legalizing all drugs

[betiko]

Hey guys, did you realize that the first worldwide economy is weapons, seconded by drugs, and petrol is only third? quite scary.

the drug economy represents about 500 billion dollars per year. I don't have the figure regarding how much money governments spend worldwide fighting drug traffic, nor how many death does the drug wars represent per year. But isn't all this something we could counter by legalizing all drugs and let governments organize that economy, a bit like tobacco? And money spent in drug wars spent in anti drugs campaigns?

If the governments ran drug business, at least it would ensure a better quality and it wouldn't be cut with even more dangerous products. Corruption would probably decline greatly and drug lords wouldn't be as powerfull. Also, given the colossal debts most of our governments have, I doubt they would mind the extra cash from the second biggest worldwide economy; nor the spending decrease in law enforcement and justice.

Of course there would still be some drug smuggling, as it occurs with tobacco. Drug use would probably increase, but I'm not even sure of that. In france, a experimental place has just been created by the government in Paris for people doing heroin ect. They provide clean syringes and a place so that people don't do it in the street. Also they have a team of nurses and psychologist to try to help these people out. We'll see how that goes.

I don't know if any of you has watched the great show "the wire"; there is a season were a high ranked police officer creates a "no man's land" where drug traffic and consumption is not enforced and manages to drop crime rates drastically. His superiors are not officially aware of it, and when it's made public by medias he basically has to step out from the police.

There is probably a great deal of lobbies who don't want to see such thing happening. what do you think?

[xeno]

I'm cool with it. At the same time I don't have kids that I'm overly protective of so what does my opinion matter. If they started selling heroin at your local cvs house moms all over the us would literally lose their shit

[betiko]

I'm cool with it. At the same time I don't have kids that I'm overly protective of so what does my opinion matter. If they started selling heroin at your local cvs house moms all over the us would literally lose their shit

what's the difference, drugs would still be frowned upon by society, and I think your argument doesn't stand as I think kids would be a lot safer. If someone wants to do drugs he will always be able to find a way. Drug wars are a lost cause and this seems like the only solution.

Also, take morocco for example. I know Canabis represents over 10% of it's GNP and it's an underground economy. Wouldn't it be better if the government could manage those profits and reinvest in education, infrastructures or whatever?

[xeno]

I'm cool with it. At the same time I don't have kids that I'm overly protective of so what does my opinion matter. If they started selling heroin at your local cvs house moms all over the us would literally lose their shit

what's the difference, drugs would still be frowned upon by society, and I think your argument doesn't stand as I think kids would be a lot safer. If someone wants to do drugs he will always be able to find a way. Drug wars are a lost cause and this seems like the only solution.

Also, take morocco for example. I know Canabis represents over 10% of it's GNP and it's an underground economy. Wouldn't it be better if the government could manage those profits and reinvest in education, infrastructures or whatever?

I think legalizing drugs is too outlandish. Ron Paul ran with it and got nowhere.

[betiko]

drug money is reinjected everywhere in nowadays economy through money laundering. Too many lobbies in real estate, hostelry, cattering or whatever know lots of income comes from drug money. Where would Las vegas be today for example!

let's not forget something: weapons is the first economy. In many thrid world countries, weapons are bought throughout the control of the drug economy by some evil bastards. There is a great deal of interference between the weapon and drug economy which are the 2 most important in the world. When you see the interests the Bushs had in haliburton ect, they had to serve the best interests of the weapon industry.

Ron Paul got nowhere, does it mean he was wrong if some of his ideas were too much for some people to deal with???

[Symmetry]

Ron Paul got nowhere, does it mean he was wrong if some of his ideas were too much for some people to deal with???

He was remarkably successful for a man with his extreme right wing views.

"...I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in [Washington, DC] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."[179]
"Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for that pro-communist philanderer, Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day!"[177][186]
"An ex-cop I know advises that if you have to use a gun on a youth [to defend yourself against armed robbery], you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible... I frankly don't know what to make of such advice, but even in my little town of Lake Jackson, Texas, I've urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming."[177][187]
“I miss the closet. Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities. They could also not be as promiscuous. Is it any coincidence that the AIDS epidemic developed after they came 'out of the closet,' and started hyper-promiscuous sodomy? I don't believe so, medically or morally.”[188][189]
“[Magic] Johnson may be a sports star, but he is dying [of AIDS] because he violated moral laws.”[178][190]
“[T]he criminal ‘Justice’ Department wants to force dentists to treat these Darth Vader types [people with AIDS] under the vicious Americans With Disabilities Act;" and “[W]e all have the right to discriminate, which is what freedom of association is all about, especially against killers [AIDS patients].”[178][191]
Other passages referred to former Secretary of Health & Human Services Donna Shalala as a “short lesbian” and Martin Luther King, Jr. as a pedophile and “lying socialist satyr" – while offering praise for former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke and other controversial figures.[177][178][188]

[betiko]

to tell the truth, I don't really know a lot about ron paul and I've never said I've supported him, but if xeno said he was supporting full drug legalization, I would agree with that. From the little I know about him I agreed with his pacifist foreign policies. Anyway, this is deviating the subject, the thread is not about ron paul. I would highly disagree with all those quotes but they're unrelated to the discussion.

[xeno]

He also wanted to do away with a lot of the useless departments like education and homeland security but I digress this isn't about him

[Symmetry]

Legalizing all drugs is a poor idea. Limited decriminalization is smarter and actually implementable.

[Symmetry]

He also wanted to do away with a lot of the useless departments like education and homeland security but I digress this isn't about him

The dude was a nut.

[xeno]

He also wanted to do away with a lot of the useless departments like education and homeland security but I digress this isn't about him

The dude was a nut.

Or a visionary. Sorry if his views weren't cookie cutter but that's what attracted so many people to him.

[Symmetry]

He also wanted to do away with a lot of the useless departments like education and homeland security but I digress this isn't about him

The dude was a nut.

Or a visionary. Sorry if his views weren't cookie cutter but that's what attracted so many people to him.

I'm ok with calling him a visionary. The vision was nutty though. L.Ron Hubbard was a visionary.

[betiko]

Legalizing all drugs is a poor idea. Limited decriminalization is smarter and actually implementable.

mind elaborating this? I gave my arguments and I think they stand.

[Symmetry]

Legalizing all drugs is a poor idea. Limited decriminalization is smarter and actually implementable.

mind elaborating this? I gave my arguments and I think they stand.

Certainly- see Portugal-

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html

The question is, does the new policy work? At the time, critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to "drug tourists" and exacerbate Portugal's drug problem; the country had some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. But the recently released results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggest otherwise.

The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.

Portugal's case study is of some interest to lawmakers in the U.S., confronted now with the violent overflow of escalating drug gang wars in Mexico. The U.S. has long championed a hard-line drug policy, supporting only international agreements that enforce drug prohibition and imposing on its citizens some of the world's harshest penalties for drug possession and sales. Yet America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world, and while most of the E.U. (including Holland) has more liberal drug laws than the U.S., it also has less drug use.

"I think we can learn that we should stop being reflexively opposed when someone else does [decriminalize] and should take seriously the possibility that anti-user enforcement isn't having much influence on our drug consumption," says Mark Kleiman, author of the forthcoming When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment and director of the drug policy analysis program at UCLA. Kleiman does not consider Portugal a realistic model for the U.S., however, because of differences in size and culture between the two countries.

But there is a movement afoot in the U.S., in the legislatures of New York State, California and Massachusetts, to reconsider our overly punitive drug laws. Recently, Senators Jim Webb and Arlen Specter proposed that Congress create a national commission, not unlike Portugal's, to deal with prison reform and overhaul drug-sentencing policy. As Webb noted, the U.S. is home to 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners.

At the Cato Institute in early April, Greenwald contended that a major problem with most American drug policy debate is that it's based on "speculation and fear mongering," rather than empirical evidence on the effects of more lenient drug policies. In Portugal, the effect was to neutralize what had become the country's number one public health problem, he says.

"The impact in the life of families and our society is much lower than it was before decriminalization," says Joao Castel-Branco Goulao, Portugual's "drug czar" and president of the Institute on Drugs and Drug Addiction, adding that police are now able to re-focus on tracking much higher level dealers and larger quantities of drugs.

Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Maryland, like Kleiman, is skeptical. He conceded in a presentation at the Cato Institute that "it's fair to say that decriminalization in Portugal has met its central goal. Drug use did not rise." However, he notes that Portugal is a small country and that the cyclical nature of drug epidemics — which tends to occur no matter what policies are in place — may account for the declines in heroin use and deaths.

The Cato report's author, Greenwald, hews to the first point: that the data shows that decriminalization does not result in increased drug use. Since that is what concerns the public and policymakers most about decriminalization, he says, "that is the central concession that will transform the debate.

Now perhaps you can provide some evidence for a successful example of legalisation?

[betiko]

Legalizing all drugs is a poor idea. Limited decriminalization is smarter and actually implementable.

mind elaborating this? I gave my arguments and I think they stand.

Certainly- see Portugal-

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html

Now perhaps you can provide some evidence for a successful example of complete legislation?

lol, interesting article, have you actually ready it? It shows that drug use has declined in Portugal as well as HIV due to dirty needles. there is your example, the one you just provided me thank you.

also, this is just about the consumers. I'm talking about something bigger. Governments controlling production, quality control, distribution and incomes.