Drug Prohibition and Drug Use
Peter Moskos and Stanford Franklin make many good points in their op-ed brief for drug legalization, but this is a silly argument: “If prohibition decreased drug use and drug arrests acted as a deterrent, America would not lead the world in illegal drug use and incarceration for drug crimes.” That just doesn’t follow logically. What’s more, the actual evidence from the alcohol prohibition era indicates that common sense is about right: making booze illegal caused less booze to be consumed, and the strength of the effect was related to the vigor with which the rules were enforced.
But that’s not to say that making alcohol illegal was a good idea and I certainly don’t think that handing out jail sentences for marijuana possession makes a great deal of sense. But in terms of hard drugs, I think that what Moskos and Franklin are mostly doing is marshaling the evidence for a dramatic change in police priorities rather than legalization of drugs as such. Tactics like the High Point Initiative appear to work as ways of shutting down overt drug markets. If a city can do that in its most problematic areas, the best thing to do seems to me to be to have its police . . . move on to worrying about something else. If people are selling drugs in a manner that’s not a nuisance for their neighbors and doesn’t involve violence, why not turn a blind eye? The knowledge that drug dealers who aren’t making problems for others will be left alone should encourage people to try to find less destructive business models. That’s still a far cry from saying that there should be heroin at the corner store, while CrackCo International hires the top marketing minds and lobbyists in the country to dream up exciting new ways of turning kids into addicts.
47 Responses to “Drug Prohibition and Drug Use”
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August 18th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Libertarians should give up their crazy dream of legal Crack. Beyond legalizing Marijuana what we really need is to develop drugs that produce mind altering effects, but aren’t addictive, don’t cause violent behavior and have minimal long term health effects. No market currently exists for such a drug because the FDA would never approve it, but if the government did a bunch of R&D it could probably come up with something. Then government could raise revenue by selling it to people.
August 18th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
New Hamsterdam is the place to be.
August 18th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Ah, more pernicious nihilism from the enemies of civilisation, I see. The late and unlamented Joseph Goebbels once said, “If you must tell a lie, then make it a big one”. The Big Lie of the culturally liberal nihilists is that drug dealing is a victimless crime. It’s not surprising that Mr. Yglesias should think this. After all, I suspect he doesn’t know anyone who was physically and intellectual stunted from birth because their parents were drug users. You don’t tend to run into many of the children of the crack epidemic at cocktail parties in Georgetown, Santa Monica, or the Upper East Side. Cocaine and heroin dealers are vile sleazebags who sell poison and destroy lives, they are no better than Klansmen.
The solution to the drug war is to stop dicking around and actually enforce the laws, Chinese style. We need punishment that is swift, sure and stern. Dealers of coke, heroin,meth, and other hard drugs should be whipped with the cat of nine tails, and possibly execution for the leaders of the gangs. The military should get involved in policing this country and rooting out drug crime. I guarantee you that there are not many drug dealers in China or Malaysia. But of course this will never happen, as hipsters like Yglesias deplore toughness, and like drugs. As usual, it will be the children of Roxbury, Harlem and Anacostia who pay the price for Lindsey Lohan and the hipsters snorting coke at Hollywood cocktail parties. God have mercy on our nation.
August 18th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Thanks for your blog. while i am not in favor of Prohibiition, it is a myth to think that alcohol consumption and abuse went up during that period. all possible measures showed reduced use and abuse. alcohol related ER admissions, alcohol OD deaths, drunk driving deaths, and alcohol-related industrial accident numbers all went down, and returned upward very promptly upon repeal.
in our current era, laws forbidding alcohol sales to young people are clearly linked to fewer drunk driving incients and fatlities in that age group. every time the legal drinking age is lowered or raised in some state or other this relationship is proved again.
I think our current drug laws-especially as they are enforced, and this is not a trivial point–are crude, cruel, discriminatory, destructive, and so on, and cry out for revision. But i am not at all sure that things like narcotic addiction or meth abuse would evaporate with repeal of narcotics laws. simply not very likely. history suggess, in fact, that there would likely be important and costly social and personal impacts to deal with.
marijuana decriminalization may be a useful place to start a social experiment since it is no more harmful than the drugs we currently allow–alcohol and nicotine–and we have chosen methods other than outright prohibition for those. if this experiment plays out well, it might be expanded. but i would urge that it be done carefully, with clear and unvarnished attendance to actual results as we go forward, not to wish-fulfillment myths.
Surely in the meantime, we can do away with the most racist elements of current law, such as the ridiculous ‘extra’ penalty for crack vs. cocaine. the only reason this was passed in the first place had to do with its racial dimensions anyway. does anyone really think otherwise? and certainly today its ramifications are horrendously disparate by race and class. horrendously. shamefully.
August 18th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Nice job, Hector! China and Malaysia, well-chosen models for us, I like it.
Cat-o-ninetails, friend of civilization. Good stuff.
August 18th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Hector, not all lies are Goebbels Big Lies although yours about Yglesias is a 2nd cousin to them. Nowhere does Yglesias say what you say he does. You’re lying. And worse, you’re a bore who’s lying.
Apparently, you’ve convinced yourself that people who don’t believe in revealed truth are nihilists. Which is nonsense. And worse.
August 18th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
How about we educate people so they can make a living without selling drugs, and have something to live for besides getting high?
August 18th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Ah, Hector, full of sinful wrath as usual.
Anyway, the real question is not whether prohibition-style anti-drug policies have some effect on abuse of the drug in question, but rather whether they do much to reduce overall drug abuse. That is because drug abusers can and do switch to other drugs in response to their current drug of choice becoming harder to obtain, and there is good reason to believe that all we have ended up doing is playing drug abuse whack-a-mole, with the overall incidence of drug abuse not really responding much to our prohibitory efforts.
August 18th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Why are these drugs illegal, Hector? If your argument is crack babies, wouldn’t enforcing existing child abuse statutes suffice to criminalize the behavior?
August 18th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Hector, you sound like you’re having a really bad day. Why don’t you go out, treat yourself to a brand new hairshirt, get back home and kneel uncomfortably in front of your favorite portrait of Franco for a few hours mortifying your flesh and lamenting your earthly desires.
You know, just some quality “me time”.
August 18th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
“I guarantee you that there are not many drug dealers in China or Malaysia.”
Hector, you do have access to the internet, correct?
August 18th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
“If prohibition decreased drug use and drug arrests acted as a deterrent, America would not lead the world in illegal drug use and incarceration for drug crimes.” That just doesn’t follow logically.
I don’t see the slightest element of illogic in it, though who am I to argue with a Harvard-trained philosopher?
I mean, one of the arguments used by proponents of narcotics prohibition and strict drug laws is their value as deterrents. There just doesn’t seem to be much evidence that such arguments are correct. AFAIK not only is drug use widespread in America, it tends to be more widespread than it is in other rich countries — pretty much of all of which have less draconian drug laws than the US.
August 18th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
while i am not in favor of Prohibiition, it is a myth to think that alcohol consumption and abuse went up during that period…
What exactly are your sources for that? A cursory Google search doesn’t turn up anything to back you up. (You’ll forgive me if I say the idea of cops in 1925 checking the blood-alcohol levels of car-crash victims seems a bit…unlikely.)
August 18th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Matt,
It’s frustrating that you portray the drug legalization debate as if the only options are “keep drugs illegal” or “heroin at the corner store, while CrackCo International hires the top marketing minds…”
If we legalize (some) drugs, it doesn’t mean that they have to marketed and sold like alchohol. We could have a system in which the government (or an independent non-profit) maintains a monopoly on selling newly-legalized drugs, and there is no marketing or lobbying whatsover. That would solve the worst effects of the criminal drug trade, while also limiting the increase in use.
August 18th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
this is a silly argument: “If prohibition decreased drug use and drug arrests acted as a deterrent, America would not lead the world in illegal drug use and incarceration for drug crimes.” That just doesn’t follow logically.
No, but if the US has the most punitive laws and also the highest rate of drug use, that’s good commonsense evidence that our system has failed. If dragging in a logician calls that conclusion into question, maybe we should just leave the logician out of it, and let him continue to try to decide whether other minds are real or not.
Rigorous philosophical training makes it impossible to say pretty much anything useful with any assurance. Analytic philosophy the universal refutation.
August 18th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Hmm. Until recent years Northern Mexico was effectively a no enforcement zone for drug traffickers, in part because the local police were cut in on the action. And certainly the level of violence was less than it is today but not so much less that people felt safe on the streets or in their houses. And the same was true in Colombia back in the days when the cartels controlled major cities like Cartagena. As long as there remained an external market for the product you retained an internal battlefield to control the marketplace.
Why not turn a blind eye? Because as long as there are white suburban and college kids willing to take a mild risk to go downtown and score some drugs there will be black and brown kids willing to shoot each other to control that street corner.
Which was the real lesson of prohibition. Yes it cut down on drinking by the working class, no it didn’t in any material way prevent wealthy people from maintaining cocktail parties (because possession and consumption were not a crime under the Volstead Act, once you got your booze delivered by your bootlegger you were home free). The only price that was paid was by the poorer populations of the inner city who had to live through gang wars and an attendant culture of intimidation and extortion.
Your argument reminds me of the one that suggests that prostitution is after all a victimless crime, as if the working girls were fully informed economic actors operating in a free market environment and not just exploited sexual labor for the benefit of abusive men.
If there really was evidence that keeping drugs and prostitution illegal but not enforcing those laws really resulted in an environment that was not a nuisance for the neighbors or didn’t involve violence you would have a point. I just don’t see any evidence that such a policy has ever worked in history or today. And even where violence is relatively restrained you don’t want to have your kids walking on crack vials on their way to school or seeing johns getting blow jobs in their cars from that girl that used to be in their middle school class a couple of years before.
And legalizing drugs doesn’t mean you end up with the Weed and Crank aisle at Costco, you can regulate it much as most cities do with strip clubs. I worked for County planning and zoning and in our jurisdiction ‘Adult Entertainment’ was only allowed in Industrial Zones, which generally kept them well away from neighborhoods that actually had kids. You could just classify (justifiably) Pot stores as being adult oriented and take care of much of the problem through zoning rules alone.
August 18th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Hector,
The harm caused by the sum of all illegal drugs pales in comparisson to alcohol. That’s not entirely based on usage levels, either. The Lancet did a study of the harm done by various drugs, based on physical harm, social harm and addictiveness. Alcohol was considered the 5th most harmful substance abused, only surpassed by heroin, cocaine, barbiturates and methadone. Alcohol was considered more harmful than amphetimines, LSD, marjuana, ecstasy and anabolic steroids. All of those except amphetimines are considered less harmful than tobacco.
The US does not care about dangerous drugs, it cares about unusual drugs. You’re supposed to get high the way society tells you to, even if it’s more dangerous than they way you want to.
August 18th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
the actual evidence from the alcohol prohibition era indicates that common sense is about right: making booze illegal caused less booze to be consumed, and the strength of the effect was related to the vigor with which the rules were enforced.
What Bruce Webb said. Also, alcohol prohibition didn’t work as policy not because it wasn’t enforced vigorously, but because it was, in the end, un-enforcable. The ‘common sense’ you cite is true, but true in a fairly meaningless way.
August 18th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Jasper,
The logical flaw is assuming that the basis for the conclusion is complete. It is entirely possible for prohibition and arrests to deter drug use, but for other effects to more than make up for their lack.
The wealth of the US attracts significant supplies of drugs. The significant civil liberties of the US make it easier to do business. We have two long and lightly guarded borders, one of them with a poor country which is conveniently located so as to act as a producer and conveyer of illegal drugs. We have a very high level of inequality in our society, producing both a lower class which has little to lose from drug use, and an upper class which has little to fear from drug laws.
All of these things weigh heavily against the possible effectiveness of prohibition and arrests.
August 18th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
The thing about Prohibition was this- gangsters made my grandfather keep illegal slot machines in the basement of his drug store. They would have blown up his store if he had refused. Once or twice a year, goons would come around and take all the machines out, the police would ‘raid’ the place the next day, and the day after that the machines would go back in. Be assured, my grandfather did not make a penny off any of this.
Prohibition eventually corrupted all of civil society. Ministers and priests lauded gangsters like Capone because the gangsters contributed to their churches. Police and witnesses were afraid to testify or were bought off.
As for the fantasy that people drank less during Prohibition, even if they did, the results were worse because of poison whiskey and bathtub gin.
But how would you know how much people drank? Today many prominent and successful people smoke some pot, but would never admit it because of the laws. In medieval times public men would only tell you what they really though in books that were published after they were dead. We can truly claim to be medieval in our approach to drug regulation.
All drugs should be regulated and treated medically. This would dry up the black market and effectively get the gangsters out of the drug business.
There’s no evidence that the police actions of drug prohibition are having any effect at all, other than filling our prisons, breaking up families, and creating huge numbers of unemployable people. If in fact living here is so miserable that our addiction rates would soar high above other countries, there must be other things we need to change too.
But changing the drug laws would be a good start.
August 18th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Let me take a contrarian point on alcohol prohibition. Up until prohibition the average alcohol consumption for every man, woman, and child over the age of five (yes, children drank alcohol also) was equivalent to five shots of whiskey a day. Around the world, this had to do with the poor sources of clean drinking water; in the United States, this was abetted by bumper crops of corn in Appalachia.
In Europe, where people drank similar amounts, people would go take a cure in a place with curative waters, which probably was just usually an uncontaminated underground source. After a few weeks of being sober, they would go home and resume alchol until their health once again deteriorated. The tradition of taking the waters persists in Europe to this day.
In England, because of the East India Trade, people often drank tea, believing the tea was magically curative. And although tea does have some health benefits, the major one was that boiling provided a clean source of water.
One of the underestimated but beneficial results of prohibition was that it led to clean sources of water, first with Coca-Cola bottling, with a little cocaine to help sales, and then with public health measures. Within a very few years there were public water works and public information for decontaminating water; this led to a remarkable jump in longevity. And a reduction in violent crime.
August 18th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
The notion that drug laws don’t work (a claim which may be true) is not as happy a truth as drug legalization advocates think. In fact the idea that legal drugs are very harmful, too, only weakens their argument–to say that we just have to suck it up and live with whatever body- and mind- destroying substance human beings can dream up is pretty depressing.
We’re all universally agreed now that prohibition was a bad idea, but we’ve forgotten what a horrible public health and safety issue alcohol abuse was. It didn’t get better because alcohol was legal again. Over the horizon of drug legalization is a public health nightmare that we still won’t have solved just because people can hit a bong without getting arrested. We’ll also strengthen the libertarian opponents of universal health care, who won’t want to pay for other people’s rehab.
August 18th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
I guess we could all go on making dire predictions and rosy assumptions about what would or would not happen if we did this or didn’t do that. It’s working great for health care reform isn’t it?
Or, as with health care, we could look to other countries where IT’S ACTUALLY BEING DONE and see how it turns out there. Have a look at Portugal. See what’s become of them since they decriminalized. Have you heard about all the riots and bloodshed that’s occurred over there since they took that drastic step? I’ll bet you haven’t because there aren’t any. It’s been a success by all measurable indicators.
So take a second to examine reality, neoprohibitionists, and drop the kneejerk responses that benefit no one (save perhaps Nancy Reagan who I understand gets royalty payments each time someone says ‘no’)
August 18th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
It’s frankly ludicrous that marijuana is ever even implicitly discussed as being in the same category as heroin, cocaine or frankly even alcohol. It’s simply not reality-based thinking.
I guess “turning a blind eye” toward marijuana sales and use would be an improvement over the current system, but really anything short of complete legalization is nutty.
August 18th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
You know, there is actual empirical evidence you could cite that finds little-to-no correlation between penalties for marijuana possession and marijuana use, at least:
http://www.aclu-wa.org/detail.cfm?id=1014
August 18th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
@Colatina: It would strengthen libertarians’ hand to have a public health disaster in response to their preferred drug policy because they could then deny the benefits you claim will be necessary to clean it up? A long stretch…
August 18th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Levels of street violence were far lower between the end of Prohibition and the mid-1960s than they have been since. Why? Probably in no small part because the various vice rackets were controlled by fairly stable criminal enterprises and often unofficially tolerated.
Which is not to romanticize the mafia, or the staggering levels of political corruption and thuggery associated with them. But organized crime in mid-century America tended to eschew the open-air trafficking, drive-by shootings, and other violence and chaos that drive nice people out of neighborhoods. They sought an veneer of legitimacy. The federal campaigns against organized crime led more or less directly to an increase in disorganized crime, run by youth gangs and freelancers with guns. And the war on drugs has perpetuated this chaos by continually knocking out elements of the supply chain and creating vacuums for ruthlessly ambitious types to fill.
There’s something to be said for the Amsterdam model for removing both organized and disorganized crime from the distribution loop. Most people don’t worry these days about the “numbers racket” in their town, because we now have Vegas and riverboat casinos and video slots. But people who would never have set foot in a seedy basement for an illicit craps game will spend a weekend at the MGM Grand. And at least a few of them will end up in debt and ruination.
Like everything else, it’s a matter of trade-offs. And the trade-offs are weighted differently for each drug you’re thinking about legalizing.
August 18th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Like everything else, it’s a matter of trade-offs. And the trade-offs are weighted differently for each drug you’re thinking about legalizing.
Mmmm. Cough syrup.
August 18th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Cough syrup today actually illustrates a major problem with the “war on drugs”. Every year dozens of people die from drinking too much cough syrup that also has acetaminophen, aka Tylenol. And this is a really unpleasant way to die.
People think because it’s sold on drug store shelves, and it’s not one of the “bad” drugs, it must be safe. Call it a weak character, or simple confusion, but people end up taking a few too many sips of the cough syrup, or perhaps they take some other pill that also has acetaminophen in it, or perhaps the alcohol in the cough syrup makes them drowsy and they don’t remember how much they took.
Not too long ago, you could buy a medication that was effective against coughs, and fairly safe- it’s called codeine. You damn near need to be related to a doctor to get codeine today, because it’s been demonized as one of the “bad” drugs. The same thing happened with morphine, one of the safest analgesics, which can be taken as a simple pill.
The American people as a whole have no tendency to become addicted to these drugs. Millions of us take them every year and stop taking them when the problem that caused us pain has healed.
But if you can’t afford a good doctor, and end up at the supermarket buying pain meds off the shelf, you’ll be trying more and more stuff that just doesn’t work very well.
All part of our get-sick-quick plan.
August 18th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Ah, I see the Yglesian rootless cosmopolite hipsters are at it again. God, it realy bothers these cheerful nihilists to think of imposed authority, or of the idea that someone should ever tell someone else what to do. These nihilists- the drug legalizers, the abortionists, the strip club enthusiasts, the pornography crowd, the swingers, the libertarians- all imagine that if consenting adults want to do something, well then they should be allowed to. Wrongo. That is the intellectual creed of a five year old who doesn’t want to eat his brocolli. Intelligent and morally sensitive people realise that there are many things we want to do that are bad for us, and that it is the right- nay, the obligation and the duty- of a civilised state to encourage us- and in extreme cases, when necessary to compel us- to embrace the good and shun the evil. The state exists in order to encourage men in the direction of virtue, and to foster the development of human excellences- including moral excellence. That is its role, and its essential nature, and it cannot fall away from it. No state has the right to be indifferent to whether its citizens should use substances which f*ck up their lives, which enslave them to physical addictions, and which undermine rationality and morality not on a momentary basis but on a long term, sustained basis. No state founded in the Hellenic-Christian conception of natural law can be indifferent to whether its citizens choose to destroy their lives through drugs. It has the right, the obligation, and the duty to prevent them. By the rod and the cat of nine tails if necessary.
Only when we restore moral values like authority, obedience, submission and discipline to the center of our national discourse will we have taken the first step towards solving the drug problem, and restoring our nation’s young people to physical as well as moral health and purity. Of course, this will probably mean dismantling the hateful ideological framework of Millian – Benthamite Liberalism of which the cosmopolite hipsters are so fond. And good riddance to it, too.
August 18th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
A sip of cough syrup? How about robotripping? People are taking very large doses of cough syrup to dissociate. They would probably be better off if they just dropped acid, or better yet—ate some mushrooms; because the cough syrup is addictive when you take large doses for a long period of time.
August 18th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
If people are selling drugs in a manner that’s not a nuisance for their neighbors and doesn’t involve violence, why not turn a blind eye?
While you are at it – turning a blind eye – why not also turn one on the billions transferred to drug dealers by your purchases that go to buy weapons to terrorize Latin American populations and the subsequent deals right-wing Latin American nations make with the US to buy more American weapons to combat drug dealers. Ah, and then things get so bad American bases are needed in Latin America also.
Of course, these bases and weapons can be used to combat evil socialists and union organizers, indeed, even poor indigenous peoples complaining about their livelihood being sold to American corporate interests.
Turn a blind eye to all the American banks laundering money. After all, those bankers are so genteel and wear expensive suits. It is not as if they go around assassinating judges as those low-class sicarios in Colombia.
Turn a blind eye to all that while you are at it. Nothing matters but your bourgeois neighborhoods and middles-class sensibilities.
August 18th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
[...] UPDATE: Matt Yglesias [...]
August 18th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
They would probably be better off if they just dropped acid, or better yet—ate some mushrooms;
I would agree with you, except that – you’re not talking Portabella here, are you?
August 18th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
‘ey ‘ector! how does permitting alcohol promote moral excellence… three sentences max, mang!
August 18th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
[...] Matt Yglesias on drug legalization: Tactics like the High Point Initiative appear to work as ways of shutting down overt drug markets. If a city can do that in its most problematic areas, the best thing to do seems to me to be to have its police . . . move on to worrying about something else. If people are selling drugs in a manner that’s not a nuisance for their neighbors and doesn’t involve violence, why not turn a blind eye? The knowledge that drug dealers who aren’t making problems for others will be left alone should encourage people to try to find less destructive business models. That’s still a far cry from saying that there should be heroin at the corner store, while CrackCo International hires the top marketing minds and lobbyists in the country to dream up exciting new ways of turning kids into addicts. [...]
August 18th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
I wonder if Hector is aware that among the first things the totalitarians will do is make sure they are in control of the churches, extinguishing any that don’t play ball. I guess he probably doesn’t care, as long as the jackboot is on his foot. Anyway . . .
[T]o say that we just have to suck it up and live with whatever body- and mind- destroying substance human beings can dream up is pretty depressing.
The good news is that it appears that only a small minority of people are particularly prone to drug abuse, at least if they don’t start with habitual use too early in life. The bad news is that we really don’t have a great answer for those people: some respond to some treatments, but there is certainly no magic bullet.
August 19th, 2009 at 12:25 am
Hector,
If we keep alcohol legal and make much safer drugs like marijuana and ecstasy illegal, people will drink alcohol instead of using the less harmful drugs.
People have been using mind-altering substances since before agriculture. Society can survive it.
I think if after bread and wine Christ had said, “Take this all of you and smoke it, for this is my breath…” pot would be much more acceptable. As it is, wine was the mind altering substance of choice in Judea.
August 19th, 2009 at 8:18 am
DTM,
Er, yes we do have a great answer to those people. Have extremely draconian punishments for drug dealers, so that no one deals drugs and the poor addiction-prone individuals have no opportunity to get addicted. It is the duty of society to, in extreme cases, save us from ourselves.
As the late and unlamented Ronald Reagan said (a man whose politics I detest btw) there are simple answers, there are just no easy answers.
August 19th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Hector,
Your suggestions about the cat o’ nine tails only provoke sinful S&M fantasies in rootless cosmopolite hipsters. Forcing pot smokers to listen to your rants, however, might be an effective deterrent.
August 19th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Gotta love “rootless cosmopolite.” Excellent work, Hector.
August 19th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
But I will just clarify my earlier point: Google the word “drugs” and either “China” or “Malaysia” and see what you get. Easy! Ya big silly.
August 19th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Uh, then go live in China you dipshit… Drug use, when concerning “responsible” adults, is no one’s fucking business but their own. Kids dealing with alcoholic parents are just as susceptible to abuse as kids whose parents use illicit drugs. The difference? Their parents aren’t going to prison for ten years for simple possession. Free will people. Civil liberties. That doesn’t mean shit anymore?
August 19th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Oy. Nobody follows my suggestions. Clarification:
THERE ARE LOTS AND LOTS OF DRUGS IN CHINA AND MALAYSIA!!!!!
Caps lock off.
August 20th, 2009 at 12:35 am
Nick Cobb,
I would be happy to live in a country that doesn’t buy the absurd premise that you f*cking up your life is no one’s business but your own. No, it is the business of all of us. A just society exists to save you from your worst instincts- and that goes for strip club enthusiasts and pornography watchers as well as for drug abusers. No one has the ‘right’ to destroy their own capacity for rationality and morality. It is said, “Your body is not your own, for you were bought at a price”. How true.
August 24th, 2009 at 12:30 am
Matt wrote, with *no citations*: “What’s more, the actual evidence from the alcohol prohibition era indicates that common sense is about right: making booze illegal caused less booze to be consumed,”
This simply does not match *ANY* of the credible statistics I have read. You have to account for the reporting bias, first of all (bootleggers don’t exactly advertise their volumes to the government). Once you’ve done this, all the studies I’ve seen say that prohibition reduced alcohol consumption *initially*, but that by the end of the decade the rate of consumption had increased (partly due to a shift to higher-potency beverages, partly due to more consumption period).
Matt, if you have evidence to the contrary, *cite your sources*. Everything I’ve read says you’re flat-out wrong on the facts.
August 24th, 2009 at 12:35 am
“all possible measures showed reduced use and abuse. alcohol related ER admissions, alcohol OD deaths, drunk driving deaths, and alcohol-related industrial accident numbers all went down, and returned upward very promptly upon repeal.”
Problem is that they’re all subject to reporting bias!
When alcohol is illegal, people have a vested interest in pretending that OD’ing is something else, staying out of the emergency room, pretending that drunk driving is something else, et cetera.
I will believe that industrial accident and drunk driving numbers went down, because by driving alcohol underground, people would stop drinking during working hours and while driving, and instead drink when they *wouldn’t get caught*.
“One of the underestimated but beneficial results of prohibition was that it led to clean sources of water, first with Coca-Cola bottling, with a little cocaine to help sales, and then with public health measures.”
Um, no. These are not benefits of prohibition. These are benefits of the temperance movement, which also invented root beer (thank goodness for that!) and is responsible for lots of other good things. Most of those activities, from the public health measures to the alternate beverages, were well active before prohibition. (I am *all in favor* of temperance.)