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very long read, but very good. surprised it was in rs.
Admittedly, it's a long read, but a well-worth one in my opinion.
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/sto...on_drugs/print
very long read, but very good. surprised it was in rs.
I'm going to read it tonight when I have more time, but I'm guessing that if it's in Rolling Stone, then they've found a way to blame Bush for all of this.
Bush cant cause a hurricaine people!, hes not god
Actually, the article lays the blame on politicians on both sides of the aisle. Plus, there's a bit in there crediting G.W. Bush for planning to try a new approach during his campaign.
That's good. I'm definitely interested in reading it now. Not that I'm a Bush supporter (i'm not), but RS tends to portray him as being more evil than Satan which is annoying.
No win scenario.
Damn good read.
Funny thing, I play a lot of video games. Used to play a game called Civilization 2: Call to Power. A sociological advancement in that game, cant remember the name, was the de-criminalization of drugs, instead diverting all the $$$ spent on prosecution and imprisonment to treatment.
Just an aside with no basis in reality. Just found it funny.
Like military (elective) wars and prisons (rather than "rehab"), the war on drugs is a huge business.
As always, "Follow the Money" and it will lead you to the truth.
And what is the truth boutons? Show me the money!
Good read, very interesting material. As someone who's worked in and around drug abuse/dependency treatment-both inside the prison system and outside in the community, there is some very insightful information in the article concerning alternative methods of treatment.
I can tell you one thing from personal experience, locking up non-violent drug users doesn't do a damn bit of good. The only thing you learn in prison is how to be a better criminal, how to join a gang, etc. Rehabilitation it is not.
It's all Reagan's fault and all those stepford wife es who successfully tied "anti-drug" to "pro-christian"
Has anyone heard about that appeal going on involving two border patrol agents and a Mexican citizen drug runner?
The United States had given the Mexican Citizen Drug Runner total immunity to testify AGAINST the two border patrol guards because they shot the Drug Runner in the ass while he was trying to skip the border.
They gave him ing immunity to testify against American Citizens doing their job.
The war on drugs is a total joke.
Like Bill Hicks said.....
Jesus: murdered, Lennon: murdered, King: murdered........ Reagan:....................wounded. The Devil is obviously runnin .
All presidents, have used the war on drugs to blanket their ulterior motives for their foreign policy, just look at the Noriega affair during the early 80's....he had been a paid CIA informant while he was drug trafficing, but since he was a "good boy" helping us out with the Nicaragua , he was not villified, yet he crossed us a few times and all of a sudden he's this horrible Drug Lord who must be stopped for the sake of THE CHILDREN.
gmfab
Anyways heres that story, its an old trial but its coming back because of an appeal. The border guards got like ten years i think, each. Its insane.
http://www.statesman.com/blogs/conte...rder_agen.html
Judge: Case against border agents “got out of hand”
By Eunice Moscoso | Monday, December 3, 2007, 02:41 PM
Federal prosecutors may have overreacted in their case against two former Border Patrol agents serving lengthy prison terms for shooting a Mexican drug dealer and trying to cover it up, an appeals court judge said Monday, according to the Associated Press.
Judge E. Grady Jolly, one of three judges from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals hearing the case of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean, questioned whether the two agents would have been charged if they had reported the shooting, the story said.
“For some reason, this one got out of hand, it seems to me,” Jolly said of the agents’ prosecution.
Compean’s lawyer, Bob Baskett, said he was encouraged by the judges comments.
The case has become a cause celebre among conservatives and groups that advocate tougher border controls. Supporters say that the agents were wrongly convicted for protecting the United States against a criminal intruder.
Members of Congress have asked President Bush to pardon the agents or commute their sentences.
U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton of the Western District of Texas has staunchly defended the prosecution.
To read more, click here.
Last edited by LaMarcus Bryant; 12-03-2007 at 08:41 PM.
Great read.
This is the crux of huuman ecology, what I have been studying for the last two years but in relation to the environment (not drugs):
"The lesson of U.S. drug policy is that this world runs on unintended consequences. No matter how noble your intentions, there's a good chance that in solving one problem, you'll screw something else up."
The emergent properties of soft (human) systems - pull a lever, change a variable, and the system will change, probably in ways you can't initially predict. That is why monitoring is so important - monitor the change, re-cast your idea of what the system is and how it works, then pull another lever. We're great at this as it applies to hard (technological) systems, that's what engineers are doing all day long, and look what they've achieved! But when it comes to social engineering, we're horrible at it.
And WOAH!
"There was another problem with the Walters approach: Just as the federal government asserted the dangers of smoking pot, the states - first California, then three others - were permitting doctors to legally prescribe marijuana to relieve the chronic pain that came with cancer, polio and other debilitating long-term diseases. Attorney General John Ashcroft dispatched federal agents to begin raiding the suppliers and purchasers of medical marijuana in California - people who were operating completely within state law. The raids were even more surreal in their theatrics than the ones that had been launched by McCaffrey: In one particularly ludicrous incident, a forty-four-year-old post-polio sufferer named Suzanne Pfeil, who smoked prescription marijuana to relieve her pain, was hauled off to jail by DEA agents who pointed automatic rifles at her head and handcuffed her to her wheelchair. The rhetoric reached the level of crusade: Walters called citizens who plant and tend marijuana gardens "terrorists who wouldn't hesitate to help other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties."
That's where things all go wrong - trying to conflate completely separate issues for political advantage and in doing so shooting the wrong guy - appealing to fear, not reason.
Did any of you notice this in your day-to-day lives, like more reported violence on TV?:
"In October 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum released a report declaring that violent crime in the country was "accelerating at an alarming pace." Murders were up twenty-seven percent in Boston over the previous year, sixty percent in San Antonio..."
Last edited by RuffnReadyOzStyle; 12-04-2007 at 06:12 AM.
"High Point police began in the West End neighborhood, one of the city's three overt drug markets. A team of officers staked out the site, videotaping hundreds of hand-to-hand sales and mapping out a complete anthropology of the West End drug market. They found it was strikingly small: Sumner had expected as many as fifty dealers working there, but it turned out there were only sixteen. Before long, the officers had enough evidence to put away each of the sixteen dealers for good. But they didn't. Instead, Sumner and Kennedy called them in for a meeting. They showed each of them the portfolio of evidence against them and said that unless they stopped dealing drugs, the whole file would be handed over to the prosecutors and they'd be in jail for years. Family members were brought in to urge the dealers to stop, and social-service providers pledged assistance with food, housing and job training.
"We didn't think it would work," Sumner tells me, "but the drug markets have disappeared."
For five years before the program went into effect, the number of drug-related murders in High Point had stayed steady, around fifteen a year. In 2007, in the program's fourth year, it has plummeted to two. Violent crime in the West End has declined by thirty-five percent. "The use of drugs isn't something we could affect," says Kennedy. "But the violence was." His logic has an appealing clarity for overworked police departments: There are now more than sixty cities in the United States that use some version of Kennedy's program, edging away from thirty-five years of punitive measures that have turned the United States into the world's leading jailer to a social-work model that encourages communities and cops to engage the problem on a more human level. The real radicals of the War on Drugs are not the legalization advocates, earnestly preaching from the fringes, but the bureaucrats -the cops and judges and federal agents who are forced into a growing acceptance that rendering a popular commodity illegal, and punishing those who sell it and use it, has simply overwhelmed the capacity of government."
Now doesn't that just make so much sense.
This is an issue I have a lot of interest in, despite being extremely disinterested in mostly all other politics as a whole. The first major beef I have with anti-drug policy is the incessant need to categorize marijuana as the gateway drug. I have always felt that the real gateway drug is alcohol, and the sad thing for Americans is that alcohol is legal and can easily be obtained by minors. All you have to do is ask your legal-aged sibling or irresponsible parent to get it for you, then you call up your friends and go party.
The reason why I think alcohol is the real culprit for the gateway theory is this. Because it is cheap, easily obtained, and carries little social stigma if you are not an obsessive alcoholic and/or don't get any fines/tickets while you're intoxicated, most people see nothing wrong with alcohol. The party subculture is almost 100% rooted with alcohol, especially right now. You don't go to parties and see most of the people there crowded around a table chopping up lines of cocaine and passing the straw around. What you see are kegs, ice chests full of cans, shot bars, and people standing around with cups in their hands. It's no secret that alcohol makes you feel good. And because it is legal and socially accepted, people seek this good feeling on a weekly or even daily basis. The problem with the party culture is that you have people who do drugs mixed in with people who drink, and especially in college when you have a bunch of open-minded 20 year olds hanging out with each other, suddenly smoking pot isn't such a big deal because drinking makes you feel good. Couple that with the widespread knowledge that pot isn't all that bad for you, and smoking that first joint doesn't seem like a big deal anymore. Whether that leads to harder drugs is up to the user. I know several career stoners who are well aware of the effects of other drugs, admit that they would probably enjoy doing them, but refrain. I am the kind of person who is willing to try anything once as long as I know what it is. If some new thing comes out, I'll scour the internet. Most of the time I pass on new things, but I had friends that I've since cut ties with call me up all the time saying "this new exstacy is in town, you want to get some?" or "Hey, I know where to get some really good acid!"
But alcohol has its own built in defense mechanism. As you continue to drink, you eventually get smashed and pass out. A hangover ensues, and a bad hangover will usually keep you off the sauce for a while. Pot has no hangover effects, except maybe indigestion if you eat too much Taco Bell. Speeder drugs like coke have harsh comedowns, because they bring you up so fast, you normally spend an hour or two returning to normalcy. And the short lasting high causes you to chase the high. I used to be a coke addict, and eventually developed a mild paranoid psychosis. I started out doing it with friends, then I just migrated to doing it alone in my own home. At some point, I started freaking out while I was on it. Always looking over my shoulder, looking out the windows, having auditory hallucinations, delusions that SWAT teams were staking out my house waiting to bust me. The sad thing is, when I was on it, I knew that none of this was true but I couldn't shake the feelings. It scared me to death. Even more sad is that I knew this would happen when I was sober and had a line in front of me, but I did it anyway. Rehab and treatment really is the answer, because if I had sought that out instead of going on binges every weekend, I really would have quit sooner. It took me developing a side effect that rarely still persists to quit a habit I should have quit weeks sooner.
I can't sit here and tell people not to do drugs when it's common knowledge on this board that I have done drugs. The best advice is in the movie Knocked Up. "If it grows out of the ground, it's probably not bad for you, but stay away from pills and powders."
What about pills and powders made from stuff that grows out of the ground?
JT - completely agree.
Alcohol and nicotine kill and injure far more people than all other drugs combined - in Australia nicotine kills about 20,000 a year, alcohol 2,000, all other illicit drugs 1,000, most of them heroin overdoses. Death statistics are only one measure of damage, but they are a decent proxy.
Decriminalise possession and use, educate kids from a young age (12-13) to take away the "wonder" of drugs, and inform them about the real short and long term effects, and most of all stop putting people in jail for possession, a self-reinforcing practice which forces people towards criminal behaviour.
The war on drugs was lost when they didn't remember prohibition. People are going to do what they want. If you make it illegal and crack down, all you do is create a lucrative black market and the violent subculture that goes with it.
I'll drink to that
Great post J.T. I concur.
That's beside the point. Pills and powders may be derived from a plant precursor but that doesn't negate the refining process, like how cocaine is produced using kerosine. The end result is that you're getting a manufactured drug versus a natural one. The results are different, because you have people who do cocaine that develop addictions, paranoia, involve themselves in crime to get more of it, and then you have coca leaf farmers who chew the stuff their whole lives with next to none of the side effects I just listed for cocaine. People have smoked pot forever, with a death toll of zero. If the United States invested some money in producing a gum made from coca leaf, it would probably help out some addicts or people who want to kick their habit. But of course, the drug war has already scarred the American public forever, since most non-users immediately lump a user in the "criminal" category. To be honest, I found out my dad had done drugs off and on for years. He didn't have addictions or a bad habit, but he used some of them recreationally (respecting the true sense of the word "recreational"), and my dad has had a good job, loyal friends and led a pretty decent life. So there are some people out there who aren't your Valero-robbing crackheads... America just isn't willing to read between the lines.
I think there's some discussion to be had on how some of these drugs are available legally, with a prescription from your doctor, but that's a different discussion not exactly relevant to this article.
why do more people die from alcohol and nicotine than other drugs? guess.. MORE PEOPLE USE it..
the same reason more people die of car accidents than any other form of transportation.
So?
Decriminalisation (which does NOT equal legalisation) hasn't been shown to raise drug use rates, but it does prevent turning drug users into criminals and instead treats what should be a health issue as a health issue. As Ex said, people will do what they do, so educate and inform them, and offer treatment options if they get into trouble.
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