What If U.S. Cities Just Stopped Participating in the War on Drugs?

Re:What If U.S. Cities Just Stopped Participating in the War... by glenra on Sunday May 18, 2014 @02:47AM (#7762400)

People "stealing to get their fix" ought to essentially disappear once getting a fix drops to 1/10th the price (so much less money is required) and once a reliable source is easily obtained (so you don't have to spend any time searching for the next fix or dealing with roller-coaster withdrawal symptoms because you couldn't find it in time).

When drugs are legal, holding down a regular job will be compatible with drug use; people will work regular hours to pay for their habit, pick up their drug at the corner market on the way home, and take the equivalent of cigarette breaks.

When heroin was a branded product of the Bayer corporation, one of the founders of Johns Hopkins was a heroin addict; he took pills. (The chief long-term problem associated with regular heroin use is constipation.)

So, no: people stealing to get their fix is an argument for legalization.

(How many people are today "stealing to get their fix" of beer or cigarettes?)

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Re:What If U.S. Cities Just Stopped Participating in the War... by Natsu on Sunday May 18, 2014 @03:59AM (#7762490)

This assumes they are employable and thereby able to afford it. And by "employable", I mean able to work, not merely able to pass background checks though the two are interrelated (i.e. there are rational business reasons to consider it a negative factor).

I have worked at a place that did not screen out such (a factory, one of the few places, as I understand it, where you could get employed with a record). We're talking about being unable to show up for work or follow simple directions after a week. I can only imagine how they might've behaved in something customer-facing (i.e. flipping burgers).

Now yes, there is the other side of that. There were also a number of folks struggling to fix up their life. These I commend and I helped where I could along that route.

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Re:What If U.S. Cities Just Stopped Participating in the War... by neurobro on Sunday May 18, 2014 @08:37PM (#7765080)

I worked in an office that did perform background checks and wouldn't hire ex-convicts. Curiously, the drug addicts who worked there tended to be highly functional and even successful.

Crap, our anecdotes paint different pictures. Could it be that neither of our samples is representative of "drug users" as a population?

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Re:What If U.S. Cities Just Stopped Participating in the War... by Natsu on Monday May 19, 2014 @10:58PM (#7771034)

Someone who hid their illegal activities so well must have been a skilled liar. And skilled liars are often highly successful, but this isn't often argued as a good thing...

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Re:What If U.S. Cities Just Stopped Participating in the War... by glenra on Wednesday May 21, 2014 @11:50PM (#7782002)

Some studies have found that illegal drug users earn more than average and are more productive than average. Though in searching for the relevant studies, the first thing I found was this followup:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1465-7287.1998....

Quote: "Using various measures of current and lifetime drug use and accounting for alcohol-use comorbidity, the authors find predominantly insignificant relationships (both direct and indirect) between drug use and both wages and absenteeism, regardless of gender."

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Re:What If U.S. Cities Just Stopped Participating in the War... by neurobro on Tuesday May 20, 2014 @10:31AM (#7772713)

I'm not sure whether some drugs have the effect of turning users into skilled liars or not, but that does sound like it would be yet another harmful (though logical) side-effect of prohibition.

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