 |
|
Albert Speer
|
|
Puerile Polemic
Mar 1999
time: 00:35
|
|
quote:
And the excitment of doing something 'illegal' wouldn't be there anymore which translates into fewer users. |
bah... i contend there will be more users once it is legalized due to the greater ease of getting it.
i dont get this forbidden fruit arguement. history (as well as that one experiment done a few years ago with the electrocutions) has shown that people pathologically do as they are told.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Albert Speer
|
|
Puerile Polemic
Mar 1999
time: 00:35
|
|
the effects of heavy drinking (such as domestic abuse) went down during prohibition
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Gangerolf
|
 |
huuhh
May 2001
time: 06:35
|
|
quote:
KEY POINTS
Some 8.6 million people are held in penal institutions throughout the world, either as pre-trial
detainees (remand prisoners) or having been convicted and sentenced. Half of these are in the
United States (1.85m), China (1.4m) or Russia (1.05m).
Russia has the highest prison population rate in the world, some 730 per 100,000 of the national
population, followed by the USA (680), the Cayman Islands (665), Belarus (575), Kazakhstan
(495), the Bahamas (485), the US Virgin Islands (475), Belize (460), Bermuda (445) and
Kyrgyzstan (440).
|
US, China, the former USSR - no surprise
the Caribbean -  what's going on there?
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Berzerker
|
 |
topeka, kansas,USA
May 1999
time: 23:35
|
|
Dan S - quote:
Crack cocaine destroyed Southeast Washington. For about 15 years it was a war zone. It's just coming out of that era this year. |
Correction: both crack cocaine and the violence were products of the drug war, not drugs. You cannot look at the results of prohibition and reach conclusions about drugs. That's like blaming the rise of the Mafia during the 20's on alcohol when prohition was the prime catalyst.
As I've pointed out in previous threads on this subject, in the early to mid 80's Reagan and Congress followed by the states increased penalties for adults selling drugs. The result was many adults in the drug trade tried to reduce their exposure by hiring minors to sell drugs. Gang recruitment exploded and juvenile crime exploded too and has been rising ever since. The recent reductions in adult crime so trumpeted by prohibitionists ignores that the crime rates before and in between drug wars was much, much lower. It's like having 5 murders a years increase to 11 because of a certain policy and then taking credit for a reduction to 10 murders a year.
As for crack cocaine, it is also a product of the drug war. Back in the late 60's and early 70's Nixon declared his drug war and the focus was on those hippie pot smokers. The result? Traffickers dealing in pot tried to reduce their exposure by switching from pot which is bulky and smelly - easier to detect - to drugs that are more concentrated and easier to hide. Cocaine and heroin... The drug war drove the mass importation of these harder drugs and crack cocaine became the "poor man's" cocaine, a result of the inflated cost of cocaine due to the drug war.
quote:
You're right, it doesn't. However, it does mitigate the wide-ranging and rather severe impact of this use by removing dealers and users from the general population. |
Because of the profits to be made there is a never ending supply of people who will become dealers and you can never arrest your way out of problem when there are roughly 20 million users. All you do is create the violence associated with the black market.
Think of it this way, the reason for alcohol prohibition was alcohol related pathologies. Prohibition didn't reduce the pathologies except is certain dry states where black market violence wasn't a big problem. But prohibition did create alot of violence where gangs fought over marketshare.
Over all, the homicide rate doubled in the country during prohibition. When prohibition was repealed, the homicide rate declined 13 years in a row and leveled off to half what it was under prohibition. Then in the late 60s with the new emphasis on the drug war the homicide rate began increasing again. Over the last 35 years the homicide rate surpassed the rate during alcohol prohibition and double what it was between the 2 drug wars. Far from mitigating drug problems, prohibition merely increases them.
Speer - quote:
bah... i contend there will be more users once it is legalized due to the greater ease of getting it. |
That's what you'd think, but when all drugs were legal in this country there weren't more per capita users. And the per capita addicts was actually lower. The Netherlands has fewer per capita teens using pot than here even though pot is legal over there for adults.
quote:
i dont get this forbidden fruit arguement. history (as well as that one experiment done a few years ago with the electrocutions) has shown that people pathologically do as they are told. |
Then explain why millions of Americans use drugs if we do what we're told. The forbidden fruit argument is real simple, put a small child in a room with some boxes and tell the child not to open a particular box and leave the room. The child's curiousity was sparked by your prohibition on opening that one box and that child will open the box. Just think of where the "forbidden fruit" concept comes from, God tells Adam not to eat the apple and that's just what he and Eve do...
quote:
the effects of heavy drinking (such as domestic abuse) went down during prohibition |
It might have where alcohol prohibition went largely unaffected by the black market, it didn't where the black market was prevalent. But homicide rates doubled, violence exploded within a couple years of prohibition becoming law. William Bennett likes to cite a recent experiment with prohibition, an Alaskan town of about 3,000 people (largely Eskimos) banned alcohol. Pathologies declined but the experiment ended 1 year later when the people voted to end it. While Bennett implies alcohol prohibition was a success based on what happened in Alaska, he conveniently ignored that this small town was on the northern coast of Alaska where organised crime had no desire to set up base for obvious reasons nor the time given the experiment lasted just 1 year.
Are you going to answer my questions from the previous page or are you going to keep running away?
|
|
| |
|
|
|
DanS
|
 |
Kickball Capital of the World
Jan 1970
time: 00:35
|
|
Berz: That's a good argument, but its weak point is that we have prohibition and the murder rate started going down real fast when we threw more bad guys in jail. It seems to validate the proposition that indeed you can jail your way out of the problem.
I don't like the results either, but I dislike the alternatives even more.
Last edited by DanS on 28-07-2004 at 06:12
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Dr Strangelove
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by Ramo
There's about half a million nonviolent drug offenders in our prisons. |
Most of whom committed other felonies. IIRC the Bureau of Justice states that only 10% of the convicted felons currently in prison are there because a drug related crime was their major offense. There are scads of people who have been convicted of multiple offenses which include drug possession or dealing, but only in a minority of cases is the drug related offense the major offense. Therefore while there may be a half million people in prison who have been convicted of drug related offenses, most of those are serving time for other crimes and the other crime was the more serious offense.
|
|
| |
All times are GMT. The time now is 05:35.
Apolyton Time is 00:35. |
top of page
|
| archivepost |
|
Forum Rules:
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts
|
HTML code is ON
vB code is ON
Smilies are ON
[IMG] code is ON
|
|
|
|
|
|
27-07-2004 22:34
irate:
|