Legalizing Vices

I'd say it's more values. I disagree that a society has the inherent right to engage in behavioral modification purely for it's own benefit. People have a right to be self destructive, and I haven't seen sufficient evidence that there's enough benefit to justify suspending that right but not something like mandating chemical based behavioral modification.

Fight smart, not fair.

Um, no, it's not a matter of choice. Psychological studies, including brain scans, over the last three decades have pretty well proven that gambling is as addicting as drugs like alcohol, and almost as destructive. I've personally known someone who went over $150,000 in debt in a single weekend of gambling - at that point, it's not a matter of self-control anymore, anymore than a heroin junkie with a full needle in front of them is going to resist shooting up.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

It is a matter of choice to begin, at least.

Then your brain starts to rearrange itself...

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

@Deboss:

"rights" don't really enter into it. The individual abdicates a certain amount of personal freedom to belong to society, and good bad or indifferent that's the way it is. NOTE

Again, I'd agree with you...but the actions of each individual often affect the group as a whole, and society's leaders have to keep that in mind.

Basically...I'm for the idea of complete legalization in principle, but as a practical matter the support network for such an endeavor just isn't there. We'd need vastly better education with regard to the risks of indulging in things like hard drugs or high-stakes gambling, and we don't have it. C.D.A.'s idea of putting the revenues earned from taxing such vices into supporting them has very real merit, but we'd need a "down payment" of at least a generation of improved education on these matters.

Put simply, you can't just dump freedoms on people. History does bear this out to be true.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

Err I'm with Drunk on this one. You can't blindly assume someone's self-destructive behaviours have damage purely located to themselves. There's going to be collateral damage and that's something someone should answer for, or damage that should be prevented. I don't advocate strict bans or a Bureau of Prohibition or something, but that's because I think softer control methods are more cost-effective means.

As for my own views...

Gambling, drinking, smoking, marijuana, soft drugs, hard drugs, designer drugs and so on, I think that at the very least, user-end use should be legalised. For things that could potentially not cause collateral damage (marijuana, cigarettes, drinking, gambling), I feel that discouragement (such as advertisement bans), sin taxes and education programs are useful. For harder substances, I believe that control of production and sale, alongside controlled points of use (safe injection sites)... alongside a total ban on private distributors (heavy fines or policing of illicit producers or traffickers) is better. I don't find sin taxes on hard highly addictive substances to be a safe policy.

You can say "Pick better friends", sure. But how do you tell someone they should have picked a better parent? or a better kid? Or a better guy-driving-down-the-street-and-blowing-through-the-intersection-you-just-tried-to-cross?

edited 17th Jan '12 9:59:00 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

That's what the whole "license" part is about. And it's not like I suggested that we get rid of DUI laws, which I don't think that many people have suggested.

Fight smart, not fair.

That really doesn't help the guy that just got hit by the car, or had their brother steal their money personal possessions, Deboss. Some things are just too damn risky to legalize.

You can legalize something without making it legal to sell, you know...

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

And neither does driving while drunk being illegal help the guy who got hit by a drunk driver. If it's about safety, you're better off making a place they can go do their substances out of harms way than trying to just make it illegal. Theft to feed an addiction is not something restrained to substances.

Fight smart, not fair.

Wait, how do you legalize something without making it legal to sell? That doesn't make sense.

That's kind of putting too much responsibility on the people the addicts know, and not enough on the addicts to behave responsibly. In any case, how likely is it that these places are really going to keep the meth addicts from leaving the place while high?

edited 18th Jan '12 12:16:30 AM by AceofSpades

Legalize all drugs fully, without any sin tax whatsoever. Utterly dismantle Narcotics enforcement, firing all Narcotics cops WITHOUT COMPENSATION. Cancel all benefits for narcs that have already retired: Use the savings to fund addicts' health care.

Fully legalize gambling and prostitution nationwide, without a sin tax on either. Reduce Vice departments to a skeleton crew (no more than 5% of what they're now). Fire all other Vice cops without compensation, and cancel the benefits of current and former Vice cops.

Close all drug courts and fire all drug prosecutors, shut down 60% of prisons, ban privatized prisons and sack as many prison guards as you can get away with (again, no compensation).

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

If you give the license to sell to the places responsible for keeping track of them, and then threaten that license if someone leaves while inhibited, then you've created a semi-insular containment system.

Fight smart, not fair.

Firing people simply because of the job they were told to do is shit stupid, Savage. Especially when it's a better use of people resources to simply have them do something else. Hell, we have an insane backlog on far simpler court procedures than drug charges; just move those court employees to other things to help speed up the process for other cases. It is also simply vindictive to deny cops their pension when their families probably depend on those.

The idea here is to discuss ways to alleviate suffering, not cause it.

Bah, ninja; How effective is that on bars, though? Although I'm pretty sure that doesn't apply to most bars anyway.

edited 18th Jan '12 12:42:15 AM by AceofSpades

It is vindictive all right. It's payback for all the people that lost their freedom under their laws they enforce. As for their families, yeah they'll suffer. Keep in mind that the families of those criminalized by the prohibition lobby and their enforcers have suffered as well.

At any rate, you're giving cops special treatment: People are fired regularly in the private sector if their position gets made redundant... And losing benefits when the former employer goes bankrupt is not unheard of either.

Considering that these guys were responsible for a whole lotta deprivation of liberty and property, it's unfair to demand that the people keep paying their pensions: As a general rule, people shouldn't have to fund the pensions of those who oppress them.

edited 18th Jan '12 12:55:44 AM by SavageHeathen

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

(ignore this)

edited 18th Jan '12 12:51:46 AM by BobbyG

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No, not it's not. Let's not Godwin this shit, fuck.

Being vindictive does not improve the situation. And given the fact that you want to fund the healthcare of addicts, taxing the shit out of all those things is a far more effective way to fund it. Hell, they're the ones doing the idiotic thing, they should pay into their healthcare. (I think everyone should pay into healthcare, and that requires taxes. Which, by the way, if done right will bring the cost down for everyone.) These men and women are doing their job, and they're not the ones who decide which laws they have to enforce. If the legislatures decide something is a law, it's a cops duty to enforce it, plain and simple. And, as a friend pointed out, the people you want fired make a paltry amount of money compared to the funds needed to help addicts get better. An incredibly inefficient use of financial resources, that.

It's not special treatment when I'm pointing out that a vindictive approach is destructive and not going to achieve the desired goal. And also trample on another right entirely.

And I see you didn't address my point about the backlog of court cases; do you deny it's much more effective to move all that court personnel to none drug related cases? So that, hey, people can exercise their right to a speedy trial? Or are you so willing to punish people who are just doing their job (enforcing laws which they probably didn't decide on) or do you actually value people's rights enough that this is a better use of the people who have just been freed up? Same thing goes for the cops; they can be moved to other departments and lessen the workload on everyone.

edited 18th Jan '12 1:15:12 AM by AceofSpades

The wife and daughter of my drug-addicted uncle suffered, all right, but not because of the police. They suffered because the drugs, and the money to buy the drugs, mattered more to him than they did, and they suffered because so long as he was too addled to keep a job, he was willing to string them along to get more money out of them.

(I'd like to blame him for his own behavior, but I can't say for certain whether I'd have done any better. I feel like the appropriate thing for me to do is to blame the drugs, and to act in favor of whatever policy will prevent people from becoming addicted like he did.)

edited 18th Jan '12 12:59:50 AM by feotakahari

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

If you don't close prisons, release and pardon all those convicted of drug crimes, and fire cops and prison guards en masse, you're not saving as much as you could from the abolition of the Drug War.

If you're not going to police folks' lifestyles (and you shouldn't) why keep the police State in place? Those cops and those prisons are actually redundant. I fail to see why cops' jobs should be preserved while everyone else can lose theirs as soon as firing'em is profitable.

That happens because drugs are expensive. If drugs were cheap, junkies wouldn't need to scam/steal from their families, so they wouldn't. Expensive drugs turn junkies into criminal parasites, cheap drugs turn'em into harmless nuisances.

edited 18th Jan '12 1:19:00 AM by SavageHeathen

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

Cops and most court officials make a paltry amount of money compared to the money needed to help addicts get better. Which again, makes taxing these products the most effective way to fund that. And this is also assuming that Congress even cares about spending that supposedly saved money on anything. It is a better use of people and money to simply move those people to other departments. And again, taxing the products. (I will never support the legalizing of heroine and meth. Those are too destructive.)

And again, you did not address my point about a person's right to a speedy trial, or the court case backlogs.

I'm not even arguing the point about private prisons. That whole corrupt thing can go rot. It's the fact that what you are suggesting is not only vindictive, but incredibly inefficient at solving the problem.

Cops make a shit amount of money. Most of that drug war crap goes into the weapons and inefficient operations, not the cop's paychecks. I'm not going to punish people for just doing the jobs they were told to do. Being vindictive perpetuates injustices instead of getting rid of it. And you want to plunge us into an employment crisis in the process, because what the fuck are these people going to do? Cops aren't there for profitability. They're there to help people who's rights have been violated. Like hey, people who have been stolen from, or killed.

edited 18th Jan '12 1:22:20 AM by AceofSpades

@re: Sin Taxes: Most societal problems caused by drugs are due to the fact that drugs are both addictive and expensive. A career addict may need up to $100 a day to feed their habit. When the addict loses his job, or is too high all the time to find gainful employment, then we got a problem.

You can't make drugs non-addictive, but you can make'em non-expensive. If drugs are dirt cheap, most problems associated with them (criminality and impoverishment) disappear. Sin taxes are actually counterproductive.

Not to mention, they're regressive taxation. And a sumptuary law, attempting to make vice a privilege for the moneyed elites, unaffordable to the working class. Sumptuary laws are just evil.

edited 18th Jan '12 1:34:52 AM by SavageHeathen

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

If drugs were cheap, junkies would be high all the time. How could they pay for their home, food, water, electricity, and the drugs? Where would they get money?

Social support?

Why should society enable people who don't even try at all to basically leech off of it?

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

And what about the people who die due to other people being on drugs, for example, when driving?

Drugs are unsafe, you know — especially when operating machinery. And they can kill*

Keep Rolling On

News flash:

• THERE IS NO WAY TO PREVENT DRUG USERS FROM TAKING DRUGS.
• THERE IS NO WAY TO MAKE DRUGS NON-ADDICTIVE.
• THERE IS NO WAY TO GET ADDICTS TO PRIORITIZE OTHER STUFF BEFORE DRUGS.

If you want addicts to be able to feed/clothe/support their families, you have to accept the fact that they will be high all the goddamn time. Since their habit takes priority, trying to make drugs more expensive (with prohibition or punitive taxes) worsens the situation: Their other needs go unattended. Their families get neglected.... And the list goes on.

If drug users can both sustain their habits and their families, they will. As long as drugs are expensive, they won't. It's that simple.

edited 18th Jan '12 1:44:10 AM by SavageHeathen

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

NEWS FLASH:

• NO ONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WANTS TO GIVE BENEFITS TO PEOPLE WHO ARE JUST GOING TO SHOOT UP ALL THE TIME WITHOUT EVEN TRYING TO GET OFF THE DRUGS

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