UN Global Commission: Drug War a Failure

Still waiting on your response to your math, by the way. Does everyone born between 1998-2008 snort blow like it's closing night at studio 54?
Yeah.....I won't be answering that one. Ever. Because it's a straw man.

Drug use is going up in this country, for one.
No, it's not. You're simply quoting only the statistics for drug use going up. Plus, some of your numbers confuse the absolute number of drug users, with the rate of drug use (i.e. number of druggies per 100,000 people). A decline in drug use doesn't have this problem; a decline in drug use is always a good thing, whereas a rise in the number of drug users doesn't actually tell you anything until you check the rate. (because total population, most of which is NOT drug users, is always going up)

The reality is that drug use rates are going up with some controlled substances, and down with others--and most of the upticks seen in this thread so far only happened in the last year or two. Over the last decade, and also over the last four decades, the trend has been a decline in drug use.

Currently (i.e. last year only): cocaine use is down. Alcohol and tobacco use is down. Weed use is up. But the real driver of the rise in drug abuse is......SURPRISE!......prescription meds. Which ironically fall on the line between legal and illegal.

Tough luck kid. They're all around you, at every hour of the day. This has been and always will be the case, because you can't arrest them all.
Hmm.....that one doesn't appear to be in my list of debate fallacies. I'll call this one "the appeal to futility".

Nobody said we had to arrest all drug users. Well, excepting that you said it just now, of course. :D But we don't have to catch them all. Each drug user in prison is another person who can't hurt anybody. The more of them you put in the can, the safer the neighborhood. And my neighborhood is very safe. No, I am not surrounded on all sides by druggies. There are very few druggies in my 'hood, and if there are any around here, the laws force them to hide in the basement. Which is where I want them.


food can clog arteries, the brain dont do too well loaded up with plaque and animal protein
On rare occasions. Drugs always screw up the brain.


#1 - sometimes yes, sometimes no.
#2 - sometimes yes, sometimes no.
The correct answers are "mostly yes" on both. Liberals are usually anti-oil-industry and anti-corporate-power.

Bolding mine. So were these wars fought over alcohol or religion?
Over alcohol. For religious reasons.

Are you talking about the Massachusetts Bay colonists and the Pequots?
Yep, that's one of them. The Indians didn't want the White Man's "stupid water" and started more than one war in an attempt to stop the alcohol trade. They lost, of course. Point is, there have been wars fought over booze.


Wait, is Basket Case seriously trying to use the Opium Wars as a reason to criminalize pot?:huh:
Not exactly. Go through the course of events again: China has a problem with rampant opium abuse. China bans opium. Now, the British have a choice: they can either work to legalize opium, or they can simply start selling it illegally. Which do they do? The conventional wisdom today is that making a drug illegal simply boosts the profit margin. If that's the case......then why weren't the British happy with that profit margin?? Instead, they fought an extremely expensive war to get the Chinese to re-legalize the stuff.

The Opium Wars were a case of the drug peddlers wanting it legal, not illegal. It's a counterexample to one of today's most common arguments for legalizing drugs.

I was thinking of using the Taiping war as a rationale for banning Christianity.
You're aware I'm an atheist? :)


Edit: Oopsie. Forgot one.
Dawgphood said:
You know, <snip>, maybe they are happening at the same time because one is a cause of the other? Decriminalization reducing drug usage rates and what not?
Then show me specific proof. All of your sources, including that peer-reviewed and scholarly one, have the same problem I've explained already: decrim and a decline in drug use happened at the same time. That is not proof that the one is the cause of the other. The rehab is the cause. Prove to me that decrim specifically is the cause. The only way you can do that is with an example where a government instituted decrim without rehab, and as far as I know none has ever done that.
 
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