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Part 1 of 2. Law Enforcement Against Prohibition explains their mission and reasons for wanting to reform the drug war.
Each speaker has a law enforcement background, most as active drug warriors. Members include judges, narcotics cops, corrections officers, prison wardens and at least one former Governor though not all speak here.
Part two can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E48guWoQGa4
Their home page with member bios and other information can be found at http://www.leap.cc/
Each speaker has a law enforcement background, most as active drug warriors. Members include judges, narcotics cops, corrections officers, prison wardens and at least one former Governor though not all speak here.
Part two can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E48guWoQGa4
Their home page with member bios and other information can be found at http://www.leap.cc/
The following link is to an hour long audio documentary from American Radioworks, first section covers that in part. Corporate-Sponsored Crime Laws. The American Legislative Exchange Council is one example covered, corporate sponsored laws for profit rather than social reasons. The whole program was good but that part in particular seems relevant.
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/corrections/index.html
Legal doesn't mean party in the streets or free use, it just means arrest isn't automatic for use. What I imagine is softer drugs such as pot sold in liquor stores and such while others depending on risk get less and less available until we finally get to heroin. Believe it or not we've got proof, it can be regulated with good effect. The Swiss are doing it now, in a limited way. That should help guide them toward less risky ones by level of availability, reinforce that with real education and no scare tactics.
The following page is from the Drug Policy Forum of Texas, it shows some of the results the Swiss had in the early years of their program plus some examples of the program right here in the US in the early 1900's. We don't tend to remember, but it did work here too. This part just covers the heroin maintenance program, from my understanding that's the last step after treatment and efforts to get them off the drug have failed. Just for real addicts, you can't get it just for asking and it isn't the whole program.
http://www.dpft.org/heroin.htm
It's a few years out of date by now, the Lancet medical journal did a more current one last year that concentrated on the treatment rather than the maintenance aspects. Full article unfortunately is pay for access only but it was referred to in a number of scientific and medical publications, drug war facts has a number of quotes collected at the following link with sources listed for those who wish to look for themselves.
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/hatreatm.htm
Legal just means get rid of schedule 1, schedule one restricts all use including medical and allows few options but prison. Get rid of schedule 1 and try regulating the stuff in a way guided by science and results, that doesn't add up to uncontrolled use or party in the streets. It would I think add up to more sound health policy and the ability to adjust and actually control the problem rather than just make gestures toward it. We know we can deal with pot, it seems we can heroin as well. The ones between should find their spots too, if we're allowed the trial studies to find how to deal with them best.
One advantage of drug prohibition is that it lets you jail potential law breakers before they have a chance to commit a "real" crime. For instance, for Oregon, Portland police reports 85% of property crimes being associated with meth abuse. Hence, by jailing meth users on sight, you would create more benefit to the society by preventing thefts, than the cost incurred by keeping them in jail.
Unfortunatly that's not true. Let's take a generic make believe drug for example, it costs $1000 a kilo at the source and is worth $100,000 a kilo by the time it hits the US streets. Ok, so we pull a plan Columbia or whatever and triple the price at the source, now we've reduced the middleman profit from $99,000 a Kilo to $97,000 a kilo.
That's more or less the type of situation we're dealing with. But wait, it gets worse.
These are screen captures which in some cases contain minor errors I'd guess are due to being taken before the source was updated for the last census but Ive found no error that changed the results, just minor discrepancies in population totals. You can check the sources yourself though, I have.
Adjusted for inflation to constant 2002 dollars, heroin dropped from $1,974.49 a gram in 1981 to $372.00 a gram in 2002.
http://www.briancbennett.com/charts/fed-data/heroin-prices.htm
Heroin purity in the same 1 gram range climbed from 8 percent in 1981 to 39% last stats after a peak of 44%.
http://www.briancbennett.com/charts/fed-data/heroin-purity.htm
That might have lead to the climb in the death rates, crude death rate bouncing between 0.2 and 0.1 a year in 1979-1980 which climbed to 1.1 by 1998.
http://www.briancbennett.com/charts/death/cdc/opiates-yr.htm
I could go on into the stats for cocaine if you'd like, or whatever. I know all the arguments for why we should do this, problem is all we've really accomplished is to become the most imprisoned nation in the world and we still have one of the worst abuse rates. Here's our prison stats compared to the world, according to The International Centre For Prison Studies out of Kings College, London.
http://www.prisonstudies.org/
Select language, World Prison Brief, Highest to lowest rates, then if you want totals or rates.
What we're doing isn't taking us to a good place.
Prices can go down for other reasons. Enforcement will increase the money that has to be spent on evading enforcement so it will tend to increase prices, not decrease them. In other words, the factors that made drug prices decrease under current drug war policy, would make the prices drop even further if the drug producers didn't have to deal with the costs of confiscated equipment, jailed runners, ruined crops, etc.
Prices
http://www.briancbennett.com/charts/fed-data/cocaine-prices.htm
Purity
http://www.briancbennett.com/charts/fed-data/cocaine-purity.htm
Death
http://www.briancbennett.com/charts/death/cdc/cocaine-yr.htm
That our prison system has grown due to it is more clear, that it hasn't solved the problem seems clear enough, and last I heard the poppy fields in Afghanistan this year are at record levels. Who are we working for here?
Have we accomplished anything more than to build a record breaking prison industry for little or no results as we financed our enemies? If not, exactly who do we think we'd be "giving up" to if we stopped? The people who profit the most by this?
It's time to put pride and politics aside and look at the results.
but i *really* hate the fact the world has to go at the speed of the dumbest. You could never do the above because some idiot would buy dodgy drugs to murder someone or whatever. So much in this world exists just because someone had enough brain to breath and not alot else.
In my home town Utrecht, The Netherlands, there is free heroin distribution and user places for registered addicts. It's working great, the addicts steal much less and they get better conditions because they have clean and warm places to use the drugs. Many addicts have even started low skill jobs or quit altogether because they receive good help. Also there are much less new addicts than there used to be, but that has more to do with education. Education is really important if you want to legalize drugs.
I'm not for complete legalization, I'm more for regulation. So besides a regular pharmacy they should also have a recreational pharmacy. The product is of good quality, so safer and less chance of overdose. There is trained staff who can give advice and a booklet with each drug, telling the true story of the dangers, not the government propaganda. These drugs could be taxed, where the taxes could be used to set up good and free addict treatment and deal with any negative side effects.
Next stop, the end of most of organized crime.
Also whatever you think of drugs and their effects, for me it always boils down to a basic principle of freedom. If this is a free country I want to be able to put anything I desire into my body. The only reason to arrest me for drugs should be if I violate someone else's freedom while on them.
cybrbeast -- I find utilitarianism more coherent than philosophy of "freedom at any cost." Suppose a child demands to eat ice-cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner, should we abridge his freedom to spare his health?
The argument against complete freedom for children is that they are often unable to make rational decisions. The same holds for adults. A drug addict may know that drugs are bad for him, but will continue to seek a hit. Or consider a person on a diet that keeps breaking his promise to lose weight.
You can view this myopic irrationality as a side-effect of humans evolving in a different environment. Small reward now is preferred over large reward later because future has been inherently uncertain. Life-spans were short and you could easily die before getting to that large reward.
People can live much longer nowadays, so this mechanism is no longer inappropriate. In addition, artificial chemicals can hijack the natural reward pathways, and that's another vulnerability. People coming together
to outlaw drugs are essentially making an effort to protect themselves from their own weaknesses.
Can anyone promise use can't rise? Nope. Do we expect it? Not really. Drug abuse is mostly a product of lack of hope. It isn't exactly comparable to your normal market theories because it isn't exactly used the same way or for the same reasons. Is the only thing keeping a needle out of your arm the law? Me either. We've got some members here from other nations, maybe they can tell you first hand what happens, but I can tell you what I've read. The average age of Swiss addicts is climbing, kids aren't starting as much anymore. Regulating it into a medical issue seems to have taken some of the cool or sex appeal out of abuse. Nations where pot is regulated generally have lower use than it is here where it's still illegal, some early experimentation then they got bored. Check the use rates for yourself.
I think you totally misunderstood what is being discussed as well. Complete freedom, and for kids at that? Who suggested that? Even those who aren't fond of regulation tend to leave the kids out of it and as I explained above legal does NOT mean not regulated. What I described above was separated by class of risk and access, pot fairly available on the lesser end and heroin prescription only and for addicts only at the other. Even the pot would be behind th counter and age restricted.
We're also forgetting one other aspect. death rates climbed through prohibition, the size of our prison/jail systems increased by about six times in size, and we've spent tens of billions a year on a failed effort that actually increased the damage. When prohibition ends there's good reason to expect much of that damage such as the increased death rates to end simply by them knowing how strong what they take is, labeling. The unknown quality, purity, contaminants and so on from dose to dose is what raised the death rates. Money spent on prison can go to education which is more effective dollar for dollar anyway, stop them before they get that far. Regulation makes it safer for those who do insist on use. So far nobody has been between our kids and damage or death but a street dealer. It takes quite a bit of assuming to assume we just can't do better than that
First an excerpt from the Lancet medical journal report I'd mentioned above. As I'd said above and as repeated in their findings, unattractive for young people now. It isn't market theory that drives this. The climb in use is in the years before the program started and why they started it, they had one of the worst abuse rates in the area. The fall started shortly after the program did.
http://www.sharemation.com/Rubin/H/swiss.heroin.summary_lancet.367.1830-4_2006.html
Second we'll deal with the idea that any of this had to do with health or safety to start with. It was more control, politics. The following link is to a speech derived from The Forbidden Fruit and the Tree of Knowledge: An Inquiry into the Legal History of American Marijuana Prohibition by Professor Richard J. Bonnie & Professor Charles H. Whitebread, II, and given by Charles Whitebread, Professor of Law, USC Law School.
It is the history of non-medical use of drugs in this nation, how and why the laws developed and when. No, he's not just some activist. He had done some research on his own that impressed the Government enough that he was a part of a team given access to government archives to research the issue. That's what he was there for. It's a bit long and reads odd at times since it was meant to be spoken instead of read, but it's a good bit of history we won't see much elsewhere. It wasn't to keep the kids safe. It was politics.
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/History/whiteb1.htm
Is any of what we've got so far perfect? Probably not. What we do should be decided by research and trial studies, even when we are doing better than we're doing now we shouldn't stop looking. It should always be pursuit of a better method. Much of what we're considering today seems better than what we've done so far, and where they've been tried the fears of what could happen often turn out to be misplaced. If in some case they aren't we trash that method and try again, that's why we start in trial study instead of widespread use. That's how the Swiss went from needle park, a failure, to the maintenance program, a success. It's a process, not a simple "we do it this way" answer. We do what works, and if we're lucky we do it without politics or special interests getting in the way.
First, a review. A good example of utilitarian thinking comes from Mr. Spock when he tells us, "the needs of the many outweigh the needs the few, or the one." This speech illustrates both the goal of utilitarianism, and its costs. Put another way, the classic scenario is: "You are standing at a train switch and a train is rushing down the tracks. A car is stalled on the tracks. If you do nothing, a family of five will be killed. However, if you pull the switch, the train will miss the car but hit an unattended baby carriage, killing the baby inside. What do you do?" Utilitarians kill the baby every time.
So let's apply this ethic to the drug problem. Heroin exists. Cocaine exists. Marijuana exists. Alcohol exists. These are the train coming down the tracks. We cannot wish the train away by making it "illegal", but we can affect society by doing so or not. So, which way should we send it to make sure the fewest people are hurt? Either way, we are going to have ugly elements in our society, including underachievers, child prostitutes, drug addicts, violent criminals and innocent victims. But how can we minimize this?
With criminalization, we attempt to force all individuals to never ingest, posses or essentially be in the presence of any number of "bad chemicals". If somebody does it anyway, we apply punishment on the grounds that our rules have been broken. I think this approach is totalitarian, and that that is almost always a bad thing. I could explain why, but we are talking about utilitarianism, which might conceivably accept totalitarian solutions (as the bearded Spock does).
With legalization, you argue that we will let the tigers loose among a population of innocents that are unable to defend themselves. And you are right, this will certainly be true in some cases--possibly in even more cases than we have right now. I happen to think not, but let's assume so--I suppose prohibitionists would argue that lower prices and legal availability would cause more people to experiment with addictive drugs--people who otherwise would not have. The question, from a utilitarian point of view, would be how much drug use would increase under legalization compared to the level of drug use we see now, plus the commonly cited side-effects of the drug war, such as incarcerated parents, incarcerated children, wealthy criminals, gang violence, polluted drugs, lost taxes, etc.
The facts as I understand them (many of which are cited in this video and in the posts above) when slotted into this type argument come down on the side of legalization, but that does not necessarily mean a totally laissez-faire approach. Regulation, education and treatment would keep the vast majority of people off drugs most of the time--at least when it matters. It is true that this approach will never result in zero drugs, while prohibition always _seems_ like it at least could someday result in zero drug use--in principle. However, I think that is an illusion, and a dangerous one because it makes legalization feel like surrender, which causes people to think irrationally on this topic.
And all this is still assuming that all recreational drug use is all bad all the time no matter what. This is essentially a moral position and might not be true either--especially from a utilitarian viewpoint (see also Bill Hicks)--but I do not think it is necessary to establish this either way when discussing the basic issue of legalization.
A relative described their addiction (to illegal narcotics) to me once. It took a good friend moving in to help him change his habits and seek help, and it wasn't through lecturing or berating; simply seeing how a friend lived a contrastingly busy and successful life made my relative realize how he was wasting his own talents. He is now in his early-50's, retired, and owns three homes around the world. I often credit him with my serious aversion to hard drugs. I also sometimes wonder, what if he were imprisoned all those years ago?
As far as effects of legalization go, consider what happened in Netherlands between 1984 and today as cannabis policy became more and more permissive. In 1984, only 4.4% of Dutch adolescents had ever used pot. By 1996, it was 10.6%. In the 18-to-20 age group, lifetime use rose from 15 percent to 44 percent.
Imagine the impact of hard drug usage following a similar trend after legalization.
I have. We've got two parts to deal with, regulation and education. Regulation helps to control the drug damage, education is to control drug use.
The death rates would fall because first of all they'd now have regulated doses that are known to be constant from time to time and that under medical supervision. If they do get into trouble they can call for help without fear. That removes the two biggest reasons for the climb in the death rates. According to the Swiss results we should, if properly done, expect improvement in terms of crime and employment as well as homelessness. Bonus here, for every user we remove from the streets that's one less who supports the dealers, remove enough and we reduce or eliminate the dealers at least where the program is prevalent. With it prescription only and fewer dealers we've got fewer chances for a kid to run across some by accident one day so maybe less new addicts, we're reducing the problem for a change. Less attractive for kids with the Swiss, why do you assume different with ours? We're also not supporting the wrong side in Afghanistan now. That's the regulation part.
We've also got them coming to us instead of having to chase them down, here we can use the education. Canada recently did a safe injection site test where they found a higher number entering voluntary treatment when they were brought into contact with medical professionals at the site. No program has a great success rate if you follow the addicts over time, but if it's their idea your odds improve.
On the rest, mind sourcing any of that? Did use rise or fall in neighboring nations at the same time? More or less? Jail or prison time doesn't seem to solve the problem of sending messages. One thing it has offered us is these.
http://www.videosift.com/video/Worlds-most-dangerous-gang
http://www.videosift.com/video/The-Aryan-Brotherhood-Documentary
The 2005 national gang threat assessment I read didn't sound too hopeful about prison gangs either, we're falling behind.
http://www.nagia.org/PDFs/2005_national_gang_threat_assessment.pdf
And strict doesn't seem to mean less use. Read this for yourself, it's easier than trying to quote it all. http://www.drugwardistortions.org/distortion1.htm
If use has gone up it doesn't seem to have been as much as it is here and with our tough laws and most imprisoned nation status. Tough laws just might not be what drives it if it moves in spite of them. I'm not sure they tried it in college or whatever adds up to a problem there, not near as much as what we've done has caused problems here.
You also said that adults aren't responsible enough to make their own decisions concerning drugs. So who is responsible enough to make decisions concerning drugs? The government? Then why is alcohol legal? This is by far one of the most destructive drugs, why cigarettes? Would you want to impose jail time on people who eat to many calories, because this is also very harmful to people.
Use of cannabis in the Netherlands went up, but this has much more to do with culture. You take 1984 as a benchmark year, but coffeeshops and decriminalized marijuana were around since the sixties. Also like drattus said cannabis use outside the Netherlands is much higher still.
How much problems do the business man snorting coke, a cannabis smoker or psychonauts cause? It isn't the drugs that cause most of the problems surrounding drugs, it's the poverty in which many drug addicts live and the money that drug users in general spend on supporting crime. Addicts should be helped and treated, not locked up.
No, I want drugs to be legal and easily available so these dumb bastards can get their hands on more of the real hard shit. They're a blight on the gene pool, and to quote Joe Rogan, "If you're dumb enough to smoke crack, you're supposed to die."
I'm a big fan of evolution, and I think it's time we started exposing ourselves to evolutionary pressure again. Stop trying to save every person with a bad idea from themselves.
People themselves. Adults are not responsible enough to resist temptation when it presents itself, but they can still realize this failing and make laws to prevent themselves from coming across this temptation. Essentially it's a larger version of an alcoholic locking the liquor cabinet and throwing away the key.
Oregon has initiative system where voters can enact laws directly. The initiative to legalize marijuana has failed three times. Given that pot is considered the "mildest drug", certainly same fate would follow any proposal to legalize the harder drugs like cocaine. So it's the people themselves making the decision to keep drugs illegal, not some nebulous "government".
Refer madness, addicts in the streets, and so on. Turned out little of it was true, but they were sold the lie. Try offering them honest education and a real choice and you've got a point. Do it based on hysteria and lies and you don't.
We knew it was lies, New York Mayor's Committee on Marihuana established that. Same mayor as the airport is named after, widely seen as a hero of the era. He was against alcohol prohibition then when the Hearst and other newspapers started printing horror stories about pot some included New York. He looks around and can't find what they claim, it seemed invented, so asked for his own study. Years later we got the following. We've always known, we just pretended we didn't.
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Library/studies/lag/lagmenu.htm
I posted this for you once before, I'll post it again and you can read it or not as your wish.
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/History/whiteb1.htm
That's a history which covers from pre-prohibition until fairly recently, written by a professor of law and delivered to the annual judges conference.
Here's some of the details they used to "convince" us of it since, a collection of some of the junk science which has been tried on us over the years. The playboy one I especially though was amusing, but all were interesting.
http://www.jackherer.com/chapter15.html
A quick example. They forced Rhesus monkeys into gas masks and fed massive quantities of smoke to them in a very short time then did it again, and again, and again, and when they were done they assumed all damage was pot and ignored things like a need for oxygen. It took a freedom of information act request to even get the Government to share the methodology behind their "proof", and when they did the world laughed. Oxygen deprivation and carbon monoxide poisoning, not pot did the damage.
Does that make pot harmless? Nope. Smoke all the time and you do suffer learning impairment, the cancer scare turns out to have had little to it but it can cause bronchitis with abuse and has some other drawbacks too. Some do seem prone to mental problems being aggravated even if not caused due to it, but that's some. Not all. Too many think it's harmless though, and we know why. With all the lies they have been fed about pot they tend to assume any warning is a lie, so much else has been.
That in a nutshell is the problem with the drug war. Use went up here through the 50's-70's in spite of laws that in places could and did could offer a sentence as heavy as life for a joint. Use went up some in the Netherlands with coffee shops. Use went up worldwide in that time period. Now look at who has problems with it, and who doesn't. With them use today is half of what it is here and the kids don't seem hung up on it so much as recognize it as recreation to be had in its place and time rather than all the time. Kind of like that glass of wine, beer, or whatever else we have with meals or in front of a game rather than all the time. It isn't safe either with abuse, but it isn't a problem with casual use at home.
Today we treat all drugs the same, pot is classed with heroin and we try to convince the kids they are somehow similar. So when we manage to convince them of half of it, that they are similar, then they find we've lied about pot, what do we expect them to think about the harder drugs? They don't believe us because of the lies. It's our own damned fault.
Real facts, real regulation that separates dangerous from mild risk. Not because no harm can come from drugs, but because so much can and it's got worse without them. What I expect is not free use, it's regulated and probably as tightly as we can. We need to allow users enough access to get rid of the street dealers, but not an inch more than we have to. Trial study and science, not scare tactics and moral requirements. At this point neither I nor anyone else knows what it'll look like when we're done if we let the results lead the way, we can just guess. We need to do the work and make sure. If it's a bad idea, it never gets out of trial study, small scale use in a limited area. If good, maybe we've got a way out of some of this damage. We'll never know until we look.
Edited to clarify the carbon monoxide poisoning point on pot.
On the pot/schizophrenia issue to a large extent I'd guess you're right. I don't see evidence that pot causes the problem as such, but I do see evidence that some have problems. We know people can react badly to alcohol, to prescription mood altering drugs, so why not to this as well if they are in some way predisposed to problems? For some anything that messes with their state of mind can't help.
The way I look at it that's not a reason to keep it illegal no more than it's a reason to outlaw zoloft, prozac, or alcohol. It's a reason to make help as available as walking into an AA meeting is for those with an alcohol problem today. Prohibition hasn't worked yet and isn't likely to, all we do is to punish some who didn't need it and keep those who might need help afraid to ask for it. If more were in treatment and less in jail or prison I suspect we'd do better across the board with the drug problem.
It's just the way I have to approach these things. I can't allow any personal opinion or value judgment to come into the issue. Sometimes that comes off as a bit colder on the subject than I mean but it's easier to deal with things that way because it works just as well no matter if I'm talking to a bunch of reformers or the local PTA.
If it's taken them decades to prove even this much though I'd suspect you're right in that it isn't too bad and likely overstated. I do have personal opinions past that on the issues, but they don't belong here if I can avoid it.
and yaroslav, about the price, remember that illegal drug manufacturers don't have to pay workers properly or abide by any kind of safety or certification process. That keeps the price down.
anyway if i could grow my own weed, and heroin addicts could get free and effective help, there would be a lot of gangsters out of a job. that reason alone is good enough for me. i can't understand why people defend the right of gangsters to abuse human beings.
You say that as if it were a bad thing.
Did you miss the part about how drugs are plentiful in prisons. Are we going to lock our society down tighter than a prison to get results in the drug war?
Higher prices are a result of the drug war but why do you think that is a positive result? The money goes to gangs and organized crime. And don't forget that the second prices rise higher than the demand then dealers would have to lower their prices. Prices are not a sign of drug prohibition working they are a sign of the amount of demand in face of the risks.
I know for sure the police are right about availability. It is common practice for high-school teens to trade cannabis for alcohol. They can get cannabis easily but alcohol is harder to get because it is regulated.
As for people making the laws to protect themselves. That is simply not possible. The people who may feel that they could not control themselves amount to less than 4% of drug users and drug users are only a minority of the whole already so they simply do not have the numbers to affect laws. Really it is a case of people protecting themselves from a false fear of "drug fiends", "drug violence" and gangs when the only reason we have any of those is because of prohibition.
I imagine a world where science determines which drugs are safe instead of the prohibitionists (DEA). We already have the FDA so why does the DEA get to "schedule" drugs anyway? The FDA can decide if a drug is pure poison, prescription only, or over-the-counter. They make their decisions based on scientific research which means something natural like cannabis would be off their radar, MDMA would be over-the-counter, and heroin would be prescription only. As long as things are out in the open the risk of abuse is lessened because of education and regulation which the underground market does not afford.
-Karl
You have to consider this, prohibition didn't work for alcohol, did NOT work. End of story, good bye. Why would prohibition of drugs work? It's the same story no matter how you look at it, prohibition doesn't work. Make anything illegal and suddenly, theres a black market for it with criminals who can charge whatever they want for the product. Not only that, but they have no legal obligation to even PROVIDE the product, or guarantee its quality/purity/safety in any way.
Prohibitionists continue to argue for jail time or other punishments because they're operating under the basic assumption that it will deter criminals from pursuing that particular course. The problem with that is that these are *criminals* and a criminal will continue being one as long as its more profitable to him, because they don't have the same moral compass that the rest of the the world has. Some of them change, and it can happen, but the majority of them do NOT, and will not because its not in their nature to do so.
By legalizing it for *Regulation and Control* (these are the key elements here)NOT for free use (as every prohibitionist seems to assume legalization means) we remove the overall profitability factor for the criminals. If you have the option of going through proper channels and gaining your "hit" legaly where you know its a good product and don't have to worry about contamination or being overcharged for bad quality, OR going down some back ally and buying god knows what from some unregulated drug dealer (who would STILL get jailed btw under regulation and control laws) and possibly end up in jail because you aquired the drugs though an illegal source... folks will choose the legal way. Under prohibition, they have no choice about what to do when they go to get the hit. And they WILL get the hit if they want it. We could even enact some kind of "Shoot on Sight" policy where cops could drive down the street and kill anyone they see using drugs illegally and folks would STILL go out and get them. Its just the way the world works. Obviously this isn't something that could actually happen, its just a for instance to show that folks wanting the drugs don't care about the law when they go out to get them. Making more laws doesn't deter them, because they're breaking the law already to get them in the first place! Make all the laws you want, but if they're breaking the law already, why would they change just because we toss more down?
I'm surprised the most important point has barely been touched on though - people in a free society can do whatever the damn hell they please as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. If that's not the case, your society is not free. THAT should be the over-riding consideration - the reduced prison population/fewer medical problems/tax revenue/better use of law enforcement/yada yada are just bonuses.
I dread to imagine what kind of world you'd want to live in, yaroslavvb.
Fortunately, we seem to be on the right path - over here in the UK we've just had half a dozen Cabinet ministers tripping over each other to admit they took cannabis. It's not a career-ender any more - mainstream attitudes are changing. Long way to go, though.
i said "ok then, let's ban alcohol" and i think he got the point.
Why other people can't get the point, i dunno. Maybe they are drunk, belligerent, delusional and violent as opposed to stoned, sleepy, craving biscuits, smiling, trying to agree with me etc.
Keeping drug addicts in jail doesn't help drug addicts. The point of jail-time is to send a message to the rest of the people and hopefully provide a deterrent.
Maybe a little late to the discussion (duh), but this seems to me to be pure hobbesian absolutism (see Leviathan, chap. 28 Of Punishments and Rewards). Hobbes had a lot of good ideas, but his reliance on the Sovereign's absolute authority (a kind of totalitarianism before the word) and his equation of punishments as simple deterrents seems backward even for his day. I think our comprehension of human psychology has gone beyond that in the intervening centuries.