The reason why Libertarians don't get elected into office is because...

[hsmith]

great argument

[Scrum]

Originally Posted by lew

Although it's a pretty minor issue, most libertarians are for legalizing all drugs. We don't believe in punishing anyone for a victimless "crime."

I'm for the legalization of all drugs too.

I don't think it will ever happen though.

[7960]

Originally Posted by hsmith

yeah, we all need a nanny. sorry, i don't follow that mindless logic.

there are very valid reasons for legalizing drugs. but you refuse to acknowledge any of them because it doesn't "jive" with what you "think" government should do.

the war on drugs has produced a country of felons over nothing. victimless crimes are not valid crimes, there is no reason to punsh people for them.

so please, explain to me why drugs should NOT be legalized? i find that a hilarious opinion.

we're not debating whether drugs should be legalized, we're debating whether the country will vote for someone who says heroin should be legalized.

this is not a difficult concept............. my views on drug legalization don't matter. 300M people's views matter. So please, explain to me how you're going to convince average joe voter that your ideas on legalizing heroin are not extreme and how you're going to get him to vote for you. Because right now average joe voter thinks "they're fucking nuts if they think I'm voting for someone who doesn't think legalizing heroin is a problem."

[Scrum]

Originally Posted by hsmith

the rise of crack and meth are directly attributed to the restriction of other drugs. the government has helped create the desire for these horrible drugs

people wouldn't be making drugs out of household chemicals that can kill them if they could buy a dime bag at the grocery store.
there would be no more inner city wars for "turf" to sell drugs. children wouldn't be led to the life of crime because it is an easy way to "get rich"

remove profit incentive and the problem goes away. it is simple economics.

I agree 100%.

Nearly every problems with drugs in our society is directly linked to the black market for these items.


Legalized drugs won't make addicts, addicts will use be using if the drugs are legal or not.

[hsmith]

apparently it is a difficult concept

the concept is the reasoning behind the position.

legalizing drugs isn't an extreme. you have just bought into big government propaganda

[hsmith]

Originally Posted by Scrumtralecent

I agree 100%.

Nearly every problems with drugs in our society is directly linked to the black market for these items.


Legalized drugs won't make addicts, addicts will use be using if the drugs are legal or not.

[Scrum]

Originally Posted by 7960

we're not debating whether drugs should be legalized, we're debating whether the country will vote for someone who says heroin should be legalized.

Yep. It's a easy hotbutton issue that a majority will never support.

[hsmith]

Originally Posted by Scrumtralecent

Yep. It's a easy hotbutton issue that a majority will never support.

because republicans have made it an "extreme" issue that will never be discussed

[Diamond Cross]

Myth #2:
Legalization Will Drive The Crime Rate Down

Syndicated columnist Abigail Van Buren endorses Legalization. She wrote in her column, "Dear Abby," that, "The legalization of drugs would put drug dealers out of business."She added that it would also reduce the prison population and create a perpetual source of tax revenue.[27]

Former Surgeon General Elders told a National Press Club luncheon,"Sixty percent of violent crimes are drug- or alcohol-related.... Many times they're robbing, stealing and all of these things to get money to buy drugs.... I do feel that we would markedly reduce our crime rate if drugs were legalized."[28]

Professor Steven Duke told an America Online computer network audience, "Without a doubt, the problem of violent crime would be ameliorated [by legalizing drugs]. I think drug prohibition causes half of our serious crime."[29]
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Ma.) supports legalization. "We make a mistake, with the serious law enforcement problems we have today, to get the police to arrest people who smoke marijuana.... We are wasting $10 billion a year trying to physically interdict drugs."[30]

The new president of the American Bar Association, George Bushnell, favors legalizing marijuana and cocaine. He believes legalization will cut crime.[31]

Legalizers believe most black market and organized syndicate involvement in the drug business would die and that drug-induced crime would decrease with drug legalization. But these assertions are not supported by the facts. The United States experimented with legalization and it failed. From 1919 to 1922, government-sponsored clinics handed out free drugs to addicts in hopes of controlling their behavior. The effort failed. Society's revulsion against drugs, combined with enforcement, successfully eradicated the menace at that time.[32]

California decriminalized marijuana in 1976, and, within the first six months, arrests for driving under the influence of drugs rose 46 percent for adults and 71.4 percent for juveniles.[33] Decriminalizing marijuana in Alaska and Oregon in the 1970s resulted in the doubling of use.[34] Patrick Murphy, a court-appointed lawyer for 31,000 abused and neglected children in Chicago, says that more than 80 percent of the cases of physical and sexual abuse of children now involve drugs. There is no evidence that legalizing drugs will reduce these crimes, and there is evidence that suggests it would worsen the problem.[35]

Legalization would decrease drug distribution crime because most of those activities would become lawful. But would legalization necessarily reduce other drug-related crime like robbery, rape, and assault? Presumably legalization would reduce the cost of drugs and thus addicts might commit fewer crimes to pay for their habits. But less expensive drugs might also feed their habit better, and more drugs means more side effects like paranoia, irritability and violence. Suggestions that crime can somehow be eliminated by redefining it are spurious. Free drugs or legalizing bad drugs would not make criminal addicts into productive citizens. Dr. Mitchell S. Rosenthal, expert on drugs and adolescents and president of Phoenix House, a resident treatment center in New York, said, "If you give somebody free drugs you don't turn him into a responsible employee, husband, or father."[36] The Justice Department reports that most inmates (77.4 percent male and 83.6 percent female) have a drug history and the majority were under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of their current offense. And a surprisingly large number of convicted felons admit their crime motive was to get money for drugs. For example, 12 percent of all violent offenses and 24.4 percent of all property offenses were drug-money motivated.[37]

Even if drugs were legalized some restrictions still would be necessary. For example, restricting the sale of legalized drugs to minors, pregnant women, police, military, pilots and prisoners would be necessary but would still provide a black market niche. Pro-legalizers contend that government could tax drugs, thus off-setting the social costs of abuse. But history proves that efforts to tax imported drugs like opium created a black market. Earlier this century Chinese syndicates smuggled legal opium into this country to avoid tariffs. Even today, there is ample crime based on the legal drugs, alcohol, and tobacco. For example, organized crime smuggles cigarettes from states with low tobacco taxes into those with high taxes, and such activities are accompanied by violence against legal suppliers.[38]

If now-illegal drugs were decriminalized, the government would have to determine the allowable potency for commercial drugs. But no government can okay toxic substances, so a black market would be created for higher potency drugs and those that remained banned, like the new "designer drugs."Even pro-drug forces do not call for blanket legalization of drugs like LSD, crack, or PCP. Therefore, we would continue to have drug-related crime and illegal drug distribution organizations that would push these drugs on youngsters, who would be more easily induced into drug abuse through the availability and social sanctioning of marijuana. Drug abuse is closely correlated with crime. The
National Youth Survey found that 25 percent of youths who admitted to cocaine or heroin use also committed 40 percent of all the index crimes reported. The survey also found that youths who tested positive for cannabinoids have more than twice as many non-drug-related felony referrals to juvenile court as compared with those found to have tested negative.[39]

The extent to which individuals commit "drug-related crimes only" is overstated. Most incarcerated "drug"offenders violated other laws as well. Princeton University professor John Dilulio found that only 2 percent -- i.e., 700 -- of those in federal prisons were convicted of pure drug possession. They generally committed other and violent crimes to earn a sentence.[40]
However, 70 percent of current inmates were on illegal drugs when arrested and, if drugs become cheaper, violent crime could reasonably be expected to increase.[41]


Myth #3:
Legalization Makes Economic Sense

Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke believes drugs can be a revenue source for the government. "Remove the profit motive, and you put the dealers out of business... have government stores and buy marijuana cigarettes... nicely wrapped, purity and potency guaranteed with a tax stamp."[42]

Ethan Nadelmann, a former Princeton University professor and now director of the Lindesmith Center, states: "Make sure that junkies have access to clean needles; make it easy for addicts to obtain methadone; give heroin-maintenance programs a chance to work; decriminalize marijuana; stop spending billions on incarcerating drug users and drug dealers. We know we can reduce drug abuse more effectively by spending that money on education, pre and post natal care and job-training programs."[43]
Nadelmann told the Rolling Stone audience, "...The Pentagon's interdiction efforts, which cost U.S. taxpayers close to $1 billion... had no impact on the flow of drugs.... [The] drug war has been most efficient at filling up the country's prisons and jails."[44]

Dr. Robert Dupont, founding director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and president of the Institute for Behavior and Health in Rockville, Maryland, refutes the economic myth. "We now have two legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco. We have 113 million current users of alcohol and 60 million tobacco users. The reason marijuana and cocaine use is so much lower is because they are illegal drugs. Cocaine and marijuana are more attractive than alcohol and tobacco. If we remove the prohibition of illegality we would have a number of users of marijuana and cocaine similar to that of tobacco and alcohol."[45]

Health costs associated with legalization would be very high. And legalization would have consequences elsewhere. For example, the Drug Enforcement Administration says legalization of drugs will cost society between $140-210 billion a year in lost productivity and job-related accidents. And insurance companies would pass on accident expenses to consumers.[46] The Institute for Health Policy at Brandeis University found that in 1990 dollars the societal cost of substance abuse is in excess of $238 billion, of which $67 billion is for illicit drugs. The report states, "As the number one health problem in the country, substance abuse places a major burden on the nation's health care system and contributes to the high cost of health care. In fact, substance abuse -- the problematic use of alcohol, illicit drugs and tobacco -- places an enormous burden on American society asa whole."[47]
The claim that legalization provides an opportunity to tax new products is misleading. For example, total tax revenue from the sale of alcohol is $13.1 billion a year, but alcohol extracts over $100 billion a year in social costs such as health care and lost productivity.[48] There is no evidence to demonstrate that taxing cocaine, heroin, and marijuana would bolster revenues any more than do alcohol and tobacco, nor would the revenue from such taxation offset the social and medical costs these illicit drugs would impose.

The pro-drug lobby argues that legalization will save on enforcement costs. But elimination of drug enforcement would provide little funding for other uses. The government now spends 3.3 percent of its budget on the criminal justice system and half of that goes to enforcement. Less than 12 percent of law enforcement money goes to drug law enforcement.[49] Former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Joseph Califano cautions that in a post-legalization world, "Madison Avenue hucksters would make it as attractive to do a few lines [of cocaine] as to down a few beers."[50] This would line the pockets of legal drug producers, but it will clearly hurt the American taxpayer and American families.

FROM:

Legalization - Myths and Facts

[hsmith]

ok?

[Diamond Cross]

S' all right.

[hsmith]

the family research council has no bias

[lew]

I like how that article mentiones numerous people that support legalization, and yet this guy still thinks it's a bad idea.

[hsmith]

"The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and comcribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent."
That is how Billy Sunday, the noted evangelist and leading crusader against Demon Rum, greeted the onset of Prohibition in early 1920. We know now how tragically his hopes were doomed. New prisons and jails had to be built to house the criminals spawned by converting the drinking of spirits into a crime against the state. Prohibition undermined respect for the law, corrupted the minions of the law, created a decadent moral climate-but did not stop the consumption of alcohol.
Despite this tragic object lesson, we seem bent on repeating precisely the same mistake in the handling of drugs.
ETHICS AND EXPEDIENCY
On ethical grounds, do we have the right to use the machinery of government to prevent an individual from becoming an alcoholic or a drug addict? For children, almost everyone would answer at least a qualified yes. But for responsible adults, I, for one, Would answer no. Reason with the potential addict, yes. Tell him the consequences, yes. Pray for and with him, yes. But I believe that we have no right to use force, directly or indirectly, to prevent a fellow man from committing suicide, let alone from drinking alcohol or taking drugs.
I readily grant that the ethical issue is difficult and that men of goodwill may well disagree. Fortunately, we need not resolve the ethical issue to agree on policy. Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse-for both the addict and the rest of us. Hence, even if you regard present policy toward drugs as ethically justified, considerations of expediency make that policy most unwise.
Consider first the addict. Legalizing drugs might increase the number of addicts, but it is not clear that it would. Forbidden fruit is attractive, particularly to the young. More important, many drug addicts are deliberately made by pushers, who give likely prospects their first few doses free. It pays the pusher to do so because, once hooked, the addict is a captive customer. If drugs were legaily available, any possible profit from such inhumane activity would disappear, since the addict could buy from the cheapest source.
Whatever happens to the number of addicts, the individual addict would clearly be far better off if drugs were legal. Today, drugs are box incredibly expensive and highly uncertain in quality. Addicts are driven to associate with criminals to get the drugs, become criminals themselves to finance the habit, and risk constant danger of death and disease.
Consider next the test of us. Here the situation is crystal clear. The harm to us from the addiction of others arises almost wholly from the fact that drugs are illegal. A recent cominittee of the American Bar Association estimated that addicts commit one-third to one-half of all street crime in the U.S. Legalize drugs, and street crime would drop dramatically. Moreover, addicts and pushers are not the only ones corrupted. Immense sums are at stake. It is inevitable that some relatively low-paid police and other government officials-and some high-paid ones as well-will succumb to the temptation to pick up easy money.
LAW AND ORDER
Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement. Can you conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order?
But, you may say, must we accept defeat? Why not simply end the drug traffic? That is where experience under Prohibition is most relevant. We cannot end the drug traffic. We may be able to cut off opium from Turkey but there are innumerable other places where the opium poppy grows. With French cooperation, we may be able to make Marseilles an unhealthy place to manufacture heroin but there are innumerable other places where the simple manufacturing operations involved can be carried out. So long as large sums of money are involved-and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal-it is literally hopeless to expect to end the traffic or even to reduce seriously its scope. In drugs, as in other areas, persuasion and example are likely to be far more effective than the use of force to shape others in our image.




- Milton Friedman

[Scrum]

Man that's a wall of text there DC.

Let me just start by saying that legalized drugs will not eliminate crimes like robbery, rape and assault. Thos people will still commit those crimes whether they want to steal for drugs or for an XBox. They are criminals and drugs do not turn them that way. They made a decision.

Lets get to this next.

Health costs associated with legalization would be very high. And legalization would have consequences elsewhere. For example, the Drug Enforcement Administration says legalization of drugs will cost society between $140-210 billion a year in lost productivity and job-related accidents.

The DEA dont want their jobs and funding eliminated by the legalization of drugs? Shocking.

Of course they are going to say this.

[hsmith]

Originally Posted by lew

I like how that article mentiones numerous people that support legalization, and yet this guy still thinks it's a bad idea.

mayor kurt schmoke of MD was clearly INSANE for suggesting the legalization of drugs which have destroyed his city due to gang warfare

he must be a loony libertarian!

oh wait, he was a democrat

[Diesel66]

Originally Posted by hsmith

the war on drugs has produced a country of felons over nothing. victimless crimes are not valid crimes, there is no reason to punsh people for them.

so please, explain to me why drugs should NOT be legalized? i find that a hilarious opinion.

The late 1800s were horrible because the entire nation was abusing drugs and alcohol. China in the 1800/early 1900s was a great time too. Nothing like the whole country stoned out of their minds

Originally Posted by hsmith

This thread is proof why: no one knows what the LP stands for.

A bunch of uneducated conjecture.

It is straight from their website.

open the borders, legalize all drugs,


Those two ideas alone will keep the LP from getting elected. Majority of Americans are pissed off the Dems and Reps refuse to close the border and you guys want to open it up more

[Diamond Cross]

Originally Posted by Scrumtralecent

Man that's a wall of text there DC.

Let me just start by saying that legalized drugs will not eliminate crimes like robbery, rape and assault. Thos people will still commit those crimes whether they want to steal for drugs or for an XBox. They are criminals and drugs do not turn them that way. They made a decision.

Lets get to this next.

The DEA dont want their jobs and funding eliminated by the legalization of drugs? Shocking.

Of course they are going to say this.

Doesn't mean they aren't right.