Drugs are and amazing business and making them illegal, make rich to the worst kind of people. It's giving power to the last people you would want in power.

So, in the consumer countries you have addicts suffering. In the producers countries you have wars and societies totally corrupted, and the worst of the worst get rich.

Amazing strategy.

It looks more like a war on humanity that a war on drugs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Convention_on_Narcotic_...

Keep in mind that it came into being right as the Nixon years used anti-drug legislation to effectively take down blacks and hippies.

On top of that you have nations that wanted to hedge around their big and growing pharma industries, and others that was negative to all drugs (except their local cultural ones) for religious and cultural reasons.

In effect religion and economics trumped medical science, and the world has been dealing with the blowback ever since.

Companies make a 2x, 3x, 10x, 100x premium off of labor. The only way they can do that is with a perceived shortage of "work". The way they do that is to make enough political instability that a strong single digit percentage of people are visibly falling through the cracks of solvency. Drugs help.

Many business owners are aware on some level that they could double salaries and stay solvent, but they don't think about it, they think in terms of "market rates" for labor, and they want rates to be as low as possible, so they subconsciously collude in cultural movements which make work seem scarce, and life scary and chaotic.

Their brains don't drift to the "what if we all just work hard and get paid a fair share? what if every employee was on a partner track?" scenario because they would lose money. And they're the ones deciding what the partner agreement says so it doesn't change.

There's no technical reason in 2017 for there to be any unemployment, for anyone to be hungry or need health care, lack access to the internet, or anyone to work more than 20 hours a week.

The problem is if that happens, the working class will rest up, get educated, and demand fair compensation for their wages, and the capital class will be stuck with a piddling 20% of the global economy instead of the 80% they currently get.

So they fight tooth and nail to keep a certain level of instability, in the workforce, and in far away places.

I think you have a conspiracy narrative, and you are trying to fit evidence to support it.

One (but certainly not the only) missing factor here is a discussion of skilled vs. unskilled labor. The market for skilled labor is relatively small compared to unskilled labor, but even in that market companies struggle sometimes to fill positions, that's one of the claims companies backing H1B programs make (even if it is a bit dubious). On the other hand, there's an almost unlimited supply of unskilled labor available, and that's growing all the time. Further complicating things is the fact that the demand for unskilled labor is directly driven by the size of the market, and they tend to scale together.

People desperate for any work to offset their costs of living are more willing at accept lower pay if it means getting a job and that's exactly the situation we see evolving now. All of this so far has been predicated on the supply side of things being the driver, but there's also the question of demand. If people had options they could fall back on then the unskilled labor market would demand higher wages and refuse to work under the poverty line forcing employers to increase wages. The problem is of course that people are so desperate for anything at all that they're willing to work in jobs that can't keep them financially viable because it at least slows the collapse. Eventually they'll either move into a skilled position that gives them a better chance, get sick, die, or turn to crime or drugs to try to cope. Long term this is of course economically disastrous, the middle class has all but ceased to exist, and the economy is slowly grinding to a halt as more and more of the population finds themselves unable to take part meaningfully in it. However in the short term it means record breaking profits for corporations. It's pretty obvious to anyone who's watched the policies that corporations have pushed for the last 40 years exactly what choice they're going to make.

Far from reducing labor, you just turn it into largely unpaid, forced labor. AKA "The way it's always been".

If you suddenly have a lower cost of living you have increased your negotiating leverage. This often leads to higher wages.

Similarly, increasing people's desperation commensurately decreases their wages.

Penal labor is, incidentally, big business:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...

Regarding conspiracies.... There's no conspiracy. Like I said, I think most business owners realize they are making money off their employees. They just don't benefit from paying people a fair wage because they don't have the infrastructure to capture the additional value created by a growing human being.

It makes sense when you think about it: The reason they are a capitalist and not labor is that they don't want to have to do repetitive work, or sometimes don't want to work at all. As your employees develop new skills and abilities, it takes work to restructure the business around them. It's repetitive. "Oh, another one of my tech support people wants to train to do product design. Great." Most capitalists find it easier to just structure the company to support one kind of labor and then try to prevent employees from growing out of it.

Due to information technology, we're getting close to being able to scalably restructure organizations around a group of people with continuously progressing skills, but it's a hard problem. Only a handful of companies (with great management) are able to do it by hand today.

So for now, labor is stuck in a low energy state, even though there is a stronger equilibrium at a higher, "fair" pay. Individual companies don't benefit from going against the norm, so there's a chicken and egg situation, which creates an opening for the afformebtioned disruptive technology.

> so they subconsciously collude in cultural movements which make work seem scarce, and life scary and chaotic.

I agree that business owners will offer someone lower wages, because the job they're providing is very stable. (i.e. my friend had a choice between being an assistant manager at a chain sandwich shop, or being a manager of a new restaurant in a different city. He's taken the low-risk option.)

I also agree that there are structures that exist that encourage the drug war to go on. The iron triangle between: Politicians passing drug laws and other harsh criminal laws, DAs who want perfect records, police & prison guards who want more overtime and toys, and the unions that represent police and prison guards and lobby for more laws.

It's the business owner -> drug war link that I find tenuous. I know several business owners, of multi-million dollar companies. They aren't consciously thinking like you say they are, they are simply thinking "who do I need to hire to get this job done".

Admittedly, maybe I need to be talking to the CEO of a company that primarily employs retail or blue-collar workers.

You also make the claim that it's subconscious, so I don't even know how to collect evidence in regards to that...

I don't think your theory is falsifiable. Because you're making conjecture about someone's subconscious, and about a small group, it's nearly impossible to prove or disprove.

What kind of evidence would you need to change your mind?

//edit and I have to give credit to the other replies--- the prison workforce is a great counter-example to why the drug war would be useful from an evil capitalist perspective. I feel embarrassed that I missed that :/

Would you mind describing the reasoning behind this part?

Say no to drugs but the governments' kept it Running through our community, killing the unity The war on drugs is a war on you and me And yet, they say this is the Home of The Free But if you ask me, it's all about hypocrisy...

I mean... people liked Tupac for a reason, flaws and all.

See also: the opium wars.

It was a national security concern, insofar as smugglers bringing cocaine, heroin, and marijuana into the US via Mexico are a matter of national security for the US.

It's circular to bring up the US War on Drugs to support the argument that the opium wars were about national security, in response to a comment challenging whether the opium wars support the argument that the US War on Drugs is about national security. My whole point is that I'm skeptical of the case that either is about national security.

Yes, and that failure is the arbitrary criminalisation of certain narcotics.

Heroin is more dangerous than cigarettes, since the threshold for overdose is so low. So, probably not a great thing to be able to buy at a gas station.

Personally, I think heroin should be available at pharmacies by prescription, cheaply purchasable in small quantities. Addicts should have to visit daily for their doses, and should get some support from doctors and pharmacists if they want to withdraw. Doctors should make it easy for addicts to get prescriptions for heroin, and clean, safe drug delivery options.

It's a matter of harm reduction. It would help reduce overdoses because dosages would be exact. It would help reduce organized crime, because the money would be diverted to legitimate channels and taxed.

These kinds of ideas are already being discussed in Vancouver, where black market fentanyl and carfentanil is causing a rash of fatal overdoses. While we have safe injection sites, addicts are still using black market drugs which are wildly unpredictable.

I strongly support this as well. Focusing on harm reduction with a stable slope to coming off the addiction. Criminalizing, as the parent poster said, is giving piles of money (power) to people who really, really, really shouldn't be getting it.

I don't "do drugs", and have never done them. The closest I've come is a bit too much to drink. I have no horse in making heroin legal. But I do have the horse race of not wanting to see addicts lined up on the street; not wanting homeless camps turned into drug distribution zones... we have significant problems in Seattle from meth/heroin, and it's time to change what isn't working.

Handing out known quality heroin eliminates that risk.

There is also the longer term side effects of the drug. The way those abused heroin addicts look, if you ignore most bruises (some are a consequence of withdrawal symptoms, wild involuntary movements, presumably not all though), is a medical condition.

The real problem is impurity... people get used to stuff at a certain purity, and then are sold either a much purer batch or something laced with a strong synthetic opiod like Fentanyl.

This is a good sentiment, but I think it would be a disaster in practice. You already have pharmacists moralizing and deciding whether or not to sell birth control (still legal at least in multiple US states last I checked). I don't think it's going to go well to give them power of addicts as well. You need to be sending them to people like social workers, who are made the choice to help with recovery.

I generally go for the person liberty argument, but heroin is a tough sell even to me because of how ridiculously addictive it is. But I see a lot of harm coming due to certain things being illegal, and a lot of harm coming from many of the things we prescribe because the alternatives have an irrational stigma. I've had some very passionate (i.e. rude) messages sent to me on Facebook because I support legalizing marijuana, and apparently this makes me equivalent to a serial child murderer because people might drive under the influence. Nevermind how bad drunk driving statistics are or how easy marijuana is to obtain anyway, or how some of these same people are on opiate pain killers 24/7

We don't police clothing distribution, and lots of people buy clothes, why haven't violent gangs selling clothing just taken over the city? Because they're outcompeted by law-abiding sellers who don't have all the overhead costs of evading the law, who use legal, nonviolent means to wage their turf wars.

As you point out in another comment, every jurisdiction that has decriminalized drug usage while keeping selling drugs illegal has continued to police drug distribution. I'm not OP, but suggesting we stop policing drug distribution implies to me that we're making drug distribution legal. Which is to say, making selling drugs legal. Just like alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine. I'm not saying I agree that's what we should do, but it's a defensible position to take, and seems to me like the obvious reading of OP's comment.

You don't get to choose between having drugs and not having drugs. Everywhere in the world has drugs, you just get to choose whether you have an underground criminal black market that the state creates through its policies or not.

The whole decriminalization of consumption argument just moves the goalpost. You create the same problem The Netherlands has had with weeds for the past few decades, which is admittedly better than most of the rest of the world, but production remains and unregulated black market.

Also, some studies suggest that the current arbitrary blanket ban has hindered possibly useful medical research related to some of the currently prohibited substances.

If there was a drug that gave the user unimaginable euphoria or was guaranteed to kill them with a 50/50 chance should we do everything in our power to stop that? Especially for the young and impressionable? Even as someone who thinks heroin should be legal that gives me pause.

Should knifes for personal use be legal to purchase? How about guns? How about artillery? Tanks? Nuclear weapons?

I don't know, but thinking about these issues in absolutes like "personal liberties" tends to bring you some bad places, just like any other absolute. I think it's more useful to think about the practical implications of our actions given existing data, which shows the current drug war clearly isn't working, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't ever have any sort of ban on substances purely intended for personal use for public health reasons.

> If there was a drug that gave the user unimaginable euphoria or was guaranteed to kill them with a 50/50 chance should we do everything in our power to stop that? Especially for the young and impressionable?

We do have a system in place for controlling access to substances like Alcohol and Tobacco to minors.

I'm not the OP, but I think so, precisely out of a concern for individual liberty.

There are also prudential concerns, e.g. that criminalisation actually results in worse outcomes for addicts, dealers & society. But even were that not the case, I'd be in favour of legalisation.

Few if any substances actually automatically mean throwing one's life in the gutter; the issue of substance abuse is much more complicated (with many external variables that have nothing to do with the substances themselves) – and it may not be relevant to the majority of the population at all.

In my personal opinion, if it were possible to enact a law which would have the effect of ending cigarette usage in the US without any other unnecessary effects (cigarette company employees losing their jobs would be a necessary effect, of course; everyone dying because we nuked the world, on the other hand, would be an unnecessary effect), then I would be 100% in favor of enacting it.

Such a law is not physically possible. A law that says "no one shall smoke, buy, sell, or make cigarettes" would not end cigarette usage in the US and would have so many ancillary negative effects as to be worse than the current situation. We saw this with Prohibition, and we're seeing it right now with the War on Drugs.

---

It's also worth noting that there is plenty of underexplored middle ground between criminalization and being available at every corner store, such as:

- illegal but not criminal: minor fines for using, huge fines for selling

- suspension of privileges like driver's licenses

- you have to register on a list when you buy and be subject to social services checking up on you (list would obviously be at least as private as medical info, and you get expunged when you get clean)

- available with obstacles such as doctor's prescription, or over-the-counter but still only a subset of pharmacies

If we took even 1% of the total we spend prosecuting addicts and used it internationally, we could probably put a much more severe dent in supply. We already invaded Afghanistan, but in many cases helped the farmers instead of shut them down (this is a complex issue, opium is a much more valuable crop than food - but its a problem money can solve ). We could work with other countries to disincentivize coca production (again - the farmers that grow it can choose coca or bananas, guess which is worth more ?)

There are so many other ways to shut down the drug war, but the first place is to stop prosecuting people for possession.

Drugs destroy life ? They dont destroy it as much as spending 10 years in jail for having few gms of heroine.

The overall theme of politics these days is to create an "other" group and blame everything on that group. Demonise that group and take more power in hand to then hurt them to cover up the failures of the government doing basic things.

Muslims, illegal immigrants, Asians, China, Blacks, stoners, hippies, Rock musicians, top 1% etc.

Thus government gets to pretend that they are doing something for "us".

It doesn't have to be. The system random walks through all sorts of configurations. All we need to end up like this is no incentive to fix these problems when they occur. In fact, we find a mild incentive to not fix it. In time, all of the poisonous sludge the system produces runs down and collects in these crevices.

What's most odious to us casual onlookers is that there are so many in the system that simply shrug at the human pain as they collect the spoils. "I'm just doing my job" is really no different than "I just did it for the money."

I feel the problem is less about the "war on drugs" and more about the UK's failure to help her recover from her addiction.

Changing the maintenance programme itself might take more effort, and according to this article, more research is needed: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-31943109

I dunno, maybe healthcare is just hard to get right, whether run publicly or privately. Maybe we still know very little about how to treat and fix the human body, but rapid progress in other areas of technology and the numerous developments we have made in healthcare lead us to think otherwise.

This based on the idea that free markets are better at operating efficiently.

Thing is that the ultimate goal of any enterprise is wealth extraction.

The most direct such extraction is via racketeering.

But baring that the next best option is to offer a tangible product or service others are willing to pay for.

But note that the goal is not to offer good product or service, it is wealth extraction. Thus one will aim to offer the most minimal product or service one can get away with at the highest price.

So no, i don't think there is any reason why they should fear that the US system is being gamed to introduce public health services. It is being gamed to maximize wealth extraction by everyone involved.

On the other hand, ruining existing public health services to make private equivalent look good would directly lead to increased wealth extraction by those involved with the private health services.

It's actually not an uncommon opinion in the UK, at least among the people I know. In fact, Thatcher herself introduced much of the bureaucracy into the NHS in the form of the "internal market".

In the US they are literally doing this right now with the post office. In the UK they did it with the rail network.

It's a standard part of the privatization playbook.

But Labour significantly increased spending on the NHS, from 5% to 7% of GDP before the banking crisis (which with GDP falling saw spending rise in GDP terms by about another 1%.)

Since the Tories regained power they've been cutting back on NHS spending (and more dramatically on social care, which increases the demands on the NHS.) That's why we're seeing the horror stories once again of waiting lists and winter crises, which had last been common under the previous Tory administration in the early 1990's.

http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/opinion/2015/10/nhs-spending-...

The public sector employment figures on page 13 of this report are pretty telling: https://www.ifs.org.uk/bns/bn145.pdf

1991-1997: NHS headcount static at 1.2M under Tories

1997-2010: NHS headcount grows to 1.6M under Labour

2010-2013: NHS headcount begins falling under Tories

Headcount is generally not a good metric to measure productivity or effectiveness as it's a number that politicians love to manipulate to for their respective ideologies (social welfare expansion for the left and budget restriction for the right).

Figures I found for 1997 and 2007 are similar, showing proportions of clinical staff at 49% and 51% respectively. http://content.digital.nhs.uk/catalogue/PUB00829/nhs-staf-19...

And medical school intake has risen from 3,749 in 1997/98 to 6,262 in 2012/13 - a rise of 67.0 per cent. http://www.nhsconfed.org/resources/key-statistics-on-the-nhs

It's still not enough - Britain spends maybe 2% GDP less on healthcare than other rich European countries. But at the end of Labour's time in power, there were 1/3rd more doctors and nurses employed by the NHS. The funding increase helped enormously.

Edit. But yes, the massive IT projects in the NHS were a hugely wasteful like all massive government IT projects. The approach of the Government Digital Service seems to be a huge improvement.

Building lots of infrastructure under Public-Private-Partnerships - built up massive bills - brought in under the Conservatives, massively expanded under New Labour.

The internal market, a new Labour innovation, brought in massive inefficiencies, and private profits along the way.

The current government is battering a massively weakened system.

Left and right transcend economic class. The idea that the left is rooted in the working class is a complete fabrication.

Gordon Brown also harmed the NHS by the way. Considerably.

The sooner we end war on drugs, the sooner the supply will go down, and that will mean less addicts.