The War On Drugs In Perspective

[Senior]

I think guy nails the issue on the head in that morality is relative and is something that each person decides for themselves. What is right in my eyes in wrong in anothers. Lets each make up our own minds and not have a politician decide for us. Anyway it's a short article and very good,

Mom, Drugs, and Apple Pie
by Fred Reed

I wish someone would explain to me the War On Drugs, or at least why we think there is one. I grant that I'm just a country boy, and intellectually barefoot, and can't understand things that don't make sense. For that you have to go to Yale. Help me.

As the newspapers tell it, drugs are somebody else's fault. Mexico's, for example, which grows and ships drugs. Yep, our drug problem comes from them. Colombia makes us take drugs too. In Washington you often see Colombians with machetes to peoples' throats, making them use drugs. Sometimes they actually block traffic. The Afghans grow drugs for the American market, but it's not their fault, because they are our allies and love us and fight terrorism.

Does this make sense? Maybe it's because I'm slow, but looks to me as if America has a drug problem because Americans want drugs. It isn't Colombia. You might as well blame Toyotas on Japan as blame cocaine on Colombia. If we didn't want Toyotas, we wouldn't buy them. Drugs, too.

Drugs are as American as barbecue sauce. Everybody here wants drugs. Kids want drugs. Country boys in pickups want drugs. Fancy consultants want drugs. All God's chillun want drugs. Throw in people who don't think they want their minds altered, but gobble Prozac like anteaters on a bug pile. They're drugged-up to the gills, but don't know it.

The War On Drugs has gone on for a good thirty-five years since the Sixties. It's as real as professional wrestling. Well, almost. What do we have to show for it? Nothing. Nothing. You can get any drug you have heard of, and some you haven't, from your daughter in high school. I don't mean that she uses them. I mean she knows where to get them, or could find out in fifteen minutes. Crystal, shrooms, ecstasy, acid, whatcha want?

Downtown, crack is common as corruption. Open-air drug markets are like Seven-Eleven – there's one every few blocks. Eight black guys hanging on a corner in the city? Good bet. The customers usually are blue-collar whites from the suburbs. The upper class does white powder. Kids do odd stuff. Nitrous, for example. Just Say N2O.

The schools actually promote drugs. When my daughter was in the third grade, she had never thought about narcotics. Then a nice cop with DARE came. He showed them what the drugs looked like and explained what they did. The kids were intrigued: Acid? You see things? Neat….

Who are we kidding? A lot of their parents do drugs. Yes, the Volvo People, shiny and prosperous. When the kids aren't around, the little bag comes out of the bottom drawer. (The kids toke when the parents aren't around.)

No, not everyone uses, or ever did. Not everyone drinks. But enough do it that it's acceptable, on the order of discrete adultery.

Drugs are a vital part of the national economy, like Boeing. The difference is that drugs have a future. We might as well try to outlaw gravity. Anyone caught stuck to the earth instead of floating in the air will be arrested….

People with too much time on their hands talk about legalization. Thing is, drugs are legal. It's a curious, tacit, off-the-books legality, a legality in bits and pieces, undeclared, but it's there, and has to be, because of the demographics. You can't arrest the middle class, the upper class, the lower class, the high schools and the universities.

You sure aren't going to bust half the Gifted And Talented program at Central High, give them a narcotics record, and ruin their lives. So teachers just somehow…don't notice. Crime largely ignored is crime largely legalized.

When was the last time you heard of high-school or middle-school (don't kid yourself) students being busted at school on dope charges? Blacks only get arrested because they're visible, because drugs in the ghetto produce dead bodies, and because they are going to vote Democratic anyway.

The other part of de facto legalization is to that penalties for the first arrest are meaningless – say, an appearance in court and some sort of stupid community service. For kids, it's a joke, an adventure, a badge of honor. Adults in the middle-class almost never get caught. They're discreet, and the cops don't really care. Besides, jailing the tax base doesn't fly.

For the middle class and up (and where is the power in the country?) drugs are illegal enough that no politician has to take heat for being in favor, but legal enough that people can use them.

Why is this? Ah. Because too many folk fondly remember getting twisted in the dorm room years back, remember succumbing to the munchies and eating a whole loaf of stale bread or a ream of typing paper while Dylan honked and blew about the vandals got the handle.

Gimme a break. For too many of us, doing drugs in college was fun, a rite of passage, like going to a speakeasy in the Twenties. It provided a sense of adventure, of shared disdain for laws seen as witless and meddlesome. We were chemical libertarians. And in any age the bright and adventurous are more likely to do drugs than are solemn drones.

This doesn't make drugs a good idea. It does make them unlikely to go away.

What do parents from the Sixties say when the budding tad asks, "Daddy, did you and mommy do drugs back then?" Heh, ah…urgh. Do you lie? "Oh nooo-oo, we never did that." Budding tads tend to know when they're being lied to. Or do you prevaricate greasily: "Well, I experimented, but it wasn't a good idea and I didn't inhale"?

I heard the story, perhaps apocryphal, of the father who told his daughter of eight years, "If you put your tooth under the pillow, the Tooth Fairy will give you a dime." "A dime of what?"

If the laws don't much quash the use of drugs, what affect do they have?

They keep prices up for the drug cartels. Dealers enjoy a huge, federally guaranteed margin of profit.

Two groups most oppose legalization. First, the morality lobby consisting of hard-line conservatives, serious Christians, latent Puritans, and people who fear social devastation wrought by drugs. Second, the drug industry, which would expire yesterday if legalized. This includes folk with a few plants growing in a closet, Kentucky farm boys with a dozen rows hidden amongst the corn, judges and cops battening on bribes, the peddlers in the ghetto, and the cartels. All God's chillun.

When crime and morality are in league – precisely what war on drugs are we talking about?

[MC Hammered]

I always wondered if the saying "One wants what they can't have" is true in the case of drugs.

If anything and everything was readily available for a person to use, in moderation of course, would we have a drug problem?

I went to Amsterdam and you can find just about anything you can imagine there, but the city was clean, people aren't shooting up in the middle of the street and I never saw anyone local doped up out of their gills other than us foriegners.

I walked all over their city and suburbs and expected to see something like out Downtown Eastside and I couldn't find it. I thought the city might change at night and it did... but nothing like it does at Main and Hastings.

So if the government came in and regulated the drug trade and opened up all doors so an adult can access all types of drugs, would there be a drug problem?

[Ragga_Wh0re]

i disagree with him saying that high schoolkids dont get busted and charged... THEY DO WAKE UP ASSHOLE. It wasn`t surprising when he turned it into a racial thing with "the blacks..." etc etc.

lame

[wigglesworth]

Thats wicked good reading. Man's got many great points.

[hardstylin]

drugs=fun times
drugs=great memories
drugs=huge economy

I think they should legalize and regulate all of it, just becuase drugs become legal doesnt mean people are gona run out and do them so I doubt there would be huge increase in drug use that isnt already happening. And the war on drugs is over drugs WIN and always will, governments should stop wasting billions on stoping it, and join it and make billions.

[Senior]

Originally posted by ~*goddessa*~:
i disagree with him saying that high schoolkids dont get busted and charged... THEY DO WAKE UP ASSHOLE. It wasn`t surprising when he turned it into a racial thing with "the blacks..." etc etc.

lame

The war on drugs is a racial issue!

The prevalence of imprisonment in 2001 was higher for
-- black males (16.6%) and Hispanic males (7.7%) than for white males (2.6%)

Consider that, a black person is nearly 8 times more likely to serve time in prison.

-- Sixty-four percent of prison inmates belonged to racial or ethnic minorities in 2001

Dispite the fact they are minorities they are the majority of prison populations.

-- In 2000, an estimated 57% of Federal inmates and 21% of State inmates were serving a sentence for a drug offense

More than half of the people in federal prison are there for a DRUG related offense.

-- between 1990 to 2000, drug offenders accounted for 59% of the growth in Federal prisons.

The amount of drug related offenders in prison has been increasing.

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/crimoff.htm#prevalence

The war on drugs locks up black people as well as other minorities at alarmingly higher rates than other segments of the population yet all segments of the population use drugs.

Consider that,

-- In 2002, an estimated 19.5 million Americans, or 8.3 percent of the population aged 12 or older, were current illicit drug users. Current drug use means use of an illicit drug during the month prior to the survey interview.

Now the kicker,

-- Among persons aged 12 or older in 2002, the rate of substance dependence or abuse was highest among American Indians/Alaska Natives (14.1 percent). The next highest rate was among persons reporting two or more races (13.0 percent). Asians had the lowest rate of dependence or abuse (4.2 percent). The rate was similar among blacks and whites (9.5 and 9.3 percent, respectively). Among Hispanics, the rate was 10.4 percent.

Black and white people have a nearly identical rate of drug use but if you're a black drug user you are 8 times more likely to end up in jail as a result.

http://www.samhsa.gov/oas/oasftp.htm

[Chet]

Originally posted by Senior



The war on drugs locks up black people as well as other minorities at alarmingly higher rates than other segments of the population yet all segments of the population use drugs.

Consider that,

thats because you don't see the police busting down on white suburbia like they do in the projects
or the ethnic neighborhoods
if 2 black of hispanic teens are standing around there is a far greater chance that the police will question them then if 2 white teens were standing in there place

if police cracked down on places like the english properties I'm sure you would the numbers for coccasions on the rise

and typicaly (from what I have seen)police are more likely to let
coccasians off the hook with warnings