Enough Already -- Stop Funding the Taliban Through Opium Prohibition

This most likely is due to a low demand for certain drugs among high school students. Even if that's not true, there's still no reason to beleive that ending opiate prohibition would increase consumption for that age group. In fact, the accompanying treatment-based approach would more likely decrease the overall risk of harms associated with addiction and abuse.

Nobody here can deny that the current strategy just isn't working. Our prisons are overcrowded, we're indirectly funding terrorist/insurgent/gang activity around the world, and the supply of illicit drugs almost never fails to meet demand.

I can tell you from personal experience that the Drug War strategy that seeks to lump all drugs together is extremely destructive. Kids who try cannabis or psilocybin or LSD and realize that there lives haven't become a complete mess overnight have no reason to beleive any of the "education" they received in the DARE program and the like. The result is that they have no clue as to the difference between responsible drug use and abuse (because the DARE line is that there is no such thing as responsible drug use). Do not underestimate the power of cognitive dissonance.

 

You are the one who is lumping all of the drugs in one category. "End the drug war now" as in across the board legalize everything because they are all equal. I have been discussing opiates, and briefly cocaine. Bringing in all these other drugs interchangeably when it makes for more rhetorical points is not a honest debating tactic. mar1juana and LSD have not been part of the calculus of my points.

You are the one who is propagandizing, bringing up emotional images and arguments, and introducing arguments that I never even remotely made. As I see it, you are guilty of everything you blame on me. Your post reads like those annoyingly ubiquitous 'Christian Children's Fund' TV commercials, but for drugs.

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And if we are going to decide that personal experience is a legitimizing factor in this discussion, I have no doubt that I will win that exchange.

 

I fail to find any substance in your post, so forgive me if I have nothing to say. I'm sorry that you think I was "blaming" anything on you as that wasn't my intent. Anyways, I won't engage in personal attacks or one-upsmanship.

 

Count me in as one who could get whatever illegal substance with much greater ease than beer, booze, and tobacco. And I'm talking in junior high. High school was no different.

Re: taking beer or spirits out of another kids parents home: That rarely, if ever, happened, and when it did, we were caught 9 times out of 10. It just wasn't worth it for the trouble we'd get into.

Bars and stores are typically worried about losing their business, paying fines, losing licenses in serving minors. Dealers have no such scruples.

Substitute drugs for booze during prohibition last century: gang warfare, preying on innocents, bullying businesses, murder, robbery, rape, pimping, extortion, etc. The situation today really isn't any different than it was back then.

You want to control it? Then legalize it, tax it, and regulate it.

Legalize.

 

So then, you have just effectively beheaded the entire argument of this article - that in the USA drug prohibition puts money into the hands of the Taliban. Perhaps the article should be reprinted somewhere in Europe?

This is repeated often but I have yet to see anything but anticdotal evidence to back it up. I was looking for statistics yesterday and most of them indicated it was significantly more difficult for people in high school to get heroin or cocaine than marajuana.