YOUR solution to the Mexico Crisis

[hgc]

The reason that drug U.S. drug laws are so entrenched is because of the political power of the gangs on this side of the border with a vested interest in the "drug war" -- drug law enforcement, with their asset seizure scams, criminal justice services and prison industries.

No drug war, and a lot of people inside the law will see their income stream will dry up fast. Do you think that these people give two ◊◊◊◊◊ about endemic violence on the other side of the border?

 

[bit_pattern]

You know, I expect people who claim that critical thinking is vital to an understanding of reality to be more honest with themselves than I see from some in this thread.

I think some people here have confused a vitriolic hatred of Islam and blind, slavish devotion to neo-kookery ideology with critical thinking, to be completely honest.

Prohibition did not increase addiction rates. You pulled that out of nether-regions.

Uh, it bloody well did. Your quote doesn't deal with addiction rates, it only looks at total alcohol consumption which is highly misleading because before Volstead the most consumed alcoholic beverage was beer, whereas during the Volstead era the most consumed beverages were hard liquor. You need alot more beer than whiskey to get drunk. So the total of alcoholic-beverages consumed may have gone down but the potency of the alcohol - not to mention sheer toxicity of the shoddy, unregulated bootleg liquor, often just pure ethanol or methanol mixed with colourings to make it look like premium liquor, the sort of stuff that would quite literally send people blind - increased sharply, as did addiction rates and serious health problems.


http://www.cedro-uva.org/lib/levine.alcohol.html

The rest of your appeals are equally bogus.

Then you'll have no problem proving them wrong then, ay?

Legal drugs are the leading cause of preventable death in the developed world, costing the health-care system a fortune every year. That's not a very flattering model for your laissez faire drug utopia. Your stupid idea would end up killing hundreds of thousands of people and sending the government bankrupt. Might have something to do with why no government has been suicidal enough to try it.

That is wishful thinking and blind faith on your part.

Heroin maintenance works: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6363439&postcount=75

Decriminalisation works: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10080

Wherever drugs are re-regulated and the market taken from the hands of organised criminals it leads to better social, health, and economic outcomes for drug users and society in general and far lower rates of drug abuse. Dem's the facts and no amount of snide dismissiveness from you is going to change those facts. It's quite clear you don't know what the hell you are talking about.

That's not a very flattering model for your laissez faire drug utopia.

Actually, no, I advocating the re-regulation of drug markets, to bring them back into the fold of the state so that it keep them under a very watchful and restrictive eye. It is the advocates of the status quo that are advocating laissez-faire by leaving a massively distorted market to operate freely in the shadows with no regulatory oversight. As always, you've got things completely arse-backwards.

 

[bit_pattern]

I don't know. .

Says it all really. Fortunately for the rest of us the academic literature wholeheartedly disagrees with you. And they DO know, they have the methodology to back it up, unlike you and you fly-by-your-arse BS intuition.

 

[Virus]

You haven't explained what you're going to do with the legions of new drug users and addicts your system would create. Kind of a big issue.

 

[quadraginta]

You haven't explained what you're going to do with the legions of new drug users and addicts your system would create. Kind of a big issue.

What did they do with the legions of new drug users and addicts after Prohibition was repealed?

 

[McHrozni]

Says it all really. Fortunately for the rest of us the academic literature wholeheartedly disagrees with you. And they DO know, they have the methodology to back it up, unlike you and you fly-by-your-arse BS intuition.

All that alledged academic literature and you're completely unable to answer someone like me, whom you claim to be obviously wrong and completely oblivious to the facts.

Geez I do wonder why that is.

McHrozni

 

[SatanicSheep]

All that alledged academic literature and you're completely unable to answer someone like me, whom you claim to be obviously wrong and completely oblivious to the facts.

Geez I do wonder why that is.

McHrozni

Are you talking about your $5 skag scenario?

I for one disagree that prices on drugs would dramacticaly drop after they'd been legalized. I think one thing working for the "legalize it" crowd is that people with power are quite envious of the profits made by drug cartels. They'd probally work to keep the price as high as possible.

Producing quality dope that people pay top dollar for isn't as simple as throwing some pot or poppy seeds in the garden. You can grow your own tobacco and brew your own beer, but the tobacco and booze companies still make up a majority of the supply and rake in a lot of money. Where's the huge incentive to grow your own when you could get a pack of joints at the 7-11?

 

[Virus]

What did they do with the legions of new drug users and addicts after Prohibition was repealed?

I was asking Bit Pattern but if you mean "nothing" then just say "nothing".

 

[quadraginta]

I was asking Bit Pattern but if you mean "nothing" then just say "nothing".

If you are looking for a private conversation then don't have it in public.

The point you are artlessly dodging is that there were no "legions of new drug users and addicts" when Prohibition was repealed, and there is no reason to think that there would be this time, either.

You are asking for a solution to a problem there is no reason to expect. That's what past experience shows.

 

[McHrozni]

Are you talking about your $5 skag scenario?

Yes.

I for one disagree that prices on drugs would dramacticaly drop after they'd been legalized. I think one thing working for the "legalize it" crowd is that people with power are quite envious of the profits made by drug cartels. They'd probally work to keep the price as high as possible.

Wheather you agree with it or not, this was the proposal my initial reply (earlier) was aimed at. That is a bad idea and I'm glad you agree with it. Drugs sold legally at comparable prices to what the street price is now is less problematic, though it still suffers from a number of issues that we addressed in the other topic, two months ago or so.

Producing quality dope that people pay top dollar for isn't as simple as throwing some pot or poppy seeds in the garden. You can grow your own tobacco and brew your own beer, but the tobacco and booze companies still make up a majority of the supply and rake in a lot of money. Where's the huge incentive to grow your own when you could get a pack of joints at the 7-11?

Producing $5 a gram heroin and still retaining a healthy profit margin is certainly reasonable, if you don't have to bribe a horde of policemen and customs officials, pay a number of people risking their necks delivering and selling stuff, you don't have to deal with the losses of imput resources and produce through seizures, you don't have to use mobile labs to avoid detection and can obtain the necessary chemicals (acetanhydride in particular) legally.

I probably even missed a few factors that would drive the costs down ...

Making your own heroin is quite difficult. You need quite a few poppies and a few hard to obtain chemicals, plus you need to have some knowledge of chemistry to follow the procedure correctly (I won't describe how it's done, it's unnecessary I'm not sure I still know it well enough). It's nothing that a normal person can't learn, but it is more difficult that "cut plant in pieces" that we see with hemp. As mentioned above, you also need some chemicals you can't buy in a 7-11. You need a special licence for one of them in fact, which is why heroin is much easier to restrict than, say, hemp.
Cocaine is a lot more complex, but I never knew the exact procedure for that

McHrozni

 

[bit_pattern]

You haven't explained what you're going to do with the legions of new drug users and addicts your system would create. Kind of a big issue.

No it's not. Despite your belief that it would lead to "legions" of new addicts being an article of High Faith for you, the evidence suggests regulating the drug market would lead to a marked decrease in addiction.

Still waiting for you to debunk my "bogus appeals" btw. Anytime you're ready there, champ.

 

[bit_pattern]

All that alledged academic literature and you're completely unable to answer someone like me, whom you claim to be obviously wrong and completely oblivious to the facts.

Geez I do wonder why that is.

McHrozni

Huh? Sorry, dude, that makes zero sense.

ETA _ Ah, upon reading quadrginta's reply I have half a clue what you're on about now, I'm sorry but I haven't been following your posts so you need to be more specific. I take it that the crux of your argument is that legalisation would make drugs cheap and hence addiction rates increase, right? Well, that's a moot point because under Bit Pattern's Grand Utopian Vision for Drug Law Reform heroin would never be "legalised" in the way that, say, alcohol is today. I don't think any sensible person would call for an unfettered heroin market, in fact the problem with heroin today is that is EXACTLY what we have thanks to prohibition, it would have to be THE easiest street drug to source and I doubt there is a major city in the developed world today without a raging, open-air heroin market operating somewhere. No, in my ideal world there wouldn't be any price on heroin, nada, it would be supplied and administered by medical professionals in a very strictly regulated environment where addicts have to register, in the same way we successfully administer methadone today. Addicts could safely receive pharmaceutical-grade heroin and wouldn't have any need to resort to criminal gangs to support their addiction. It wouldn't instantly solve the problem but it WOULD greatly reduce the incentives for criminal gangs to import illegal heroin because why would anyone pay street prices for steet quality when they can get the goods for free from their local clinic?

And, yeah, the literature is NOT "alleged": http://www.google.com.au/search?q=m...s=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

 

[bit_pattern]

Cocaine is a lot more complex, but I never knew the exact procedure for that

McHrozni

It's actually incredibly easy, I made a couple of grams in Colombia when I was over there a few years back. Getting it to the pasto form could be done quite easily in your backyard with a few common household/garden items. Getting it to hydrochloride is a little more problematic, you have to source the acid and dry it gently under lights. But really, it's a piece of piss and certainly a lot safer than mucking around with acetic anhydride, that's for sure.

 

[Virus]

Past experience with a product that was consumed by almost all adults at the time. Why should we believe the same thing will happen for highly addictive substances?

 

[McHrozni]

Huh? Sorry, dude, that makes zero sense.

That may be because you missed one of my earlier posts. Scroll back or flip back a page.

McHrozni

 

[Virus]

No it's not. Despite your belief that it would lead to "legions" of new addicts being an article of High Faith for you, the evidence suggests regulating the drug market would lead to a marked decrease in addiction.

Still waiting for you to debunk my "bogus appeals" btw. Anytime you're ready there, champ.

Didn't you just sit there a day ago and give me an insulting, patronizing lecture on supply and demand? Then you go and completely ignore price theory. Making things cheaper increases demand. Or does the magic of drug utopia cause some economic laws to apply and not others? Then you went on about distorted markets and in the same sentence suggested rigid government regulation and control which, as your new-found libertarian friends will tell you, distorts markets.

 

[McHrozni]

It's actually incredibly easy, I made a couple of grams in Colombia when I was over there a few years back. Getting it to the pasto form could be done quite easily in your backyard with a few common household/garden items. Getting it to hydrochloride is a little more problematic, you have to source the acid and dry it gently under lights. But really, it's a piece of piss and certainly a lot safer than mucking around with acetic anhydride, that's for sure.

That depends on wheather or not you're smart enough not to sniff the said acetanhydride.

As I said I never knew the exact procedure for production of cocaine, I just heard that it was a lot more complex. As you describe it it indeed doesn't seem to be all that difficult, though you do need to have some knowledge an skills.

Anyway, I'm sure we can both agree that heroin and cocaine are a lot more difficult to produce yourself than hemp, which was the only reason why I even went into details.

McHrozni

 

[bit_pattern]

That depends on wheather or not you're smart enough not to sniff the said acetanhydride.

Anyway, I'm sure we can both agree that heroin and cocaine are a lot more difficult to produce yourself than hemp, which was the only reason why I even went into this. As I said I never knew the exact procedure for production of cocaine, I just heard that it was fairly complex.

McHrozni

LOL, same with the hydrochloric! But I thought acetanhydride had a bit a tendency to go 'BOOM'?

 

[Cainkane1]

Drugs are out of control so they might as well be legalized. While its true drug gangs would do something else illegal such as smuggle prostitutes into the USA but this isn't as lucrative as drugs. The gangs would become smaller and more controllable although I may be wrong. Another thing they might do is to deal in drugs like xanax or other controlled medicines. Heck maybe they would smuggle in illegal weapons from China or Russia. Theres a whole lot of ways to make a living illegally.

 

[bit_pattern]

^^^ True, but there is nothing as lucrative as drugs and there's a difference between making a living and making a killing.

Didn't you just sit there a day ago and give me an insulting, patronizing lecture on supply and demand? Then you go and completely ignore price theory. Making things cheaper increases demand. Or does the magic of drug utopia cause some economic laws to apply and not others? Then you went on about distorted markets and in the same sentence suggested rigid government regulation and control which, as your new-found libertarian friends will tell you, distorts markets.

It'd be nice if you would actually, you know, like read a link every now and again

A. You can pontificate with your free-market theory all you want, the real-world experience tells us that re-regulating drug markets does lead to reduced addiction rates, this is likely due to a number of factors that DO make the drug markets exceptional. For instance, there is a psychological component to prohibiting something that makes the prohibited item seem glamorous and alluring, remove that allure and the attractiveness of drugs to potential new users is decreased.

B. There's no great need to make drugs significantly cheaper than they already are, as I've said again and again, the drug market would need significant regulation and that could conceivably involve legislating minimum prices, much in the same way that anti-tobacco campaigners are advocating a minimum price for cigarettes.

C. When addicts and users are brought into the light of the system, instead of being in the murky shadows of the underworld, then they can be directed to appropriate rehabilitation if necessary. Our medical health professionals would b able to reach people who they would never know existed when they were copping on the street. More access to health services leads to reduced addiction rates and better health outcomes, it's an undeniable fact.

Still waiting for you to debunk my "bogus appeals", guess I'll be waitin awhile, huh?