The one encounter with the DEA agent reminds me of cheap, sleazy, sales tactics used at car dealerships. High pressure tactics to force an action.
Civil forfeiture is absolutely insane. The “war on drugs” needs to end. Legalize all drugs. Dissolve the DEA. Tax all drugs. Earmark part of the sales towards drug addiction treatment and mental health.
Most governments let them win. People just don't want to admit that losing comes with consequences so they think the war still exists.
Few countries won their war on drugs and it's amazing the benefits that a drug-free society brings. In fact, not even benefits, but the lack of obscene negatives.
No junkies on the streets might be a good baseline criterion.
Ideally you'd want a world where it was effectively impossible to buy drugs without proper authorization. Singapore has managed it, though being much much smaller helps a lot there.
Singapore has not managed it by being a "much smaller state", it managed it by being a highly repressive and authoritarian state. Myself, I prefer the junkies on the streets.
I actually grew up in another relatively small state that had a huge heroin problem in the 80s: Portugal. Portugal solved it by decriminalizing drugs and by making treatment modalities available for the people who needed help, namely methadone. This worked spectacularly well.
By the way, if you want to make it "impossible to buy drugs without proper authorization", I imagine you will want to include one of the most dangerous hard drugs there is: alcohol. We all know how well that worked the last time it was tried...
Thank you for using this term instead of calling Singapore a dictatorship (as many others are wont to do). It's a much more accurate description of Singapore's style of governance.
Singapore hasn't managed it, even in a ridiculously small land area with extremely aggressive laws against drugs they are seeing an increase in usage by youth.
It simply does not work to fight it aggressively. Junkies on the street can be managed but probably not eradicated in the next few decades, the issues the USA sees with drugs are extreme, and the root cause is usually much deeper than the drugs themselves. A lot of other developed countries have managed to help their drug addicted homeless population, the USA seems to be on a downward spiral on that front for decades...
Attacking the surface of the problem is a game of whack-a-mole, a Sisyphean task that won't ever come close to solving the actual problem.
That’s fair, and I agree that a multi-pronged solution is probably the best one.
You need programs to address the root causes (homelessness, poverty) as well as aggressive enforcement of drug laws. I’d argue the two are not necessarily at odds, and actually would complement one another.
> I’d argue the two are not necessarily at odds, and actually would complement one another.
How would that work in reality though? Aggressively enforcing drug laws push people to the margins (being arrested, having a felony charge, etc.), living on the margins of society is a major factor into pushing people into despair, despair fuels drug addiction.
Aggressive enforcement of drug laws is not compatible with an empathetic approach to drug abuse, it also creates many consequences which could've been unforeseen when introduced but we all live in the world of such consequences. Removing freedoms in name of pushing anti-drug laws, for what ends specifically? What are we trying to achieve by being tough on drugs in the end?
Singapore hasn't managed its war on drugs? Lol what? Of course they have. They have managed their wars on a lot of things. Affordable housing, immigration, congestion, cultural division. Drugs was probably the easiest ones to manage..
It does work. It works extremely well. Extremely well. The problem is that if you don't actually want to win the war, it works poorly. As is evident in the US and many other first world nations.
No, fixing the problems that just letting it run rampant is whack a mole. You're spraying for cockroaches when you find them rather than fumigating the house.
It's okay, most people from leading countries of the world think their situation is the best and they need compassion for all the amazingly negative aspects of drug use. Junkies, aggression, organised crime involvement, etc. The truth is that your governments don't want to fix the problem and it's obviously snowballed out of their control. It's easier to lay down and admit defeat than actually tackle the problem when it's this far gone. Good thing places like Singapore never let it get to that point.
They've won the war on drugs. It's not even a contest which is better, the drug free environment is way better. You just have to experience both to realise.
Their own statistics show (by their definition of) drug abuse increasing in 2023 [0].
Even with all the repressive stance, death penalty, they still see an increase. That isn't what I would consider "working" for such harsh penalties.
> They've won the war on drugs. It's not even a contest which is better, the drug free environment is way better. You just have to experience both to realise.
There are absolutely no "drug free" environments in the world, absolutely none so your statement is impossible to assert in reality.
I prefer to live in a society where death penalties do not exist, even less for the cases of substance use/abuse.
That sounds like your ideal. Mine would be when there is no authority that says which plants or substances I can put in my body. I don't want/need an authority to enforce "what's best for me".
And what side-effects do you think that making it "effectively impossible to buy drugs" will have on society? I'm genuinely interested in your opinion on this.
Korea, Japan, China, Singapore. It seems to be a thing that is well managed in countries that actually control their populations in some form, whether by immigration or strong laws.
It's amazing too. It's weird how many people are for drugs when such environments exist.
The madness stops when you win the war? What do you mean what does it mean to win the war? What do you think the war is? It means you eliminate the abuse and criminal behaviours of drugs. This is easiest done by eliminating drugs themselves as a societal problem. Obviously it's impossible to eliminate every single instance, but it's quite easy to eliminate virtually all negatives to society.
The same way when does anything end? When you reach the level that is what you can feasibly resemble as "the end". So in this case, drug-free.
>What target needs to be reached for the war on drugs to stop?
You need to eliminate the negatives that society has to deal with related to illicit drug use? It's not that hard.
When is a newly built house finished?
>Then why has nobody done it?
Huh? Many countries have done it. Why many others haven't is because they don't want to.. Drug usage is a problem for the lower rungs of society, not the government or higher ups. The government must want to improve the life of their citizens at the cost of themselves. Like most objectively good government decisions.
> The same way when does anything end? When you reach the level that is what you can feasibly resemble as "the end". So in this case, drug-free.
You seem to be unaware that you're cyclically defining "the end" to be "when it's over".
War generally ends when the other side capitulates, or when both sides run out of resources and come to a peace agreement. In war on drugs, there's no "other side", there's just an invisible black market that you can get more and more visible by introducing more and more survaillence.
That's because the purpose of the war on drugs is to "disrupt" and "criminalize" black and leftist communities. Obviously you can't just say the quiet part out loud, even though they have:
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing them 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 in the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” - Richard Nixon’s domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman, 1994.
The goal of the war on drugs was never to remove drugs from society or eliminate drug use. The US government introduced LSD to the 1960's counterculture through MKULTRA and crack cocaine into black neighborhoods. The US government funnels arms and money through drug cartels. The US government wants drugs on the streets, and wants them to be illegal, and wants drug laws to be arbitrary and cruel, because they know the specter of the angry black man and the dope-smoking communist will scare the mainstream so bad that they'll beg the government to be as violent and authoritarian as they like just to keep "law and order."
Doubt it. It may have started with this, but it didn't live its life like that.
Drug free societies are way better in every measurable way. You only have to live in one for long enough that returning from that place seems absurd to be ridiculed with drugs.
only big farma companies are allow to destroy human lives by selling narcotics and should be allowed to hide the profits when brought to court. isn't it obvious?
Civil forfeiture is absolutely insane. The “war on drugs” needs to end. Legalize all drugs. Dissolve the DEA. Tax all drugs. Earmark part of the sales towards drug addiction treatment and mental health.