A defense of the War on Drugs

[Truncador]

I used to be a big opponent of the WOD, but not anymore. It has nothing to with legislating morals, nor of averting the scenarios that moral crusaders hallucinate: anarchy, crazed hippies killing and having orgies in the street, triumph of terrorists over a stupefied populace, etc.

The real danger is more mundane. Life and work today are more complex than ever before; people work longer hours than ever at jobs that involve a permanent learning curve. They then return home to figure out how to work their various gadgets, pore over the details of their investments, and torment themselves with the excess of information they find online. The human brain is being pushed to its limits. If things reach a point where the demands of economy and technology exceed average intelligence, attention span, and memory capacity, trouble awaits.

The problems to follow could involve a spike in mental illness, suicide, and domestic violence; incalculable costs to shareholders caused by workplace screwups; and catastrophes of greater or lesser severity caused by errors in judgment. At worst, society would become unable to sustain its own way of making its existence, resulting in a meltdown worse than any of the paranoid fantasies of moral crusaders

This doesn't mean we should yearn for a simpler life in some mythical forest. No matter the tongue-clucking indictments of some wannabe aristocrats, modern life rules. What it does mean, though, is that the State has a vital public-health interest in protecting its stock of brainpower. This interest is as urgent as control of infectious disease once was. In both cases, when the very existence of the State is endangered, personal autonomy must give way- for the State has no existence outside the individuals who make it up. Drug abuse is no longer a private, but a public, wrong; individuals can no more assert a right to damage their own brains than they can to refuse vaccination.

Compounding the problem is that standards of decorum based on age are becoming less rigid. People used to disdain drug use after a certain age as beneath the dignity of a mature adult, and stopped in adulthood. Today middle-aged teenagers with families and responsible jobs carry on like they did 20 years ago whenever they get the chance, smoking pot and even doing coke. I recently heard a tale from one fellow whose place of business sounded like high school, complete with peer pressure to do drugs Hence a trend towards chronic drug abuse; I wonder how acute some of these guys who started in their teens are going to be in their mid-50s, when they'll be the senior men in their fields.

Also, the strength of today's stuff is off the charts. People used to smoke a light dirtweed, or some hash that was probably about 50 per cent impacted tobacco. Coke was hard to find, expensive and cut when it was around. In Canada, speed was unknown. Today they smoke hydro grown with techniques and from seeds developed by agricultural biologists, and more like an acid trip than a buzz. I don't know about coke, but I'd imagine it's cheaper and more potent than it used to be. In addition to now-fashionable speed, people also take this poisonous E garbage, which can fry neurotransmitter receptors at the synapse after only a few doses.

Drug laws also aid the war on crime. Not everyone who does drugs commits crimes, but drug abuse is a well-known dimension of criminality. A lot of the people who get into the system for drugs are thus at risk for other offending, and might otherwise slip under the radar. In places where elites coddle criminals, drug laws give police a way to compensate by heaping additional charges on the bad guys, helping ensure they stay behind bars longer. On the other hand, not everyone caught needs to be imprisoned; this group can be diverted, or not charged altogether. This is why the cops tend to like drug laws.

 

[Truncador]

Cont'd

Finally, drug decrim promises a frivolous, phony "freedom" which diverts attention from under-protection or interdiction of the bedrock of real freedom: the right to keep what one earns, to carry guns wherever one goes, to speak one’s mind on all subjects, and to expect competent and incorrupt government from the assemblies whose authority one submits to. This is the ground on which all true freedom rests, and anything that puts the cart before the horse (e.g. enacted before the bedrock freedoms are totally secured) should be treated with utmost caution.

Consider the insidious concept of "harm reduction" whereby State paternalism puts a liberal, happy face on itself by showcasing what it permits as opposed to forbids. Holland isn't as liberal as many think (see their legal system). Note there's no legal right to smoke pot there; rather, it is tolerated, on the explicit grounds that the pot smoker is a sick person who can't control himself and needs help. Today this means that the sick children of the father-State have to be given a safe place where they won't come to harm in the course of their “illness”. Tomorrow it might just as easily mean that the stoner is to be "helped" into an extermination gas chamber- since it is entirely up to the physician-State to decide on the ideal course of "treatment" for its patients and children in a country with no judicial review.

Happy Dad can turn into angry Dad overnight, and his disarmed children are entirely vulnerable to his wrath. Ironically (and revealingly) in America you get in a lot of shit for having dope, but before they can give it to you they have to jump over a brick wall of due-process rights set in stone, and guaranteed by arms. The right to be tried by peers who could refuse to convict altogether if they felt the law unfair, by itself, is more real freedom than every coffee house and crappy tourist-trap brothel in Amsterdam put together.

 

[blitz]

Sorry dude, I started reading it but I'm far too high and it's too long to finish.

Sounded good for a while but then it sounded like a guy that needed another line and couldn't admit it. TERB should not be part of your steps program.

 

[Keebler Elf]

Drugs keep people down so it's easier for me to step over them on my way to the top. So keep smoking that weed; it makes my life so much easier with less competition...

 

[langeweile]

Drugs keep people down so it's easier for me to step over them on my way to the top. So keep smoking that weed; it makes my life so much easier with less competition...

I never thought of it that way.

 

[wollensak]

Nice Try, but

According to recent surverys of our youth, most have experimented with drugs, and a percentage are using on a semi-regular basis.

I'll agree todays drugs are more powerful. I remember as a young adult going through a period where I smoked marijuana/hashish on a regular basis. I stopped because I had so many more things I wanted to do that were more
stimulating, rewarding and enjoyable, and I couldn't do these things as a stoner.

Many successful adults of today were frequently stoned in their youth, much more so than I was. Most no longer partake because they are now members of the hurry-up world we live in and they just can't stand not being in control at all times.

I firmly believe that most drug use is a peer-group thing. The mass-media driven youth culture has more impact on drug-use patterns than the avilability of drugs themselves. Parents may well find themselves helpless to counsel their kids given the overwhelming power of the mass media and the peer group.

Eventually the bright, well-adjusted kids will shake off the drug culture, much as their parents did.

I fail to see how jailing drug users is going to do much of anything except to overwhelm the court system.

Prohibition always makes criminals richer and corrupts public officials, as well as wasting time and resources. Take away the profits of the drug lords
by an intelligent decriminalization strategy. Invest the money in rehabilitation
and drug education. The law-and-order approach has failed miserably and should be abandoned.

 

[Truncador]

I think there's a tendency for people to underestimate the effectiveness of criminal justice sanctions, especially on the middle and upper classes, as well as such of the lower classes who have middle class values. Many of the people who use illegal drugs these days do so because they know nothing's going to happen to them if they're caught, not because law is ineffective. As a rule, middle class people:

-are terrified of being sent to prison

-don't like having their freedom restricted, being told what to do, or when people meddle in their private affairs.

This implies the opposite of what the Fed's in Canada want to pursue right now, which is to decriminalize possession while ratcheting up punishments for sale/cultivation. In short, a classic supply-side control, which by its very nature is destined to fail (for demand creates its own supply). A more suitable strategy would be a zero-tolerance law against possession with a minimum mandatory sentence of, say, three or five years- with the elective possibility of the sentence being served in the community at the discretion of the authorities. The latter would entail house arrest after 6:00 PM with electronic monitoring; weekly visits to a social worker who'd pry into the offender's affairs and generally give him lots of shit; suspension of driver's license, cable TV and Internet services; etc. This would sure make a lot of would-be space cadets think first.

On the other hand, the State would probably be too cheap to pay for the surveillance/social work apparatus. A guy I know came up with an ingenious scheme for disposing of college-age political offenders, which would arguably both work for drug offenders in that age bracket as well and solve the cost issues. The idea is to give the offender the choice between prison and an enormous, sky-high fine. The middle-class parents of the offender would almost certainly pony up and bail him out. They'd probably be pretty mad at him, too, and would insist on doing their fair share of meddling in order to keep him on the straight and narrow, with the indebted offender in no moral position to object. The parents would thus unwittingly become unpaid social workers at no cost to the State, which indeed would recoup some of its costs from the fine.

 

[Asterix]

The idea is to give the offender the choice between prison and an enormous, sky-high fine.

So you're suggesting that felony drug offenders, who have or who's parents have enough money, should be given the option of buying their way out of prison time.

 

[mass123]

Also, the strength of today's stuff is off the charts. People used to smoke a light dirtweed, or some hash that was probably about 50 per cent impacted tobacco. Coke was hard to find, expensive and cut when it was around. In Canada, speed was unknown. Today they smoke hydro grown with techniques and from seeds developed by agricultural biologists, and more like an acid trip than a buzz. I don't know about coke, but I'd imagine it's cheaper and more potent than it used to be. In addition to now-fashionable speed, people also take this poisonous E garbage, which can fry neurotransmitter receptors at the synapse after only a few doses.

Have you guys done any drugs? Its near impossible to get acid, mescaline, peyote these days, the best highs. Where are these super marijuana strains? Most of what is sold is junk, and laced with crap to make it grow faster. Coke as always been cut to hell and back, most dealers are also addicts cutting it. Even E is crap nowadays, half of it is caffeine the other DXM (what you find in cough syrup). Most dealers are punk kids going for the quick buck, quality is not there. The old drug culture of the past is gone.

Besides everyone is already high from prescription drugs which your docter will prescribe with no problems.

One the best trips you can order of the net with no problems because it has not become too popular and under scrutiny yet: http://www.salviasupply.com/

 

[Truncador]

So you're suggesting that felony drug offenders, who have or who's parents have enough money, should be given the option of buying their way out of prison time.

Admittedly, there would be some equity issues. As I noted, originally the scheme was proposed to address violent campus radicals, who usually come from rather uptown backgrounds. The main reason for bringing it up is because it's so truly enlightened in the way it proposes to use the power of the State to mobilize society to do the State's job for it, a real exemplar of non-totalitarian, liberal social engineering.

 

[Asterix]

Admittedly, there would be some equity issues. As I noted, originally the scheme was proposed to address violent campus radicals, who usually come from rather uptown backgrounds. The main reason for bringing it up is because it's so truly enlightened in the way it proposes to use the power of the State to mobilize society...

No, it is by definition elitist. You're saying that the state should sanction different treatments and penalties for significant criminal offense based on financial position. Those with enough money already stand at considerable advantage in the criminal justice system with the ability to hire better talent. You're suggesting that the state institutionalize the process, so that those without the means to buy their way out are nearly guaranteed time in prison. Don't make me use the political "f" word.

 

[Truncador]

No, it is by definition elitist. You're saying that the state should sanction different treatments and penalties for significant criminal offense based on financial position.

No, I'm saying that the State should pursue alternatives to incarceration wherever they are socially available. This perspective, which prioritzes effectiveness, makes equality of result a secondary consideration. Equality is pretty hollow when it comes to dealing with social strata that are clearly not equal, but each have characteristics and needs of their own. There is nothing to be gained, and much inequity, in sending an upper-class kid to Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison where he'll be relatively ill-equipped to get along, and who could at any rate have been released into a community ready and able to rehabilatate him at no public cost. Conversely, releasing a member of the dangerous classes into a socially disorganized community where he will, far from being salvaged, strut around like a king and corrupt others with his example, helps perpetuate social distress- and social inequality along with it.

 

[Truncador]

http://www.salviasupply.com/

And here I thought the FDA or Health Canada would take a dim view of people peddling poisonous mushrooms and such openly for internal use when they don't even permit those over-the-counter asthma inhalers anymore. Your tax dollars at work...

 

[Asterix]

No, I'm saying that the State should pursue alternatives to incarceration wherever they are socially available. This perspective, which prioritzes effectiveness, makes equality of result a secondary consideration.

Equality under the law is of secondary importance? Thankfully you weren't there to provide your special wisdom when the 14th ammendment was being drafted. I'm touched that you're concerned about the prospect of upper class kids winding up in jail, but to give them the option of buying their way out of a felony conviction stands justice on it's head. You could make a more convincing argument that locking up hundreds of thousands of US citizens on drug possession charges in the first place, is doing nothing to solve the problem, or to promote justice.

 

[Truncador]

Equality under the law is of secondary importance?

No, just equality of result. It's hard to imagine anything more in agreement with the principle of equality under the law than giving everybody, rich and poor alike, the same opportunity. Any objection to this necessarily relies on a Marxist doctrine that was intended as a criticism of the very idea of equality under the law and always ends up doing exactly that.

You could make a more convincing argument that locking up hundreds of thousands of US citizens on drug possession charges in the first place, is doing nothing to solve the problem, or to promote justice.

I doubt that there are, even in America, "hundreds of thousands" of people locked up for simple possession alone. Almost by definition, were drug abuse that serious an offense it would be unknown except among criminals, since people who aren't criminals are capable of governing themselves according to substantial legal deterrents; the only people who would smoke pot would be the type of people who impulsively rob, steal, attack, rape, etc. (= low self-control and/or inability to calculate risks and/or feel fear due to subnormal intelligence, sociopathy or other mental illness, immersion in local subculture of crime and poverty, or all three together).

 

[mass123]

And here I thought the FDA or Health Canada would take a dim view of people peddling poisonous mushrooms and such openly for internal use when they don't even permit those over-the-counter asthma inhalers anymore. Your tax dollars at work...

Salvia is not a shroom,

"Salvia divinorum is a sprawling perennial herb which grows wild only in the Sierra Mazatec region of Mexico. It's leaves contain the extremely potent salvinorin-A. It has a history of use as a divinatory psychedelic for oral use and has been widely available since the mid 1990s primarily as a smoked herb. Its effects are considered unpleasant by many people."

Its only a matter of time until some college kid decides to smoke up and take a stroll on a freeway- ruining it for everyone else by making this a controlled substance.

 

[Truncador]

Salvia is not a shroom

On their site, they advertise mushrooms of the species, amanita muscaria, which are poisonous and can be fatal (as they themselves admit), and a few other highly dubious things such as morning glory (=a ticket to, umm, ride the porcelain bus, w/minimum to non-existent high).

Its only a matter of time until some college kid decides to smoke up and take a stroll on a freeway

I think the bestest buzz in the world comes from a few shots of cask-strength whiskey and a strong cigar or pipe smoking mixture. There's no way anyone's in danger of playing on the freeway or shorting out his wiring by doing that...

 

[Peeping Tom]

The massive fines as a measure of forward thinking social engineering is correct. It is also the easiest to implement, as judges already possess the power of discretionary sentencing. The only change required would be to implement appropriate levels for the economic penalty, should these be a limiting case. It is assumed that the mandatory minimum sentence is already in place; i.e., 5 years no parole for 1st time.

The relevant discretionary factors are: age, social status and economic means. This allows rapid assessment on part of the sentencing judge. For example:

Middle / upper class student:

In lieu of hard time, a fine of $20 000 to $100 000. In addition, electronic monitoring for the 5 years including house arrest after 6 pm and all day weekends. A zero tolerance ban on any venue serving alcohol. Revocation of driving priviledge.

Working / business owner:

Cap on income designed to limit means to the poverty level for the particular case. Employees would have a salary garnish and business owners would pay via IRS. The sentence period could be reduced by providing hour for hour community service.

This differs from the current situation by placing onerous burdens on the convicted - something sorely lacking under the current arrangement. It has the effect of forcing the convicted back to the immediate and dominant social group: family and peers - the only organizational unit likely to have any rehabilitory effect. This would force the convicted to learn personal discipline, something which jail can't teach and that alone which can keep one out of jail.

 

[Truncador]

Working / business owner:

Cap on income designed to limit means to the poverty level for the particular case. Employees would have a salary garnish and business owners would pay via IRS. The sentence period could be reduced by providing hour for hour community service.

This differs from the current situation by placing onerous burdens on the convicted - something sorely lacking under the current arrangement. It has the effect of forcing the convicted back to the immediate and dominant social group: family and peers - the only organizational unit likely to have any rehabilitory effect. This would force the convicted to learn personal discipline, something which jail can't teach and that alone which can keep one out of jail.

Using enforced poverty as an instrument of discipline is a truly excellent idea. The offender would be forced to spend his time and energy trying to keep from going under instead of worrying about where his next fix would come from; also, as you note, it would force him back into the arms of society.

However, I think that the proposal re: income caps could be tweaked a bit. Forcing him to forefeit everything he has beyond a minimum living wage might give him an incentive towards downwards social mobility out of spite, or of simply not wanting to bother to work hard and get ahead for no reward. This means that he might not be as productive as he otherwise might, to the detriment of economy and State. Perhaps the judge could assess a fine as a given proportion of his income at the time of conviction, and upon completion of sentence return the portion of his earnings over and above the living mininum that had been seized, minus the fine. This could be tied to staying clean and productive during the sentence period. The offender would have something to look forward to and an incentive to keep on producing, and the State would get an interest-free loan in the meanwhile.

 

[Asterix]

Using enforced poverty as an instrument of discipline is a truly excellent idea. The offender would be forced to spend his time and energy trying to keep from going under instead of worrying about where his next fix would come from; also, as you note, it would force him back into the arms of society.

I don't suppose it has occurred to either of you genius social engineers, that most people imprisoned for drug offenses were likely already at or below the poverty level. "Using enforced poverty as an instrument of discipline" would roughly be the equivalent of threatening to put out the eyes of a blind man. Even if it would generate funds, which I doubt, if the state gets into the game of trying to make money off of drug offenders as you suggest, it will follow the same course as gambling and the lottery. As government became more dependent on the revenue, it would be less inclined, if at all, to fix the problem.