From the Utne Reader - From (of all places) the International Committee For the Fourth )Communist) International Reuters (by way of a third party) Do you need more? Here's some information about Britian's Opium trade and the resultant Wars
You seem to miss my point here. The explosive growth in arrests for posession of Crack began 1-2 years before Len Bias died. The situation may have been aided by changes caused by Bias' death, but it The reason this is so important to me is that, smoking freebase cocaine, either through crack or as the freebase in flamable solution in the 70's is a prime example of the evolution towards more rapid delivery methods. Insufflation is fine, but IV gets it there quicker. There is stigma against IV so people developed the type of ether based freebase Pryor used. That turned out to be dangerous, so the business evolved to crack. Crack took off because it was powerfull enough to be super-addictive, but not dangerous or stigmatized. Another similar example of the evolution to more powerful delivery methods is evidenced by the fact that an infintessimaly small number of IV drug users started their addiction through IV use. They start some other way and evolve in search of a bigger (more addictive) rush. In your Switzerland example, they screen very heavily to make sure that the people who enter the program are already addicts. This does nothing to alter the availability to first-time users, and does not put some sort of half-intended stamp of government approval on the issue. Conversely, in your plan, I could decide I want to start shooting Heroin. I would walk down to the nice, clean, friendly government building, sign up for a class with some disapproving, but generally agreable and honest government types, and go from there. This would make me much more likely to start, than if I had to drive down to some gheto, find someone to buy from, make sure they're honest, avoid getting arrested, etc. Your plan makes it effectively easier to start. In this way your plan is much more closely related to the "Needle Park" experiment from Zurich, where people could go and openly buy heroin without fear of being arrested. It was shut down because it was unmanagable.
BTW, you also give too much credit to the people of the past. The introduction of Gin to England in the 18th century was directly attributable to a rise in mortality. Opium was a common cause of infant mortality in 19th century England, and addiction among children was common. One problem is that the concept of addiction wasn't introduced until 1804 and took some time to become widespread and recognised. Also the syringe wasn't introduced until the 1850's and wasn't cheap and readily available until after the introduction of the Harrison Act in 1914, while cocaine was synthisized in 1850, but not readily available in Europe until the 1880's. It only took thirty years for it to become a major concern. Also, keep in mind that the practice of "a few drinks with lunch" is still recent enough in Houston that I know lawyers who look back fondly on the final days. In the 19th century people got sloppy in the afternoon.
Of course I don't need any more. You gave me more than enough ammunition there already. They are living in a prohibitionist system just like we are (except even MORE extreme in its methods and madness). They are living in one of the most controlled and repressive cultures there is and despite being able to lose their hands for some drug crimes and their lives for trafficking, they still buy and use drugs. Their drug usage rates are similar to ours here in the states (3% of 66 million people according to the third article you cited) even though their drug laws are much harsher than ours in many ways. Contrast this with rates of teen drug usage in Holland, where mar1juana is tolerated and they do not prosecute drug USERS at all. Their rates of teen drug use are about half what we see here in the states. HALF!!!! Your articles also addressed crime rates (60% drug related) which is directly caused by the inflated drug prices under a prohibitionist system, prevalence of use (half of the people treated after the earthquake were current or former drug users) which is pretty comparable to the US in that half of our young people use drugs before they leave high school, and the spread of AIDS (70% coming from contaminated syringes) when needle exchange programs have been shown to reduce the spread of HIV and Hepatitis dramatically. No matter the problem with drugs, we can deal with it more effectively, less expensively, and more intelligently in a regulated system as opposed to the lunacy that is our national drug policy. Who would you rather have distributing drugs: A) A street thug, member of the Mafia, or terrorist who has no problem selling to kids? B) A legitimate, regulated businessperson paying taxes to the government? One of the two is going to provide drugs no matter the consequence.
And the only way we are going to be able to more closely control the "bigger rush" is by regulating the market. We allow people who have been fully educated as to the effects of said drugs to acquire them, but we track sales to identify problem users. Once we identify cases of potential abuse, we can target treatment options and keep an eye out for more abberant behavior. The point is that we can more closely control drug distribution in a regulated market. No, but it does show that heroin users can be productive members of society AND can recover from their addiction if given appropriate treatment. It shows that even the most egregious examples of addicts, heroin junkies, can be happy, relatively healthy citizens if given a chance. If you are of age, then yes, absolutely. The thing is that statistics show that if you reach age 18 and you have not used any drug (including tobacco and alcohol), you are nearly a hundred times less likely to use cocaine or heroin EVER, in your life. The statistics skew even more if you do not use drugs or drink until the age of 21 (although the sample size was MUCH smaller for that statistic, as it included alcohol). If we can create a system where our kids CANNOT get drugs, drug usage rates, especially usage of drugs like cocaine and heroin, will drop dramatically. Furthermore, if an adult is fully educated to the consequences of his/her actions, who are you or I or the government to say that they cannot ingest that drug, especially after they have signed the requisite paperwork to take full responsibility for their actions even if inebriated? In addition, that clean, glass government building (actually, the classes would be at community colleges and exams would be at the DMV or some such and the distribution centers would probably be attached to pharmacies) would be filled with treatment professionals whose job (along with the teachers of the classes) would be to discourage drug use as much as possible throughout the entire process. In addition, when people actually get addicted, these treatment professionals can offer help, like beds in facilities paid for by the taxes on drugs. The thing is that most people who get addicted start as kids. That is why we are seeing increases in drug use and addiction rates despite the ever more draconian drug laws. That is why this problem is getting worse and worse. A black market guarantees that kids will have, in most cases, an easier time getting drugs than adults. At that rate, half of our children will CONTINUE to use drugs before they leave high school every year and the same numbers of our kids will get addicted and die every year. Yet you propose more of the same old failed policies. We can make a system where our kids simply cannot acquire drugs. We will have to change the entire system, but that is the first step to winning the drug war.
What does any of this have to do with the price of tea in China ? We have seen what nearly a hundred years of prohibition looks like and it stinks on ice. We have appropriate ways to deal with drug users and addicts and prohibition is definitively NOT the best solution. Can you name a single positive impact that prohibition has had on our society?
You stated that drug abuse was not rampant before prohibiton. The links are intended to show two things: 1. That the addictions were there and were, when apples-to-apples, as bad or worse than they are today. They were, however, hidden beneath a veneer of respectability, or not recognised for what they are. and 2. Many of the most damaging and negative factors were either not present before prohibiton, not widely desciminated before prohibition, or not economically viable before prohibition. Relative covariance does not denote causality. One might just as easily say that the prevelance of drug addiction is a cause of the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 instead of the Harrison Act of the same year. Your assertion doesn't stand up beyond the superficial similarities because the volume of unaccounted variables is extreme. You then attempt with a monomaniacal linearity and predictability to use the "Willie Horton Maneuver", by attacking the results of prohibition without providing any compelling evidence for your alternative, or any reasonable proof that your alternative would work more effectively. I would suggest, on the other hand, that the two cases in modern history when governments have sought to facilitate the avalability of drugs in modern history have been complete disasters, resutling in the Gin Act of 1736, and the Opium Wars of the 19th century. I don't disagree that excessive criminililization has been a conterproductive and self-defeating stragtegy. I would, however, suggest that absolute and complete official sanction, distribution, and regulation that you propose would be a complete and unmitigated disaster whose negative concequences would dwarf those caused by the current system and perminantly scar the american psyche.
Then why, according to statistics from the Australian government, were there exactly zero recorded deaths from heroin and cocaine prior to criminalization in the mid-1950s? Why were there no documented deaths or problems during the years that cocaine and heroin were available throughout the old west in general stores and open for anyone to buy? The addictions almost certainly were and are there, but we actually know how to deal with addictions these days. If our drug policy had the ability to track problem use, we could nip the vast majority of abusive use in the bud and minimize the overall impact that drugs and drug use has on our society. We can use the data from drug sales and surveys to identify tactics that reduce overall drug use. The most damaging and negative factor IS prohibition itself. Prohibition inflates the profits to be made on drugs and then cedes control of said profits to criminal organization. It criminalizes behavior that should not under any circumstance be banned and increases violence, increases animosity between the police and the neighborhoods they are supposed to protect, and increases the number of deaths due to overdose and cross reaction. Care to debate what the meaning of the word "is" is? I guess you want scientific evidence, huh? How about every single study since the late 1800s coming back in favor of liberalizing our drug laws? If you want a list, there is one posted in one of the drug threads, I can dig it up tomorrow if you like. You can ignore the facts if you like, but it is true that: Despite astronomical increases in expenditures on the "War on Drugs" since 1970, students continue to report that half of them have used drugs before they leave high school. Other, more liberal drug laws have been passed in other places in the world and those places have seen dramatic improvements in their rates of teen drug use. Specifically, since they started a policy of tolerating mar1juana sales, their rates of teen drug use OVERALL have fallen to half of ours here. In addition, their rates of hard drug use are far below ours overall. Swiss prescription heroin programs have shown us that even heroin addicts can lead healthy, productive, taxpaying lives when criminality is removed from their addiction. I think that it is the duty of the citizens to stand up and point out policies that are not working. You have chastized me for "attacking the results of prohibition" when that is the right and duty of all Americans. In addition, I HAVE shown evidence (several times) that you have chosen to ignore. If I cannot attack the current policy (because you say so) and I cannot use evidence to show that another direction would be better (because you ignore my evidence), then we are at a stalemate. Personally, I think that the only issue at hand here is how terribly destructive prohibition is. You have not tried to dispute any of the problems with prohibition, which means that you have either conceded me that point or have just been silent on this issue while ranting about others. Prohibition is far more destructive than drug use could possibly ever be. What I propose is a heathcare based system that determines scientifically what the best way to treat certain drugs is. If you can prove to me that prohibiting distribution of heroin is less destructive than regulating its sales then I say ban away. The thing is, we will have to experiment with our drug laws to find out what the best way actually is. I might want to ask MacBeth for a ruling on this one, but do the 17- and 1800s actually count as "modern history?" We don't have an example from modern history as our entire history (and our fathers and grandfathers and great grand fathers) has had criminalized drug use. The policies were based in flawed "science" and propaganda like "Reefer Madness." Besides, we have the technological ability now to control distribution very closely and we can use that ability to work on ACTUALLY reducing drug use over the course of the next decade rather than simply paying lip service (along with a trillion dollars or more) to that goal (which is what we will have with 10 more years of prohibition). In that case, we are much closer on this issue than you might think. The only thing I want to do is to take the excessive criminalization out of drug policy in favor of a healthcare and education based policy. I would suggest that you are being a bit of a drama queen here. I mean seriously, it would be impossible for our drug policy to be any worse. It has not made any progress toward its goal in 30 years despite astronomical increases in spending. It would be improbable enough to create a system worse to deal with this issue than prohibition to send you to Magarathea.
We'll just disagree here. I think your arguments have structural flaws, and I assume you think the same of mine. Three of final statements, however, because I like to babble: #1. Organized crime, through counterfeiting and smuggling, and the attendant violence that follows is present in the legal tobacco trade. Here's one example. The situation also occurs, but on a much smaller scale with alcohol, despite no clear value-related reason to favor tobacco. I would suggest that you look at the variables and think about why one is more severe than the other, and how this would translate to the various drugs which are currently illegal. #2. There is a school of thought out there that I have seen in several forms, but are generally similar. The arguments all center around the effectiveness of the civil rights movement at chipping away at the institutional stratification of African-Americans as an underclass, followed by the creation of complex heroin and later cocaine distribution networks in the US, followed by Nixon's War on Drugs, and it's particular tilt against the very people who had just been emancipated by the Supreme Court. There is very compelling multidimensional statistical evidence which shows a balance between the benefits of civil rights, and the effects of the prosecution of the War on Drugs with it's peculiar tilt against poor inner-city African-Americans. The fundamental flaw, however, relies on the existence of a particular style of paranoid Bilderburger / Illuminati / Trilateral Commission / Skull and Bones type of secret government and resultant multi-level conspiracy theory which defies any reasonable application of Occam's Razor, that you either intuit or you don't. #3. This is really an analogy, and as you can arrive at any conclusion through analogy, it's not so much an argument for or against, as a final caution: I'm not sure if you've ever read the book The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. The book deals in a broad sense with the many follies and idiocies that lead Europe to World War I under the assumption war was no longer possible or that modern wars would be quick and relatively bloodless, and illustrates how the introduction of technology altered the landscape of war in ways that were not understood by the Generals who studied it, resulting in lives being thrown away on vast scales. The following is a passage from the book which serves in my mind as a parallell for many of the reasons why I consider your position to be unwise at best: ...it goes on to detail how other sources proved that in the event that some sort of war accidentally was triggered, various forces both economic and social would cause the war to be swift, civil, and relatively painless. The title for the book comes from fro a statement to this effect that Kaiser Wilhelm made to the departing armies stating that he would see the armies home before the leaves fell from the end of August. (Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on June 28th, and official declarations of war occurred at the end of July.) Of course, the war turned out to be the most savage and bloody war of all time while bogging down in a stalemate in which the nations of Europe threw away a generation of men in an act that is remarkably akin to the desperate self-destructive compulsion of drug addition from my perspective. Furthermore, the aftermath created the conditions for the greater spasmodic self-destructive convulsion that was World War II. The sum effect transformed Europe from the shining jewel of the world, both culturally and in terms of production of goods, into a collection of shattered dysfunctional nations, whose only saving grace was the memory of their heritage. The suggestion, in case you've missed it, is that given the potential worst case, and given a void of experiential knowledge regarding the effects of the scenario that you argue for, any rush to implement your scenario would, IMHO, be the same as declaring War to be dead, no matter what evidence you believe that you have. I would hope at the very least that you would be willing to implement it on a limited scale, would be willing to take the time to ensure that accurate long term effects could be mapped, and most importantly would be willing to relent from the course if the data didn't prove the benefits of your decriminalization, instead of the all too common rationalizations that come from people who "dogmatically believe" as I find to be endemic to the NORML acolytes I've known. Anyway, that's it. It'd be nice if you were right and I were wrong.
Yes, it happens, but on a FAR lower scale than what we are talking about with drugs. The UNODCP (United Nations Office of Drug Control Policy) has estimated that global drug trafficking is a $400 billion business. That entire business is controlled by criminal organizations worldwide. My contention is that if legitimate businesspeople were in charge of distributing these substances, the black market would dry up to the point that kids would find it more and more difficult to acquire drugs. As the average age of first use goes up, usage rates of harder drugs like heroin and cocaine will go down. We already know that people will use pot at roughly the same percentage no matter the law against it (http://bbs2.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=77244). This may be the same for harder drugs, but there is no data to prove or disprove that hypothesis. If there is even the slightest possibility that we can have the same or even lower usage rates with a policy that is less expensive, less oppressive, and less racist, then we need to explore such a solution post haste. If you want to apply Occam's Razor, ask yourself the question "Why do black people make up 13% of drug users and yet comprise 55% of those arrested for drug crimes?" You do not have to believe a single conspiracy theory to see that prohibition will disproportionately affect minorities and poor people. Of course I would want this implemented on a limited scale to start. The way I would want to see it happen at the start would be with the federal government getting out of drug policy altogether except as a clearinghouse for information. Then, I would allow the states to experiment with their drug policy over time so that we can find out what programs work and what programs are unworkable. There are already states that have passed medical mar1juana laws and the Alaskan Supreme Court has found that anti-mar1juana laws are unconstitutional because of the privacy guarantees therein. Nevada is again considering a law that would decriminalize possession and cultivation of personal amounts of mar1juana. Unfortunately, the federal government is overstepping its bounds in raids on medical mar1juana operations in California, campaigning against the referendum in Nevada, and orating against the court findings in Alaska. The states have the right to manage their own drug policy as long as they don't affect interstate commerce. People have the right to ingest what they want. Nobody has the right to criminalize behavior that half of us (us includes everyone who has graduated high school since 1972) have engaged in before the age of 18. I note that you did not even attempt to answer any of my questions or to refute my contention that prohibition is far more dangerous and harmful than drug use has ever been (or could ever be for that matter). In addition, you seem to totally overlook the evidence that IS out there regarding the success of more liberal drug policies worldwide (in modern times, not the 17- and 1800s). We can have a drug policy that takes drugs out of the hands of our children, but we will have to regulate the market to make that happen.
Man, I just have to admit--if I'm EVER going to start up with ANY kind of drug, I'm consulting andymoon first. Seriously. I don't agree with andymoon on a lot of his points, but my gripes originate from my own personal and religious beliefs, which really don't warrant much discussion in this thread. And yeah--let this just be an example to posters who have opinions which might be seen by many as being controversial or even wrong, but don't know how to articulate or get their point across. andymoon responds to every argument in a respectful way and in my opinion is a fantastic poster on this board. Keep up the good work, man.
If you really have some religious misgivings regarding drugs, I highly recommend reading at least the first chapter of "Saying Yes" by Jacob Sullum. Here is a link. I have it and if you are in the Houston area, I would be willing to lend it to you if you like. Sullum goes into many of the religious implications of drug use and examines the teachings of the Bible, Torah, and Koran to illustrate the positions that the prophets had on drug use (hint: you will be extremely surprised). I try to be very respectful in my anti-prohibition threads, but you should have heard some of the insults I have hurled at t_j! I have ignored him and have since seen my respectful treatment of other posters improve dramatically. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
I actually live in Salt Lake so I'll respectfully decline to borrow your book you mentioned--however, I work a graveyard that NEVER sees me doing actual work, so I'll see if I can get my hands on a copy and check it out. Sounds like a pretty interesting read. As for the insults thrown at t_j, no explanation needed. While I don't post nearly as often as I used to, some people still need to be placed in ignore, regardless if you've ever argued PERSONALLY with them or not. Thanks again for the heads-up on the book. I'll check it out.
I'm sorry, I started on a reply here, but am just too tired. I didn't respond to your arguements because I am convinced that no further productive converstation can occur and I'm trying to disengage, but you seem to want to be mistaking my disintrest for aquesience, so I'll respond as soon as I have some free time and I'm not about to fall asleep.
Newsbrief: Rural Maryland Cops Force Students to Disrobe During Drug Raid 5/21/04 It was supposed to be business as usual – just another police dog drug search – at Kent County High School in Maryland's Eastern Shore on April 16, but it ended up with 16 students patted down and two female students ordered to strip down and be inspected by a female sheriff's deputy. No drugs or other contraband were found on any of the 18 students. Drug dogs brought in by the Kent County Sheriff's Department at the behest of the school district sniffed about 250 book bags at the school and alerted on 18. The owners of those 18 book bags were the students who got searched. Now, the Baltimore Sun reported, Kent County Sheriff John Price has conceded his deputies were on shaky legal ground. "We were acting under what we thought was probable cause, and we still believe there was probable cause," he said. "At the same time, it was an area that was unclear," Price said. "We didn't know it was a gray area." He is reviewing the department's policy, he said. So is the school district. Superintendent Bonnie Ward told the Washington Post the high school policy on searches is being reviewed, but added that safe, drug-free schools are her "top priority." But Ward's top priority may soon turn out to be defending the district from lawsuits filed by outraged students like Heather Gore and her parents. According to the Post, Gore, a varsity tennis player and majorette in the school marching band, broke down in tears as described her ordeal at a recent school board meeting held to discuss the raid. "My name is Heather Gore," she began, sobbing before even the first word was out. "I am a sophomore at Kent County High School, and on April 16, I was forced to endure a partial strip-search due to a drug search carried out by the Kent County Sheriff's Office. The humiliation that I endured that day, and that I am still enduring, is overwhelming." Heather, 15, and fellow sophomore Lacey Fernwalt, 16, were taken to a room with a school administrator, where a female deputy ordered them to partially undress. Lacey removed her pants, and the deputy, Marcellene Beck, looked inside her bra, she said. According to Heather, Beck told her to remove her skirt then lifted her tank top, exposing her breasts. Then Beck told Heather to spread her legs as the deputy tugged at the edges of her underwear. "I was crying and hyperventilating. I sat there in disbelief," she told the Post. "I'm still so embarrassed," she said. Heather's mom, Patricia Gore, is looking for more than a simple policy review. An apology would be nice, she said. "I certainly have a lot of things besides lawyers' fees I need to spend money on, but my daughter shouldn't have had to go through all this, and neither should anyone else," she said. The Gores may get some help from the Maryland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, Deborah Jeon, managing attorney for the group's Eastern Shore office, told the Sun. "I think there is a very significant question as to how the entire sweep could be consistent with the Maryland regulation prohibiting investigative searches by a police officer unless there is a warrant," Jeon said. Those regulations also bar police from searching a student unless the student is under arrest or believed to be concealing a weapon, she added.
We say unequivocably, with one voice, that you DO NOT USE DRUGS UNTIL THE AGE OF CONSENT. Then, after the age of consent, you fully educate people and allow them to choose their own intoxicants. You track usage rates so that you can target offers for treatment, you open up and maintain treatment centers, and you pay for the whole kit and caboodle with taxes on the drugs themselves. [/B][/QUOTE] This works real well with the liquor laws we currently have in place. Lord knows I didn't get a hold of a beer till I was 21.
Actually, if you look at statistics, we have had a HUGE impact on availability of alcohol and tobacco to young people over the last decade and a half. The "We Card" programs and the like, along with having standardized, reasonable age limits nationawide have reduced availability of alcohol by 50% and tobacco by 25%. The system I would create (read my initial idea here ) would have even more stringent controls as well as complete education, where we will let everyone know that the penalty for allowing drugs to fall into the hands of young people could land you in prison for ten years. A recent study found that many teenagers can get illegal drugs more easily than alcohol, which does not surprise me at all. In the 80s, I was able to get drugs far more easily than alcohol. The system I would create would have as its primary goal reducing availability to teenagers. I think that goal is realistic if we change our strategy and begin treating adults as adults.
This is the single silliest bit of tautalogical partizan slogan I've ever heard in my life, even before taking into account the fact that you contradict one of your major precepts... The contradiction is as follows: You say, (in contradiction of the complete and total history of every political state in the history of the world, btw) that the government has no right to outlaw something that "half of us (us includes everyone who has graduated high school since 1972) have engaged in before the age of 18." Ok. Fine. Great. So if we accept the absurdity of this statement, i.e. that the governement has no intrest in matters which affect public health if it "interstate commerce clauses aren't affected" then we immediately have to disband most of the OSHA, most of the work of the Center for Disease Control, etc, but that's fine. We then have to eliminate any civil rights legislation, allow states to ignore Roe vs. Wade, etc. Of course, you fail to realize that the position which you argue was otensably "argued" and answered in contradition of your postion by the Civil War. But if we suspend belief and accept the tenuous 19th century anti-Federalist arguements that you propose, we are presented with a situation whereby we can't outlaw marajuana becuase 1/2 of people under 18 have tried it, but of course, your system prevents minors from getting any drugs. Therefore, once your system becomes successfuly implimented, the initial clause which supported the rights of people to smoke marajuana becomes again invalid, and the government, presumably looses one barrier to the prohibition or marajuana. My point here, is that your are arguing with slogans, oblivious to any sort of rational, logical discourse. You say something isn't so, I disprove your statement and you warp that into "evidence" of your rightness, and you aproach economic and political history with the idealogoical naiveté of a high school student. Every time in the past 24 hours that I've sat down to write this I've been overcome by futility of attempting elucidate any sort of logical arguements, but as I promised a response so here it is. I' sorry for the vitrol, but it's a genuine expression of a feeling that I haven't felt since attempting to discuss Vatican politics and polity with a rabbid Catholic proponent of reimposition Vatican hegamony over the world ala Leo's forged "Donation of Constatine", asserted over Charligmane without his consent.
So, you take a single statement, decide that it is one of my "major precepts," and attack it without any sort of evidence, logic, or rational discourse, instead choosing to, in your words, argue with slogans. Granted, your slogan was 6 paragraphs long, but that is the extent of your argument here. I went through your statement point by point, citing evidence, studies, and the realities of life after the year 2000 and you come back with THIS??? The major flaw in your argument is in assuming that the sataement you are attempting to tear apart ("half of us (us includes everyone who has graduated high school since 1972) have engaged in before the age of 18.") is the entirety of my position. This is a single, tangental point that has very little to do with the meat of my argument. If you are so interested in keeping prohibition around, I would suggest that you defend it as a policy in this country and begin to cite evidence that shows that it is having a positive impact. I asked you earlier in the thread what positive impact prohibition has had and you simply ignored me. As far as the other policies you mentioned (civil rights, Roe V. Wade, CDC, OSHA), they were created in response to a real problem and in some cases were driven by outside forces that the government could not control (I am not optimistic that without the protests and marches that civil rights legislation would have become enacted). Prohibition of drugs, on the other hand, was driven by jingoistic fear of the unknown. Stories (undocumented, but believed nonetheless) abounded of the Chinese opium smokers who subjugated girls to their will with the "evil" opium, the blacks driven to rape and murder by mar1juana (yes, mar1juana), and the threat of Mexicans with cocaine. None of these stories was based in fact and yet, when alcohol became legal again after alcohol prohibition ended, these drugs were not reassessed. The government has not proven that these drugs represent a health hazard worthy of the problems that prohibition causes. You are probably going to come back with a few one-liners about drug usage or drug users, but the fact of the matter is that the VAST majority of people who use drugs use them responsibly and do not cause problems for anyone. Now, you can continue to throw out red herrings if you like, but the only effective defense of the current policy will not be a simple-minded attack on the idea of liberalizing our drug policy. If you want to prove that prohibition is better, you actually need to take and defend THAT position. I would ask you for scientific studies that show that prohibition is a better policy than...well...anything else, but I know it is futile because such studies simply do not exist. You could start by answering a few questions. What positive impact has prohibition had on our society? How can we say that prohibition has been effective at all given that half of our young people use drugs before they leave high school? How is prohibition to be considered the best policy when high school kids report that it is easier to get illegal drugs than alcohol? How many MORE people (over the 2 million already there) would you think we will have to imprison before we actually have a positive impact on rates of use? You accuse me of having the "idealogoical naiveté of a high school student" despite the fact that I have been using evidence and science to prove my points while you continue to try to tear down my arguments without even beginning to defend prohibition. I would contend that the naive point of view is actually believing, in this day and age, that prohibition works AT ALL, given the evidence to the contrary.
My above statement doesn't even take into account that all of the issues you mention here were ways to remove the oppression from a group of people whereas prohibition actually IMPOSES oppression on a wide swath of our society. One of these days, there will be a law or court case that overturns prohibition and THEN, your analogy will hold water (in reverse of course).
