and continues to use drugs. Her child is then born addicted and often with a great deal of damage. This is no fantasy. The kid whose mother did that lives just around the block from me (adopted by his foster parents). And this is not an isolated event. We hear news story after news story of children who are neglected because their parents were strung out. Every NICU nurse has stories of addicted and drug damaged babies.

If you are using drugs responsibly, you may not be directly harming anyone but you are still perpetuating and support a drug culture that has caused many, many people great pain. The price for this individual pleasure is simply too high to society.
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
Yes, I understand how drugs can be destructive. I just don't understand how, after arrest and going through whatever the justice system throws at her, that person is then going to be a better family member, or able to raise their children better.
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
Remember, not only do individual choices have consequences, but the choices we make as a society have consequences as well. In short, do the drawbacks of making certain drugs illegal outweigh the benefits?
 

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Posted by Kama (Member # 3022) on :
 

quote:

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I honestly believe that such social norms as no fault divorce, promiscuity, and a general attitude of refusing to deal with the consequences of actions (deadbeat parents, bankruptcy, scapegoating, etc) is harmful to the individual, families, and society.

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quote:

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That child suffered a lot of pain in the hospital. She directly caused harm to the child. I consider it abuse and neglect. So I do think she should get arrested, and spend some time in jail watching a TV monitor of all the pain her child is going through. Then she should go to rehab.

Will that help her become a better mother? She had already done drugs, had a child taken away, cleaned herself up and got her child back. Then she got back into drugs, and that is when she got pregnant the second time. Both brothers were adopted by the same family.

No one can change her. No amount of justice system, of rehab, no amount of love and warm fuzzies will make her a fit mother. She will never get better until she decides to get better herself and makes concrete steps towards that. It is completely up to her.

The fact is that society has already lost someone who had the potential to be a good parent or teacher or whatever. Society lost that person to drugs. The justice system can't change that.

But that doesn't mean we throw the baby out with the bath water. We must, as a society, make a statement that such activity is not acceptable behavior. We do that by imposing legal consequences.

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Make a person's legal history disappear after, say, five years, if they stay out of trouble.

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The cost of this massive growth in incarceration is staggering. Americans will spend nearly $40 billion on prisons and jails in the year 2000. Almost $24 billion of that will go to incarcerate 1.2 million nonviolent offenders.4 Meanwhile, in two of our nation's largest states, California and New York, the prison budgets outstripped the budgets for higher education during the mid-1990s.5

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That's a lot of money, Amka.
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
I don't want to drift off onto a tangent, so for right now, let's just agree to disagree and stay focused on the whole drug thing.
 

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Posted by Chaeron (Member # 744) on :
 
Amka, I believe you may have a warped view of the scope of drug abuse, and the problems it creates. Also, you are failing to distinguish what is casued by drugs and what is caused by drug prohibition. Another problem I have with prohibition, is that it is incompatable with the values of a free society, and that policy, especially taken to the extent of the war on drugs, seriously undermines other civil liberties and corrupts the judicial system.

I have written lengtly on this subject in the past on this forum, and for the sake of my wrists, I will not reiterate that here. What I will do, however, is provide the opinions of two respected publications on the issue: The Economist and The National Review. I chose these two because they seemed two very different publications who both make a well stated and researched case for legalization. The latter is particulary good as it containes the different rationales for drug law reform of several different people, many of whom are well respected authorities on the areas in which they write.

The NRO article can be found here.

Here is an editorial from The Economist, Jul. 26, 2001:

quote:

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IT IS every parent's nightmare. A youngster slithers inexorably from a few puffs on a joint, to a snort of cocaine, to the needle and addiction. It was the flesh-creeping heart of “Traffic”, a film about the descent into heroin hell of a pretty young middle-class girl, and it is the terror that keeps drug laws in place. It explains why even those politicians who puffed at a joint or two in their youth hesitate to put the case for legalising drugs.

The terror is not irrational. For the first thing that must be said about legalising drugs, a cause The Economist has long advocated and returns to this week (see survey), is that it would lead to a rise in their use, and therefore to a rise in the number of people dependent on them. Some argue that drug laws have no impact, because drugs are widely available. Untrue: drugs are expensive—a kilo of heroin sells in America for as much as a new Rolls-Royce—partly because their price reflects the dangers involved in distributing and buying them. It is much harder and riskier to pick up a dose of cocaine than it is to buy a bottle of whisky. Remove such constraints, make drugs accessible and very much cheaper, and more people will experiment with them.

A rise in drug-taking will inevitably mean that more people will become dependent—inevitably, because drugs offer a pleasurable experience that people seek to repeat. In the case of most drugs, that dependency may be no more than a psychological craving and affect fewer than one in five users; in the case of heroin, it is physical and affects maybe one in three. Even a psychological craving can be debilitating. Addicted gamblers and drinkers bring misery to themselves and their families. In addition, drugs have lasting physical effects and some, taken incompetently, can kill. This is true both for some “hard” drugs and for some that people think of as “soft”: too much heroin can trigger a strong adverse reaction, but so can ecstasy. The same goes for gin or aspirin, of course: but many voters reasonably wonder whether it would be right to add to the list of harmful substances that are legally available.

Of Mill and morality

The case for doing so rests on two arguments: one of principle, one practical. The principles were set out, a century and a half ago, by John Stuart Mill, a British liberal philosopher, who urged that the state had no right to intervene to prevent individuals from doing something that harmed them, if no harm was thereby done to the rest of society. “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign,” Mill famously proclaimed. This is a view that The Economist has always espoused, and one to which most democratic governments adhere, up to a point. They allow the individual to undertake all manner of dangerous activities unchallenged, from mountaineering to smoking to riding bicycles through city streets. Such pursuits alarm insurance companies and mothers, but are rightly tolerated by the state.


Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign



True, Mill argued that some social groups, especially children, required extra protection. And some argue that drug-takers are also a special class: once addicted, they can no longer make rational choices about whether to continue to harm themselves. Yet not only are dependent users a minority of all users; in addition, society has rejected this argument in the case of alcohol—and of nicotine (whose addictive power is greater than that of heroin). The important thing here is for governments to spend adequately on health education.

The practical case for a liberal approach rests on the harms that spring from drug bans, and the benefits that would accompany legalisation. At present, the harms fall disproportionately on poor countries and on poor people in rich countries. In producer and entrepot countries, the drugs trade finances powerful gangs who threaten the state and corrupt political institutions. Colombia is the most egregious example, but Mexico too wrestles with the threat to the police and political honesty. The attempt to kill illicit crops poisons land and people. Drug money helps to prop up vile regimes in Myanmar and Afghanistan. And drug production encourages local drug-taking, which (in the case of heroin) gives a helping hand to the spread of HIV/AIDS.

In the rich world, it is the poor who are most likely to become involved in the drugs trade (the risks may be high, but drug-dealers tend to be equal-opportunity employers), and therefore end up in jail. Nowhere is this more shamefully true than in the United States, where roughly one in four prisoners is locked up for a (mainly non-violent) drugs offence. America's imprisonment rate for drugs offences now exceeds that for all crimes in most West European countries. Moreover, although whites take drugs almost as freely as blacks and Hispanics, a vastly disproportionate number of those arrested, sentenced and imprisoned are non-white. Drugs policy in the United States is thus breeding a generation of men and women from disadvantaged backgrounds whose main training for life has been in the violence of prison.

Legalise to regulate

Removing these harms would bring with it another benefit. Precisely because the drugs market is illegal, it cannot be regulated. Laws cannot discriminate between availability to children and adults. Governments cannot insist on minimum quality standards for cocaine; or warn asthma sufferers to avoid ecstasy; or demand that distributors take responsibility for the way their products are sold. With alcohol and tobacco, such restrictions are possible; with drugs, not. This increases the dangers to users, and especially to young or incompetent users. Illegality also puts a premium on selling strength: if each purchase is risky, then it makes sense to buy drugs in concentrated form. In the same way, Prohibition in the United States in the 1920s led to a fall in beer consumption but a rise in the drinking of hard liquor.


It took years of education for gin to cease to be a social threat



How, if governments accepted the case for legalisation, to get from here to there? When, in the 18th century, a powerful new intoxicant became available, the impact was disastrous: it took years of education for gin to cease to be a social threat. That is a strong reason to proceed gradually: it will take time for conventions governing sensible drug-taking to develop. Meanwhile, a century of illegality has deprived governments of much information that good policy requires. Impartial academic research is difficult. As a result, nobody knows how demand may respond to lower prices, and understanding of the physical effects of most drugs is hazy.

And how, if drugs were legal, might they be distributed? The thought of heroin on supermarket shelves understandably adds to the terror of the prospect. Just as legal drugs are available through different channels—caffeine from any cafe, alcohol only with proof of age, Prozac only on prescription—so the drugs that are now illegal might one day be distributed in different ways, based on knowledge about their potential for harm. Moreover, different countries should experiment with different solutions: at present, many are bound by a United Nations convention that hampers even the most modest moves towards liberalisation, and that clearly needs amendment.

To legalise will not be easy. Drug-taking entails risks, and societies are increasingly risk-averse. But the role of government should be to prevent the most chaotic drug-users from harming others—by robbing or by driving while drugged, for instance—and to regulate drug markets to ensure minimum quality and safe distribution. The first task is hard if law enforcers are preoccupied with stopping all drug use; the second, impossible as long as drugs are illegal. A legal market is the best guarantee that drug-taking will be no more dangerous than drinking alcohol or smoking tobacco. And, just as countries rightly tolerate those two vices, so they should tolerate those who sell and take drugs.

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Posted by Frisco (Member # 3765) on :
 
That post was much clearer, Amka. Thanks.

I agree with pretty much what Stormy's said. I think we waste a lot of money and create a lot of crime by criminalizing drugs.

But I get that you don't think they should be criminalized, just that people shouldn't do them. And I only disagree with that because I've known many, many people who use them and are responsible about it.

It may just be that I'm not hanging around the right places, but I've only known one person who resembles the stereotypical 80s movie junkie. What I do see are my uncle and his banker and small business owner friends getting stoned after work. Lots of cocaine going down at dinner parties thrown by yuppies. My friends in law school who like to chase Vicodin with vodka. Stuff done recreationally. For fun. For hobby. Not all-consuming or life engulfing.

I'd chastise them for putting their bodies at risk, but I spend too much time rock climbing and playing hockey. I'd lecture them about escapism, but I'm the one who sat in a movie theater for 14 hours on Trilogy Tuesday.

In short, I don't see the destructiveness you speak of. Certainly my experiences don't show that there aren't people who are destructive, just that there are plenty of people who are capable, moral, productive citizens...and drug users. I suppose we just have different opinions of what society should be--and different ideas about what it is.
 

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Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
 
There is a lot of money spent in incarcerating drug offenders, but has anyone considered the costs of caring for addicts? And, since even pro-legalization sources admit that addiction rates will rise if drugs are more available and less expensive, how do you factor that?

One in three heroin users becomes physiologically addicted according to Chaeron's article. So, if a million more people try it once it's legal and cheap, we have more than 300,000 new addicts.

What does the average heroin addict cost the state in emergency medical care and public assistance? Not sure, but I think it's a pretty hefty cost.

About 1/3 of the calls my husband makes are drug related - overdoses, users sick because they haven't eaten or taken care of themselves because all they do is seek their next high. It costs thousands and thousands of taxpayer dollars a day to keep a fire department rescue unit in service. Increase the number of addicts, increase the number of drug related calls, and you'll have to put more units in service.

If you legalize them they won't be as expensive, but they won't be free either. What happens when the heroin addict can't keep a job any more and no longer has any money to buy his now-legal addiction? He's going to resort to crime to get it. And we're back where we started.

Who is going to distribute the drugs? Pharmacies? What kind of security measures are they going to have to put into place to protect themselves, knowing that once they start carrying heroin they are going to be the targets of crime? No matter how cheap you make it, there will be people who can't afford it and who will resort to crime to get it out of desperation. Those security measures will raise prices on every medication - we'll all pay more for it.

Once drug use becomes legal, will insurance have to pay for it? What will happen to our insurance premiums? Health insurance is already so expensive it's out of the range of many families.

What about babies born to addicted mothers? Isn't that rate going to go up? Who is going to pay for the additional costs of caring for these babies? What about the social costs - are we going to remove babies from addict mothers? Add these potentially millions of new crack babies to our already overloaded foster care system?
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
Belle, google around for an article as to the costs of legalization. I would be interested in seeing it. This is a collaborative effort, you know.

On a side note, it's ironic to me that so many liberals castigate Mr. Bush on the Iraq war, when he has thrown fiscal restraint to the winds and made it very difficult for many conservatives to argue on principle against spending massive amounts of money on fixing any problem.
 

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Posted by CStroman (Member # 6872) on :
 
I'm with Amka.

Divorce involves two consenting adults and anyone who claims it's not had an overly negative effect on society as a whole, must actually think families are stronger now than they were 50 years ago.

Honestly, unless you are an anarchist, everything we do has effects on others.

Morality dictates whether those effects are negative or positive, and the majority of the population decides what the morality is.
 

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Posted by CStroman (Member # 6872) on :
 
BTW there is already alcohol and tobacco available as legalized drugs. Why do we need more?

Smoke or drink if you want your fix.
 

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Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
 
I don't think you'll see many people actually argue that what happens between two consenting adults has no effect on anybody else. Oh, they'll say things that sound like that, but when you pin them down, it's obviously not true.

But what many people do believe is that unless an action directly harms others, it is immoral to keep people from doing that.

Personally, I disagree with this, but it doesn't do any good to paint your opponents with too broad a brush.
 

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Posted by CStroman (Member # 6872) on :
 

quote:

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But what many people do believe is that unless an action directly harms others, it is immoral to keep people from doing that.

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True, but who defines what is considered as "Harm"?

After all that is the inherent flaw in the "Devil's Law" of:

"As long as it isn't HURTING anyone, it's ok".

See, science has no definition of "harm". Harm is assigned by Morals and Ethics.

I can say that shooting someone in the head is Harmful.

Science says that shooting someone in the head will cause their body damage and maybe death.

Whether that is considered HARMFUL or not is a question of Morals/Ethics.

Science is "cause and effect".

Good and Bad are Ethics/Morals judging of those causes and effects.

You remove Ethics and Morals from the law, and EVERYTHING is excusable.

That's the way the country has been heading.

When I say Anarchist believe such, it's truly the only stance where complete autonomous individualism is believed as probable or even doable.

Even though no anarchist society in the history of the world has ever existed let alone succeed.

I for one believe that the PEOPLE define what is HARMFUL and what is NOT. And that it is the governments responsibility to reflect the peoples wishes and interests.

Otherwise it stops being a Government of the People, and becomes Socialist or Tyrannical.
 

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Posted by CStroman (Member # 6872) on :
 
Oh and to keep this back on track.

No drug users are our enemies. Drug's are the enemy and the pushers.

I look at Alcohol and Tobacco which are two legalized drugs and maybe someone could provide me with the positiveness of these drugs.

The great things they have provided this country by being legalized?

The current legalized drugs are the exact reason there should be no more legalized drugs.

But drug users aren't the enemy. Drugs are. The Pushers and makers are.
 

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Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
 
Storm, drugs are illegal as it stands. The people in favor of legalization say it will cost less.

I want to see the hard facts of that before I can agree with them. It's all well and good to say "Look at how much we'll save on prison costs" without addressing how much we'll spend in other areas.

So, for those in favor of legalization - I'd like to see the increase in addictions taken into account and how much that will affect society, versus what we'll save on incarceration costs.

Certainly the money isn't the only issue at stake here, but since it's often touted as one of the main benefits to legalization, it needs to be examined thoroughly from every angle.
 

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Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
 
Calling an idea the "Devil's Law" will not help you cause one iota with the large agnostic/atheistic population here on hatrack.

For that matter, there are a lot of religious people who don't believe in a literal devil, but I've never seen that discussed here.

Even for those of us that are religious and believe that the Devil is very real, calling it the "Devil's Law" doesn't do much either. Even though I agree with you that this is a philosophy that delights Satan, using that as an argument in a mixed environment such as this doesn't do any good. All it does is make some people automatically disregard what you are saying and make yourself feel superior.

edit: Forgetting the word "not" can really change the meaning of a sentence.

[ September 21, 2004, 12:17 PM: Message edited by: mr_porteiro_head ]
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
Stroman, your posts don't even respond to arguments already put forth for the legalization of drugs being more beneficial for society than the illegalization.

Also, I take it you support the headscarf ban in France. After all, if you support the majority willy nilly defining morality, then you must support that since the majority of French support it.

Even if, as you and Porter believe, everything someone does effects other people, where does that leave private property? It seems to me that it makes it negligible if the only things people can do on their land is what the majority says they can do.

Remember Nauvoo. When you start defining harm in terms of abstractions, all kinds of trouble can occur.
 

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Posted by CStroman (Member # 6872) on :
 

quote:

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Also, I take it you support the headscarf ban in France. After all, if you support the majority willy nilly defining morality, then you must support that since the majority of French support it.

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quote:

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Stroman, your posts don't even respond to arguments already put forth for the legalization of drugs being more beneficial for society than the illegalization.

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quote:

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Even if, as you and Porter believe, everything someone does effects other people, where does that leave private property? It seems to me that it makes it negligible if the only things people can do on their land is what the majority says they can do.

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quote:

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Remember Nauvoo. When you start defining harm in terms of abstractions, all kinds of trouble can occur.

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Nauvoo was the most populated city in the state at the time. So when you talk about Majority rule...

Again it is a must that the government reflect the wishes and values of the majority. Especially if you expect that majority to support it.

Common sense.
 

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Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
 
Actually, IIRC, Nauvoo was slightly smaller than Chicago at the time.
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
Belle, just because some drugs are illegal, doesn't mean that standards of proof don't come into play for those who want to keep them illegal, too. That is, you can do a little leg work, too.

Also, my response was less about the financial benefits than about the benefits to people. to families, if the system shifted from criminalization to prevention and treatment.

Let me just say that your question is very difficult to answer. What is addiction, really? When we talk about the costs of addiction, how far out should we take the chain of cause and effect? They're not easy questions to answer and extremely susceptible to bias.

Let's also not forget that legalizing drugs will result in *increased* tax revenue. Something about pot being one of the largest cash crops is banging around in my head....
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
Whatever, the Mormons were not the majority.
 

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Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
 
Marijuana wouldn't be nearly so expensive and profitable if it were legalized.

I don't think it could remain the largest cash crop if we legalized it and tried to tax it.
 

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Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
 
Storm, the Mormons were not the majority in the state, but they certainly were in their county. In fact, one of the reasons that there was so much enmity against the Mormons was because they tended to vote in a block. The violence against Mormons was an effort to thwart democracy. They wanted to scare off (and, eventually, kill off) the Mormons so that they couldn't vote and control the politics.

And if things had continued, Mormons could have easily become the the majority of the state. There was a lot of fear of the consequences if that were to happen.
 

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Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
 
On the topic of enforcement costs and marijuana as a cash crop:

I remember a police raid in Suffolk, VA where they swooped in, surrounded a farm, took pictures, seized samples, and burned 5 acres of pot to the ground.

When they got the samples back to the lab, the tech said, "why did you bring me alfalfa to analyze?"

There were two theories: one was the police totally screwed up and went to the wrong farm. The other was that the farmer had a section of the field dedicated to marijuana, surrounded by alfalfa, and the police burned all the evidence.

Dagonee
 

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Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
 

 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 

quote:

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Actually it's a ban on Religious Iconography in schools. Not just Hijabs. Crosses are outlawed as well.

I have no problem with it as long as any Homosexual, Atheist, and other Iconography is banned as well.

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quote:

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quote: Stroman, your posts don't even respond to arguments already put forth for the legalization of drugs being more beneficial for society than the illegalization.

Actually my posts talk about legalized drugs in our society. I don't know what you are referring to. Are you saying I have to respond to you? Forcible response?

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quote:

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My posts are on topic and have as much right existing as yours.

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quote:

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quote: Even if, as you and Porter believe, everything someone does effects other people, where does that leave private property? It seems to me that it makes it negligible if the only things people can do on their land is what the majority says they can do.

Ahem...Property Laws? You can't use your property to mine uranium or as a Graveyard or Commercial property unless tagged as such.

Personal Property is only YOURS if you abide by the laws of the country and state and county and/or city.

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quote:

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quote: Remember Nauvoo. When you start defining harm in terms of abstractions, all kinds of trouble can occur.

Nauvoo was the most populated city in the state at the time. So when you talk about Majority rule...

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quote:

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And if things had continued, Mormons could have easily become the the majority of the state. There was a lot of fear of the consequences if that were to happen.

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You aren't contradicting my point, Porter.
 

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Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
 
Yes, he was compensated - and without a law suit. They just paid him the market price of alfalfa based on expected yields, and did something to clear the burnt rubble and restore the soil. So he didn't have to even harvest it to get the money for his crop that year.

They were very apologetic.

Edit: And if I remember right, it happened because the Sheriff was trying to beat the state police to the bust, or vice versa.

Dagonee

[ September 21, 2004, 12:24 PM: Message edited by: Dagonee ]
 

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Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
 
Storm I get the feeling you are dodging the question. Why?

I'm not out to argue a case - I am content with drugs being illegal.

Those that favor legalization need to demonstrate that it would be of benefit. I say, they have not done so unless they address all the issues, including the harms that increased addiction will have on society.
 

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Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
 
Similar to your basil story, dkw, a friend of Eve's brother was raided because neighbors reported his chemistry lab in his basement.

It was a couple of beakers, petri dishes, etc. and the cops thought it was a speed lab.

Dagonee
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 

quote:

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Marijuana wouldn't be nearly so expensive and profitable if it were legalized.

I don't think it could remain the largest cash crop if we legalized it and tried to tax it

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quote:

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Storm I get the feeling you are dodging the question. Why?

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Back at you. If you read my previous post to you, it answered all of your points in this post. Why are YOU dodging the question. Saying that drugs should be illegal because drugs are illegal is a circular argument. I and others have given links that support legalization of drugs. You guys that want to keep them illegal haven't done anything, it seems to me.

I'm not saying that I won't answer your question. I'm saying that it will take a lot of research to really get a handle on the answer. If you expect me to do it all, right now, you are out of your mind. You can provide some answers, too.
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 

quote:

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Bur really, I think this is a moot point. Not many really care about the tax revenue from legalized drugs. It's a side-issue, and not the reason behind anybody's (that I have heard) opinions on whether we should legalize drugs.

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In this thread, the question was raised as to what the financial benefits of legalization of drugs would be. Taxable revenue is a part of it. My point about taxes was that there are a lot of facets to that question. I wasn't trying to make it the main reason for legalizing drugs. Many of my posts were in response to Amka's contention that illegalization was best for families and people in general. I agree that the money lost or gained is secondary to what we do with that money.

edit: I can't spell.

[ September 21, 2004, 12:44 PM: Message edited by: Storm Saxon ]
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
I have to take a break from this thread. I do have a life outside of Hatrack that needs tending. Sorry.
 

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Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
 
Storm all I did is ask if people arguing in favor of legalization have done ALL the research to prove that it would in fact be beneficial. have they looked at all the areas? If they have, point me where these things are covered.

If they haven't - they need to.

I spent less than three minutes looking up emergency room visits and what they cost.

The national average cost for emergency room visits, is $383, according to Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Texas.

http://www.bcbstx.com/employer/hccc/topic6.htm

The CDC states that cocaine related ER visits were 193,000 in 2001. That's cocaine only - not the other illegal drugs.

So we can approximate that in 2001 cocaine addiction resulted in ER costs of $73,919,000.

If we take a guess (since there isn't really enough evidence to support how many people will use drugs if they are hypothetically legalized) that addiction rates for cocaine will triple in one year, then we can extrapolate that emergency room visits will cost around $221,757,000, or an increase of $147,838,000.

Now, heroin numbers I'm sure are out there too.

That's just one of my questions - what about rising ER costs?

I'm sure if we were to look for average costs of caring for cocaine addicted babies, we'd find those costs are substantial too.

If we assume (as even the pro-legalization crowd admits) that addiction rates will go up, we should be prepared that health care costs will rise dramatically.
 

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Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
 
Belle - I think I favor keeping drugs illegal, but for the emergency room visits to be meaningful, we have to know how many visits are caused by poor quality drugs. It's a pretty easy leap to make that legalization will reduce the amount of poor-quality drugs out there. So if a significant portion of the visits are caused by this, legalization may decrease those visits.

This is why I haven't made up my mind - there's little good information accessible to the layperson that isn't being used in one side or the other.

What do people think of starting with one drug, say marijuana, to so we could study the effects on usage?

Dagonee
 

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Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
 
In 2002, there were 670,307 drug abuse-related ED episodes in the coterminous U.S.
(Table 2.2.0), a rate of 261 ED episodes per 100,000 population (Table 12.2.0).

http://dawninfo.samhsa.gov/

Using again the national average of $383 per ER visit as reported by BC/BS of Texas, those visits cost approximately $256,727,581. If they doubled or tripled after legalization - I'm sure everyone here is capable of the math.

As for babies - here is some good info, highlights are mine.

quote:

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To date, the only study of the costs of prenatal exposure to illegal drugs is a report by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) that used hospital discharge and medical chart data from a sample of U.S. hospitals.11 The GAO found that in one hospital the median costs for newborn medical care were $4100 higher for drug-exposed infants than for infants with no recorded indication of drug exposure ($5500 vs. $1400 in 1989 dollars). Because this study was not based on comprehensive screening, it probably did not identify all of the drug-exposed infants. As a result, the estimates of the marginal costs of drug-exposed infants is probably imprecise because it appears likely that some drug-exposed infants were classified as "unexposed" by the GAO; however, the direction of the overall error is unknown.

The GAO also reported that the average cost for a year's foster care for a drug-exposed infant was $6000 in 1989 dollars.11 Although the GAO study did not estimate the impact of future special education and social services needs, it noted that these costs could be very large. For example, a pilot preschool program for mildly impaired preschool children who had been drug-exposed as infants cost $17,000 in 1987 dollars per child each year,11 and the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitation Services estimates that total long-term service costs may be as high as $750,000 for medical care, special education, and other related social services over the first 18 years of an exposed infant's life.11

Assuming that the additional costs the GAO found were predominantly due to cocaine exposure, these can be applied to prevalence estimates discussed by Gomby and Shiono in this issue. Prevalence estimates range from 30,000 crack-exposed infants to 158,400 cocaine-exposed infants each year. Based on a sample of three hospitals, the GAO reports that median hospital charges were $1100 to $4100 higher for drug-exposed infants than for infants not exposed to drugs. Thus, the national costs for newborn care attributable to prenatal cocaine exposure could be between $33 million and $650 million 1989 dollars. These estimates may vary because the costs for a cocaine-exposed infant may substantially differ from the perinatal costs for an infant exposed to other illegal drugs.

Using a low assumption that only 10% of the cocaine-exposed infants require foster care, and a high assumption that 30% require foster care, the added first-year foster care costs are between $18 million and $285 million. Thus, the aggregate first-year costs of prenatal cocaine exposure are between $51 million and $935 million in 1989 dollars.

A recent study by Phibbs, Bateman, and Schwartz that examined the costs of cocaine exposure at one inner city hospital suggests that the GAO may have underestimated the costs attributable to prenatal cocaine exposure.17 These estimates, which do not include physician costs, found that the added costs attributable to cocaine exposure were $5200 (mean) per infant. There was also an added (mean) cost of $3500 per infant due to babies boarding in the hospital. Some of the boarder baby costs are attributable to problems unique to New York City; the national average costs due to boarder babies are probably smaller. The study also found that the cost effects of cocaine were larger for crack exposure and for multiple drug exposure.17 Obviously, if prenatal cocaine exposure has substantial long-term effects as well, the total costs of cocaine-exposed infants will be even larger.

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quote:

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No insistance that it can be used responsibly makes up for the fact that most criminal and neglegent behavior involves illegal drugs.

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quote:

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A person regularly using drugs is less likely to make responsible choices such as safer sex.

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quote:

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BTW there is already alcohol and tobacco available as legalized drugs. Why do we need more?

Smoke or drink if you want your fix.

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I think that statement is ridiculous. Would society ever get anywhere if once we had *something* that served a certain function we completely neglected that area because "we already have something that works, why do we need something else?" And i realize i'm comparing drugs to something not necessarily equal to them, but i still think my point that your statement is ridiculous is valid.

quote:

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The great things they have provided this country by being legalized?

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quote:

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The GAO found that in one hospital the median costs for newborn medical care were $4100 higher for drug-exposed infants than for infants with no recorded indication of drug exposure ($5500 vs. $1400 in 1989 dollars).

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quote:

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As Dag said, it's not a cut and dry issue. My beef is with the people on the other side (pro-legalization) who only quote the savings from the penal system and never consider the other costs.

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With a nod to Dag, I actually said this first.

And no one is saying that penalization represents the sole factor in legalizing drugs. You've been on the forum long enough to know how things work. Points are raised haphazardly. Very rarely is someone going to make a post that tries to be representative of ALL the factors involved in a discussion. I think it's unfair of you to shift the whole burden of proof on to one side now. It's unfair of you to continue to try and potray pro-legalization folks (ie, me ) as being somehow disingenuous by not considering other costs. Particularly given my posts to you in this thread regarding the matter. If there are other costs that people haven't considered, continue to do as you have and bring up those points.

As to the posts that you've made already regarding financial costs, it is clear that it's going to be a bit before you approach anything like the costs of enforcing the drug laws as they currently exist. That is, in the tens of billions of dollars.

One point that I'd like to raise in regards to costs of drugs is that with criminalization of drugs as the sole way to prevent drugs, the effects of drugs aren't treated. That is, people become addicted to drugs, and they have no way to get help because they can't afford it. So, assuming the belief that drug use from legalization will triple is true, if most of the 1/3 of those users can't get help for their problem pre-legalization, and not lead productive lives, and ALL of the users can get help post-legalization, then that is a win for legalization, is it not?

[ September 21, 2004, 02:20 PM: Message edited by: Storm Saxon ]
 

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Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
 
Yes, enforcing the laws costs a lot, but I maintain that de-criminalizing drugs won't take out the criminal element. People will still resort to crime to get a hold of drugs if they cannot afford them, and my experience in the pharmaceutical industry leads me to believe that even a legal version of heroin is still going to be mighty expensive.

Once you consider the manufacturing cost, the warehousing, transport, and overall distribution of a Schedule II drug - there is a reason they cost so much. I have no doubt heroin would be even more expensive and even more of a regulatory nightmare than morphine.

Once they are addicted, and can't afford their nice safe legal version of heroin, they are going to have to come up with the money somehow.

So I am not convinced that if we legalized drugs we could automatically close down 1/3 to 1/2 of our prisons and lay off 1/3 of our police force. You may not be locking up dealers anymore, but I have no doubt you would still be locking up drug addicts, who have committed crimes related to their addiction.

As for additional costs that might not have been brought up:

We haven't even begun to consider the costs in the medical field in regards to managing the prescriptions. For those highly regulated drugs, you can't just hand someone a prescription with 12 refills for the year. They have to have new prescriptions each month (or whatever interval is approved) and they can't be phoned into pharmacies. Each one must be individually written, and taken to a pharmacist. That means each time a user needs a new script for his fix, some staff person has to pull his chart, check when the last script was written, take the chart to the doctor for his approval, get the script from the doc, call the person back and/or mail the script out to him. Most doctor's offices are already bogged down in paperwork because of insurance companies and HIPAA requirements and referrals and billing. These additional man-hours will have to be paid for, and the costs will be passed on to the public.

What about the additional cost of caring for addicts that develop health problems after long term use? Even if the drug supply is ostensibly “safer” once it’s legal, people are still going to have health problems from chronic use.

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Long-term effects of heroin appear after repeated use for some period of time. Chronic users may develop collapsed veins, infection of the heart lining and valves, abscesses, cellulitis, and liver disease. Pulmonary complications, including various types of pneumonia, may result from the poor health condition of the abuser, as well as from heroin's depressing effects on respiration.

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High doses of cocaine and/or prolonged use can trigger paranoia. Smoking crack cocaine can produce a particularly aggressive paranoid behavior in users. When addicted individuals stop using cocaine, they often become depressed. This also may lead to further cocaine use to alleviate depression. Prolonged cocaine snorting can result in ulceration of the mucous membrane of the nose and can damage the nasal septum enough to cause it to collapse. Cocaine-related deaths are often a result of cardiac arrest or seizures followed by respiratory arrest.

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Methamphetamine causes increased heart rate and blood pressure and can cause irreversible damage to blood vessels in the brain, producing strokes. Other effects of methamphetamine include respiratory problems, irregular heartbeat, and extreme anorexia. Its use can result in cardiovascular collapse and death.

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Effects on the Heart

One study has indicated that a user’s risk of heart attack more than quadruples in the first hour after smoking marijuana(8). The researchers suggest that such an effect might occur from marijuana’s effects on blood pressure and heart rate and reduced oxygen-carrying capacity of blood.

Effects on the Lungs

A study of 450 individuals found that people who smoke marijuana frequently but do not smoke tobacco have more health problems and miss more days of work than nonsmokers(9). Many of the extra sick days among the marijuana smokers in the study were for respiratory illnesses.

Even infrequent use can cause burning and stinging of the mouth and throat, often accompanied by a heavy cough. Someone who smokes marijuana regularly may have many of the same respiratory problems that tobacco smokers do, such as daily cough and phlegm production, more frequent acute chest illness, a heightened risk of lung infections, and a greater tendency to obstructed airways(10). Smoking marijuana increases the likelihood of developing cancer of the head or neck, and the more marijuana smoked the greater the increase(11). A study comparing 173 cancer patients and 176 healthy individuals produced strong evidence that marijuana smoking doubled or tripled the risk of these cancers.

Marijuana use also has the potential to promote cancer of the lungs and other parts of the respiratory tract because it contains irritants and carcinogens(12, 13). In fact, marijuana smoke contains 50 to 70 percent more carcinogenic hydrocarbons than does tobacco smoke(14). It also produces high levels of an enzyme that converts certain hydrocarbons into their carcinogenic form—levels that may accelerate the changes that ultimately produce malignant cells(15). Marijuana users usually inhale more deeply and hold their breath longer than tobacco smokers do, which increases the lungs’ exposure to carcinogenic smoke. These facts suggest that, puff for puff, smoking marijuana may increase the risk of cancer more than smoking tobacco.

Other Health Effects

Some of marijuana’s adverse health effects may occur because THC impairs the immune system’s ability to fight off infectious diseases and cancer. In laboratory experiments that exposed animal and human cells to THC or other marijuana ingredients, the normal disease-preventing reactions of many of the key types of immune cells were inhibited(16). In other studies, mice exposed to THC or related substances were more likely than unexposed mice to develop bacterial infections and tumors(17, 18).

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The above quotes are from the National Institutes on Drug Abuse and were taken from http://www.nida.nih.gov
 

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Posted by Maccabeus (Member # 3051) on :
 
Speaking of other costs...

I seem to remember reading about some of the prodrug advocates of the 60s changing their minds in the 70s when they realized that their increasingly addled supporters weren't voting anymore, swinging power toward the Republicans.

Nonrational behavior can be extremely costly.
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
Thanks for your thoughts, Belle. I'll try and educate myself a little more on the issue at some point.
 

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Posted by CStroman (Member # 6872) on :
 
Just a side question. Can't a slight overdose of Morphine induce a coma?

Wasn't that a big deal during WWII. Give the GI enough to dull the pain, but too much will put him in a Morphine induced coma or kill him.

I really don't know, so I'm askin'.
 

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Posted by Chaeron (Member # 744) on :
 
Belle, did you read the two articles I provided? It sounds like you did not, and a number of the answers you are looking for are contained within.

Secondly, never quote DAWN statistics if you want to make a convincing argument. DAWN is very deceptive because it tracks "drug related hospital visits". This means every time someone is admitted to a hospital and an illegal drug is mentioned, even if it has nothing whatsoever to do with the reason for admission, DAWN ticks off another mark next to that drug. If someone is admitted to the hospital for alcohol poisoning, and they admit to also having smoked marijuana, DAWN will count it as a marijuna incident. If a person with cocaine in their system is struck by ligntning, and an autopsy shows the presence of the drug, DAWN counts it. Also, DAWN allows more than one drug to be listed. If someone is admitted for a heroin overdose, and marijuana is in their system, it's a mention for both. Interestingly enough, the number one reason for ER visits for both Heroin and Cocaine? Addicts voluntarily seeking detox.

Additionally, Belle, how do you figure drugs will remain close to their current price? What do you base this on? I have already provided sources which indicate just how extreme the markup on drugs is in the United States.

If you are interested in anything the anti-prohibitionists have to say, look up the statistics on the heroin maintenance programs in Switzerland, the Netherlands and other European nations. These programs provide heroin of regulated purity to addicts through the medical system. The program has been an unqualified success. The number of addicts have dropped, their average age has been steadily increasing, and the number of overdoses and health problems have dropped off the map. Additionally, many addicts, while still addicted, have been able to get their lives together and hold down jobs, and manage their lives. Heroin addicts are not natural criminals and hoplessly unemployable. The current policies of our government see to that.

Belle, even taking your dubious figures at face value, the totals are still under $1 billion. Federal drug enforcement costs alone are already over $20 billion. This says nothing of the costs at state and municipal level.

Another point I would like to make, is that we've seen the effects of prohibition and it's repeal already with alcohol. Why must we persist in making the same mistake again, and this time ensuring it drags out even longer?
 

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Posted by Chaeron (Member # 744) on :
 
Belle, the adverse health effects of illegal drugs are often overstated for political reasons. For instance, despite all that you quoted about the carcinogenic effects of marijuana, the lung cancer rate among those who smoke it exclusively and non-smokers is the same. There is no epidemiological evidence to support the assertion that it causes cancer.

My behavioral pharmacology prof, who is herself an addiction researcher, considers alcohol to be the most destructive drug, not because it is most prevalent, but because chronic abuse is the most destructive physiologically, and it's addictive potential is so powerful. Heroin is much less destructive when used chronically, with one exception: illegal heroin is highly adulterated. These adulterants are often toxic, and cause the vast majority of chronic health problems among addicts. Additionally, overdosing is so common because purity and potency are impossible for the addict to know. As I said before, the programs in europe have mostly eliminated the larger social and health problems associated with heroin.

<edited for grammar and a bit of a conclusion>

[ September 21, 2004, 09:20 PM: Message edited by: Chaeron ]
 

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Posted by Chaeron (Member # 744) on :
 
Do I get the last word?

Looks like I killed another thread.
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
I'm glad it's someone else's turn.
 

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Posted by Chaeron (Member # 744) on :
 
What I don't understand is what about my post ended the conversation? I'd like to think that my massive intellect and brilliant posts are too intimidating for people to respond, but alas, I don't have that kind of ego. I just think I'm being shunned.
 

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Posted by Mabus (Member # 6320) on :
 
I don't think so, Chaeron, or my posts wouldn't end threads so often. I think sometimes people just lose interest. Also, sometimes I quit posting to think about an argument or look up information and forget the thread was there, so maybe other people do the same.

I've been on morphine, as it happens--nice pure hospital morphine. I did and said a lot of things I don't remember, and what I do remember was bad enough. I was vicious, rude, and disgusting. I know what's inside me; why in the world would I want to let it out? I won't even drink alcohol, partly for that reason. So I basically find it incomprehensible why anyone would want to take drugs (for the first time, anyway), and therefore what the point of legalizing them would be.
 

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Posted by Chaeron (Member # 744) on :
 
Mabus: I think you may have the burden of proof the wrong way around. While prohibition may be the status quo, It seems that the onus would still rest on those who wish to make something a crime to show that it should be, rather than the other way around.

It bothers me that people give statements like "I think drugs are nasty, why should they be legal?" in this kind of discussion. I try to give a strong case for legalization that is based on solid empirical data, moral claims about liberty, responsibility, etc. I never seem to change many minds, but no one seems to bother debating my points either. It's like there's some kind of dialectic paralysis when it comes to drug policy--things are the way they are and most people are unwilling to seriously examine if the current policy is a mistake.
 

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Posted by Katarain (Member # 6659) on :
 
Chaeron,

Well, I was thinking "hear hear!" (Or is that Here here??) Whatever... I thought your arguments were impressive. I can't say you convinced me, though. I was already convinced.

Maybe people aren't responding because there is no good counter argument?

*sigh* I think this is a long-winded AOL-esque "me too!" post.

-Katarain
 

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Posted by Katarain (Member # 6659) on :
 
Oh.. I have a question... is legalization generally a democratic or republican thing? Or a liberal or conservative thing? Or maybe none of the above... or maybe an even mix?

I'm generally conservative.. but I sometimes get the feeling that other legalization supporters are liberals.. is that true here?

I can't say that I'm particularly in favor of all drugs being legal... but I'd probably still vote for it. If I think people should have the right to do whatever they want (at LEAST in the privacy of their own homes) without infringing on others rights and be thinking of marijuana, then that thinking should apply to other drugs too. I'm okay with that.

Oh, and once I asked someone to provide me with just one instance of death caused by marijuana use that didn't involve driving. Curiously, I got no response.

-Katarain
 

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Posted by Chaeron (Member # 744) on :
 
I find that this issue has support across the political spectrum. That is why I posted the symposium from the National Review. I felt that the conservative voice for drug reform is often overlooked. It's too often dismissed as a pet cause of stinking hippes and drugged out communists.
 

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Posted by Danzig avoiding landmarks (Member # 6792) on :
 
Civil disobedience? Prison rape is a serious problem in our society, and you expect people to voluntarily go there? Not acceptable; not happening. Anytime you buy for underage kids, drink/smoke underage, or use illegal drugs, you are practicing civil disobedience. Hey, the actions of the consenting individual affect society, and anytime you show personal sovereignty it plants a thought in someone's mind. Share your drugs; you never know when the person you smoked out ten years earlier will be the judge for your case and go easy on you and others. Remember, calling things immoral is what people do when they cannot currently force you to do as they wish. The public is one or more people besides yourself.

How does it help children to take away their parents from them because they like to wind back at the end of the day with a joint or a Vicodin rather than a beer? Neglect is already illegal for any reason. Keeping drugs illegal hurts children more than legalization would.

Placing one's own desires above the law makes one a hero. Society has no legitimate claim against the individual. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you because they have something to gain by it, or think they do.

Forced to watch commercials? Is someone holding a gun to your head? No? Then kindly do not compare your free choices to throwing me in jail for popping pills. (I ate mushrooms just last night. Think of the starving children that could have eaten them!) I disagree with lots of the messages popular culture sends as well, but I change the channel. That is not having morality forced upon me. Being sent to jail for eating the same Xanax and Adderall that are given to housewives and children everywhere is having morality forced upon me.

The consequences of my actions are that I get high for a length of time, anywhere from thirty minutes to sixteen or more hours depending on the drug I choose. If you would like my dollars to go to nicer people than they currently do, legalize drugs.

I honestly believe that LDS and Christians and the entire culture surrounding them is destructive to me and my friends. I feel the evidence backs me up. Most LDS and Christians are against drugs and gay marriage. No insistence that some are not power-hungry bullies makes up for the fact that most seem to feel that they have the right to interfere in the lives of non-consenting others.

I honestly believe that such social norms as no fault divorce, promiscuity, and a general attitude of refusing to deal with the consequences of actions (deadbeat parents, bankruptcy, scapegoating, etc) is harmful to the individual, families, and society. Too bad I cannot do anything to stop this, because if I tried to be an upstanding community figure the police would use the higher profile to arrest me, and people would claim that I would be a bad example because I use drugs, and drugs are bad because bad irresponsible people use them.

The most common illegal drugs, including crack, are not as bad for babies as the currently legal drug alcohol. If more mothers used crack rather than alcohol, birth defects would go down. Furthermore, as long as abortion is legal in this country worrying about damaged babies is pointless anyway. Focus on the big issues first. Neglect is already a crime.

If you are trying to keep drugs illegal, you may not be raping anyone directly but you are still putting people in prison for smoking a joint, shooting up, or whatever.

Society can get bent. It has done nothing for me or anyone who is not currently ruling a large portion of this or another country. Kings, priests, and their followers have been saying ever since they arose that society is more important than individuals. Sorry, but no. When society stops trying to put me in prison/kill me, perhaps we might talk. Why am I supposed to be helping a society that has stated repeatedly it does not want me or my kind? Am I missing something here? Society has lost me to drugs even if I decided to quit, because anything that would try to hurt me like that needs to be destroyed.

Society does not know what to do with people like me, because I (we?) do not want to quit, and you cannot stop us. Personal sovereignty trumps your right to indoctrinate your kids.

Drug stores, pharmacies, grocery stores, and specialty shops would distribute the drugs. They will use the same security measures that places selling alcohol and tobacco do. Insurance already pays for many recreational drugs, because people fake illnesses to get legal Xanax, Ritalin, and Oxycontin. On the other hand, to my knowledge alcohol and tobacco are not covered under any plan. Is there a large problem with theft to pay for beer and cigarettes? I see lots of bums, but not many people that desparate. Heroin is dirt cheap to make and one of the most "functional" drugs as long as the supply is constant. No one who can afford starting an addiction would be unable to pay to keep it up.

We need more drugs because alcohol is pretty boring, and tobacco sucks. They are also more deadly than marijuana, heroin, and cocaine.

Pushers? No one pushed it on me; I sought them out. I became a much more outgoing person since I started using illegal drugs. If you want to put me in prison, you are my enemy. If you want to eradicate drugs, you are my enemy.

Health issues regarding needles are a red herring. If drugs were legal, no one would shoot up. Heroin was originally available in cough syrup, just as codeine, hydrocodone, and DXM still are today. Same with damage to nasal passages; no reason not to bring back the original Coca-Cola or make cocaine-laced chewing gum. No one would use methamphetamine if amphetamine and cocaine were readily and cheaply available. The only reason it is so popular now is because it has an OTC precursor. Not that there is a whole lot of reason to trust government-funded research anyway. An entity charged with persecuting drugs and drug users is not going to be objective.

Yes, drugs can kill you, as can pretty much anything else you do, including drinking water. This is why information about drugs and how to use them as safely as is possible should be taught in our schools. I do not think there is anyone on either side who is unaware that drugs can cause health problems, and anyone who cares to search the Internet or ask a doctor can find more details about any specific drug.

Mabus, you were vicious, rude, and disgusting? On morphine? Well, not everyone is; I am usually a nicer person when I am high on pretty much anything. I think you or anyone else would be a very loving person on MDMA. Either way, the fact that you were mean to people is not an excuse to make drugs illegal for everyone. As for why people take drugs, mainly because they are awesome, by which I mean interesting and usually enjoyable. Why do you do whatever you do for fun?

[ September 24, 2004, 10:16 PM: Message edited by: Danzig avoiding landmarks ]
 

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