This is your position on drugs because you enjoy using them and i'll go so far as to say use them safely or responsibly.
Haven't used anything besides wine for a while now. Weed puts me to sleep, coke makes me nauseous, beer makes me fart. Also happens if I don't degas my wine properly which is an amusing side effect.
I base this off of our previous conversations. What you and a select group of your friends do can not be the basis of your standpoint if the majority of the populace does different...Well, I'll say you can't have that as your standpoint and hope it will ever be that way.
But somehow your standpoint that the majority of the population does different, even if completely incorrect, is perfectly valid. Nice double standard. Of course what you're missing here is that it's your experience that is limited because as a cop by default you are dealing with problem users. You have people telling you left and right on here that your experience is not the majority case and yet you ignore it.
Christ, even William F. Buckley eventually changed his view on this, especially on weed. Get over it. The majority of users are
not behaving the way you think they are. Some 80-90 million people have used pot is the estimate I believe. Are you honestly going to sit there and tell me all or even a significant portion of them are abusing it and robbing liquor stores and driving stoned all over the place? That's BS, it just doesn't make sense or agree with reality. We'd be wading in blood if that were the case. It's nonsense.
Usually, a lot of law goes into effect afterwards and not prior to. Of course there are exceptions but steroids had been around how long before getting turned illegal?
And before they were illegal the AMA and DEA didn't want them added to the list of scheduled substances. Once they were added all of sudden, and despite the lack of supporting research, they became the scourge of all mankind and especially 'the children'. Your view of how laws are made and why is naive to say the least, especially in this instance because there has been a temperance movement in this country for a long time trying to get all drugs, including alcohol, banned. The problems with alcohol prohibition came after it was enacted and evaporated shortly after its repeal.
Yes there are still people who abuse it, throw their lives away, and hurt others. To say the answer is to ban it and throw
all users in prison is nonsense. It's been tried, it failed, and it made the existing problems worse by introducing a criminal element into the manufacture and distribution of the substance.
This is where my personal view mixes with reality. I personally would like steroids legal BUT too many people do stupid **** and ruin it for the rest of us. You argue that we should make all the drugs legal and criminalize illegal acts. On paper it seems ideal enough but in reality the number of police we'd need to respond to this type of setup would be too much to handle.
Based on the presumption that prohibition has had any real effect on supply and availability. It hasn't. You have to
assume your policies are effective before this argument makes sense so you're merely begging the question.
First you need to prove the policy is effective, at least at stemming supply in any significant way, which it isn't. You just push the supply to the black market, and any time any short term restriction of supply is accomplished you just up the profits and incentives for remaining and new manufacturers/dealers to move into the affected market. If demand remains so does supply, plain and simple. The prices may go up, in a market with the inelasticity of the drug market that price rise is negligible, and can't be accomplished with an estimated 10% interdiction rate, which is likely inflated.
Maybe if we started with this way of doing things from the beginning we may be able to handle something like you describe but there's no way we could handle that now. If Marijuana became legal tomorrow it would be a nightmare.
Nonsense, pure and simple. What, all of a sudden if it's legal people who never smoked before are going to start using it by the ton and throwing themselves off bridges? Get real. The same exact thing that happened when alcohol prohibition ended will happen; the black market will largely disappear along with its attendant problems and that's it. Users will still exist, they will buy from stores instead of through the illegal network. Abusers will still exist, and whatever problems they caused will still exist and need to be dealt with. Only with less effort and resources being expended trying to throw all users in prison we can spend more time dealing with the problem population.
Demand for drugs is largely inelastic, Jay. That means few people will stop using despite cost increases
and few people will start using despite cost decreases. You can either take the resources you have, X, and spend them trying to throw all users in prison or target your efforts on the problem population as they arise. One guess as to which will be more effective.
While I can understand how being a cop slants your view, it's no different than the COs I know at local jails becoming more and more racist because they're dealing with the scum of the various minority populations. It's fallacious logic and it needs to be avoided. And if we are to live in a free society even
if there were a causative relationship between drugs and crime and 90% of all users were committing violent crimes, that still
doesn't justify policies that throw the innocent 10% into prison for the sake of expediency.
