If life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness doesn't include willingly and responsibly putting whatever you want in your own mouth for whatever reason you want then I don't even want a country.
The main problem with drugs is when companies in pursuit of wealth and power sells highly addictive drugs to kids ruining their lives. Imagine if instead of putting sugar in everything they put addictive drugs in everything, that is what full legalization would result in.
Harsh punishments for personal use are nonsense, USA are just insane on that, but I don't think making everything legal is reasonable.
A substance legal for adults will be used by most kids. Every kid knows how to get alcohol or cigarettes, just ask some random homeless dude to get it for you in the nearest store for a dollar and there, done.
Grade A fear mongering, go for the kids. High schools are full of all kinds of illicit drugs. Regulating them and creating outreach would actually get a better handle of that. The additive argument is utterly absurd. Again legalization means regulation, which would prevent such a thing.
Making a chemical legal doesn’t preclude disallowing it becoming a food additive. And food regulation is a very serious matter, that can, and is, being strongly enforced.
If that’s the only reason you’re against legalisation, I have good news for you! You needed worry about it, at all.
There is a quite wide range of reasonable options on this. I don't think it is unreasonable for drugs to be mostly legal in many cases, no, but I don't think that small fines for personal use is unreasonable either.
A good explanation is driving above the speed limit on roads. An unreasonable system would put people behind bars for years for any kind of speeding. That is roughly what you have today in USA with respect to drugs and I understand why you'd want to remove it. However removing speed limits is not reasonable either, even if you personally can handle it we can clearly see that deaths increase significantly with higher limits so in this case we care about their lives above your freedom.
If making a particular drugs more legal to use causes a lot of deaths then I don't think it should be legal to use, no matter how much you think that your liberty gets violated if you aren't free to use it. I value their lives above your freedom. Cannabis doesn't kill people so I don't care much about it, but harder drugs often do.
Edit: As an example we can see how making opium more available to people (prescribed via doctor) killed a hundred thousand people in USA the past 10 years. Making it easily accessible even without prescription would likely be worse. I don't think that properly regulating the substance and saving that many people is unreasonable.
Aren’t consumption of alcohol and cigarettes (and advertising for them) much higher among the poor? Is there a reason why other drugs would be any different?
Imagine if we created family-friendly policies and parents actually cared about their children, spent time with them and raised them well and taught the kids the value of saying 'Oh, up yours!' to most of the world, knowing full well most of the world doesn't care about you and isn't doing what it is doing to make your life better.
Children are vulnerable when there are no adults actually looking out for their welfare in earnest. When there are adults looking out for them, children aren't anywhere near as vulnerable as we routinely paint them.
Buying alcohol and cigarettes is illegal for kids, yet in school 15 year old kids were still out smoking cigarettes every recess and every party had tons of alcohol. Their parents didn't get them that, they just ask random people to buy it for them at a local store, so their parents have no control over their substance use.
Controlling kids and empowering kids aren't the same thing.
You seem to assume "X substances are bad" plus "kids shouldn't have certain choices available to them, ever."
Life isn't as simple as "x substances are bad." Kids are best served by an approach other than simply seeking to control them per se, which generally doesn't work and is typically counterproductive.
Ok, so lets assume that is true, we can create a society with good parents everywhere. But until we have actually created that society we have to work with what we got today, and parents today aren't like that.
Today sucks. Continuing to create policies rooted in the fact that "today sucks" tends to be a path towards tomorrow sucking as well.
I do realize that creating good policies during a transition phase is especially challenging. But you tend to not get there from here if you don't bother to try to go in that direction at all.
Decrimilaziation is a good step in the right direction. Yes, there will be some pitfalls of taking it. We can and should work those and bringing up such concerns is a valuable part of that process, so thank you for doing that.
But it's not a good reason to take a good step. It just means "We also need to be concerned about unintended consequences for vulnerable populations." That's always a good thing to have your eye on, whether those vulnerable populations are children, women, people of color, the LGBTQ crowd or cis het white males with money.
Problem with you who are used to USA is that to you making drugs illegal means putting random people into prison for years. For me it means the kids who go out to smoke weed maybe get caught once every few years and gets a slap on the wrist and a small fine. I see how the first creates more problem than having things legal, I don't see how the second creates problems for society and I'd suggest you try that before you progress further.
You are not a US citizen nor living in the US. But you would like me -- an American citizen who is living in the US and spent many years living in California -- to defer to your personal opinions about how best to manage the problems in my country.
I'll pass, thanks.
We have a several hundred year history in this country of crapping all over Natives and people of color and they tend to be the ones ending up in our prisons for years and years on end on BS excuses and to my mind this is a vastly more serious problem than some kid no longer living in fear if he tries mushrooms or something that it will leave him with a criminal record, which may not stop him from trying them and may, instead, begin his descent into a life of crime as he gradually figures out how to get away with more crap in a system that he knows for a fact is out to get him.
> We have a several hundred year history in this country of crapping all over Natives and people of color and they tend to be the ones ending up in our prisons for years and years on end on BS excuses
Those problems would mostly go away by just reducing the sentence from years in prison to a small fine. Viewing this as choosing between punishing them with years in prison or making it legal is ignorant.
> You are not a US citizen nor living in the US. But you would like me -- an American citizen who is living in the US and spent many years living in California -- to defer to your personal opinions about how best to manage the problems in my country.
This is a discussion, not me trying to force your country to enact some specific law. If you only discuss with Americans then you are ignorant and ignore the diversity of views and experiences from the rest of the world.
I think the argument was that drugs should be illegal the same way speeding is illegal. A strike system where most of the time you get away with a small fee. However, in my opinion this is missing rehabilitation based on reducing dosages every month, which is absolutely necessary to quit drugs that cause chemical dependence.
The tar and other additives in cigarettes cause chemical dependencies. Vaping removes the additives and replaces them with a controllable amount of nicotine. Over time you reduce your exposure to nicotine and at some point you just quit entirely when the dosage is very low.
It's always inherently problematic to try to figure out what will work well for a community you are not actually a part of and have no first-hand experience with.
The US desperately needs more family-friendly policies. If we don't successfully address that, a lot of our efforts simply won't be very effective.
You need fertile ground to grow something good. We lack that because we lack some basic essentials in terms of nurturing our people.
I'd say more generally, it's about control and having something police / government can hold over almost anyone, or any demographic, if convenient for whatever reason. That is the danger of these kinds of laws, they are a shortcut around other rules that are supposed to keep police power in check. And as pointed out elsewhere, local decriminalization doesn't really change this. It's a step in the right direction, but what it really needed is an explicit relinquishing of the power over people that these laws afford (in the US, perhaps an amendment even?) Until that happens, drug laws will still serve their purpose
This, in my opinion, is closest to the truth - not to discount the issues of race that have historically propagated downward through the system and continue to affect people today.
From John Ehrlichman, a Nixon associate:
> You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Note: the veracity of this particular quote has been contested, but the story it purports to tell is compelling in my opinion regardless.
So wrong. Marijuana and heroin were both illegal long before Nixon took office, largely due to laws passed by Democrats.
Now that drug laws have become unpopular, there's an effort to rewrite history and blame it all on the Republicans, especially Nixon. It's surprising that this effort is so successful when the correct history is so easy to find:
Opium, coca, and their derivatives (including heroin) were made controlled substances by the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1915 [1], a law sponsored by a Democrat and signed by Woodrow Wilson (a Democrat).
Marijuana was made a controlled substance by the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 [2], likewise introduced in Congress by a Democrat and signed by Roosevelt, another Democrat. Roosevelt also publicly urged the states to legislate against "the narcotic drug evil." [3]
The Boggs Act of 1951 [4] introduced mandatory sentences for possession or distribution of both drugs. It was, you guessed it, also sponsored by (and named for) a Democrat in Congress, and was signed by Truman (D).
And even the relevant legislation passed during Nixon's term in office, the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 [5], was again introduced by a Democrat and passed a Democrat controlled Congress with bipartisan support. This law merely continued the prohibitions introduced by the previous laws after they were successfully challenged in Leary v. United States in 1969 [6].
Well, you've successfully constructed a hell of a strawman! My comment was to express my support for the following statement:
> I'd say more generally, it's about control and having something police / government can hold over almost anyone, or any demographic, if convenient for whatever reason.
I didn't say anything about Democrats or Republicans. I happened to use a quote that touched on Nixon in support of my claim.
I would also note, for people not well-versed in American history, that up until around the 1960s, the concept of a Southern Democrat still existed - people mostly identified with opposing desegregation in the American south. Some of these politicians, including Strom Thurmond, who voted against civil rights and for the Controlled Substances Act, later became Republican figureheads. Party ideals shift over time.
With that said, I don't think the current state of drug laws in the US are an issue of party. It's a lack of evidence-based policy, and it's extremely problematic.
One might not blame politicians for looking at the effects of narcotics and their relation to organized crime in the mid-20th century in America and say: "we need to legislate this, because the problem is ballooning and we don't have any other tools at our disposal." Addiction science didn't exist yet.
One might even forgive the Controlled Substances Act as an extension of this reaction, were it not for the fact that through the subsequent creation of the DEA and the scheduling system, the effects of drugs and addiction became significantly more difficult to research in the US. This happened under Nixon, and I think that's why he receives a significant portion of the blame for the current state of affairs (rightly or wrongly).
The DEA has also simply failed in its remit. They've shown themselves to be completely incapable of assessing the medical utility and controlling the abuse potential of drugs (marijuana on the one hand, prescription opioids on the other). This, combined with the fact that the CSA and the DEA's existence prevent us as a country from evaluating other approaches to the drug problem, make for a lose-lose situation.
> I happened to use a quote that touched on Nixon in support of my claim.
A quote that claimed "what [the drug war] was really all about" was disrupting black communities and the anti-war left.
If Ehrlichman did say that (as you pointed out, even that is disputed) it's quite absurd. The prohibition of drugs started decades before the Vietnam War or the Civil Rights movement, and it was an international effort, in response to real dangers. It's not tenable to argue that it was all about control, nor that Nixon's motives (if those were his motives) were even relevant to the passage of the CSA with only 6 opposing votes in Congress.
That said, I agree that time has shown that prohibition has failed and can be as harmful as the drugs themselves. I just think the Ehrlichman quote adds far more heat than light to the discussion.
> If Ehrlichman did say that (as you pointed out, even that is disputed) it's quite absurd. The prohibition of drugs started decades before the Vietnam War or the Civil Rights movement, and it was an international effort, in response to real dangers. It's not tenable to argue that it was all about control, nor that Nixon's motives (if those were his motives) were even relevant to the passage of the CSA with only 6 opposing votes in Congress.
Nominally, perhaps. But nobody can argue against the fact that widespread enforcement efforts stepped up drastically in the late 60s and 70s, with drugs being a particular focus after Nixon declared war on them explicitly. Just look at any chart documenting the incarceration rates [1], not to mention the literal creation of agency with (in modern times) a multi-billion dollar budget dedicated exclusively to drug enforcement.
The US collectively (cite, state, and federal) spends over $100B per year on policing. The DEA and its $3B budget isn't driving the incarceration rates.
> I'd say more generally, it's about control and having something police / government can hold over almost anyone, or any demographic, if convenient for whatever reason.
That statement glosses over the fact that such restrictive policies frequently come about as a result of trying to control minorities and never the dominant race. After all, if you do that, you'll get voted out of office.
For example, in California, gun control was brought about as a result of Black people carrying guns in public. When white people did it, it was totally fine, but once Black people started utilizing their 2nd amendment rights, the state government curtailed it.
Opium (as well as many other addictive drugs) are illegal in nearly every country on the planet, so I have a very difficult time pinning this policy decision on racism.
Again, all hard addictive drugs (opium, heroin, cocaine) are illegal in pretty much every country on the planet (save the recent notable exception of Portugal). Many of these countries have never had a sizable Chinese immigrant community. Is your rationale that they were all somehow biased against the Chinese? Of course, opium is still quite illegal in China today.
