Author Topic: War on Drugs  (Read 105614 times)

Offline ActiveSloth

  • Kopite
  • *****
  • Posts: 508
  • Brendan Rodgers, he shakes his own hand
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #200 on: March 17, 2012, 10:56:11 pm »
Based on what though?
I assume the scoring system is based on both a qualified opinion (nurse or doctor) and the patients own score. Is that what you mean?

Offline RojoLeón

  • Brentie's #1 fan
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 3,773
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #201 on: March 17, 2012, 10:58:59 pm »
I assume the scoring system is based on both a qualified opinion (nurse or doctor) and the patients own score. Is that what you mean?

That the problems were exclusive to the drug and not caused by the associated lifestyle issues or any other societal/personal factors.

Offline ActiveSloth

  • Kopite
  • *****
  • Posts: 508
  • Brendan Rodgers, he shakes his own hand
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #202 on: March 17, 2012, 11:14:02 pm »
That the problems were exclusive to the drug and not caused by the associated lifestyle issues or any other societal/personal factors.

I guess that is a problem they have to take into account but I would need to read the journal fully to understand how they have take this into account

Online Corkboy

  • Sworn enemy of Bottlegirl. The Boston Toilet Mangler. Grauniad of the Cidatel. Into kinky S&M with the Lash.
  • RAWK Scribe
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 32,362
  • Is it getting better?
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #203 on: March 19, 2012, 11:39:33 pm »

Offline RojoLeón

  • Brentie's #1 fan
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 3,773
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #204 on: March 20, 2012, 05:46:08 am »
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2012/03/2012319235051159609.html

Mexican police killed in highway ambush


Twelve Mexican police have died in a mountain highway ambush hours after the severed heads of 10 people were dumped in a small town in a key illegal drug growing region.

Gunmen opened fire on Sunday evening on a police convoy, killing 12 officers and wounding 11 more, said Arturo Martinez, spokesman for the Guerrero state government said on Monday.

The ambush took place on a rural highway near the town of Teloloapan, located in southern Mexico between the beach resort of Acapulco and Mexico City.

Earlier Sunday, the severed heads of 10 people were lined  along a street outside a slaughterhouse in the center of Teloloapan.

The region has been long used by drug gangs to grow marijuana. Surrounding Guerrero state has seen a spike in violence since last year as several major gangs battle over trafficking routes.

The La Familia cartel and its offshoot, Los Caballeros Templarios (The Knights Templar), are among the gangs fighting for territory in the region. The heads had been left with a message threatening the La Familia gang, local media reported.

More than 50,000 people, including more than 2,500 police and soldiers, have died in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderon launched an army-led crackdown on the cartels after taking office five years ago.



Winning the war, one decapitated body at a time - I wonder if these cartels are lobbying the fuck out of DC to ensure that drugs stay illegal up North. The money from all of this bloodshed is going straight through normal banking channels - clean as a whistle.

At least these deaths (and many others) are keeping our economic system afloat..

Just a pity for these poor countries like Mexico and Afghanistan that bear the brunt of the bloodletting that fuels the west's desire for fun - but you really have to question the legitimacy of the prohibition that is maiming and murdering mostly poor, 3rd world folk and incarcerating mainly poor, African and Hispanic American folk.

Meanwhile the Repugs get all frothy, talking about women's reproduction and same sex marriages. This gets fucking zero airtime in the political debate.

Offline masher

  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 1,794
  • hippie at heart
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #205 on: March 20, 2012, 08:53:26 am »
There will be lung cancer cases caused by smoking joints.

Hmm.. That's interesting, because you can't show me one case of lung cancer being caused by marijuana use alone.

Offline doc_antonio

  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 2,801
  • Always look on the bright side of life
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #206 on: March 20, 2012, 09:12:33 am »
Hmm.. That's interesting, because you can't show me one case of lung cancer being caused by marijuana use alone.

That's why he said smoking joint's, and not pipes, bong etc. as the majority of joints rolled contain tobbaco, which itself has been proven to (in most circumstances) cause lung cancer.

Cannabis on its own has not been directly associated with lung cancer. (to my knowledge)

physical and mental health, social harms including crime, "family adversities" and environmental damage, economic costs and "international damage".
So cannabis will have a huge effect on the mental health side of the user.

i've never understood this (granted everybody is different) i've been smoking cannabis for 7-8 years now, since i was 15/16, and i've been able to hold down a job, have a healthy relationship with my parents and siblings, have a good relationship with my friends and so far no mental problems... yes cannabis does make you slightly paranoid, but thats not to say it has a huge effect on someones mental issues, after a terrible breakup with my ex i started smoking it quite alot, but that was to help me forget (like many people do with drink, and i would find drink to be far more dangerous than weed) all my problems, the reason my head was being fucked up was because of my ex, not the weed, i was still able to manage the amount i took and if i had enough then i would stop.. someones lifestyle and personal relationships IMHO has more of an effect on the persons mental health issues than cannabis ever would... but again thats just my views, would be interesting to hear from other regular cannabis users on how/if it has effected their lifestyle and mental health.

EDIT: and also the whole crime thing i never understood, when im high i barely think about other people nevermind thinking of going to commit a crime, i think more about the in depth of a movie/tv show/book...
« Last Edit: March 20, 2012, 09:14:48 am by doc_antonio »
"When I’ve got nothing better to do, I look down the league table to see how Everton are getting along." - Bill Shankly

Offline scatman

  • Slutty enough to make Jordan blush - and hard enough to piss in the wrong bush! Missing a shift key.
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 18,087
  • This is my world, you just WORK here :D
    • directions to football stadiums
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #207 on: March 20, 2012, 11:06:35 am »
That's why he said smoking joint's, and not pipes, bong etc. as the majority of joints rolled contain tobbaco, which itself has been proven to (in most circumstances) cause lung cancer.

Cannabis on its own has not been directly associated with lung cancer. (to my knowledge)

i've never understood this (granted everybody is different) i've been smoking cannabis for 7-8 years now, since i was 15/16, and i've been able to hold down a job, have a healthy relationship with my parents and siblings, have a good relationship with my friends and so far no mental problems... yes cannabis does make you slightly paranoid, but thats not to say it has a huge effect on someones mental issues, after a terrible breakup with my ex i started smoking it quite alot, but that was to help me forget (like many people do with drink, and i would find drink to be far more dangerous than weed) all my problems, the reason my head was being fucked up was because of my ex, not the weed, i was still able to manage the amount i took and if i had enough then i would stop.. someones lifestyle and personal relationships IMHO has more of an effect on the persons mental health issues than cannabis ever would... but again thats just my views, would be interesting to hear from other regular cannabis users on how/if it has effected their lifestyle and mental health.

EDIT: and also the whole crime thing i never understood, when im high i barely think about other people nevermind thinking of going to commit a crime, i think more about the in depth of a movie/tv show/book...
when im high I think about food, soft drinks, TV/computer games and comedy shows.
Would sacrifice Fordy in a sacred Mayan ritual to have him as the next Liverpool manager
Football stadiums in England

Offline masher

  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 1,794
  • hippie at heart
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #208 on: March 20, 2012, 12:53:14 pm »
That's why he said smoking joint's, and not pipes, bong etc. as the majority of joints rolled contain tobbaco, which itself has been proven to (in most circumstances) cause lung cancer.

Cannabis on its own has not been directly associated with lung cancer. (to my knowledge)

Ah yes, did not read it correctly. Clearly I hadn't had my morning spliff :D

Quote
EDIT: and also the whole crime thing i never understood, when im high i barely think about other people nevermind thinking of going to commit a crime, i think more about the in depth of a movie/tv show/book...

Think they are referring to mafia/gangs emerging in order to control the supply of product. I dont know anyone who smoked too pot and then went home to beat up his wife and kids.

Offline FernandoSusoLFC

  • Has a boner for Bony. Listens on mute. broke the Flanno to Fiorentina story. may be @indykaila or @melly mellwood #incognito
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 15,660
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #209 on: March 20, 2012, 02:11:26 pm »


Saw this on Reddit but surprised St.Louis isn't on this comic due to it being the gateway from East to West in America and lots of drugs are peddled through here.

They did it in the 80s hence why they have such big gang problems.

Offline tinman1

  • A friend of Dorothy
  • Kopite
  • *****
  • Posts: 956
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #210 on: March 20, 2012, 09:53:59 pm »
Gangs these days are spraying their crops with methadone so that the kids smoking it are actually withdrawing from it so 1 x £20 sack a day is becoming 3 or 4 £20 sacks a day very quickly.
“Well to be honest with you, I’ve not got a lot to say about David Haye apart from he’s not a proper fighter, is he? He’s basically a bit of a gay fighter as I’ve said. Nothing against gays, but if there was ever a gay fighter David Haye would be one. He showed nothing! He had all the talk beforehand and he went in there and acted like a bitch!"

Offline SP

  • Thor ain't got shit on this dude! Alpheus. SPoogle. The Equusfluminis Of RAWK. Straight in at the deep end with a tube of Vagisil. Needs to get a half-life. Needs a damned good de-frag.
  • RAWK Staff.
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 36,042
  • .
  • Super Title: Southern Pansy
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #211 on: March 20, 2012, 11:49:11 pm »
Cannabis and psychosis is not a simple cause and effect relataionship. For a small percentage of people who are predisposed to psychosis can have psychosis triggered by heavy cannabis use. Without cannabis that psychosis may never manifest itself.

Offline rednich85

  • Gargantuan Wanker. Intimately linked to Keys and Gray.
  • RAWK Supporter
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 17,631
  • Stay Black. That's the most important thing.
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #212 on: March 21, 2012, 12:08:56 am »
Gangs these days are spraying their crops with methadone so that the kids smoking it are actually withdrawing from it so 1 x £20 sack a day is becoming 3 or 4 £20 sacks a day very quickly.

LOL
"Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons."

@rednich85

Offline Veinticinco de Mayo

  • Almost as nice as Hellmans and cheaper too! Feedback tourist #57. President of ZATAA.
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 35,467
  • In an aeroplane over RAWK
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #213 on: March 21, 2012, 01:45:04 pm »
Hmm.. That's interesting, because you can't show me one case of lung cancer being caused by marijuana use alone.

Nobody can show anyone one case of any cancer caused by one thing alone.  It does not work like that it is all but increasing or decreasing risks.
Tweeting shit about LFC @kevhowson Tweeting shit about music @GigMonkey2
Bill Shankly - 'The socialism I believe in is not really politics; it is humanity, a way of living and sharing the rewards'

Offline doc_antonio

  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 2,801
  • Always look on the bright side of life
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #214 on: March 21, 2012, 01:48:07 pm »
Cannabis and psychosis is not a simple cause and effect relataionship. For a small percentage of people who are predisposed to psychosis can have psychosis triggered by heavy cannabis use. Without cannabis that psychosis may never manifest itself.

Genuine Question - Has that actually been proved?
"When I’ve got nothing better to do, I look down the league table to see how Everton are getting along." - Bill Shankly

Online Corkboy

  • Sworn enemy of Bottlegirl. The Boston Toilet Mangler. Grauniad of the Cidatel. Into kinky S&M with the Lash.
  • RAWK Scribe
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 32,362
  • Is it getting better?
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #215 on: March 21, 2012, 02:04:54 pm »
Genuine Question - Has that actually been proved?

There has been a tentative correlation between heavy teenage cannabis use and increased incidence of psychosis. I have seen figures that suggest the same sort of correlation with immigrants. However, I have also had psychiatrists tell me it's a very real link, from their own anecdotal experience.

Offline SP

  • Thor ain't got shit on this dude! Alpheus. SPoogle. The Equusfluminis Of RAWK. Straight in at the deep end with a tube of Vagisil. Needs to get a half-life. Needs a damned good de-frag.
  • RAWK Staff.
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 36,042
  • .
  • Super Title: Southern Pansy
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #216 on: March 21, 2012, 05:53:38 pm »
Genuine Question - Has that actually been proved?

Interesting Radio 4 programme "The Life Scientific" interviewing an expert in the field.

It is not cut and dried.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01bwmvt

Offline doc_antonio

  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 2,801
  • Always look on the bright side of life
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #217 on: March 22, 2012, 10:12:04 am »
There has been a tentative correlation between heavy teenage cannabis use and increased incidence of psychosis. I have seen figures that suggest the same sort of correlation with immigrants. However, I have also had psychiatrists tell me it's a very real link, from their own anecdotal experience.

well as i can only go on my own personal experiences, me and my friends have been/were heavy users when we were 18/19 we're 23/24 now and it hasnt effected us.. i understand that it has a very strong link to mental health issues, but my arguement is what cant kill you or make you sick now-a-days? although it has been linked to mental health, its still probably 1 out of 100 would have mental health issue's which is much better than the amount of people who die/have problems through drink... surely (that was a guesstimate)

I think the war on drugs eventually boil's down to 'what drug can we tax?' the fact that they wouldn't be able to tax all of the weed in the world, thats why there is such a strong stance against it. also people may laugh (and i may have thought of this while i was stoned...i still am) but if the government was to start taxing weed, the amount of people who would buy it would get us out of recession... look at amsterdam for example.. they've essentially legalised cannabis, and they're doing just swell.
"When I’ve got nothing better to do, I look down the league table to see how Everton are getting along." - Bill Shankly

Offline rednich85

  • Gargantuan Wanker. Intimately linked to Keys and Gray.
  • RAWK Supporter
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 17,631
  • Stay Black. That's the most important thing.
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #218 on: March 22, 2012, 10:16:31 am »
well as i can only go on my own personal experiences, me and my friends have been/were heavy users when we were 18/19 we're 23/24 now and it hasnt effected us.. i understand that it has a very strong link to mental health issues, but my arguement is what cant kill you or make you sick now-a-days? although it has been linked to mental health, its still probably 1 out of 100 would have mental health issue's which is much better than the amount of people who die/have problems through drink... surely (that was a guesstimate)

I think the war on drugs eventually boil's down to 'what drug can we tax?' the fact that they wouldn't be able to tax all of the weed in the world, thats why there is such a strong stance against it. also people may laugh (and i may have thought of this while i was stoned...i still am) but if the government was to start taxing weed, the amount of people who would buy it would get us out of recession... look at amsterdam for example.. they've essentially legalised cannabis, and they're doing just swell.

Define heavy user.

Did you start blazing when you were 18/19?

I think smoking it younger than that has a lot more risk. I've been smoking hash/weed since around 14. Loads in my circle of mates had to pack it in because of paranoia.
« Last Edit: March 22, 2012, 10:20:45 am by rednich85 »
"Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons."

@rednich85

Offline doc_antonio

  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 2,801
  • Always look on the bright side of life
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #219 on: March 22, 2012, 10:20:55 am »
Define heavy user.

personally i was going through 5g's (50bag) every 2 days...

My friend however was easily doing 2 maybe 3 times that, as he didnt have a job and was able to, although i can garantee if i was out of a job and had that much free time i would have been doing the same.. not so much for me now, a 20bag would do me a week.
"When I’ve got nothing better to do, I look down the league table to see how Everton are getting along." - Bill Shankly

Offline doc_antonio

  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 2,801
  • Always look on the bright side of life
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #220 on: March 22, 2012, 10:21:56 am »
Define heavy user.

Did you start blazing when you were 18/19?

I think smoking it younger than that has a lot more risk. I've been smoking hash/weed since around 14. Loads in my circle of mates had to pack it in because of paranoia.

i started when i was 15/16 my friends the same.. some where younger, some where older.. but we all started roughly the same time.
"When I’ve got nothing better to do, I look down the league table to see how Everton are getting along." - Bill Shankly

Offline rednich85

  • Gargantuan Wanker. Intimately linked to Keys and Gray.
  • RAWK Supporter
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 17,631
  • Stay Black. That's the most important thing.
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #221 on: March 22, 2012, 10:25:55 am »
personally i was going through 5g's (50bag) every 2 days...

My friend however was easily doing 2 maybe 3 times that, as he didnt have a job and was able to, although i can garantee if i was out of a job and had that much free time i would have been doing the same.. not so much for me now, a 20bag would do me a week.

How did your unemployed mate smoke 100-150 quids worth of smoke every 2 days? Hee must have been knocking it out as well and smoking his profit haha.
"Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons."

@rednich85

Offline doc_antonio

  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 2,801
  • Always look on the bright side of life
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #222 on: March 22, 2012, 10:36:23 am »
How did your unemployed mate smoke 100-150 quids worth of smoke every 2 days? Hee must have been knocking it out as well and smoking his profit haha.

yeah, there's times i wondered that to, he took quite a bit off me when i was getting it in bulk and he had got himself in trouble a few times with dealers, getting it on strap and finding it hard to pay them back when the time came, but his brother started growing it and selling it to us and he gave him family discount i suppose.. he got worse when he got his part time job in the filling station up the road from me, weekly income ment it more or less all went on weed.

i actually started a topic on RAWK with my concern on how it was affecting him, although after i sat down and spoke to him about my concerns he cut down to about 50bag every 3-4 days, and still to this day smokes that much, although he has a full time job now.
« Last Edit: March 22, 2012, 10:41:45 am by doc_antonio »
"When I’ve got nothing better to do, I look down the league table to see how Everton are getting along." - Bill Shankly

Offline Giovanni

  • C'mon Chelsea!!! Stood on the Spyin Kop, the tricky bitch. Look out!
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 1,628
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #223 on: March 22, 2012, 12:40:47 pm »
Gangs these days are spraying their crops with methadone so that the kids smoking it are actually withdrawing from it so 1 x £20 sack a day is becoming 3 or 4 £20 sacks a day very quickly.
::) Is this inbetween them driving around at night without their lights on and shooting at the first car to flash them?

cyas

Online Corkboy

  • Sworn enemy of Bottlegirl. The Boston Toilet Mangler. Grauniad of the Cidatel. Into kinky S&M with the Lash.
  • RAWK Scribe
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 32,362
  • Is it getting better?
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #224 on: March 22, 2012, 03:29:28 pm »
From a couple of years back...

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera reported head of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, ranked 701st on Forbes' yearly report of the wealthiest men alive, and worth an estimated $1 billion, today officially thanked United States politicians for making sure that drugs remain illegal. According to one of his closest confidants, he said, "I couldn't have gotten so stinking rich without George Bush, George Bush Jr., Ronald Reagan, even El Presidente Obama, none of them have the cajones to stand up to all the big money that wants to keep this stuff illegal. From the bottom of my heart, I want to say, Gracias amigos, I owe my whole empire to you."

source

Offline Veinticinco de Mayo

  • Almost as nice as Hellmans and cheaper too! Feedback tourist #57. President of ZATAA.
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 35,467
  • In an aeroplane over RAWK
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #225 on: March 22, 2012, 03:32:05 pm »
I think the war on drugs eventually boil's down to 'what drug can we tax?' the fact that they wouldn't be able to tax all of the weed in the world, thats why there is such a strong stance against it. also people may laugh (and i may have thought of this while i was stoned...i still am) but if the government was to start taxing weed, the amount of people who would buy it would get us out of recession... look at amsterdam for example.. they've essentially legalised cannabis, and they're doing just swell.

Why do you think that the currently prohibited drugs could not be taxed?
Tweeting shit about LFC @kevhowson Tweeting shit about music @GigMonkey2
Bill Shankly - 'The socialism I believe in is not really politics; it is humanity, a way of living and sharing the rewards'

Offline scatman

  • Slutty enough to make Jordan blush - and hard enough to piss in the wrong bush! Missing a shift key.
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 18,087
  • This is my world, you just WORK here :D
    • directions to football stadiums
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #226 on: March 22, 2012, 03:59:00 pm »
I was a heavy user from age of 15 to say 25, I've cut down heavily the past 2 years, smoking infrequently, some of my friends still heavily smoke it and have done since 13/14 years old.
Would sacrifice Fordy in a sacred Mayan ritual to have him as the next Liverpool manager
Football stadiums in England

Offline doc_antonio

  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 2,801
  • Always look on the bright side of life
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #227 on: March 22, 2012, 04:37:19 pm »
Why do you think that the currently prohibited drugs could not be taxed?

Well they could, but there would still be some that would sell it illegally without tax.. dealers and such would be losing out in a shit load of money if it was legalised as (most of them) weed would be their biggest income, and the most common drug dealt by dealers. I think anyway.
"When I’ve got nothing better to do, I look down the league table to see how Everton are getting along." - Bill Shankly

Offline Veinticinco de Mayo

  • Almost as nice as Hellmans and cheaper too! Feedback tourist #57. President of ZATAA.
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 35,467
  • In an aeroplane over RAWK
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #228 on: March 22, 2012, 10:12:38 pm »
Well they could, but there would still be some that would sell it illegally without tax.. dealers and such would be losing out in a shit load of money if it was legalised as (most of them) weed would be their biggest income, and the most common drug dealt by dealers. I think anyway.

Not a chance really mate.  If unregulated supply remains a criminal offence with the same tariffs as now but legal, regulated, taxed sources are available at a lower cost than at present and at a verified quality.  The margins no longer justify the risks.   
Tweeting shit about LFC @kevhowson Tweeting shit about music @GigMonkey2
Bill Shankly - 'The socialism I believe in is not really politics; it is humanity, a way of living and sharing the rewards'

Offline pantbash

  • is single and likely to remain that way
  • Kopite
  • *****
  • Posts: 922
  • A Bacchanalian - Still persecuted since BC
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #229 on: March 22, 2012, 11:51:42 pm »
Not a chance really mate.  If unregulated supply remains a criminal offence with the same tariffs as now but legal, regulated, taxed sources are available at a lower cost than at present and at a verified quality.  The margins no longer justify the risks.   

Would the same penalties for unregulated supply be realistic?

I am finding it difficult to explain my thoughts at present due to the nations fav legal drug!!!



Assumingi legality for substances, then I would also assume the penalties for "illegal" supply would eventually be less than supply at present.
Due to the normalisation of treating substance supply as a normal business like any other.


Although to start with (immediatly after legalisation) the penalties would probably have to remain high for "illegal" supply, due to entirely political ends.

/end of thought splurge
« Last Edit: March 22, 2012, 11:53:52 pm by pantbash »
Atheism (from Greek, "athos" meaning 'hell', "eios" meaning 'demon' or 'Satan', and "ismos" meaning Liberal, literally "Satan's Liberal Helldemon")

Offline BostonScouse

  • grumbles more after a win - clueless muppet or diamond fella?
  • Kopite
  • *****
  • Posts: 690
  • We all Live in a Red and White Kop
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #230 on: March 23, 2012, 09:40:49 am »
even if they are different penalties the black market will get priced out, plus regulated stuff will be safer.

I don't see a bootlegging industry in the U.S. post-prohibition do you?

Offline Giovanni

  • C'mon Chelsea!!! Stood on the Spyin Kop, the tricky bitch. Look out!
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 1,628
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #231 on: March 23, 2012, 10:15:55 am »
even if they are different penalties the black market will get priced out, plus regulated stuff will be safer.

I don't see a bootlegging industry in the U.S. post-prohibition do you?
And this is the key point.

We have proof in history that prohibition of goods does not work. It just hands monetary opportunties to criminals.

The government are trying to wash their hands of their responsiblity to educate the people so they can make an informed decision for themselves.
cyas

Offline King Callum

  • Boys Pen
  • *
  • Posts: 11
  • You'll never walk alone
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #232 on: March 23, 2012, 08:25:16 pm »
From a couple of years back...

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera reported head of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, ranked 701st on Forbes' yearly report of the wealthiest men alive, and worth an estimated $1 billion, today officially thanked United States politicians for making sure that drugs remain illegal. According to one of his closest confidants, he said, "I couldn't have gotten so stinking rich without George Bush, George Bush Jr., Ronald Reagan, even El Presidente Obama, none of them have the cajones to stand up to all the big money that wants to keep this stuff illegal. From the bottom of my heart, I want to say, Gracias amigos, I owe my whole empire to you."

source

Interesting, prohibition does create opportunity. All you need to do is look at the Mkat/Bubble period, that untested legal high was quick to be reclassified and in turn increased street price. People made thousands importing it from china just before media got a whiff of it and decided to sensationise it with stories of death and violence despite the incidents being linked to a concoction of other drunks also present.
I agree with the school of thought that pushes for decriminalisation and then taxed legality, although i understand the argument against as there are alot of weaker-minded people who can become addicted to anything. I could imagine Jeremy Kyles delight at the prospect of an unlimited number of candidates for all new government created problem.

Offline WhoHe

  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 2,309
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #233 on: March 25, 2012, 03:01:00 pm »
This is interesting, the president of Guatamala wants to end the "taboo" of legalisation, I think if any region knows the costs of illegal drugs it is South America. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-17502417

Offline NOTBORNIN1982

  • and neither is he the best poster on here, not even close in fact. Maybe the 1982nd.
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 3,180
  • Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #234 on: March 25, 2012, 03:05:56 pm »
This is interesting, the president of Guatamala wants to end the "taboo" of legalisation, I think if any region knows the costs of illegal drugs it is South America. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-17502417

Guatemala is Central America... I love being a sophistic bastard!  :wave


"How much do you smoke, sir? Two packs a day, is that right? Pussy. I go through two lighters a day. That's right, two lighters! You're a health nut compared to me."

Offline RojoLeón

  • Brentie's #1 fan
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 3,773
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #235 on: April 6, 2012, 09:23:39 pm »
These articles are all linked regarding the emergence of sophisticated drug dealing gangs in Detroit and how they inspired similar gang structures across the country. (see the Wire for an example in Baltimore).
They rose off the back of the draconian drug (and effectively racial) laws which turned modern day USA into a society where the vast majority of sexual crime (and a great deal of the violent assaults) happen to men behind bars. A prison system that is historically second only to Stalin's USSR in terms of incarcerated population.
A system that disproportionally sends African American and Latino men to jail.


http://nplusonemag.com/raise-the-crime-rate

Quote
On May 23, in what has become an annual ritual, the New York Times celebrated the latest such finding: in 2010, as America’s army of unemployed grew to 14 million, violent crime fell for the fourth year in a row, sinking to a level not seen since the early ’70s. This seemed odd. Crime and unemployment were supposed to rise in tandem—progressives have been harping on this point for centuries. Where had all the criminals gone?

Statistics are notoriously slippery, but the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and violence.

Crime has not fallen in the United States—it’s been shifted. Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie—but as the single most shameful lie in American life.

...

There followed a thirty-five-year period of “tough” crime laws. They began in New York State, with Nelson Rockefeller, the liberalish governor who, having failed three times to secure the Republican presidential nomination, decided he would make drug policy his peace offering to the party’s right wing. Previously an advocate of treatment programs and community supervision, Rockefeller abruptly changed course in 1973, innovating harsh mandatory minimum sentences for both the sale and possession of illegal drugs. In the next thirty years, New York’s prison population sextupled, climbing from 13,400 prisoners in 1973 to 71,500 prisoners in 2000.

The pattern soon repeated itself across the country. As whites abandoned the cities, their governors and legislatures enacted increasingly tough sentencing laws for the minorities left behind. In 1978, in what he would later call the biggest mistake of his life, Michigan’s governor, William Milliken, an embattled moderate Republican from the state’s desolate north, signed the 650-lifer law, a Rockefeller-inspired provision mandating life sentences for anyone caught in possession of 650 or more grams of cocaine or heroin. Only 200 people have served the life term, apparently because most big cases get transferred to federal court. (It’s still terrible, though: 85 percent of those sentenced under the provision had no prior criminal record.)

The new sentencing policies did little to discourage criminals. The same summer that Milliken signed his life-sentence law, an ambitious group of teenagers met on the playground of Birney Elementary, on Detroit’s west side, and founded Young Boys Inc., the first professionalized multicity drug-dealing ring in the United States. Within two years, YBI was pulling in $300,000 a day selling heroin in Detroit and other cities. Many of their clients were Vietnam veterans, tens of thousands of whom had become addicted to opium overseas. YBI’s crucial innovation was to distribute their product through a network of hard-to-prosecute juveniles, “corner boys” as young as 12 years old. They were also among the first to use limitless violence to terrorize and execute rivals. As the auto industry collapsed, the market for heroin grew more and more robust. By the mid-’80s, police activity had loosened the grip of YBI’s founders; by that time, though, the corner-boy and murder-the-competition model had spread to every major city in the United States.

Spoiler
Is it true that living in America has become riskier? In 2006, the political scientist Jacob Hacker published The Great Risk Shift, a progressive tract that appropriated the vocabulary of wealth management to show how thirty years of privatization and deregulation had abraded the security of the American family. Risks once borne by corporations and the government, Hacker noted, like unplanned health costs, are now the responsibility of Mom and Pop. Transferring risk from the collective to the individual, though, ends badly for everyone. Family affliction, like banker “contagion,” is tricky to sequester: if Larry and Terry get bankrupted by bad luck, their misfortune cascades, dragging down creditors, neighbors, and especially their children. The reason liberals like insurance is that it helps diffuse risk throughout society. Pooling risk, one might say, is the essence of the progressive social contract.

Hacker focuses on hazards like cancer and credit exposure, but these are not the only perils we face. Every time we leave the house—and more often, actually, if we remain within it—we run the risk of getting stabbed, shot, raped, or robbed. But while financial risks have crested in recent decades, the risk of suffering personal violence has receded. According to government statistics, Americans are safer today than at any time in the last forty years. In 1990, there were 2,245 homicides in New York City. In 2010, there were 536, only 123 of which involved people who didn’t already know each other. The fear, once common, that walking around city parks late at night could get you mugged or murdered has been relegated to grandmothers; random murders, with few exceptions, simply don’t happen anymore.

When it comes to rape, the numbers look even better: from 1980 to 2005, the estimated number of sexual assaults in the US fell by 85 percent. Scholars attribute this stunning collapse to various factors, including advances in gender equality, the abortion of unwanted children, and the spread of internet pornography.

It shouldn’t surprise us that the country was more dangerous in 1990, at the height of the crack epidemic, than in 2006, at the height of the real estate bubble. What’s strange is that crime has continued to fall during the recession. On May 23, in what has become an annual ritual, the New York Times celebrated the latest such finding: in 2010, as America’s army of unemployed grew to 14 million, violent crime fell for the fourth year in a row, sinking to a level not seen since the early ’70s. This seemed odd. Crime and unemployment were supposed to rise in tandem—progressives have been harping on this point for centuries. Where had all the criminals gone?

Statistics are notoriously slippery, but the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and violence.

Crime has not fallen in the United States—it’s been shifted. Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie—but as the single most shameful lie in American life.

From 1980 to 2007, the number of prisoners held in the United States quadrupled to 2.3 million, with an additional 5 million on probation or parole. What Ayn Rand once called the “freest, noblest country in the history of the world” is now the most incarcerated, and the second-most incarcerated country in history, just barely edged out by Stalin’s Soviet Union. We’re used to hearing about the widening chasm between the haves and have-nots; we’re less accustomed to contemplating a more fundamental gap: the abyss that separates the fortunate majority, who control their own bodies, from the luckless minority, whose bodies are controlled, and defiled, by the state.

Before last year, the federal government had never bothered to estimate the actual number of rapes that occur in prisons. Its data relied on official complaints filed by prisoners, which in recent years have averaged around 800. One such complaint was filed in 1995 by Rodney Hulin, a boy from Amarillo, Texas, who had been arrested as a 15-year-old after throwing a Molotov cocktail into a pile of garbage. The trash burned, causing about $500 worth of damage to the exterior of an adjacent house. Hulin’s prank was unimpressive, but Texas in the mid-’90s had little tolerance for teenage ruffianism; in 1994, George W. Bush had become governor, defeating Ann Richards, a popular incumbent, by depicting her as soft on crime. Hulin was charged with two counts of second-degree arson. He was a small guy—just five feet tall and 125 pounds—but he got a big sentence: eight years in adult prison.

Within a month of arriving at Clemens Unit, a temporary holding facility outside Houston for juveniles on their way to adult prison, Hulin was raped by another inmate. He asked to be moved out of harm’s way, but his request was denied, and the rapes continued. In a letter to prison authorities, he wrote, “I might die at any minute. Please sir, help me.” Help was not forthcoming: getting raped was not deemed urgent enough to meet the requirements of the prison’s emergency grievance criteria. When Hulin got his mother to complain to the prison’s warden, she was told that Hulin needed to “grow up” and “learn to deal with it.”

Hulin’s method for dealing with it was to kill himself. Ten weeks after his arrival, he was discovered dangling from the ceiling of his cell.

Hulin’s case was unusual: most prisoners who get raped do not write letters to the warden. It isn’t hard to see why: resisting an inmate who claims your body as his own, or, worse, acquiring a reputation as a “snitch,” can turn an isolated incident into months of serial gang rape. Just ask Roderick Johnson, a petty thief who was attacked by his roommate shortly after arriving at a Texas prison. Johnson asked to be transferred to a different section of the facility, and got his wish. But news of Johnson’s physical availability had spread throughout the complex—after you’re raped once, you’re marked—and he was soon enslaved by a gang. In addition to passing Johnson around among themselves, Johnson’s new overseers sold his ass and mouth to a variety of clients for $3 to $7, a competitive enough price that it resulted in multiple rapes every day for the eighteen months that Johnson spent in prison. When he went to the authorities, they laughed and told him to “fight or fuck.”

Bringing criminal charges against prison officials for failing to protect inmates is virtually impossible in the United States, but civil actions can be filed. After Johnson got out, he lodged a civil suit against six guards who he said refused to help him. In 2005, a Wichita Falls jury found in favor of the guards. In 2007, after passing a note to a clerk at a gas station that read, “I have 9 mm. Put the money in the bag,” Johnson was arrested again. This time, since Johnson was a repeat offender, he got nineteen years.

Victims in juvenile facilities, or facilities for women, have an even tougher time: usually it’s the guards, rather than the inmates, who coerce them into sex. The guards tell their victims that no one will believe them, and that complaining will only make things worse. This is sound advice: even on the rare occasions when juvenile complaints are taken seriously and allegations are substantiated, only half of confirmed abusers are referred for prosecution, only a quarter are arrested, and only 3 percent end up getting charged with a crime.

In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.

America’s prison system is a moral catastrophe. The eerie sense of security that prevails on the streets of lower Manhattan obscures, and depends upon, a system of state-sponsored suffering as vicious and widespread as any in human history. Dismantling the system of American gulags, and holding accountable those responsible for their operation, presents the most urgent humanitarian imperative of our time.

Progressives lament the growth of private prisons (prisons for profit). But it’s sadism, not avarice, that fuels the country’s prison crisis. Prisoners are not the victims of poor planning (as other progressive reformers have argued)—they are the victims of an ideological system that dehumanizes an entire class of human being and permits nearly infinite violence against it. As much as a physical space, prisons denote an ethical space, or, more precisely, a space where ordinary ethics are suspended. Bunk beds, in and of themselves, are not cruel and unusual. University dorms have bunk beds, too. What matters is what happens in those beds. In the dorm room, sex, typically consensual. In prisons, also sex, but often violent rape. The prisons are “overcrowded,” we are told (and, in fact, courts have ruled). “Overcrowding” is a euphemism for an authoritarian nightmare.

As sites of governmental authority, prisons destabilize Weber’s definition of the state as the monopolist of violence. In prisons, the monopoly is suspended: anybody is free to commit rape and be reasonably assured that no state official will notice or care (barring those instances when the management knowingly encourages rape, unleashing favored inmates on troublemakers as a strategy for administrative control). The prison staff is above the law; the prison inmates, below it. Far from embodying the model of Bentham/Foucault’s panopticon— that is, one of total surveillance—America’s prisons are its blind spots, places where complaints cannot be heard and abuses cannot be seen. Though important symbols of bureaucratic authority, they are spaces that lie beyond our system of bureaucratic oversight. As far as the outside world is concerned, every American prison functions as a black site.

The media mostly honors the government’s preference for leaving prisoners in the shadows. The nation’s prisons now contain more inhabitants than any American city save New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. And yet there is no “prison correspondent” at any of the nation’s major newspapers. This isn’t entirely the papers’ fault. Even if reporters were sent to the prisons, they could be denied entry: the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment does not prevent prison authorities from barring the press.

It’s impossible to tell the story of American incarceration without also telling the story of American racism. Unlike most leftwing stories about racism, though, this one isn’t about the South, and it isn’t even really about American conservatism. After slavery and Jim Crow came the Great Migration, urban riots, and the war on drugs. The history of the prison crisis is largely a story about progressive politicians—liberal Republicans and centrist Democrats—supporting “tough on crime” policies to protect their right flank, both for self-preservation and to propel other progressive priorities. The prison crisis was something that we ourselves created, law by law, decision by decision, state by state.

One of the original flash points was Detroit. In 1967, riots broke out after city police arrested eighty-four revelers at a party given for a pair of African American veterans who had just returned from Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson sent in an army division to pacify the city, resulting in forty-three deaths and the destruction of 2,000 buildings. In the following months, tens of thousands of residents from the city’s Caucasian enclaves hurtled across 8 Mile Road to the suburbs; they never came back. The following year, as the war in Vietnam escalated, Johnson declared he would not seek reelection, throwing the Democratic nomination to the cheerful but ineffectual Hubert Humphrey. That November, after a bitter campaign fueled by racial antagonism, the country elected Richard Nixon. For the first time in history, the Democratic candidate had failed to secure a majority of votes from the old Confederacy.

There followed a thirty-five-year period of “tough” crime laws. They began in New York State, with Nelson Rockefeller, the liberalish governor who, having failed three times to secure the Republican presidential nomination, decided he would make drug policy his peace offering to the party’s right wing. Previously an advocate of treatment programs and community supervision, Rockefeller abruptly changed course in 1973, innovating harsh mandatory minimum sentences for both the sale and possession of illegal drugs. In the next thirty years, New York’s prison population sextupled, climbing from 13,400 prisoners in 1973 to 71,500 prisoners in 2000.

The pattern soon repeated itself across the country. As whites abandoned the cities, their governors and legislatures enacted increasingly tough sentencing laws for the minorities left behind. In 1978, in what he would later call the biggest mistake of his life, Michigan’s governor, William Milliken, an embattled moderate Republican from the state’s desolate north, signed the 650-lifer law, a Rockefeller-inspired provision mandating life sentences for anyone caught in possession of 650 or more grams of cocaine or heroin. Only 200 people have served the life term, apparently because most big cases get transferred to federal court. (It’s still terrible, though: 85 percent of those sentenced under the provision had no prior criminal record.)

The new sentencing policies did little to discourage criminals. The same summer that Milliken signed his life-sentence law, an ambitious group of teenagers met on the playground of Birney Elementary, on Detroit’s west side, and founded Young Boys Inc., the first professionalized multicity drug-dealing ring in the United States. Within two years, YBI was pulling in $300,000 a day selling heroin in Detroit and other cities. Many of their clients were Vietnam veterans, tens of thousands of whom had become addicted to opium overseas. YBI’s crucial innovation was to distribute their product through a network of hard-to-prosecute juveniles, “corner boys” as young as 12 years old. They were also among the first to use limitless violence to terrorize and execute rivals. As the auto industry collapsed, the market for heroin grew more and more robust. By the mid-’80s, police activity had loosened the grip of YBI’s founders; by that time, though, the corner-boy and murder-the-competition model had spread to every major city in the United States.

And then came crack. Crack democratized the consumption of cocaine by providing a cheap and easy delivery system—smoking—for a highly addictive, high-demand product. Economists have labeled crack a “technological shock,” comparing the dislocations it triggered to the impact of computer chips, or mechanized agriculture. Unlike computer chips and mechanized agriculture, however, crack’s impact was entirely negative. This was not so much because crack was physically harmful—though it was—but more because it was illegal, and highly profitable. Within years of its introduction, the homicide rate for young black males had doubled. The inner city experienced a spike in weapons arrests, fetal deaths, low-birth-weight babies, and children in foster care. Between 1984 and 1994, the death rate for young black males reached 1 percent—double the rate of soldiers fighting in Iraq. A small part of this was caused by crack overdoses. A very large part was caused by a homicidal dialectic of black-market violence and state-sponsored reprisal, a dynamic sustained by popular hysteria and irresponsible media.

The media had never met a story they liked as much as crack, which involved gangs, guns, scary minorities, urban poverty, addiction, and, crucially, babies. Fetuses incubated in crack-exposed wombs were supposed to furnish a generation of “superpredators”—brain-damaged reprobates who wouldn’t be able to tell right from wrong. Although we now know the “crack baby” is a mythical creature—children of crack addicts do not exhibit developmental problems above and beyond those normally experienced by children whose fathers are dead or in prison—the image set off a moral panic in the 1980s, leading the country to begin the unusual practice of incarcerating large numbers of women. In 1986, two months after college basketball star and number two NBA draft pick Len Bias died of an ordinary cocaine overdose erroneously pinned on crack, Newsweek declared crack the biggest story since Watergate and Vietnam. Nancy Reagan was interested in crack, too, and the White House spent $2 billion on equipment and personnel to fight the epidemic, including staff hired to amp up anxiety about the drug among the press.

In the 1990s, the action shifted to the states, twenty-four of which enacted some version of a “habitual offender law,” more colloquially known as a “three strikes” provision. Even more than mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, three strikes laws have been responsible for geometric growth in the prison population. Though details vary depending on where you look, the vengeful theory underpinning the laws is universal: repeat offenders need to be removed from society. As a result, defendants have been given life sentences, which cost taxpayers as much as $1 million, for crimes as minor as stealing golf clubs from a sporting goods store or videotapes from Walmart. By 2003, 127,677 Americans were serving life sentences, an 83 percent jump in eleven years.

As of 2005, the last time a census was taken, there were 1,821 prisons in the country. Maine had just seven, while Texas had 132. Of these 1,821 prisons, 347 were maximum security. Most countries don’t have “supermax” prison facilities like we have in the US, where Alcatraz model of remote, nightmare fortress has become increasingly popular with the passage of time. Inmates in maximum security facilities are more vulnerable to rape, which may seem counterintuitive. The risk of rape, though, increases as prisoners lose control over freedom of movement. In minimum security prisons, it’s easier to find protection in a crowd. On the other hand, maximum security prisons are also distinguished by their willingness to put inmates into solitary confinement for extended periods of time, sometimes decades. Many psychologists now believe that such a long period in solitary inevitably leads to insanity. On the plus side, those prisoners will not get raped, or at least not by inmates.

Meanwhile, back on the battlefield of the war on drugs, crack continues to be consumed in nearly the same quantities as in 1990. But a huge price drop destroyed the handsome margins of the crack trade and virtually eliminated the violence associated with it. The crack-crime epidemic is gone, but the incarceration complex it fomented lives on. As a result, one in three black baby boys can expect to spend part of his life in prison.

Once you go to prison, you never really come back. Beyond incarceration’s immediate physical and mental horrors, after being convicted of a felony, your public life is functionally over. In many states, you won’t be able to vote or sit on a jury. You won’t be eligible for public housing or food stamps. You’ll find it very difficult to attend a college, and may find it nearly impossible to get a job—like everyone else, educators and employers discriminate against ex-cons.

Finding a job is a particular problem, not only because criminals often leave prison with a large amount of debt—from court fees, conviction penalties, probation fines, and especially from child support bills, which continue to accumulate while convicts are in prison—but also because steady employment is itself often a condition of parole: a diabolical catch-22. As scholars have noted, the situation calls to mind the “vagrancy” laws passed in the South in the wake of reconstruction, which made it illegal to be unemployed while black vagrantswere arrested and forced back onto plantations, this time as convicts rather than slaves. An ex-con who fails to land a job may end up back in prison for violating parole. Since service-oriented occupations are usually out of the question, ex-cons are often forced to seek industrial and construction jobs far from urban centers. This puts a large number of people in the position of having to take long, expensive taxi rides to show up for low-wage jobs that don’t even cover transportation costs.

The United States now spends some $200 billion on the correctional system each year, a sum that exceeds the gross domestic product of twenty-five US states and 140 foreign countries. An ever-increasing share of domestic discretionary spending, it would seem, is devoted to building and staffing earthly hells filled with able-bodied young men who have been removed from the labor force. If we added up all the money federal, state, and local governments invest in the poorest zip codes through credits and transfer payments—food stamps, Medicaid, teacher salaries, et cetera—and balanced that against all the value the government extracts from those zip codes through sin taxes, lotteries, and the incarceration complex, we might well conclude that the disinvestment outweighs the investment. Any apparent gains made in the last thirty years in narrowing the employment and education gap between African Americans and whites vanishes once you include the incarcerated population. Before asking the government to spend a fortune improving student-to-teacher ratios, it may be prudent to first ask the government to stop devoting public resources to ripping the heart out of inner-city economies.

Of course, not everyone has made out badly from the country’s prison-construction binge. Telephone companies run up impressive profits from prisoners forced to call collect. Defense contractors have signed lucrative contracts selling paramilitary equipment to local law enforcement agencies. Rural communities have benefited most of all. Not only does the criminal justice sector employ 2 million people, including more than 500,000 correctional officers, most of them in rural areas, it also helps to inflate the local population of prison zones for the purposes of congressional districting and social spending. Schoolchildren learn that in 1787, slave-holding states reached a compromise with free states that allowed nonvoting slaves to count as three-fifths of a human for the purposes of apportioning congressional seats. Counting a slave as a fraction of a man seems like a vivid manifestation of the way the United States dehumanized Africans. Today, thousands of people are removed from urban districts, where public money is urgently needed, and shipped upstate, where each counts for a full person. In this way, prisoners bolster the voting power of rural districts, while being unable to vote themselves. Perhaps this is the reason why, as criminal justice surveys indicate, rural whites form by far the most punitive demographic.

Certain breeds of urban dwellers benefit, too. In gentrifying sections of Brooklyn, for example, steep drops in crime, combined with the virtual depopulation of entire city blocks, has underwritten a real estate boom. In neighborhoods like Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, wealthy people with children have reaped the benefits of climbing land values from apartments they never would have bought had it not been for the removal of tens of thousands of locals from adjacent areas. Neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant show the population exchange in its purest form. As African American Brooklynites are exported upstate for involvement in petty drug crimes, twenty-somethings reared in prison towns migrate south and reoccupy the same areas vacated by prisoners. Often, of course, the new inhabitants proceed to consume and sell the very same drugs that got the previous tenants into trouble. Since they’re white, they do so with impunity.

What would it mean to “reform” the prison system? Despite the best efforts of the moneyed elite and its institutional avatar, the Republican Party, the credentialed elite that controls the White House has succeeded in making progress on multiple reformable domains, including credit markets, the health care system, and public education. These are important, high-stakes achievements, and, as we have seen, no good deed goes unpunished. But America’s incarceration crisis is not a reformable problem. It cannot be addressed by a hectoring Rahm Emmanuel, or a priggish Olympia Snowe; it will not be solved by a supercommittee, or a gang of six.

The US prison system doesn’t need reform—it needs to be abolished. Like slavery in the 19th century, and civil rights in the 20th century, prison abolition in the 21st century can only be accomplished by a popular movement as radical and uncompromising as the movement that set up the prison regime in the first place.

We can start by reevaluating our priorities. There’s no use saying that progressive goals aren’t in competition with one another. They very surely are, and criminals have lost that competition again and again, with tragic results. For decades, politicians from Nelson Rockefeller to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama have sold out criminals in order to win concessions on health care, abortion, gay rights, early education, progressive taxation, and any number of other worthy objectives. Prison abolitionists must now perform the reverse procedure—we must be ready to sacrifice the traditional progressive agenda on the altar of criminal justice. Morality, like politics, starts at the edge of Ockham’s razor: the bad can no longer be allowed to obscure the evil.

The movement to abolish the death penalty is venerable and well-funded. Although it wasn’t successful in preventing the execution of Troy Davis, it’s helped a number of inmates get off death row through DNA evidence, and has arguably had decent success in the last fifteen years in shifting public opinion away from state-led killing. Hundreds of highly qualified, well-educated people devote their lives to trying to eradicate an unethical practice and a national embarrassment.

Compared with the horrors of garden variety American incarceration, though, the death penalty can be viewed only as a distraction. An extremely small number of people are executed in the United States—fewer than thirty a year, on average, in the last three decades. But at any given moment, a full 7 million people are under some form of regular surveillance from the correctional system. More African Americans are in prison today than were enslaved in the 1850s. Back in the early ’70s, before things got really bad, the United States had a decently large and energetic prison abolition movement. Why this movement has nearly disappeared—Angela Davis, a University of California professor and former imprisoned Black Panther, is virtually the only abolitionist left—even as the prison crisis has become more severe, is difficult to answer. The timing, though, suggests that the death penalty may have something to do with it—after execution was reinstated in 1976, many activists who might have spent their lives focusing on prisons switched their attention to a narratively vivid but politically minor bugaboo.

And yet the death penalty does offer one interesting benefit, from the point of view of prison abolition, because the first question any prison abolitionist needs to answer is what we’re supposed to do with violent criminals. An important part of that answer has to be that we must simply put up with an increased level of risk in our daily lives. But what about Charles Manson? Surely something must be done to prevent Charles Manson from chopping up celebrities.

If, in the popular imagination, the primary purpose of prisons is to keep us safe from (the vanishingly small number of) people like Charles Manson, then we should simply kill Charles Manson. Prison abolitionists should be ready to advocate a massive expansion of the death penalty if that’s what it takes to move the discussion forward. A prisonless society where murderers were systematically executed and rapists were automatically castrated wouldn’t be the most humane society imaginable, but it would be light-years ahead of the status quo. (Interestingly, unlike rape, homicide has one of the lowest recidivism rates of any crime—you can only murder your wife once—suggesting that death row inmates may pose less of a security risk than other categories of offenders.)

Gun control is another area where progressive energies have been wasteful and counterproductive. “Centrists” of any persuasion will try to tell you that most people don’t actually want their fellow citizens running around with guns, but gun control appears to be one area that really has cost the Democratic Party a large number of one-issue voters over the years. In any case, you’ll have a hard time convincing anybody that we should abolish prisons and take away the community’s ability to defend itself. Even on its own terms, gun control is not a straightforwardly progressive matter. The war on guns bears important similarities to the war on drugs—both are used as pretexts for searching, arresting, and imprisoning ethnic minorities. Gun control, like drug control, doesn’t do much to restrict supply—instead, it creates a black market for the product regulated through violence. In many states, obtaining a gun license is expensive and complex: we’ve essentially made it legal to own a gun if you’re wealthy and white, and illegal to own a gun if you’re poor and black. Years are added onto criminal sentences because unregistered guns are spotted on the premises, even if the guns have never been used. The only way to sustainably curb the supply of guns is to reduce demand for guns, and the easiest way to do that would be to legalize narcotics.

On May 23, 2011—the same day the morning papers rejoiced over another year of crime reduction—the Supreme Court ordered the State of California to release 45,000 prisoners. In a 5-to-4 decision written by Anthony Kennedy, the Court declared that overcrowding in the state’s penitentiaries had become so severe that simply existing in the system violated a prisoner’s Eighth Amendment right of freedom from cruel and unusual punishment.

As a news story, the ruling generated surprisingly little attention—a good deal less than the Court’s 2008 decision banning the death penalty for child rapists— but in legal circles it caused a panic. Antonin Scalia, in a fiery dissent, called it “the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation’s history.” Samuel Alito predicted the ruling would generate a “grim roster of victims,” anxiously noting that the quantity of prisoners mandated for release added up to “two army battalions.” In the early ’90s, Alito pointed out, a similar order issued by a federal judge in Philadelphia liberated some 10,000 prisoners: within 18 months, 2,748 of the prisoners had been rearrested for theft, 2,215 for drugs, 1,113 for assault, 959 for robbery, 751 for burglary, 90 for rape, and 79 for murder. California, Alito suggested, should gear up for an enemy invasion.

As the prison population has expanded, the ex-prisoner population has expanded, too, rising from 1.8 million in 1980 to 4.3 million in the year 2000. Every year, 650,000 prisoners are released from American prisons. Just as new prisoners tend to come from poor, urban neighborhoods—in New York, 75 percent of inmates come from just seven neighborhoods: Harlem, Brownsville, East New York, South Bronx, South Jamaica, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the Lower East Side—released prisoners cluster in a limited set of urban enclaves. This isn’t to say that everyone goes back to where they came from—many ex-cons, especially those who lack supportive families, specifically avoid their home neighborhoods. According to surveys, many believe they’ll be less likely to engage in renewed criminal activity with a change of scenery.

Within three years, 70 percent of released prisoners are rearrested, and half are back in prison. A large portion of these “recidivists” haven’t committed new felonies—they’ve simply violated the terms of their parole. California, which is especially adept at throwing parole violators back in prison, ends up reincarcerating two thirds of released prisoners within three years.

Of course, many released prisoners do commit new felonies, and the evidence is clear that releasing prisoners raises the crime rate, just as imprisoning criminals lowers it. The impact in both directions is relatively small, though. One study showed that during any given year in the ’90s, the net increase in the number of ex-offenders circulating in the general population accounted for 2 percent of property crimes and 2.5 percent of violent crimes. The effect was higher for murder and robbery, though. Fourteen percent of murders and 7 percent of robberies were attributable to prisoner releases in 1994. And that’s only the new releases—the fraction of murders committed by the entire ex-offender population was much higher. On the other hand, released prisoners are subject to considerably more state surveillance than most people, and while it’s safe to assume that ex-cons commit crimes at a higher rate than those who have never seen the inside of a prison, they are also more likely to be investigated and rearrested than someone who was never on the police’s radar to begin with. Released prisoners also have fewer noncrime options: getting a job without family or social connections is virtually impossible for them.

The prospects for California’s released prisoners, therefore, are not good. Neither are the prospects for the state. The likelihood is high that most of these released prisoners will be back in jail within three years, and California may very well be back in court for overcrowding its prisons. (The state is hoping to preempt the issue by transferring inmates to county jails in lieu of early release, but it isn’t clear that crowded jails are any more likely to survive judicial scrutiny than crowded prisons.) To reduce its prison population, California will have to do more than release prisoners—it will have to stop creating new ones.

When evaluating the impact of the war on drugs on the country’s incarceration crisis, it helps to keep in mind a statistical nuance: a large fraction of prison sentences are for nonviolent drug offenses, but a small fraction of the prison population is in for a nonviolent drug crime. This is because, despite the harshness of mandatory minimum sentences, drug criminals don’t spend nearly as much time in prison as other kinds of criminals.

It’s tempting to believe that we could free most of the prison population simply by liberating nonviolent drug offenders. Nonviolent drug offenders are “innocent”; they haven’t hurt anybody. Advocating on behalf of criminals is much easier when they haven’t committed any violent crime. And yet this misses the point of the prison crisis: you cannot relieve the suffering of the prison population without increasing safety risks for the rest of us.

And increasing those risks, from a moral standpoint, is the right thing to do.

What would happen to California’s criminal community, once freed from the ping-pong of prison and parole? They would continue being criminals, in all likelihood, breaking and entering, stealing cars, selling drugs, and—very occasionally—taking lives. This would be difficult and painful, both on the individual level for the victims and on a social level more broadly; economic and cultural shocks accompany any kind of population exchange, and a massive jailbreak will likely result in a period of strain and disorganization for inner cities. Over time, though, things will settle. There will be more fathers around, and more state money for things like education and health care.

The incarceration complex, like a civil war or foreign occupation, institutionalizes economic dislocation, making chaos and uncertainty a defining feature of the life cycle. Crime, on the other hand, causes disruptions that are smaller and more manageable. Despite the near-infinite capacity of the human spirit to deal with routine desperation, the residents of East Harlem will never “adapt” to a community life structured around prisons, because uprooting communities is the very function and purpose of incarceration. The capacity of New York residents to absorb higher levels of crime in daily life, on the other hand, is nowhere near its limit.

In all likelihood, dismantling or sharply contracting America’s prison system would make the country feel more like the United Kingdom. In the UK, only 3 percent of crimes result in a prison sentence. In the United States, the figure is closer to 18 percent. London is a more dangerous city than New York. Your likelihood of getting robbed or assaulted is higher there. For educated, middle-class whites unlikely to get in trouble with the police, London is, in some ways, a tougher place to raise children.

On the other hand, life spans are longer in the UK; social mobility is more fluid; racial disparities are smaller; the AIDS crisis is better-controlled; and neighborhoods are more cohesive. Despite some slippage in the last decade, the UK never had the prison boom we experienced in the US—Margaret Thatcher didn’t allow it. Confronted with a crime and drug abuse rate that is high by European standards, London attacked the problem on the front end, installing thousands of CCTV security cameras and hiring thousands of bobbies to discourage lawbreaking. Compared to the United States, they do little in the way of punishment.

Abolishing prisons and releasing all the prisoners would amount to a deregulation of criminal punishment. It would mean letting the private sector determine how best to prevent ourselves from getting robbed. In high finance, the laissez-faire approach has proved to be a disaster; for petty crime, it would be a boon.

If ever there were a time to launch a coordinated assault on the prison-industrial complex, the time is now. Budgets are strained, voters are angry, and crime is low. The Tea Party is in the midst of convincing everyone that government is the enemy— and so it is, in the field of criminal justice.

Popular resentment against an authoritarian state shouldn’t be denied or pooh-poohed— it should be seized and marshaled toward progressive ends. The prison crisis was created by centrists. Limited reforms and immoral moderation will not end the crisis. Prisoners and ex-cons, the most abused population in United States, will have to rely on political extremists, on both the left and the right, to turn the page on what will one day be recalled as one of American history’s darkest chapters.
[close]
 

http://old.post-gazette.com/pg/06064/665355.stm

 
How Detroit gang got to New Castle
Tactic of using teens as drug couriers invented by Young Boys Incorporated
Sunday, March 05, 2006
By Milan Simonich, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

DETROIT -- The gang called Young Boys Incorporated started here and changed the face of drug dealing.

Adults in their 20s and 30s took children from the streets and hired them to be couriers of crack cocaine. The kids would have most of the confrontations with police. Meantime, those behind the illicit operation would hide themselves and the money their couriers brought in.

If police caught the young drug runners, their juvenile status would protect them from adult punishment. Those who escaped the law would pocket a little money and learn about the business of operating a drug gang.

Every cop working a beat generally knows about the criminal system that Young Boys Incorporated started during the 1980s. But Pennsylvania law officers say they had never seen adults use 14- and 15-year-old drug runners so boldly or so widely until last month, when they caught two Detroit gangs that had shifted their crack-dealing operations to New Castle.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett said the number of couriers sent to New Castle was larger and more efficiently disguised than drug-dealing operations elsewhere in the state.

"These young dealers would stay for several weeks and then return to Detroit, replaced by another group of young dealers," he said.

New Castle Police Chief Thomas Sansone said couriers hired by drug dealers often are locals, but the gangs broke that pattern.

"What was different in this case was that all of the juveniles were from Detroit, and not one of them was reported as missing or a runaway," Chief Sansone said. "They were kids nobody was looking for."

Police say the couriers came from the East and West Sides of Detroit, where the gangs were headquartered. From there, adult bosses drove them 250 miles to New Castle. Once in town, they were to deliver crack cocaine to buyers and keep their mouths shut if police started asking questions.

They did just that.

When found on the streets late at night and questioned by New Castle police, the kids from Detroit lied about who they were. Whether they were staying in crack houses taken over by the gangs or fending for themselves is one of the case's enduring mysteries.

None was found with crack or cocaine, Chief Sansone said. In the end, those who were picked up by police ended up in a juvenile shelter while social workers searched for their parents or guardians.

The gang leaders' tactics threw Chief Sansone's 35-member department off stride for years. Each time his officers thought they had a bead on one group of couriers, a new army of 14-year-old dealers replaced them.

Only after the gangs had been in business for almost three years did their empire started to crumble. Police and prosecutors, using wiretaps and secret informants, obtained arrest warrants for 28 of the gang members. Seventeen of them are Detroit natives.

Even so, all the teenage couriers imported from Detroit slipped away. What became of them is the most haunting part of the case.

"It shows there is a whole underground -- an underworld -- that we don't have a handle on," said Carl S. Taylor, a Detroit native and Michigan State University professor noted for his street research on the gangs.

After World War II, when Detroit was capital of the auto industry, it had a humming economy and a population of almost 2 million. Today, it is down to 900,000 people, and it consistently ranks as one of the most impoverished big cities in America.

Dr. Taylor, 56, said a poor economy, staggering school dropout rate and sense of hopelessness combine to give Detroit gangs a steady supply of foot soldiers.

"Street culture is the one institution that will take you in when no one else will," he said.

Even though these criminal operations have eager teenagers to choose from, they also are facing a bad economy. No longer can the Detroit market feed every drug gang.

"When there's no more meat on the carcass, where do you go?" Dr. Taylor asked. "It's a tough and ugly situation in the city, so I'm not surprised that Detroit gangs find their way to Pennsylvania or Ohio or anywhere else."

In fact, he said, Detroit's drug gangs have branched out to the Midwest and South, all following the business blueprint created by Young Boys Incorporated. This means gangs recruit juveniles to do the dirty work of street sales and delivery while adults collect most of the money.

The leaders tend to be older and willing to use violence to shove out any hometown competition.
That was the case in New Castle.

Police say Lamarol "Tone" Abram, 28, and James "O-Z" Brooks, 39, led the Detroit gangs that ran crack-dealing operations. They eventually expanded into Beaver and Mercer counties. Police estimate that, through violence or the threat of it, they eliminated 80 percent of the competition.

Mr. Corbett said the Detroit gangs chose Pennsylvania markets where they would be "the big fish."

But James Tate, second deputy police chief of Detroit, maintains that the gangs looked for a new base because they were being run out of their hometown.

Mr. Tate said Detroit police made drug busts totaling $140 million last year and $85 million in 2004. Because they are under such duress in Detroit, he said, gangs look for cities where they might operate with less pressure from police.

Mr. Corbett, though, said the gangs that took over the crack-dealing trade New Castle and other Western Pennsylvania towns never really left Detroit. They continued to accumulate powder cocaine at their home base in the city, he said. Then they drove the drug supply to Pennsylvania, where it was processed into crack.

In addition, the regular rotation of couriers from Detroit showed that the gangs always maintained their presence there, Chief Sansone said.

With operations in two states, the gangs confounded law enforcement for a time.

"It was frustrating," Chief Sansone said. "A few times we arrested people, adults and juveniles, who had felony drug warrants in Detroit. But then the Detroit police would not extradite them, so we had to let them go. They began to feel more comfortable when they realized we couldn't do anything to them."

Mr. Tate said he knew of no such breakdowns between law officers in Detroit and Pennsylvania. He said Wayne County courts and prosecutors, not his department, typically handle extraditions.

For Dr. Taylor, who wrote about Young Boys Incorporated in his 1990 book "Dangerous Society," gangs are not a police problem.

"They are societal problem, but they have been so glamorized with 'Scarface' and 'The Godfather' that we don't realize it. I'm guilty because I'm looking forward to 'The Sopranos' as much as anybody."

He says the 14-year-old drug couriers who moved from Detroit to New Castle should have been found out immediately, as they were not in school. But nobody in Detroit, not a mom or a dad or a neighbor, seemed to notice when teenager left town for weeks at a time.

"Gangs are evidence of a total breakdown of society," Dr. Taylor said. "It's not 'The Sopranos' at all. It's dog eat dog, life in its lowest form. That's the part of this we should be most worried about."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,154394,00.html

It was the kind of research project most social scientists avoid. The researcher had to lay out $50,000 of his own money. He spent six years in one + of Detroit's most dangerous neighborhoods in the company of two of the most violent street gangs in America. He routinely asked highly personal questions of edgy young men who earn small fortunes selling drugs and have few qualms about killing people who inquire too closely about their activities.

For obvious reasons, most research on violent urban subcultures is done with computer printouts, not with tape recorders and notebooks on the mean streets. Not so with Carl S. Taylor, adjunct professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University and director of the Criminal Justice Program at Jackson Community College. In 1980 Taylor set out to study Detroit's two biggest and most powerful youth gangs: Young Boys Inc. and the Pony Down. In the process, he encountered four additional groups. The resulting book, Dangerous Society, published in February by Michigan State University Press, provides a harrowing portrait of how the gangs transformed themselves from opportunistic street punks into sophisticated drug-dealing empires that rake in hundreds of millions a year.

Taylor's work is of far more than academic significance. His major discovery is that even as Young Boys Inc. and the Pony Down were unraveling in the mid- 1980s following the jailings of their leaders, they were being quickly and silently replaced by far more sophisticated and highly secretive business operations. Taylor's findings contradict the sanguine attitude of fifth-term Mayor Coleman Young and his political allies, who insist that the Motor City no longer has a serious gang problem. Says inspector Benny Napoleon, who monitors gang activity for the Detroit police: "We have nothing remotely resembling a large, well-organized gang."

Taylor presents convincing evidence to the contrary: the groups have become less obvious to the police simply because they have shifted into more covert and more profitable enterprises. "Detroit kids just laugh when they hear people in L.A. are still wearing colors," says Taylor. "What's sweeping this city are what I call CEOs -- covert entrepreneurial organizations. They do not wear gold chains or beepers or Fila sweatsuits anymore. They're probably wearing ragged clothes and driving ratty cars. They've seceded from the union."

Cocaine sales fueled the evolution of Detroit's gangs. They began as what Taylor calls "scavengers," youths preying on the most vulnerable residents of their neighborhoods. But when the double whammy of crack and job cutbacks in the auto plants smashed into Detroit's poorest areas during the 1980s, the gangs developed "corporate" organizations with a concern for the bottom line and enough discipline to use violence mainly to protect their drug-dealing turfs.

Though smaller and far less visible than the original Young Boys Inc., which pioneered the use of hard-to-prosecute juveniles to sell drugs, the new-style crews have mimicked its security-conscious structure. "In Y.B.I., one of the keys was that the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing," Taylor says. "That's still true. At the top of each organization you have what amounts to a wholesale operation."

Though most of the membership is drawn from the impoverished underclass, an increasing number of recruits from middle-class families have been lured by the promise of quick financial rewards. Taylor also discovered that female gangs, once considered relatively harmless adjuncts to male crews, have become dangerous, independent groups. In an interview with Taylor's research team, one female gang member bragged of ousting unwanted guests who tried to "bum rush" a party. The guests fled, she said, after "I cut loose on their fake asses with that Uzi."

Taylor believes that gang members share a grossly distorted version of the values mainstream Americans hold dear. The difference is that gang members want money and status faster, and are willing to kill to obtain them. Asked to identify his role models, one 14-year-old cited the cocaine-snorting protagonist of the movie Scarface and Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca. "Lee Iacocca is smooth and he be dissing ((disrespecting, in street lingo)) everybody," the youth explained. In some cases, parents encourage their children's criminal careers. Said one: "My momma talk about how proud she is of me making doughski. She used to dog me and say I wasn't s---, but now she's proud."

Taylor grew up in the West Side neighborhood from which both Young Boys Inc. and the Pony Down sprang. He escaped with a scholarship to Michigan State. While pursuing a master's degree in criminal justice and a doctorate in education, he started a private security company. He first became aware of Young Boys Inc. when several of its red-sweatsuit-clad members swaggered into a concert at Joe Louis Arena in 1980.

Taylor urges an all-out war on the poverty, poor schooling, broken family structures and dire job prospects that make the urban underclass a seedbed for crime. Unfortunately, such prescriptions are not only familiar but also too expensive and time consuming to attract much political support. Detroit is already a case study of what happens when the conditions that produce gangs are allowed to fester. Warns Taylor: "We need to face up to the fact that there is a major crisis in this city."

Offline scatman

  • Slutty enough to make Jordan blush - and hard enough to piss in the wrong bush! Missing a shift key.
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 18,087
  • This is my world, you just WORK here :D
    • directions to football stadiums
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #236 on: April 7, 2012, 12:25:38 pm »
there was a bit in the evening standard on wednesday i think advocating legalisation of drugs, was pretty good and surprising. especially scathing of the government and mp's in general
Would sacrifice Fordy in a sacred Mayan ritual to have him as the next Liverpool manager
Football stadiums in England

Offline WhoHe

  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 2,309
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #237 on: April 8, 2012, 11:05:41 am »
A historic meeting of Latin America's leaders, to be attended by Barack Obama, will hear serving heads of state admit that the war on drugs has been a failure and that alternatives to prohibition must now be found.

The Summit of the Americas, to be held in Cartagena, Colombia is being seen by foreign policy experts as a watershed moment in the redrafting of global drugs policy in favour of a more nuanced and liberalised approach.

Otto Pérez Molina, the president of Guatemala, who as former head of his country's military intelligence service experienced the power of drug cartels at close hand, is pushing his fellow Latin American leaders to use the summit to endorse a new regional security plan that would see an end to prohibition. In the Observer, Pérez Molina writes: "The prohibition paradigm that inspires mainstream global drug policy today is based on a false premise: that global drug markets can be eradicated."

Pérez Molina concedes that moving beyond prohibition is problematic. "To suggest liberalisation – allowing consumption, production and trafficking of drugs without any restriction whatsoever – would be, in my opinion, profoundly irresponsible. Even more, it is an absurd proposition. If we accept regulations for alcoholic drinks and tobacco consumption and production, why should we allow drugs to be consumed and produced without any restrictions?"

He insists, however, that prohibition has failed and an alternative system must be found. "Our proposal as the Guatemalan government is to abandon any ideological consideration regarding drug policy (whether prohibition or liberalisation) and to foster a global intergovernmental dialogue based on a realistic approach to drug regulation. Drug consumption, production and trafficking should be subject to global regulations, which means that drug consumption and production should be legalised, but within certain limits and conditions."

The decision by Pérez Molina to speak out is seen as highly significant and not without political risk. Polls suggest the vast majority of Guatemalans oppose decriminalisation, but Pérez Molina's comments are seen by many as helping to usher in a new era of debate. They will be studied closely by foreign policy experts who detect that Latin American leaders are shifting their stance on prohibition following decades of drugs wars that have left hundreds of thousands dead.

Mexico's president, Felipe Calderón, has called for a national debate on the issue. Last year Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia's president, told the Observer that if legalising drugs curtailed the power of organised criminal gangs who had thrived during prohibition, "and the world thinks that's the solution, I will welcome it".

One diplomat closely involved with the summit described the event as historic, saying it would be the first time for 40 years that leaders had met to have an open discussion on drugs. "This is the chance to look at this matter with new eyes," he said.

Latin America's increasing hostility towards prohibition makes Obama's attendance at the summit potentially difficult. The Obama administration, keen not to hand ammunition to its opponents during an election year, will not want to be seen as softening its support for prohibition. However, it is seen as significant that the US vice-president, Joe Biden, has acknowledged that the debate about legalising drugs is now legitimate.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former president of Brazil and chairman of the global commission on drug policy, has said it is time for "an open debate on more humane and efficient drug policies", a view shared by George Shultz, the former US secretary of state, and former president Jimmy Carter.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/07/war-drugs-latin-american-leaders

Maybe some flexibilty being introduced or maybe another summit generating more heat than light.

Offline scatman

  • Slutty enough to make Jordan blush - and hard enough to piss in the wrong bush! Missing a shift key.
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 18,087
  • This is my world, you just WORK here :D
    • directions to football stadiums
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #238 on: April 8, 2012, 11:07:56 am »
Nothing will happen and a lot of hot gas will be blown
Would sacrifice Fordy in a sacred Mayan ritual to have him as the next Liverpool manager
Football stadiums in England

Online Corkboy

  • Sworn enemy of Bottlegirl. The Boston Toilet Mangler. Grauniad of the Cidatel. Into kinky S&M with the Lash.
  • RAWK Scribe
  • Legacy Fan
  • ******
  • Posts: 32,362
  • Is it getting better?
Re: War on Drugs
« Reply #239 on: April 16, 2012, 11:45:40 am »
From a couple of years ago...

Cocaine study that got up the nose of the US

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian, Saturday 13 June 2009
 

In areas of moral and political conflict people will always behave badly with evidence, so the war on drugs is a consistent source of entertainment. We have already seen how cannabis being "25 times stronger" was a fantasy, how drugs-­related deaths were quietly dropped from the measures for drugs policy, and how a trivial pile of poppies was presented by the government as a serious dent in the Taliban's heroin revenue.

The Commons home affairs select committee is looking at the best way to deal with cocaine. You may wonder why they're bothering. When the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs looked at the evidence on the reclassification of cannabis it was ignored. When Professor David Nutt, the new head of the advisory council, wrote a scientific paper on the relatively modest risks of MDMA (the active ingredient in the club drug ecstasy) he was attacked by the home secretary, Jacqui Smith .

In the case of cocaine there is an even more striking precedent for evidence being ignored: the World Health Organisation (WHO) conducted what is probably the largest ever study of global use. In March 1995 they released a briefing kit which summarised their conclusions, with some tantalising bullet points.

"Health problems from the use of legal substances, particularly alcohol and tobacco, are greater than health problems from cocaine use," they said. "Cocaine-related problems are widely perceived to be more common and more severe for intensive, high-dosage users and very rare and much less severe for occasional, low-dosage users."

The full report – which has never been published – was extremely critical of most US policies. It suggested that supply reduction and law enforcement strategies have failed, and that options such as decriminalisation might be explored, flagging up such programmes in Australia, Bolivia, Canada and Colombia. "Approaches which over-emphasise punitive drug control measures may actually contribute to the development of heath-related problems," it said, before committing heresy by recommending research into the adverse consequences of prohibition, and discussing "harm reduction" strategies.

"An increase in the adoption of responses such as education, treatment and rehabilitation programmes," it said, "is a desirable counterbalance to the over-reliance on law enforcement."

It singled out anti-drug adverts based on fear. "Most programmes do not prevent myths, but perpetuate stereotypes and misinform the general public.

"Such programmes rely on sensationalised, exaggerated statements about cocaine which misinform about patterns of use, stigmatise users, and destroy the educator's credibility."

It also dared to challenge the prevailing policy view that all drug use is harmful misuse. "An enormous variety was found in the types of people who use cocaine, the amount of drug used, the frequency of use, the duration and intensity of use, the reasons for using and any associated problems."

Experimental and occasional use were by far the most common types of use, it said, and compulsive or dysfunctional use, though worthy of close attention, were much less common.

It then descended into outright heresy. "Occasional cocaine use does not typically lead to severe or even minor physical or social problems … a minority of people … use casually for a short or long period, and suffer little or no negative consequences."

And finally: "Use of coca leaves appears to have no negative health effects and has positive, therapeutic, sacred and social functions for indigenous Andean populations."

At the point where mild cocaine use was described in positive tones the Americans presumably blew some kind of outrage fuse. This report was never published because the US representative to the WHO threatened to withdraw US funding for all its research projects and interventions unless the organisation "dissociated itself from the study" and cancelled publication. According to the WHO this document does not exist, (although you can read a leaked copy at www.tdpf.org.uk/WHOleaked.pdf).

Drugs show the classic problem for evidence-based social policy. It may well be that prohibition, and distribution of drugs by criminals, gives worse results for the outcomes we think are important, such as harm to the user and to communities through crime. But equally, we may tolerate these outcomes, because we decide it is more important that we declare ourselves to disapprove of drug use. It's okay to do that. You can have policies that go against your stated outcomes, for moral or political reasons: but that doesn't mean you can hide the evidence.

source