Diablo

What do you expect from a country that when there president leaves office takes most of the money when he leaves !
(I can say this cause I have seen it happen my dad use to run a company that sold irrigation systems to farmers in mexico and i have spent alot of time working over there when i was younger !plus there is alot of drug fronts over there.
What else could it be you go into a barn on a ranch and instead of farm equiptment,hay,feed,seed and other farm and ranch stuff you see suv's,dirt bikes,dune buggys,4x4's and boats all black btw and the hands aka laborers live in rundowm shacks and get paid the equivelnt of 5$ a month and the main house is loaded on the inside and kinda rundown on the outside and they pay you in cash !)

All the gov. officials are corrupt cause there always trying to find a new way to line there pockets!

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Was that Diablo flying that helio ?

ScratchMonkey

Don't tax too much. When Canada raised cigarette taxes too high, organized crime exploded to support smuggling untaxed cigs.

Taxes suck as a feedback mechanism. Too slow, too diffuse, and the proceeds are too easily diverted to unrelated projects. You might as well poor salt water in your stereo and hope it makes it work better. Yeah, you'll create some new feedback paths, but I don't think they'll be the ones you wanted.

http://drugpolicyalliance.org/

http://stopthedrugwar.org/

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PanzerHans

A though experiment:
If you legalize drugs but regulate distrobution would that remove the prime income channel for organized crime?
I believe it is not prices that deters people from becoming drug addicts, so if prices are reduced so much that addicts wouldn't have to break into homes or mug people wouldn't that reduce crimerate as well?

Also I would think that a lot of law enforcement time is spent on drug related cases. Perhaps that time could be spent on other areas like domestic crimes white collar crime, or preventive activities?

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VI VI VI - the number of the beast

ChIck3nL3gz

Magnum think about it this way.

Darwinism.

If all these idiots kill themselves because of legalized Cocaine and Heroin the world will be a much better place. I say chain all the criminals to a table with a gun electronically controlled and aimed at their heads. Tell them one switch on the arm of the chair unlocks it and opens a door to their freedom. The other will discharge the weapon killing them instantly. See how many crooks we have running around the streets.

Legalizing these drugs for the abusers is good news. Because its like giving a loaded weapon to a child. They have no self control and will eventually kill themselves.

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[volun][drill]
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Rules and SOPs

ScratchMonkey

Heroin is no worse than rum and most "hard" liquor. It should carry no harder penalty.

The drug war started when almost-out-of-work Prohibition bureacrats came up with the idea of persecuting drugs used primarily by minorities with no political power. They couldn't defeat the white drug of choice, and they still needed their jobs, so they switched to an easier target. Tell everyone that their daughters were endangered by the date-rape drugs of minorities and it was an easy sell.

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Spartan25

Holy racism batman! Ask how the war on drugs is doing in singapore. I betcha they don't get any DUI repeats.

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99. A smiley face is not used to mark a minefield.
100. Claymore mines are not filled with yummy candy, and it is wrong to tell new soldiers that they are.
101. I am not allowed to mount a bayonet on a crew-served weapon.

CingularDuality

That's enough of the sensational accusations.

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ScratchMonkey

Some history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_(drugs)
http://www.drugpolicy.org/about/posi...er_history.cfm
http://blogs.salon.com/0002762/stori...naIllegal.html

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Grunt 70

I respectfully disagree with your assessment.

Here in SE Massachusetts we are living in crisis of heroin and opiates abuse. Heroin is 3 times more pure than it was in the seventies and the stigma that went along with it then is long gone. Young people are dying by the score in MA due to herion and opiate overdoses.

Sure people kill themselves by drinking too but its just different.

How do I know this?--

My friend Joanne has been living the worst nightmare any parent could imagine. Her son was given some oxycontin at a party the summer after he graduated high school. He liked it. He liked it so much he wanted to do it again. then again and again and again. He graduated to heroin because he could get high for 10 bucks a day instead of the $300-$400 a day OC costs.

This boy came from a two parent, happily married family, he was a track and football star in highschool. He made the honor roll every quarter and also joined the MA National Guard. He did so well at boot camp he was invited to OCS. He had a gorgeous girlfiend and He was enrolled in college for he fall...he had everything good in his life that you could want.

His life became everything bad you've ever heard about heroin addicts. He stole from everyone he knew to get high and everything in life that was worth something he destoyed. For two years his mother battled with the state to get him in treatment programs, only to see him relapse worse and worse each time. The state remanded him to custody for one last try at rehab. That was 14 months ago. He's had to move away from everything he ever knew and start his life over again from scratch. Because of his drug convictions while using he is eliminated from all kinds of support for school or otherwise. He'll never be able to rejoin the military.

Sure--there are a million stories of alcholoism out there that would rival this story. But Heroin and OC arne't in the same league as alchohol.

My friend started a support group that has now gone nation wide. You can see it at www.learn2cope.org.

She speaks at high shools and other locations around the commonwealth. You can go to her website and then on to the Yahoo forum she started I'm so proud of her--and her son--he just celebrated his 14th month of sobriety.

Ok......sorry to rant but I felt I had to add my .02

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|TG-22nd|Grunt



"When force is necessary, it must be applied boldly, decisively, and completely. But one must know the limitations of force; one must know when to blend force with maneuver" - Leon Trotsky

Arf

It wouldn't remove the prime income for organized crime. It could actually give them the opportunity to make more money. The problem with taxing drugs is that we already have a black market system in place. Addicts would simply buy the cheaper smuggled kind. Even if it wasn't taxed organized crime would still sell the drugs but now their funding would be legitimate.

Regardless of the price you're always going to run into the same problems around these drugs. You'd get fired from most jobs for being a drunk; employers are not going to hire heroin addicts. You're not going to be able buy Cocaine at Wal Mart because people don't like to be around crack-heads. The end result is that you still end up with people unable to afford their addiction.

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ScratchMonkey

Deaths from heroin overdose are preventable

Fatal Heroin 'Overdose': A Review

Heroin overdose bibliography

It's my understanding that the incidents of overdose come primarily from ignorance, esp. ignorance of the quality of one's source. Criminalization can be blamed for a lot of that ignorance.

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Grunt 70

The conclusion I draw from your post is that heroin should be decriminalized and that the public should be educated on how to use the drug safely--Please confirm.

You know -- on the one hand this makes sense. With more education given to users of the drug less people would die that is for sure.

Despite the logic of your argument I'm stuck on the emotion of the issue. Perhaps that's my own shortcoming. But I can't get over the visceral memory I have of Joanne sobbing inconsolably the day she found out her son was abusing heroin. She bacame a wreck of a human being- and is only now coming out of it several years later.

Just how many lives would be lost if heroin use is decriminalized? Is it more than the lives of the current addicts that would be saved? Surely with decriminilazation will come an even greater acceptance and willingness to use this insipid drug. I'm not sure any of us here can answer this question definitively--but I only hope and pray that my 13 year old son and my 3 year old daughter don't ever live in a world where heroin use is passe.

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|TG-22nd|Grunt



"When force is necessary, it must be applied boldly, decisively, and completely. But one must know the limitations of force; one must know when to blend force with maneuver" - Leon Trotsky

xTYBALTx

I think most of us believe that heroin legalization would save lives. Big time. But heroin decriminalization (such as the Mexican drug laws described in this thread) wouldn't be expected to save nearly as many.

Would you rather they live in a world in which heroin use is forbidden, sexy, stylish, and risque?

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A policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy. -F.A. Hayek

RandomGuy

To me it is clear that the costs of the prohibition of herion and crystal meth are less than the cost to society if we did not fight these battles. With vodka or pot most people would agree that it's the opposite.

As long as children have parents who want the best for their children, heroin will be forbidden and risque. I don't think that whether or not it is sexy or stylish has much to do with it's legal status.

Addict

Funny story I heard this weekend, hanging out with my wife's cousin. So her cousin works downtown chicago as a manager at a resteraunt. She has an incident where a bum(dirty clothes, pissed himself, unwashed) is outside their resteraunt acting high on something(barely able to keep his balance, looking up at the sky, head back, maybe eyes shut, stumbling around). So she finally calls the cops, as no one really wants to risk confronting him, but he's bothering the customers.

An ambulance and a cop show up, the ambulance has some sort of blood swipe test that quickly identifies the narcotic as heroin. They stab him with a large dose of some epi or something, and wham, brings the guy down in about 10 seconds(and BOY is he pissed that they wasted his high!).

The cop is talking to him and is like "you know, if you had stayed down around 95th street or futher, no one would have bothered you. But you had to come up and bother the public, and we have no choice.".


Seems to me, there is a certain amount of realism and acceptance even in law enforcement for the problem.