Drug prohibition is useless

[skadistic]

ME Yes smoking is bad but you don't smoke as much smoke when you smoke weed.

BasketCase....because it's illegal, perhaps? Make it illegal, and it's harder to get (for various reasons). Make it harder to get, it is smoked fewer times.

No you inhail less smoke as in parts per million. It has nothing to do with legal or illegal. YOu smoke less because the efects last longer then nicotine. Smoke a joint you get high for a few hours and may not smoke again all day, week or month. Smoke a cigarette you need another in twenty minuets. Weed is not hard to get and cant be stopped at the boarder. You can grow it anywhere its a weed.

 

[IglooDame]

The number of people who smoked MJ in the 80's is not known, and probably never will be. Most drug users make it a point to avoid getting found out. Confessing that you're a tobacco addict, on the other hand, carries very little social stigma--and zero jail time.

Those are all reasonable assumptions. But, you use the numbers 350,000, and "next to nobody" (for the sake of argument, I'll translate that as 1,000). I'd be willing to bet serious money that there was a ratio much smaller than 350-to-1 between smokers and pot users during the 1980s.

And I don't smoke pot, but my understanding is that pot smokers simply don't smoke at the same rate that tobacco smokers do, even if the pot is equivalently available and unmonitored.

What does a joint cost, by the way? And what does a cigarette cost?

 

[Irish Caesar]

It is my understanding that around my high school, marijuana was actually easier to come across for the average student than cigarettes.

 

[BasketCase]

But, you use the numbers 350,000, and "next to nobody" (for the sake of argument, I'll translate that as 1,000)

Close enough. The number on the chart was 5,000 (yes, four figures. A single pixel in front of a very tall bar for tobacco at 350,000)

Problem is, stats on MJ use are a lot harder to collect because the users are less willing to tell the truth. Not my words, that was the web site talkin'.

No you inhail less smoke as in parts per million. It has nothing to do with legal or illegal. YOu smoke less because the efects last longer then nicotine. Smoke a joint you get high for a few hours and may not smoke again all day, week or month.

Then you and I are at a stalemate. Yes, the (alleged) different effects of a joint may have something to do with it, but I make the claim that its illegal status also might have something to do with it, and I'm sticking with that.

There are people who chain-smoke ganja, though. A friend of mine found herself living upstairs of one.

 

[BaneBlade]

Since coke addicts generally put a great deal of effort into NOT getting caught, the number of such addicts is unknown.

There's no context problem, however. The numbers I posted only showed the end result.

Here's a possible route by which that end result was reached: government cracks down on cocaine. Some coke dealers get arrested. Supply goes down. Coke is harder to get and more expensive. Buyers get less coke for the same amount of money. Fewer uses of coke. Fewer deaths. That's the theoretical chain of cause and effect I'm hypothesizing.

(Pretty please, everybody note the boldface word there? This is NOT fact, it's a theory)

Your theory is viable, but: economics would tell us that you could see the effects of working prohibition in increasing street prices. But street prices(atleast for cocaine, other drugs i have no info on) had a downward trend over the last decades.

Exactly. What if its legal status is the reason....?

No, the topic wasn't originally about smoking, but smoking does in fact have a great deal of bearing on the question of whether banning a drug works. Tobacco is legal, and around 350,000 people a year died from it in the 80's. Mary Jane is illegal, and killed next to nobody over the same time period. The fact that it's illegal might be the reason it kills so few people.

Atleast in Switzerland, Netherlands and Germany it's legal or tolerated. Still it would be hard to find somebody dieing of Marijuana abuse.
Edit: forgot Morocco and Afghanistan. They did it for a looong time before the USA blackmailed their governments into making it illegal.

The number of people who smoked MJ in the 80's is not known, and probably never will be. Most drug users make it a point to avoid getting found out. Confessing that you're a tobacco addict, on the other hand, carries very little social stigma--and zero jail time.

We can(and have) computed the numbers of MJ users by using anonymous user statistics.
And you forget that MJ was widely used in other cultures as recreational drugs(Morocco and Afghanistan for example). Still there were no epidemics of dieing drug addicts.

....because it's illegal, perhaps? Make it illegal, and it's harder to get (for various reasons). Make it harder to get, it is smoked fewer times.

You don't seem to get it, today MJ is highly psychoactive. Even the most addicted stoney would frown upon the thought of smoking a cigarette pack of weed a day. Less material burned=less **** in your lungs.

 

[Sephiroth]

Otto Normalverbraucher would start cooking methamphethamines in his basement.

um, yea I live in a little county of Tennesse called Grundy County, and they do that here anyway..... there is realy nothing the police can do, I mean they would have to trow half the county in jail.........

 

[Grisu]

so you're basically just saying that banning it decreases the number of deaths by it?

actually, I agree, if we illegalized tabacco, less people would die from it. then let's also ban guns, and less people would die by guns.
ban junkfood and less people would die from malnutrition/obesity.
ban cars -> less deaths in car accidents.
ban ladders -> less deaths from people falling off ladders.
ban swimming -> less drownings. this can be continued almost indefinately

personally, I think we should have the freedom to do stupid things with our own body.

yes, maybe the war on drugs does indeed lower the number of drug addicts (though, I'm thinking it's a much smaller margin than people believe) but it's also pretty clear that it raises the number of drug-related crimes, so you shift the harm from those that actually take the drugs to those that happen to be victims of drug-crimes.

 

[Grisu]

Atleast in Switzerland, Netherlands and Germany it's legal or tolerated. Still it would be hard to find somebody dieing of Marijuana abuse.

actually it would be quite interested in seeing usage stats between countries that allow/tolerate weed and those that prosecute it. I imagene the difference would be negligible.

 

[Narz]

All nonmedical drug use adversely affects a person's life.

That is a matter of perspective. Theirs.

Besides who is to decide what a medical drug/herb is? The government? So in California marijuiana is medical but cross the border to Arizona and all of a sudden it's bad again?

Silliness to the extreme.

And I stated previously, adults should be given the right to take their own health, happiness and recreation into their own hands. That is what freedom is all about.

 

[BaneBlade]

actually it would be quite interested in seeing usage stats between countries that allow/tolerate weed and those that prosecute it. I imagene the difference would be negligible.

The differences are marginal. And if you look at NL, we're we have the most exact data from, the highest grade of legalization and longest time period for observance, MJ usage went slightly down. Maybe even by a substantial margin, i can't recall if these statistics accounted for the percentage smuggled out of country.

 

[JoeM]

So why so few people admit it?
From the opium problems in China, the alcohol prohibition in America to our days "war on drugs", nothing good came from it.
Our acccepted economic theories can even tell us what would happen if we would succesfully destroy current producers, the street prices would went through the roof, Joe Average would start growing coca in his winter-garden and Otto Normalverbraucher would start cooking methamphethamines in his basement.
So why keep on with an thousandfold proven to be unsuccesful policy?

I know my post is provocative, but I'm really interested in a controverse and serious discussion of this topic, so please refrain from trolling!

It's a fair argument, government attempts to prevent the drug trade probably pushes the prices up - exactly what organized crime wants.

Legalize it, industrialise it, tax it....spoil it.

 

[BasketCase]

Your theory is viable, but: economics would tell us that you could see the effects of working prohibition in increasing street prices. But street prices(atleast for cocaine, other drugs i have no info on) had a downward trend over the last decades.

Economics also says that lower demand will push prices down. But there's no way to know for sure if that's happening. Somehow I can't see economic analysts visiting with a drug mogul in order to obtain business figures for Wall Street Weekly.....

My theory is only a theory because we can only see the results.

 

[Stolen Rutters]

The crack epidemic of the eighties hit the little city I grew up in hard. Outside of Detroit proper, we had one of the highest incidences of unsolved murders in the state. With the collapse of law enforcement at the time, the drug trade was effectively legal and largely unchekced. It destroyed parts of town. Businesses left the south side, uninsured medical costs shot through the roof for the community, and tax revenues fell apart.

It's better now, since the root cause was the closing of the local factories, but the West Willow Crips got its opening in the hard times and pushed out the local previously-safer version of the drug trade. They are safely in control round here so most crime now is the assault and burglery kind with very little murder.

edit-actually checked stats. Crime ain't so bad now. http://www.idcide.com/citydata/mi/ypsilanti.htm

I still think it's a bad thing to allow unfettered access to any psychoactive drug of any kind. Can't do much about booze and smokes, but we can crush the rest of them.

 

[BaneBlade]

Economics also says that lower demand will push prices down. But there's no way to know for sure if that's happening. Somehow I can't see economic analysts visiting with a drug mogul in order to obtain business figures for Wall Street Weekly.....

My theory is only a theory because we can only see the results.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-157.html
A website about the american alcohol prohibition and it's failure.
All "experiments" conducted sofar seem to support my case. If there are others i'm not aware of, please correct me.
Germany, Austria and Switzerland have programs(though IIRC only Austrias is state-sponsored) whick check drugs right at the disco/rave. You buy Ecstasy, Amphetamin or whatever, go to them, they'll do a quick chemical analysis so you can be sure of what you have(no overdose, no toxin). they also ask for the prices, data gathered suggest through these (and other sources) suggest downward trend to consume Heroin, upoward trend for nearly all "chemicals" and MJ. Prices fairly stable(these programs are running since atleast 2000!)
Sources for these are the annual Drugreports of the 3 german states, available online as pdf.

 

[warpus]

All nonmedical drug use adversely affects a person's life.

So I suppose you're for the criminalization of caffeine - a recreational drug (by your definition) ?

 

[{|}$~\]

being a spelling nazi

Godwin's Law. Argument over. You lose.

 

[JerichoHill]

Economics also says that lower demand will push prices down. But there's no way to know for sure if that's happening. Somehow I can't see economic analysts visiting with a drug mogul in order to obtain business figures for Wall Street Weekly.....

My theory is only a theory because we can only see the results.

Actually, and economist researched a whole book while staying with a drug gang in Chicago during 1 summer in 1980.

So we know how drug gangs work. Amazingly enough, their organization and "business model" is like a fast food restaurant.

 

[Shadylookin]

Godwin's Law. Argument over. You lose.

1. a spelling nazi is a term for someone that hounds people's spelling mistakes.

2 that was not my argument, that was me telling you to stop doing so and debate the issues

3 you failed to debate the issues

4 I can't lose as there is no game being played

5 would you kindly respond to my questions?

 

[IglooDame]

5 would you kindly respond to my questions?

Meh, I'm still waiting for him to explain why we should bother banning drugs that are no riskier than a wide variety of other recreational activities.

 

[Aphex_Twin]

http://thefreedomchannel.blogspot.com/2006/08/law-enforcement-against-prohibition.html