Re:Testing Legal Highs Would Save Lives
by austerity on Sunday November 30, 2014 @07:39AM
(#8676687)
Sorry, but that's an outright conspiracy theory you have there. The drug policies are nothing but a populist response to the public demands to "do something" by politicians who know no ways to deal with undesirable phenomena other than trying to ban it. The same knee-jerk reaction is behind many if not most policies (most famously, rent controls).
In my country there are no private prisons and no racial minorities to criminalize but the drug laws are just as bad as in the US. Actually, much worse. And if you go to the comments section under any article about legal highs on the local news sites, most people are demanding even more draconian measures, including death penalty for possession.
It's not really a conspiracy theory. No one (or at least very few) actually support drug laws for the express purpose of criminalizing a certain population, and no sane person is suggesting that they do. The important thing, however, is that that's their real fundamental motivation, and the reasons people actually cite are usually just moral rationalizations.
In your country, wherever that is, the undesireables are the poor, as they are most everywhere.
Your statement assumes that drug prohibitions exist to protect the health of the public. This is, as you've pointed out, demonstrably false. If, on the other hand, you view drug laws as a means to criminalize a large percentage of the population and give police a ton of discretion in declaring who is and isn't a criminal, the situation become entirely consistent and you realize that drug laws are nothing more than a way to keep prisons full and allow police to remove "undesirables" (read: minorities) from society.
Allowing the the drug war to be framed as a public health issue means arguing on terms chosen by proponents of the drug war. We need to reject that premise and discuss it for what it really is, a racially-motivated tool for social repression. If those that argue against what you suggest (safe an legal avenues for drug use) were forced to show that, absent the current drug laws, the damage to society would be greater than the damage inflicted by the drug laws themselves, their arguments would look even more foolish than they currently appear.