Re:Inside an L.A. OxyContin ring that pushed more than 1M pills
by wildmusings on Sunday July 10, 2016 @06:15PM
(#12067515)
I'm not saying that legalizing weed will divert usage. I'm saying it will deal a severe blow to the finances and internal stability of these drug gangs and massively weaken them for the final blow. It's also not worth banning in the first place, the result of moral panic not rational analysis, and not to mention that it's a lost battle culturally.
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.
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.