So all your drug war has accomplished is to compound the abuse problem with a horrible criminal underclass, a vast and militant law enforcement regime to contend with it and an insidious corruption of people and institutions throughout our society. Despite all of this real damage your drug war doesn't actually save people; millions have been killed through drug abuse and millions are addicted today despite your drug war and the huge amounts of treasure spent to wage it.
Is it conceivably possible to conduct your drug war so vigorously that it actually stops the bulk of this criminal activity and actually saves people from abuse? Yes. It is possible. You're going to need a GULAG system and a near total elimination of your civil rights because you will need to inflict enough misery and suffering on a large enough fraction of the population to generate sufficient fear to make the rest comply. The trade of valuable, easily concealable products in a liberal market economy is impossible to stop without such measures, which is why your drug war will never work, no matter how badly you feel about the tragedy of abusers.
So please, reassert your rational mind; your drug war is doing more harm than good.
The drug war has been a total disaster. It's thrown much of Latin America into chaos, with their governments unable to contend with the sophistication and brutality of drug cartels that rake in billions from the most lucrative drug market in the world, the United States. It's also a massive source of revenue for the criminal gangs that plague our cities within our country.
The laughable propaganda from the government has also totally undermined important anti-drug messages. The ridiculous claims about the dangers of weed, for example. The reefer madness stuff. The DEA's insistence on keeping weed Schedule I. It's actually given rise to an equally ridiculous myth: that weed is totally harmless. But more importantly, it's undermined the message against harder drugs. If the government is lying about weed and shrooms, then people will think they're lying about other drugs as well.
If we don't win the cultural battle against drug use being acceptable, then all is lost. You're right that no amount of law enforcement can change that in a liberal democracy. But assuming that battle can be won, this is what I think needs to happen on the legal and military end:
I say legalize weed and other drugs with lower abuse potential; this will immediately destroy the largest segment of the illegal drug market. For hard drugs, stop imprisoning people for possession. Withhold the first arrest for simple possession from the public record, so it doesn't show up on background checks and destroy people's ability to get a job. This will create the public support for what must come next: come down like an iron fist on the weakened organized crime groups that have lost their largest source of revenue. Exploit internal strife caused by dwindling revenues, turn some people into informants, and then put away the rest for a very long time.
The second biggest drug market is cocaine. Almost all of it comes from Colombia. Once the current peace process falls through or fails to stick, the US needs to help Colombia finish off the FARC completely. Unconditional surrender should be the only acceptable outcome. A complete commitment to ending mass coca production in Colombia should then be a condition of their friendly standing with the United States.
Marijuana is easy to obtain and cheap almost everywhere in the US, and in some places it's even legal, yet people still abuse a panoply of other drugs. Here one may read a recent story about growing methamphetamine abuse in Colorado, a state that has had legal and extremely high quality marijuana for several years now:
http://www.cpr.org/news/story/meth-use-colorado-has-police-a...
No, we need to accept the fact that some fraction of us are going to hurt ourselves, whether with liquor, stimulants, hallucinogens, etc., help them as we can, and stop self-inflicting the damage and costs of our doomed attempts to control things that are inherently uncontrollable in a free country.
I don't want any "iron fists" in our justice system on behalf of the "drug war." Those that would ruin themselves with legal drugs are a far smaller problem than the extreme violence, endemic corruption and law enforcement embiggening we've self-inflicted trying to save them from themselves.
I care. I have family members that I grew up with that have ruined their own lives with drugs. But I never forget that every one of them was born after we declared our "drug war" and it didn't do them one damn bit of good.
Drugs will always be with us, but not like this. We can reverse the tide of destruction. There are entire communities being ravaged by the current heroin and prescription opiate epidemic. I refuse to accept that this is just the price of modernity. America wasn't like this before and it doesn't have to be like this in the future. We can build a better society for our children.
Abuse should be treated as a medical problem, not a criminal problem. We need to take the cops and lawyers and the prison industry out of fixing it.
Implementing the drug laws in practice targets the poor and minorities.
American prisons would have plenty more room to keep pedophiles in prison and off probation if the cells weren't packed wall to wall with non-violent drug offenders.
Not much of an argument IMO
:/
But the majority of people serving sentences for drug crimes are there for selling drugs.
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/lists/top-10-marijuana-m...
"About 40,000 inmates of state and federal prison have a current conviction involving marijuana, and about half of them are in for marijuana offenses alone; most of these were involved in distribution. Less than one percent are in for possession alone."
Remember that distribution of weed, while it sounds relatively harmless, is very often controlled by violent gangs. It's like getting Al Capone for evading taxes. The best solution is to legalize weed and put it in the hands of legal businesses.
Also:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/releasing-drug-offenders-...
There he shows that releasing all prisoners who are in jail with drug offenses as the most serious charge would only reduce the prison population by about 14%. This is counting both distribution AND simple possession. Not insignificant, but not the headline figure of 50% that you often hear.
So without more details about the particular state laws, it's impossible to know who was really jailed for "possession alone" vs "distributing".
Because giant corporations are 'less evil' than the gangs.
looks at virtually every major corporation's use of cheap, offshore labour, sometimes child labour
At least the gangs are upfront about killing people.
For a long time, I believed that we're better off legalizing all drugs and making them available to anyone who wants to buy them. But I've had a change of heart recently.
People simply aren't in control of themselves when they're addicted to these substances. The crooked doctors, the pain clinics, and all the complicit organizations in the supply chain profit, while millions of people lose their human agency to a chemical that alters their mind and transforms them into irrational drug addicts. It is very difficult for them to recover, and very easy to relapse. It is a human tragedy of enormous proportions. It tears apart families, ruins childhoods, and creates poverty. And at its worst, it takes lives.
We have to take care of our people.