But, like the US Open, there will be a hierarchy fairly rapidly, and eliminations from competition.
Peter, over at Bayou Renaissance Man, refereed his own feelings on the most recent topic, and declared us both right, in his estimation. {And to be fair, I agree with Borepatch unreservedly on one thing: the current half-witted half-baked half-assed Mutually Beneficial Slapfight On (Some) Drugs With Collateral Damage [abbreviated MBSO(S)DWCD] is absolutely a cluster-fuck boondoggle of epic jackassery. Nota bene: That does not, ergo, mean surrender is the correct second choice.}
Then, there were comments there, some of which I'd be interested in discussing.
Or mocking, where appropriate.
And so we begin:
Except that the government (meaning you and me) is still paying for it. If you're going to execute a m*****f****r, execute him. Don't pay for his food and drugs until he does the job himself.
CDH said...
- Don't some Western European nations have 'drug ghettos' for lack of a better term where drugs are basically legal? It isn't much better than a death sentence, but hey, if you are going to go kill yourself slowly while shooting that crap into your veins or nose, may as well get it all in one nice convenient place!
If you want to make instant lethal injection a massive heroin OD instead of Valium, succinylcholine, and potassium, I'm OK with that.
Full marks for an excellent grasp of economic reality.
- The law of supply and demand doesn't care about the legality of the trade goods, currently the status of illegal drugs constitutes a federal price support.
I believe that until you are willing to execute all the consumers of drugs the demand will not go away. I'm not advocating this, just observing that the law of supply and demand doesn't care.
But I'm experimental: let's execute all the producers and suppliers of illegal narcotics, and then see what needs doing after that.
I'm fine with EMTs and paramedics stamping DNR on junkies where found, and then driving away, leaving them right there. That much should be a Libertarian laissez faire wet dream.
- The WOD is a failure to the nation and its people, but not necessarily to those who benefit from either the trade or the War on it. Follow the money.
Much more should be made of Aesop's call to remove all support for the (self-created) victims of addiction -- not just denial of medical insurance and supprt programs like methadone maintenance, but refusal to provide medical care. Probably EMT's but possibly even physicians may want to draw a line at the point where Do No Harm conflicts with Give Him What He Wants.
Also, let's play Historical Spot The Flaw:
Methadone was made to get people off of heroin, which was made to get people off of morphine, which was made to get people off of opium.
Bonus: guess how many of the above are opiates?
a) All of them
b) All of them
Angus would probably be tickled to know that more than a few paramedics with local agencies have expressed the exact same "Legalize heroin. Ban Narcan." thought, verbatim after delivering the lastest wastes of skin and oxygen to the E.R.
- When you make recreational drugs legal, make narcan illegal.
Things sort themselves out if you let them.
We're at the point where having the drugs being illegal is worse than letting them be legal.
That doesn't mean that legalizing them is going to make things good, but it will make things better.
Just like when prohibition ended.
Prohibition didn't cure the ills caused by booze and created many more problems. Ending prohibition didn't end all of the problems, but it mitigated much of them.
Things ended up worse than before, and the lesson should have been to not ban things people take to get euphoric.
But we don't like that answer, so we keep trying to force people to be moral.
But that only covers opiates. It does nothing about methamphetamine, cocaine, and 37 other drugs. My story at Borepatch's OP was a young lady totally methed out. Banning Narcan would still leave me (and society) dealing with her times 500,000. Unless I can push intubation drugs, and then not intubate, the problem is still here.
The solution is to not bring them to the hospital, ever.
The problem with that is it's a Final Solution, and that phrase has a certain track record regarding audience approval.
Also, legalization isn't going to be better.
Making Corleone Italian-American Importing or Medellin Narco-Cartel Inc. a Fortune 500 company isn't going to stop them whacking the competition, and the profits, now pure as snow, will be untouchable.
We know what that looks like in practice: Mexico.
"Forcing people to be moral" has a name too: laws.
They've worked since Hammurabi.
They've also failed since Hammurabi. Because people are people.
Doing without them has never worked, not even once.
Lad, this is going to hurt you more than it will me.
- If you're talking about narco-cartels "not paying taxes" or profiting more, you're missing most of the point of legalization. Cartels will not be able to compete with legal businesses unless the tax rates are absurdly high. This is a huge reason for me to support legalization, I'd much rather a mostly legal corporation profit (with the lower margins that real competition brings) than a full-on criminal.
Leave the penalties for illegal import, illegal sale. Make it legal to use or posses in private, in a willing business but a felony on a playground or similar--use will move. We don't really have a big problem with opioid overdoses in general, we have a small OD problem attached to a big fentanyl OD problem. Instead of using fentanyl as an excuse to ban normal opioids, make it a felony to adulterate with fentanyl. Where junkies can get known dosages of known drugs, OD rates will be lower. Legal for adults, felony to sell to children--when I was in junior high, I knew where to get pot or speed, but alcohol was much more difficult. Junkies may rob...but they won't need nearly as much. Let police focus on crimes against decent people instead of dealing with the aftermath of drug dealer disputes.
I don't take illegal drugs, nor would I if they were legal. But I believe that decent people like me are harmed by indirect effects of drug laws more than we would by their elimination.
I'll say this as tenderly and gently as I can: you're a total idiot.
Cartels will give drugs away to get market share, and drive legal competition out of business.
Then they'll tell the board of directors at Big Pharma Inc. they think it would be a shame if their factory accidentally burned down next week.
Then their CEO would find a horse's severed head in his bed.
Then their employees' heads would keep appearing in duffel bags in front of the main gate every Monday, without their bodies attached.
Then the Mob and the cartels would own Merck, Bayer, Glaxo-Smith, etc., after buying them for $1 apiece.
Big Pharma has their hooks into your congress now; how d'ya figure the country will do with President Corleone then?
Sweet Suffering Shiva, this was TV and movie plotlines in the 1970s. FFS, try and keep up.
"Leave the penalties for illegal import, illegal sale".
Okay.
So you want the current Mutually Beneficial Slapfight On (Some) Drugs With Collateral Damage to stay in place, and you want to legalize everything here, and enforce no laws?
Except you want the government to prosecute people for f**king with junkies' heroin?
Call it the Junkie Protection Act of 2019?
Dude, we should be mandating that dealers put carfentanil into every heroin dose. It wipes out the cities' entire heroin addict populations overnight.
That's a feature, not a bug.
Problem solved. Next question.
And you think that ensuring a clean heroin high for everyone who wants it is going to magically be better for you and the country than things are now??
And "Let police focus on crimes against decent people instead of dealing with the aftermath of drug dealer disputes."
Srsly???
I was doing CPR On Norm Normie, who was capped with one 10-ring AK bullet to the chest, because two drug @$$holes got into a tiff, and with typical drughead marksmanship capped Norm 100 yds away, whilst he was carrying his elderly mother's groceries home, right next to his wife. He was DRT, deader than canned tuna, and that was twenty effing years ago. You think if you make drugs legal tomorrow, the drug culture is suddenly going to become intelligent, thoughtful, law-abiding, tax-paying Rotarians and Elks???
My main ridicule of your position was simply putting what you said out there to see, for the embarrassment factor. But you win the prize: Say hello to my little friend.
That.
- @McThag: I wouldn't make Narcan illegal. It's used to treat good people who accidentally come into contact with fentanyl and other illegal substances - cops, EMS workers, etc. They're going to need it, whether or not we make illicit drugs legal.
One might argue that Narcan should be reserved for the "good guys", but denied to the "bad guys". Trouble is, how can one tell? It's not always obvious whether or not someone affected by fentanyl touched it accidentally or took it on purpose. Any delay in making that call might be fatal.
But it isn't that hard to tell them apart. Anyone who enters the premises in uniform, on duty, gets the Narcan. No one else does. After one, maybe two cases of innocent bystander deaths, and they'll be dropping a dime on the drug cookers at the speed of light.
Jerry, what you've called a Drug treatment Center?
- Create Drug Treatment Centers where drug users can use their drug of choice. The drugs would be free to the users. The treatment centers provides meals and a place to sleep. If you want to get out you have to be clean for 30 days. If you decide to use drugs until you die it's your choice.
The drugs would come from dealer stocks when they're arrested.
Doing this will reduce crime. Users no longer have to commit various crimes to get money to buy drugs. Dealers will soon have to find more profitable for ventures.
The drug treatment centers will also be a draw for do-gooders intent on saving these poor people from their destructive impulses. They will leave us alone.
On the downside people will die in the treatment centers but I believe the net death toll will be less than what we're doing now.
A place you can't leave?
We call those prisons.
But you've helpfully added providing narcotics to their daily menu. This will be a big hit with the 50-80% of criminals who use drugs, but for the guy paying for it, not so much. And the guards will quit en masse before they'll cater drugs to their charges, because they don't wanna deal with junkies freaking out there any more than I do in the ER.
And the only way you're going to get dealers stocks when they're arrested is to continue the current MBWO(S)DWCD.
So quit pussyfooting, cut to the chase, shoot the druggies in the head, and turn them into worm food out back. For two cents, I'd throw the do-gooders into the same pile. But that's only after decades of first-hand experience with both populations.
If you're not willing to go there, you're not really helping.
JWM, your are evidently complete unacquainted with the fact that the current weed is about 200 times more potent than the weak scraggly Mexican sh*t that was around in the 1970s. We see two-three people a night in every ER in CA for being f**ked up on marijuana. It's epidemic, but no one talks about it in public. It includes little kids and grannies that didn't know Junior Pothead's "brownie" or Gummy Bears were 100% potency sh*t, that messes them up for hours, at a cost of thousands of dollars and an ER bed unavailable for anything else. And this is true only since and because of legalization. Color me shocked, Califrutopia doesn't want to hear about this, because "it's just pot".
- @Sevesteen:
First, it is wise to separate the marijuana market from the hard drug trade. Like it, or not smoking weed has become part of our culture. Kids are going to sneak a joint just like a beer. Better they don't have to get it through a black market where the hard stuff is sold.
But "legalization" in CA has been disastrous.
Under the old 215 laws pot was available, inexpensive, and the requirement for a "Dr.'s Rec" kept the riff-raff out of the dispensaries.
Under 64, the State taxes on weed are so egregious that everyone is going back to the black market, or gray market. The same ounce of weed that costs ~$180 on the gray market will cost about $500 in a State "Legal Cannabis" shop. To boot, now CA continues to ignore the federal weed laws, yet calls in the National Guard to raid unlicensed pot farms. The State of California has become the new cartel.
JWM
Your other observations regarding the new idiocy of TPTB in California stand.
Um, fuck them, sideways, with a rusty chainsaw.
- Mine view is that I lost. There is no Constitutional authority delegated to the FedGov to prohibit drug use.
Jaime,
Ignorance of the law is no excuse. You're apparently totally unaware of the Opium Tariff Statutes of 1832, the Pure Food and Drug Act, Import and Export Regulations, the Harrison Act, the Narcotic Drug Import and Export Act (all of these passed before 1922), followed by the Porter Act of 1929, the Federal Bureau Of Narcotics, The Informers Act of 1930, the Marihuana Tax Act, the Vehicle Seizure Act of 1939, the Opium Poppy Control Act, the Drug Legislation of 1946, the Increased Penalties of 1951 and 1956, the Narcotics Manufacturing Act, and the Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act.
And that only covers federal laws before 1970.
[It should be noted that the largely laissez faire approach of the 19th century, so enamored by pseudo-historians online as "how it oughta be forever" got the U.S. between 500,000 and 1M drug addicts by the turn of the century, when the US population was only 76M. So between 1/2 and 1% of the country was hooked on drugs, before doing drugs was cool.
That, now, would be more addicts than we have troops in the US military, 1.75-3M druggies.
It may be more or less than that, and frankly I don't care, it's too goddamned many.
And that's not counting the criminals involved in supply and distribution, nor any sort of accounting for the crimes committed by today's addicts.]
Which is when things really got going, with the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
Sorry to wake you from your stupor, and please, return your H.S. diploma immediately, and request a full refund for the substandard civics education you received.
Then use the internet for something worthwhile, and educate yourself properly.
There was Constitutional authority for all of this, since a century and more before you were born, upheld by eleventy different federal courts, including SCOTUS.
Welcome to Reality. Take off your coat and stay awhile.
So the truth is, we've tried everything people decry before, over and again, and it hasn't worked. Nor, in most cases, was it ever intended to work, for any reasonable value of that word.
The bureaucracy is a self-greasing axle.
Blow up the car, and all the riders, once and for all.
Over a century ago, if you only robbed or stole from someone it meant prison.
If you stole their cattle or horse (life-threatening offenses), killed them, tried to kill them, maimed them, or raped them, we just hanged you.
Put drug sales and distribution into category B, re-instate the former jurisprudence, and be done with it.
Post-death penalty recidivism stands, perpetually, at 0%.
Game over.
As I said in previous Comments:
Are there some things that are so bad for society they cannot be permitted? Y or N.
If Y, cost isn't a consideration, except prudential economy with the public purse, to get the mostest result for the leastest bucks.
I'll even throw a bone to the large and small "L" libertarians:
IDGAF what you do, in your home, privately, as long as you're the sole victim of your predilections.
(The inescapable fact that there are no such things as private addicts in 99.9999% of cases is not my problem.)
But the minute it affects spouse, children, neighbors, or anyone else, or enters the public street in any way, your ass is grass.
And sooner or later, either the state recognizes this, or the neighbors will dig in and do the job themselves, and the Three S's will kick in with a vengeance.
You could look it up.
Coincidental sidenote:
Check out Daily Timewaster's Catch Of The Day.
Part I
Part II
Part IV
Part V
