Drug Legalization is a disaster: this is my shocked face.
"The Triads are not just in the illegal marijuana business, they traffic in everything from heroin to fentanyl. Legalizing marijuana however provided them with a profitable and semi-legal market that gives them a base to expand their efforts trafficking in even more lethal drugs.
Drug legalization has failed on every level. The legal drug business is collapsing. MedMen, which once promised to be the Apple of weed, fell from a $3 billion valuation to a bankruptcy with $411 million in liabilities. Despite the green crosses and online apps, 80% of Californian’s pot is still the old-fashioned illegal kind. Politicians may be boasting about hundreds of millions in revenue, but the cartels are making tens of billions and they’re taking over entire forests.
The future isn’t pot shops, weed apps or MedMen: it’s Mexican and Chinese organized crime compounds that are spreading across the West and parts of New England like a plague.
Legalization advocates still argue that if the government lowered the high taxes on legal pot, the business model could turn around again, but even without a single penny in taxes, no amount of legal labor is going to be able to compete with illegal aliens smuggled across the border and forced to work for free by gunmen. Legal businesses can’t compete with organized crime.
Drug legalization increased homelessness and drug abuse. It boosted illegal migration and organized crime. It made life worse in every state and city where it’s been tried without delivering tangible benefits to anyone (including weed users who still get theirs the old-fashioned way) except for a few politicians who temporarily have a few million more to pass around to special interests, donors and lobbyists.
And all they had to do was hand over half the country to organized crime."
Gee, almost like The Enemy Gets A Vote, and drug cartels were happy to drop their prices to $0 if necessary to put legal pot shops out of business, then take over the whole industry, and use the revenue once they cornered the market to expand their drug business to every other illegal drug in existence.
In other news, the sun rises in the east every morning, and water is wet.
Only the potheads and f**king retards didn't know this beforehand, yet here we are.
RTWT .
43 comments:
Yeah, you’re right.no one used it before it was legal and the cartels barely made a living.
Once upon a time I was part of the legalize weed camp. Then I turned into legalize everything and outlaw narcan. Now I'm part of the handle drug trafficking like some far East countries.
Trafficking? Death.
Distribution? Death.
Manufacturing? Death.
Possession? Jail, a fine, and public caning.
Burglary/theft related to your addiction? Home owner's insurance sends the bill to your family for the cleanup service scrubbing your brains off their wall.
That's after the roving sniper teams, A10 patrols, random air strikes, and Marine death squads.
To me it is very simple. Almost all of TPTB spend all of their lives sniffing unicorn farts while living in echo chambers of their own construction. Until they are de-constructed and the farts are blown away nothing will change. I am ignorant, if nothing else, but to my mind it has been the same for maybe 10,000 years. Yesterday I was asked what are the characteristics of the political class and I could not think of a positive attribute.
In my mind only change needed is to never support in any way anyone who is a user of drugs. Let them exist or not in their own world. Sooner of later the gene pool of the susceptible will diminish to a low enough level that will be tolerated.
I'm beginning to suspect all advocates of pot legalization to be secretly drug addicts themselves. Only addiction could explain the unreasoning fanaticism with which they defend the policy, despite all evidence to the contrary.
It's good business, and the government isn't nearly as good at it as the cartels. They are trying to catch up, but pesky laws keep getting in their way.
@CT Ginger,
Yours is a rare intellect, which can, in but eighteen small words, manage to combine both the reductio ad absurdum and Straw Man fallacies, misstate the original argument, make an argument from ignorance of what was actually stated, and then mount a defense against that which no one ever said!
I mean, man! When you screw the pooch, you do it so hard the poor thing will never walk a straight line again in its life.
Usually one would have to go to the BLM or Democrat Underground websites to find that amount of concentrated stupidity condensed into such a compact form, then cheerfully and consciously defecated in public. And they have to work at it, whereas you made it seem nearly effortless.
Walk tall.
The problem I see is that our current society does everything in it's power to prevent chlorine from being added to the gene pool. Part of the population needs to stop feeding, sheltering, and protecting them. Let them fucking starve or freeze to death. They get shot during a burglary or robbery? Give the shooter a Chick-fil-A gift card instead of punishing them with the legal system.
Aesop,
Legalization of drugs would work, if the government would subsidize the cost of the drugs so that whatever poison you would choose could be found in the ubiquitous vending machines offering a generous amount of any drug for, say 25cents. This would solve two problems. First, it would remove the profit motive from drugs, and hence, the cashflow of the cartels. Second, it would, eventually remove the user from the gene pool. Eventually, the universe of drug users would be whittled to a manageable level, and maybe the thousands of object lessons that OD would have some effect on the survivors. Tough love.
Property crime would decrease. Hundreds of thousands would die sooner than the current OD rate suggests. If you violently disagree with my premise, give us an example of a method that would work...and be prepared to defend your thesis.
Aesop - You, sir, just exhibited a truly master class in your response. Bravo!
The drug that has caused the most grief on our society is alcohol. The effect on families, health, and traffic fatalities is ridiculous.
Take all your comments and add your favorite drink to that and see if you still feel the same.
I drink and occasionally partake of weed. Worry about your own life and how you raise your children.
How we have fallen. Hemp and Marijuana are the same species of plant. Only difference is certain varieties have a higher THC count. Hemp was a critical plant resource in colonial periods next to corn, and indigo. Part of national defense too. Now we stoke it to be stupid and have criminal cartels doing it. Our enemies are laughing at us.
"Yeah, you’re right.no one used it before it was legal and the cartels barely made a living." -- CT Ginger
Look up hemp. Same damn plant. But the plant was too valuable to smoke rather than make into rope. British required colonial America grow the stuff or else.
Yep....the only thing worse than legalizing drugs is The War On Freedom that has been masquerading as The War On Drugs for the past half century. Under the guise of "protecting" us from those evil drugs the left AND right has succeeded in gutting the Bill Of Rights and destroying our freedoms. Nice trade off eh?
Aesop - Even I, acknowledged Pollyanna and naive fool, could have seen this coming. There was no way the illegal market was going to give way to the legal market, not only on principle but on the fact that they could drastically cut their prices short term to secure the market long term. And the idea it was sold on - that somehow the profits generated from taxes would solve a state's economic woes - almost never works, especially when it is immediately spent without waiting to see if the idea actually pans out.
@Elysianfield,
So you'd like to see any grade-schooler with a quarter hooked on heroin? Genius.
@Wingless,
Right, mind your own business.
So, when ODs in the ER go from one a month to 5-10/night, forever, like they've become in the last decade, who's business is that?
What about when raising your kid includes them taking cover from flying bullets due to cartel drive-by disputes? Bulletproof vests for toddlers? Or just foot-thick compound walls around all houses, forever, which works so well in Mexico?
Minding your own business ≠ sticking your head up your ass and watching civilization burn down.
I'd suggest a re-think, but you clearly haven't even thought this through the first time, yet.
Maybe do that first, then take another whack at this, but this time with some actual cogitation behind it.
Aesop, I am also a male nurse for almost 40 years.
None of those ODs you speak of are from weed.
Again, if we should outlaw one should we not outlaw all?
You know all too well what alcohol does to society.
Aesop,
Who would "hook" them when there is no profit motive? Peer pressure? The billions of dollars saved in not having to incarcerate users could be better employed to prevent use, make it foolish, uncool, like smoking... perhaps even offer treatment. Rat poison is sold in every hardware store, yet grade schoolers rarely partake. Rat poison equates to drugs...some will partake of either and die, just as they do now, but without the pusher, and without the profit motive driving the trade. You are going to have to be more than dismissive in your argument, when/if you present one.
You bitch about the cartels, and I present the ONLY solution other than suspension of rights and martial law, and you do not bother to give us an alternative? I expected better of you.
one thing I've never understood..these "legal" pot shops make a lot of money, right?
why hasn't the DEA raided any of them? it's an asset forfeiture DREAM. every single thing the owner of the pot shop has is now DEA property. sure, you don't get local assistance, but you don't have to share the loot with the locals either.
it's easy money, sitting on the table, and they don't grab for it?
@Wingless,
Prohibition was tried and failed spectacularly to ban something hitherto legal for 6000 years.
And those ODs got their junk from the same cartels that have completely taken over the pot market in the states that have legalized possession.
This is what happens when you comment without reading any of the linked article.
@Elysianfield,
Once they're hooked, they're hooked for life. So what you're asking boils down to "Who would ever want to make money of creating a booming junkie market?"
Did you really mean to ask that question, or are you actually that naïve?
Secondly, if your wholly erroneous suggestion is that heroin kills people as quickly as rat poison, show your work. I suspect you've just bought yourself a huge Apples to Oranges Fallacy Award, and matching clown shoes. I expected better of you.
What you've actually, and probably unintentionally, done, is to show cause that all seized narcotics should be distributed free via controlled opposition after contaminating them with lethal dosage of rat poison.
That unfortunately runs afoul of the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th Amendments, but other than that paltry miscarriage of justice, it's not a bad plan.
So who is it that's actually advocating for suspension of rights and martial law again?
The whole point of legalization of pot was to save the billions incarcerating users.
Unfortunately, it's been more than offset by the tens of billions spent to treat overdoses of harder drugs, which have skyrocketed, as well as incarcerating those bringing in and distributing illegal weed, which laws never went away, which was the entire point of the linked article.
Legalization has thus turned not only into an own-goal, it's also one where afterwards, the goalie also takes a hand sledgehammer and pounds his nuts laid out of the pavement until they're flat, and then moves to new parts of his body.
Which presumably was not the point of legalization originally.
And people still pimp for the farcical idea, with their heads well up their fourth point of contact.
@Allen,
1) They're going bankrupt in droves, because the cartels and illegal pot shops got a vote in this scheme.
2) The feds have largely gone laissez-faire on the topic, prefering not to piss off the states on something so relatively minor. They might even get asset forfeiture outlawed all the way to SCOTUS, and give enough states another reason to simply give them the finger. Every commander knows you don't issue an order you know won't be obeyed, just as an government possessed of even retard-levels of intelligence knows you don't pass laws you can't enforce and know will be flouted. Authority is like soap: the more you have to use, the less you have.
3) You foolishly assume the point of the DEA is or was ever to end drug sales, trafficking, and use, rather than prolong that battle in perpetuity to ensure their continued organizational existence, which latter is the Prime Directive of all organizations, and doubly so for governmental agencies. Has the State Department made us more respected and beloved worldwide? Has the Defense Department made us safer? Has the Treasury Department made us wealthier? Has the Education Department made kids smarter? Has the Department of Health made us healthier? You are thus guilty of applying common sense as a standard of behavior, and wondering why government doesn't use any. Srsly??
Are you kidding me?
Aesop,
Thank you for your reply. The short answer is that they are already being hooked for life. You can buy anything you want in a schoolyard, so are you objecting to the cost?
Kids, and anybody else, even those in lockdown in prison can get anything they want, so some will be hooked for life, and some will avoid the trap. Break the issue down into two parts...The Cartels, and their threat to the country, and the social cost of destroying them. The cartels exist ONLY due to huge profits available, and, yes, they do target children as users. The only solution to the cartels is to remove entirely their profit potential. I am not suggesting that the government sell captured drugs, I am suggesting that government labs will manufacture the drugs, in all forms, and subsidize the cost so that it is so cheap that a quarter will buy anything you want...high purity, moderate dose, readily available. The cartels will never be able to sell narcotics in this country, it would not pay for the gas to deliver them across the border...they will branch out to other crimes or leave. Can we agree that this is the solution to the Cartels in our country?
Next we will discuss the social costs of such a program. To begin with, we have a large segment of our population that uses drugs...it will become larger. We have thousands of deaths due to overdoses, weakened immunity, and criminal acts surrounding using the drugs...there will be many, many more...hundreds of thousands more...it is a matter of degree. Are there any positives to the social issue? Huge reduction in property crime, fewer gang issues, a lessening of the prison population, better use of law enforcement. Women will not have to resort to prostitution to maintain a habit, guys will not have to suck your dick for some crack, and the ubiquitous deaths from the OD will stand as object lessons to anyone with eyes.
The billions of dollars saved in incarceration costs and law enforcement would then be used in educational programs to show that drug use will eventually kill you. Again, I offer a solution to an intractable problem that has yet to find a solution. If you don't like it, give me another possible remedy, or at least an argument. Thank you.
To continue;
The drugs would be sold through vending machines similar to the ones selling lottery tickets. A user can submit a nickname to the machine and receive a smart card that would allow the holder to purchase a hit of the narcotic of choice once every three hours. The user would agree to observe a one minute video of the effects of the particular drug of choice, video of physical damage, etc...just like the old driving ED video in the 50's. The user would also be given to understand that, as a matter of law, no person who is overdosed will be resuscitated...an automatic DNR...So Solly, but your choices are your own.
It is my estimation that it would take less than a generation to bring the narcotics problem under control.
Thank you for the forum.
1) The cartels have already been selling drugs in this country for decades, a fact which the linked article took pains to point out. That's a Reality Fail, ten yard penalty and loss of down.
2) The solution to cartels in our country is terminating them with extreme prejudice, whenever and wherever found, death penalty for first offence, and putting up a 20' wall from the Gulf of Mexico to San Ysidro.
3) We have saved $0 in incarceration costs, they've gone up, because illegal importers outnumber legal taxpaying venues 200:1, and addiction rates and sequalae are at an all-time high going back decades. "Savings" are a bong-hit fueled dream, and always were. Yet again, something the linked article pointed out, underlined, highlighted, and rubbed the readers' noses in.
4) Kindly detail the numbers of 8-year-old heroin junkies now, and show how putting smack in 25¢ vending machines will lower that number.
Show all work.
5) Explain how getting as many kids as possible hooked for life at the youngest age possible will limit their choices for drugs to only vending machine hits, rather than induce in them the overwhelming urge to lie, cheat, steal, rob, and kill to get bigger fixes more frequently, from anyone who can provide it, as has been observed with all opiate addiction in all human beings since the Middle Ages.
6) We could cut to the chase, and ban Narcan for recreational overdoses, and solve the drug problem in about a week, not a generation.
Once all the current batch of junkies are dead, death penalty for drugs: possession/use/trafficking, as in many other countries, with execution following conviction in days, not years.
Carpet bomb and napalm the opium and coca fields for sport, and offer a $50 bounty for every drug vehicle sunk or shot down attempting entry to the US, including to military pilots and deck gunners.
Flying smugglers caught attempting entry to Gitmo upon arrest, followed by military tribunal and judicial hanging within 24 hours would be a conga line that would pay yuuuuuuuge dividends.
We'd end that problem before 4th of July, and it wouldn't come back in your lifetime or mine.
Users, if you're feeling soft, get one - ONE - chance at rehab. Fail out? Relapse?
Second offense: death penalty.
Too bad, so sad, B'bye.
It's time to thin the herd.
Aesop,
Yes, the iron fist will take care of the Cartels...'cept in Mexico, with their army in the streets. How many elementary school kids strung out? Well, in a former life I was a patrolman on the Oakland Police Department, or, as nobody would call it, Mayberry. Mostly pot and pills found in the teens and younger, but it was there, and in abundance. Many kids? Maybe, until their parents and peers recognize the danger...lower the numbers? I would give it a few years. You have access to money and can find drugs in the heaven you call the LA basin...why are you not strung out, you and a million like you? Life's lessons learned. So, with no alternative, we have kids currently OD'ing in their thousands, and the Cartels growing stronger every day...and in a venue near you.
Sorry but The cartels are well armed and violent beyond whatever methods the Mafia used after prohibition. We cannot control Baltimore, let alone a well dispersed and disciplined cartel family(suspension of civil rights, all guns confiscated, curfews, etc). My method would work to destroy the cartels, and, and maybe good parenting will save many at risk.
Whatever freedoms we have left would be lost in the warfare that attempting by force to eradicate the Cartels in this country would involve...or, we could just send them home broke.
Rehab? Sure, with open arms, as many times as you can require. After all...
We are not animals.
We're not animals; they are. You don't reason with a rabid dog, and you don't live and let live.
We haven't ever fought a war on drugs.
We've had a slap fight on (some) drugs, with collateral damage.
Cartels respond to Lemay's Iron Law: "When you kill enough of them, they stop fighting."
Any other approach is hopeium, based on flying unicorns pooping Skittles.
We've tried legalization: it's been a predictable total failure.
Let's try killing all they send for 10 years, and weigh which route delivers better outcomes.
1)I keep seeing owners of legal pot shops buying large amounts of real estate, paying cash. so if they're going bankrupt, they aren't showing it.
2)ok, "don't piss off the locals" could be the reason. but eventually the cash available outweighs the opinion of a local guy with a badge.
3)I never "foolishly" assumed that. I assume the goal of every government agency is self-perpetuation. if they get rid of the problem they were created to solve, then they get retired, and other agencies are not interested in hiring retreads.
I'm applying simple asset forfeiture principles...you go after the biggest fish, because the biggest fish has the biggest payday. I add 1 (lots of money) to 1 (an agency with every incentive and legal precedent to take that money) and I'm coming up with 2 (a raid, and asset forfeiture)
but it doesn't happen. when the obvious thing doesn't happen, why is the correct question.
Here is another account of the destruction.
https://www.danielgreenfield.org/2024/06/california-legalized-drugs-cartels-took.html#more
Aesop,
Thanks again for the opportunity to comment. But one final aside. Legalization, like here in Oregon, was a half assed attempt, there was no subsidization of the cost, and no free, anonymous access. The cartels were given the role of supply, the money still went to Mexico...,
Regarding the social costs, dead kids, fucked up lives? This is still happening, and kids are dying, and lives are being destroyed. More damage would occur before the culture turned. This is an intractable problem without any other options for success. No. Other. Option. Has. Worked.
And there would be costs...maybe heavy, but did you expect a simple, easy decision? A massive change in the culture without blood? The omelet requires eggs.
Just think about it...and again, thanks for the opportunity.
Aren't the illegal pot dealers buying up or otherwise keeping the legal pot licenses off the market, too? So, that keeps people from even starting a legal pot business. Top. Men.
Logistically, even without illegal labor, it's simpler to run an illegal business. No safety or product standards, no labor law compliance, etc.
Legal pot is a scourge in every single way.
@Allen,
You're still not getting it.
1) The current owners are becoming essentially cartel proxies, to stifle competition. The Enemy Gets A Vote.
2) It isn't the locals with a badge that UncleDotGov is ducking; D.C. couldn't give two shits for the opinions of the rubes in Mayberry or Hooterville. It's the governors and state legislatures. They can't afford this fight, and they can't win it.
3) Name the last three government entities that have been sunsetted. I'll wait over here. Anything else is wishcasting, not reality, even if you're coming up with your wishes by using common sense.
4) The lemon still isn't worth the squeeze. Whatever they'd get, they'd lose tenfold in ire, hate, discontent, and legal wrangles, which under the current SCOTUS could be scuttled completely. That's the kind of "winning" the Titanic did by daring that iceberg to get out of its way. Uncle Govt. is delusionally crazy, but not stupid when it comes to seeing where their bread is buttered.
That is the "why".
@elysianfield,
1) All legalization has always been half-witted, half-hearted, and half-assed.
It was never anything but an attempt to curry favor with the few potheads who can remember to stumble to the ballot box on election days; nothing more nor less.
The only thing that was meant to "work", for any value of the word, was legalizing weed.
They never cared about consequences, intended nor unintended.
2) Kids always get hurt. Full legalization would devastate them. And adults. And society. The quickest way to end a war is total capitulation, but it's never worth more than fighting it tooth and nail.
Asking for "easy" is a False Dichotomy.
The easy choice is generally the stupid and most self-destructive one. As this attempt has proven, in spades, and exactly as millions of people against it told TPTB it would be.
3) I have thought about it.
Set up the guillotines, and let's try total war for 10 years.
Just for the novelty of the approach.
Japan and Nazi Germany only lasted 4 years.
Committees Of Vigilance cleaned up California in 6 months.
I'm pretty sure we can blow these m*****f*****s out of existence before you know it, and by Year Ten, no one will miss the people we rid from society.
And just like dropping atomic bombs, even the dumbasses around afterwards will realize testing our resolve is a poor choice.
I note for the record that the recidivism rate for drug dealing in both Singapore and Saudi Arabia stands at 0%, for half a century. Ours is running somewhere around 98%.
From where I sit, that's choice is obvious.
Aesop,
Your arguments have merit, but what I am suggesting has a harder edge than anything tried before. Can we at least agree that removing the profit motive from drugs as I suggest would remove the gangs and cartels from the equation?
Thanks again.
A) You didn't remove the profit. The only way to do that would be to literally give it away, by the metric buttload, to anyone, 24/7/365. Any attempt to restrict it whatsoever is the entry for cartels to supply that need. You're building your entire castle on sand.
B) You'll never be the sole supplier, so you can't control supply.
C) You'll expand demand off the charts.
D) Government would have to devote enough resources to producing the drugs to overwhelm the cartels. It would become the largest government agency in weeks. This is like screwing for chastity, or ending kiddie porn by pimping every kid in foster care.
E) The unintended social consequences of B and C will devastate any illusory aims of the original quest in A. You'd literally burn society down to save it, and do tenfold or a hundredfold damage compared to just ending the market by ending the marketeers on either side of the transaction.
Goose, "A job is the best social program ever invented."
Drug tests, performance/attendance required, no spare money or time to waste on drugs.
I'm not disagreeing, but we'd have to completely end the welfare state, and restore the laws about vagrancy.
NTTAWWT
"The only way to do that would be to literally give it away, by the metric buttload, to anyone, 24/7/365."
Soooo, selling a hit of anything for 25 cents in vending machines somehow not enough?
Not all...
Some of us were misguided libertarians who thought "you should have the right to fuck up your own life as you see fit."
@elysianfield,
Your idea was "once every 3 hours".
Even that little restriction would open the gateway to everyone who wanted more every two hours. Or every hour. Or every five minutes.
Which runs facefirst into the brick wall of human nature and druggie behavior.
If you had an oil tank farm-sized container of any given drug, a non-zero number of addicts would lie on the ground for the entire circumference of such a tank, with a spigot draining into their mouths, 24/7/365, until they had fatal heart attacks. And then the do-gooders would demand that we do CPR on them.
That's why any distribution system that isn't infinite is a fail, and always will be.
And then, it lets in all the other pathologies of theft, robbery, or any other means to get money to buy more than you would give away, from the exact same cartels you thought you'd evaded.
And then the cartels break the machines (and steals all your product).
So now you've got to provide more security to your dope vending machines than we do for banks, on the taxpayer's nickel, forever. Then prosecute and incarcerate the thieves and vandals. Which is the same Cornucopia Of Fail that Legal Pot Shops were supposed to get rid of. Until they became zoning-limited. And robbery magnets. And more expensive than illegal weed.
I'm still waiting for the imaginary "savings" to kick in under your plan, when addiction goes through the roof, and descends the age tree to every kid tall enough to reach the coin slot, while requiring a delivery logistical tail that would rival FedEx, all by itself, just to keep the machines fully stocked 24/7/365 forever, plus the employees to work that, all the accidents they'd get in (all of this on the taxpayer's back too, btw), the fleet of trucks, gas for the trucks, maintenance on the trucks, guys to do the maintenance, insurance, pensions, worker's comp., ad infinitum. They'd be bigger than the entire military and Medicare, combined, by a week from Wednesday, and in reality, would work at an efficiency somewhere between the DMV and Obamacare.
All to force all of society to cater to something that should be intrinsically illegal, malum in se, and punished at draconian levels.
Let me know when the penny drops.
The price tag for your plan is the National Debt, forever.
Even if they all eventually died.
The price tag for mine gets us to the same outcome for 50¢-$1 worth of ammunition, one time, until the problem was manageable again. That'd be a few months, tops.
If it makes you feel better, I'd be fine with making their executions lethal injection with their drug of choice. One and done. Win-win.
@Anon 01:20,
Libertarianism is based on the idea that you can drop rocks into a pool without causing any ripples. Forever.
If people were allowed to shoot up drugs on the edge of an active volcano, or ankle-chained to anvils over the Marianas Trench, after providing sufficient insurance for their families first, I'd be for it in a minute.
But they don't want that. That'd require a sense of personal responsibility they always lack.
Society's mistake is in not making that selfish failure a one-time choice with permanent consequences.
By contrast, no one dances on the railing on the upper decks at the baseball stadiums, despite the total lack of signage or enforcement of any such rule to the contrary.
There is a lesson there.
Make stupid hurt, and make drug-stupid lethal, first time, and everyone will lose interest except for a very small number of suicidal people, manageable under existing societal apparatus.
elysianfield would build them a net from home plate to the bleachers, and have us provide taxpayer funder parachutes and airbag suits forever, and escalators to return and repeat the trip.
No sale.
Aesop,
Details? Three hours per hit arbitrary...it can be one hour, or less. The time limit is only to keep the industrious from buying enough to begin smuggling the drugs, at a volume, into Mexico or Canada. The vending machines would be in every venue you see Powerball machines...supermarkets, quickie-chickies, Gas station delicatessens, etc.
"By contrast, no one dances on the railing on the upper decks at the baseball stadiums, despite the total lack of signage or enforcement of any such rule to the contrary.
There is a lesson there." Indeed. And seeing your little buddies dying by the numbers would also provide a similar epiphany...the lessons would hurt.
Safety Net? Where does the DNR pledge say anything about a safety net?
Punished at draconian levels. I am probably alone amongst your readership in that I made HUNDREDS of felony arrests for Marijuana, pills, etc. I suppose we could have just executed the miscreants in the street, but at the time I was on the Department, there was little political will to do so. There is, apparently, the political will to legalize all drugs as was done in Oregon...they just did not go far enough and subsidize the cost of drugs to freeze out the Cartels.
...Did you even read the posts I earlier submitted?
And the use of drugs is a malum prohibitum issue, not malum in se.
Arbitrary is exactly the problem, and anything less than ALL THE DRUGS ALL THE TIME, which is what druggies want and do now, will engender exactly what I outlined, and doing it the "All the Drugs, All The Time" way will engender exactly what you outlined: they'll take extra to sell to others, because PROFIT. And then we'd become Columbia to Canada's US.
TANSTAAFL
If taking any part in the drug trade from grower to user was instantly lethal, it'd became less of a problem than lightning strikes to the head inside a month. Wages would increase. Healthcare costs would plummet. The only downside would be to the people at the end of the gibbet. Boo frickin' hoo.
Make drug use instantly lethal. Like most never-happened epidemics, it dies of crib death.
You want to give them a regulated dose.
If you're going to do it, do it right: Give away a dose so lethal you only get one hit of anything, and they find you with the needle still in your arm before you could react, deader than canned tuna. Like carfentanil was when it first hit the streets. Wipe out the whole drug population in a week.
Gone.
Landfill.
Next problem.
Cartels and their minions are out of the drug business forever, same week.
They could eat it, but there'd be no one to sell it to, at any price including free, for some good time.
The abuse of drugs is malum in se. People who claim otherwise are merely attempting to ignore the "hidden" costs. If drug users ventured far out to sea in a rowboat, childless, and offed themselves there after blasting enormous holes in the bottom of the boat, you might have a case. But for far less effort and investment, we could simply execute them.
But that's not how it works, and I'm carrying that cost daily, with the full weight right in the middle of my back, and have been for decades.
So is everyone who pays taxes.
If we can indelibly stamp "DNR" on drug users' foreheads, allow paramedics to leave them to die where they drop, and execute them for any crime committed as a consequence of their habit (burglary, theft, robbery, etc.), it still would not remotely approach being malum prohibidum. But the recidivism rate would be far lower, which is an excellent start, and a wonderful reason to institute the policy immediately.
If they would just legalize growing it for personal consumption or chicken feed and stop trying to make money off it a lot of problems would be solved.
Weed has fuck all to do with OD's.
You're an idiot: the weed is being brought in and distributed by the same people causing the ODs: the Mexican drug cartels.
If you're too stupid to read the linked posts, you probably shouldn't comment on them, or at least not until you aren't high any more.
Go have a bag of cookies or something.
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