I will. It's worth it. Your paragraph above is meaningless--the number of people hurt or killed in anti-drug raids is only meaningful when compared against the number of people hurt or killed by drugs themselves.
Which drugs, legal or illegal? Because in recent years deaths from entirely legal drugs have been skyrocketing, along with illegal drugs. So, clearly, these raids aren't protecting anyone.
That's a loaded question. It assumes Portugal's decriminalization policy was successful. It was not. Portugal's REHAB program was successful. As are, indeed, almost all rehab programs everywhere else in the world. Drug education, prevention, and recovery programs are almost always highly successful at reducing drug problems. Portugal's turnaround was the result of its rehab program, and there's no justification for giving the credit to decriminalization.
Now this is just flatly untrue. Decriminalization and other harm reduction strategies, such as clean needles, have significantly reduced problem drug use and specifically the use of intravenous heroin. It even says this in the report discussed by the OP, which you apparently did not read in all your "exhaustive" research.
Exactly. However, note the word I underlined. Banning something like cocaine prevents more people from being hurt/killed by cocaine than are hurt/killed by drug raids. And yes, if we ban alcohol or tobacco, that would reduce the number of people who die from them.....but, and this is the part you left out, by how much?
According to the Global Commission on Drug Policy Report (the one discussed in the OP, and located
here) the use of cocaine increased worldwide 27% from 1998-2008. So, how is banning something reducing it's usage again?
Personally, with alcohol and tobacco: I don't care. American culture being what it is right now, bans on tobacco and alcohol will not happen in the U.S. any time soon; regardless of whether or not such bans should happen, they won't. So I'm not going to bother worrying about it.
Ahh, even though they are both incredibly harmful and incredibly addictive for many people, even more so than heroin and cocaine.
Because that same rule holds true with everything else. Dangerous stuff that's legal almost always kills more people in the long term. When people want to stop something from hurting people, what do they do with it? They ban it.
Or, in the case of a legal, regulated product like cigarettes, they use education and public awareness campaigns to tell people how dangerous it is.
How we Americans spend our money is part of our private lives. Yet, unless I misunderstood you, you don't seem to have a problem with taking money from rich people to help poor people. The very same people who want drugs legalized out of concern for privacy, suddenly stop caring about privacy when it comes to dipping into the pockets of rich people to "make them pay their fair share" or whatever the current slogan is.
They do the same thing with guns vs. drugs. The
same people who want to BAN guns in order to prevent guns from killing people, are trying to LEGALIZE drugs--their reason being, in order to prevent drugs from killing people. The logical disconnect there is just unbelievable. Cue cheesy joke: the only real difference between cocaine and a shotgun is that a shotgun hurts more when you shove it up your nose.
Oh, this old spiel of yours. I know it may be hard for you to believe this but many people like their guns and their drugs. But, I suppose you can keep grouping people together in broad sweeping statements like that, inaccurate though they may be.
That doesn't make a case for decriminalizing. A tug of war can always be won two ways. The above disconnect can be resolved either by legalizing weed or banning it. Yes, I agree that many hypocrisies exist in politics--the fact that hypocrisy exists does not imply an answer to how it should be solved.
Since marijuana is essentially harmless, why ban it at all?
The two merely happened at the same time. Which doesn't mean anything. Prove specifically that the one
caused the other.
The NIDA has already provided extensive proof (forty years of it) that rehab programs reduce drug use. What actually happened in Portugal is this: Portugal's rehab programs reduced drug use. Less drug use resulted in less crime. (just because you see a fire truck show up every time you see a house on fire, doesn't mean fire trucks cause fires.....)
Already has been mentioned in the Global Commission on Drug Policy Report, in which it was concluded that decriminalization and harm reduction reduced problem drug use and drug use rates.
Surpiiiiise! The Netherlands only decriminalized cannabis--their policy on other drugs, especially hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin, is even tougher than that in the United States! Plus, the Netherlands is also doing the same thing Portugal did: rehab programs. Which, as I already said (with source) are successful. False cause and effect again. It's not the decrim that reduced the Netherlands' drug problem, it's the rehab.
Actually, this is also wrong. Heroin and Cocaine are both illegal in the Netherlands but they also have harm reduction (clean needles, medically prescribed heroin, etc) which has almost halved the number of heroin users. That's something we definitely don't do over here.
Source, with verifiable numbers. Or it didn't happen.
Don't bother. I've looked myself, many times, and can never find reliable statistics. How many shootings with Tommy guns? How much violence and corruption? Been there, done that, couldn't find an answer.
Unrelated side note: the desire to escape the dismal reality of the Depression was what actually caused people to turn against Prohibition, a program that was widely approved by the voters when it was first implemented. People wanted to get smashed in order to forget the Depression for half an hour at a time.
Nah, it was because people didn't want to continue a failed policy that enriched corrupt bootlegging kingpins.
