|
Simplepowa
In Pursuit of Knowledge


Registered: 03/06/09
Posts: 4,310
|
Hard to fight war on drugs when we are the ones fuelling it
#19074003 - 11/02/13 08:15 AM (10 years, 2 months ago) |
|
|
The hunt for the Mr Big behind the drug trade is over at last. We have found him. It is you. The urban, educated middle classes of the rich nations, who take drugs or don't object to others taking them, fuel the enormous demand for marijuana, cocaine and heroin. Without their dollars, euros and pounds, there would be no billions to fight over, no gangs, no narco-states or narco-terror.
Yet for some reason, whenever we discuss the alleged ''war on drugs'', we never mention demand. There are evil dealers, whom we all deplore. There are still more evil traffickers and gangs, whom we deplore still more. But why are they evil? It is not the acts of transporting or selling that make them wicked. If it were soap or scented candles, nobody would mind. It is the thing they deal in. But why are drugs evil? Because of what they do to people.
And that can only happen if individuals buy those drugs and use them. It is at that moment that they cease to be inert matter, and do the damage they undoubtedly inflict. There is no sense to this. While warships churn the seas, and special forces of many nations patrol the jungles of the Third World, interdicting supply, we have, for the past 40 years, refused to interdict demand. Demand has, unsurprisingly, grown.
To be sure, there are vestigial laws in most advanced countries, which formally prohibit possession of drugs. But they are sporadically and feebly enforced by police, prosecutors and courts.
In the US, 20 states and the District of Columbia have adopted ''medical marijuana'' statutes which, in practice, decriminalise possession - so fulfilling the 1979 prediction of the American legalisation campaigner Keith Stroup that ''we are trying to get marijuana reclassified medically. If we do that … [we] will be using the issue as a red herring to give marijuana a good name''.
In Britain, the courts were instructed in 1973 to stop sending anyone to prison for cannabis possession. The police forces recently adopted an empty gesture called the ''cannabis warning'' as their preferred response to finding someone in possession of this still technically illegal substance. That is, assuming that they act at all. Those who attend the major British rock festivals expect that the police will ignore cannabis smoking unless forced to take notice.
This relaxed attitude does not apply only to cannabis. In January 2010, British rock singer Peter Doherty was caught in a criminal court building with heroin valued at $300. Mr Doherty already had a long record for drug offences and had just been fined (again) for heroin possession. Yet he walked free from the building. If this is a ''war on drugs'', what would a surrender look like? The cultural background to this is hugely important. Many respectable newspapers, prominent political, academic, artistic, and medical figures - even police officers - have for years called for weaker laws against drugs.
Most of them, unsurprisingly, are members (as am I) of the 1960s radical generation, the cultural revolutionaries whose long march through the institutions is now pretty much complete. They see nothing wrong in a little self-stupefaction; far from it. The same elite have readily embraced the mass prescription of legal ''antidepressants'' and in Britain have removed almost all restraints on the sale of legal alcohol. They often indulge their own children's drug-taking. And they have encouraged the approach of ''harm reduction'' in schools and health education, assuming that the young will (as they always put it) ''experiment with drugs''.
Unsurprisingly, such attitudes, which also deliberately confuse the legal and the illegal drugs, do not exactly discourage such experiments. And rather a lot of those experiments end in the tragedy of irreversible mental illness, increasingly correlated with cannabis use among the young.
Our self-excused ''experimentation'' also fuels the tragedies of Mexico and Colombia. Yet tender-hearted bourgeois-bohemians, who proudly buy Fairtrade goods and huffily refuse to buy the products of sweatshops, militantly campaign for the freedom to take and buy the mental poisons which feed the gangs and bring misery to millions far away.
It is of course a moral question, of pleasure versus restraint, of chemical stupor versus hard-edged discontent with reality, of selfishness versus self-control. By choosing the hard path, our civilisation became free, peaceful and prosperous. Do we really think we can now choose the easy road, and not pay for it?
Peter Hitchens 31-10-13 http://www.smh.com.au/comment/hard-to-fight-war-on-drugs-when-we-are-the-ones-fuelling-it-20131030-2what.html
--------------------
Carl Sagan - "Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people." --- Robert Pirsig - "When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion." --- Brian Cox - "[One] problem with today’s world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it. The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense."
|
ima kitten
meow


Registered: 11/11/11
Posts: 79
|
Re: Hard to fight war on drugs when we are the ones fuelling it [Re: Simplepowa] 1
#19074358 - 11/02/13 10:02 AM (10 years, 2 months ago) |
|
|
what a terrible article. more mindless shlock from the chicken hawk disinformation machine... 
hard to fight the war on shitty journalism (and the war on the war on drugs, for that matter) when douche bags like this still gain employment....
--------------------
 please... keep on the grass!  
|
Deemstar
Doctor Deemstar



Registered: 10/11/12
Posts: 883
Loc: The void
Last seen: 15 days, 15 hours
|
Re: Hard to fight war on drugs when we are the ones fuelling it [Re: ima kitten] 1
#19074675 - 11/02/13 11:23 AM (10 years, 2 months ago) |
|
|
Smoke meth, hail satan, legalize murder.
-------------------- Gnome-miii-odd JAH!!! Pasta-far-eye! R.I.P. Georgie poor G A.K.A. Jorgon Lucy
|
Coolwhip
Stranger
Registered: 11/04/11
Posts: 37
Last seen: 9 years, 7 months
|
Re: Hard to fight war on drugs when we are the ones fuelling it [Re: Simplepowa]
#19075443 - 11/02/13 02:34 PM (10 years, 2 months ago) |
|
|
Tell that to the 1,000,000+ people in jail, prison, or probation/parole in the US alone for nothing more than using drugs/selling small amounts to their friends and other user associates, without even recouping the amount of money they spend to support their habits. It's not like we don't actively pursue, arrest, and convict people for mere possession. What more does he suggest we do, mandatory random drug tests for the entire population? Minimum mandatory sentences longer than what people receive for rape/manslaughter for simple possession?
And teen marijuana use may well be the cause of mental illness later in life in some individuals. If so I imagine only a certain % of the population who are carrying the genes which make you susceptible, because it damn sure ain't like everybody who smokes weed habitually as a teenager ends up with mental illness. Yet, as of right now, there is only a correlation. I started smoking weed when I was 12, I didn't seek it out myself someone older peer pressured me into it; I've never had to be pressured again and I have struggled to maintain my mental health throughout my life. But looking back now I was already suffering from mental illness, probably childhood depression, from a young age, which manifested as anger, the inability to focus on school(low energy, not hyperactive), deep pits of sadness, etc. Which led to conflict with my parents who style of discipline completely starved me of recreation/social interaction compounding the problem until I thought I was losing my mind and I knew this wasn't normal.
I remember being 10 years old and pleading with my mother, who was in the middle of angrily lecturing/applying more restrictive rules for not completing my HW on time, to take me to the doctor because there was something wrong with my brain(although at the time I didn't even know what mental illness was) which she ignored and even mocked. But after I started smoking weed most of my problems disappeared, and I don't mean I forgot about them when I was high, I mean my mood, outlook, behavior, etc. Of course, 4-5 years later when I started driving I ran into a whole new set of problems as I became introduced to harder drugs, but that's another problem that is created by weed being illegal, not by weed.
Anyways my point is there is a correlation, not definitive causation.
|
dokunai
Cactus, Cannabis, Cubensis

Registered: 01/31/10
Posts: 1,878
Loc: Hyphal Heights, USA
Last seen: 7 years, 14 days
|
Re: Hard to fight war on drugs when we are the ones fuelling it [Re: Coolwhip]
#19075713 - 11/02/13 03:36 PM (10 years, 2 months ago) |
|
|
The author asks what if would look like if the "good guys" in the war on drugs surrendered, implying that we are already at such a point or very close to it. I wonder what his idea of victory would be? I'm guessing it might involve regular mandatory blood screening for everyone, life in prison or maybe capital punishment for simple possession, and probably a whole bunch of other terrible things under the auspices of zero tolerance.
Quote:
By choosing the hard path, our civilisation became free, peaceful and prosperous. Do we really think we can now choose the easy road, and not pay for it?
I would hardly use the words free, peaceful, and prosperous to describe human history. But, I digress. The author obviously prizes freedom and wants to preserve it, as long as that freedom doesn't involve you doing something he doesn't like, such as ingesting certain substances.
|
Morel Guy
Stranger


Registered: 01/23/13
Posts: 15,577
Last seen: 4 years, 1 month
|
Re: Hard to fight war on drugs when we are the ones fuelling it [Re: dokunai]
#19079781 - 11/03/13 11:00 AM (10 years, 2 months ago) |
|
|
Not sure what to think about this story. It starts off assuming that the readers agree drugs are bad. It's not like drugs go into a test and come out as good or bad. They put lot's of dangerous drugs into the pharmacies. It's crazy what side effects of legal pharmi's are, just absurd. You can be court ordered to deal with growing breasts. Who wants a pair of titis from risperidol?
All a doctor can do is help you navigate risks of drugs. I say legalize risk, we can handle a little more to have a whole lot less (risk).
-------------------- "in sterquiliniis invenitur in stercore invenitur" In filth it will be found in dung it will be found
Edited by Morel Guy (11/03/13 11:02 AM)
|
|