Hurkyl said:
You say this a lot, but what does it really mean? It's certainly nonobvious that this is a bad thing, nor that it's an indicator that the war on drugs is failing.
Generally the end result of trying to make a product more scarce through force is to drive up the price of that product, so that its not profitable. A decrease in price means that there is no trouble with supply, so it's ok to drop prices and allow demand to go up; and the purity increase shows that it's not artificially creating more product by diluting it.
And you make juxtapositions like this as if it meant something. Even if improving purity and decreasing price is shown to be a bad thing, you've made absolutely no effort to show that things would not have been worse had this seizure not taken place.
That's the point actually, you're going to have a lot of pissed off violent criminals; but this doesn't mean user supply will drop, because seizures are anticipated enough to have it make little impact, and the seizure rate is generally constant so it wouldn't really lead to more availability either.
It would be silly to expect 100% victory, but your criticisms of the war on drugs seem to be based primarily on the fact that 100% victory hasn't been accomplished. The war on drugs is successful if drug usage is less than if there was no war on drugs, which you admit is the case:
Less "drug use" is not the only measure of success. I believe I've stated that use would indeed go up, but addiction and ruined lives because of it would go down. The primary problem with drug use is the violence the illicit market creates, this is responsible for a majority of drug related deaths. The goal of a war on drugs should be to minimize the deaths related to drugs, and in that respect the wars punitive approach is a failure.
I base my ascertation of failure upon the following:
- No significant drops in use have been realized since the wars inception, despite massive funding increases.
- As previously mentioned, this is because supply has not been reduced despite increasingly strong efforts.
- Drug availability to minors has been increasing.
- The drug war has clearly failed to help otherwise law-abiding citizens with a problem, since prison destroys their lives even more.
- Even as use remains steady, the number of *non-violent*, *first-time* offenders incarcerated continues to increase, and their average sentence is higher than that of rapists and murderers.
Furthermore, you use selective sampling as if it's representative:
You are obviously trying to imply that this is your "typical" drug user.
However, you've given no reason to think that these people aren't simply the exceptional cases that are better able than to keep their habit from spilling over into other parts of their life... and that might not even be permament.
And you haven't even attempted to say that the druggies are as productive and successful as the others.
Actually, since overall drug use has been found, by government study, to have a constant rate across all socioeconomic brackets, this is pretty much true. And furthermore, recreational occaisonal use has even less of an impact, and these users make up such a substantial majority of all users, that they can be considered typical.
(a) It is already known that social use and addiction are not mutually exclusive, at least with alcohol.
(b) Since one can become addicted to some drugs from a single use, moderation won't prevent addiction.
(a) The decision to misuse alcohol, i.e. alone, in class, because of depression or wanting to escape, must inherently preceed addiction... going straight from social use to addiction without taking the step of misuse does not happen, and does not happen with any other substance.
(b) Psychologically yes, physically no. Given that, this does not speak to why alcohol is acceptable and drug users should be treated as criminals instead of a person with a health problem.
Furthermore, smoked nicotine is more physically addictive than any illicit drug (laboratory quantitive measurements, its legal status for humans just makes things worse), and more psychologically addicting than most. On top of that, smoked nicotine is the MOST DEADLY DRUG. You are more likely to die from addiction to smoking from causes directly related to it, then from causes directly related to addiction to any other drug. Why should this be ok and everything else should mean jail time? If you would outlaw nicotine to, do you think people addicted to the most addictive drug would simply stop when it was now available on the street? Would people selling it non-violently deserve more jail time than murderers and airplane hijackers? Would the drop in use justify the increase in violence and the people whose addiction was now unaffordable and virtually impossible to get effective help for?
My superordinate criticism is that using a punitive approach to drive down use rather than a treatment and effective preventive education (prevention programs today are largely NOT effective) is not the most ethical or effective way of reducing the burden on society and saving the most lives; the fact that such a punitive approach cannot succeed further is secondary.