The US (federal and local) governments have spent about 13.2 billion dollars on the war on drugs so far this year.
"Harvard economist Jeffrey A. Miron has estimated that legalizing drugs would inject $76.8 billion a year into the U.S. economy—$44.1 billion from law enforcement savings, and at least $32.7 billion in tax revenue ($6.7 billion from marijuana, $22.5 billion from cocaine and heroin, remainder from other drugs)." (from Wikipedia)
About 20% of the population of state prisons are classified as "drug-related offenses", and about 53% of federal prisoners fit the same category. Admittedly, some of these would still be in prison under a “legalize all drugs” approach (for example, those who dealt to minors), but I’m assuming a vast majority would not.
"According to the American Corrections Association, the average daily cost per state prison inmate per day in the US is $67.55. State prisons held 253,300 inmates for drug offenses in 2005. That means states spent approximately $17,110,415 per day to imprison drug offenders, or $6,245,301,475 per year."
http://drugwarfacts.org/cms/?q=node/62
This has a few hidden assumptions.
First, it assumes that the number of people using the drug will increase if it is made legal. Second, it assumes that the threat of a heroin addict in a society in which the drug is legal remains roughly the same as the threat in a society in which the drug is illegal. I don't see any justification for either of these premises.
If heroin were made legal, would you suddenly have a desire to use it? I know I wouldn't. I don't know of anyone who would, actually. I have friends who drink alcohol, smoke marijuana, and / or take ecstasy. I don't know anyone who uses heroin. The reason my friends don't use heroin isn't because it's illegal (ecstasy carries the same penalty as heroin), but because of how harmful it is.
"Everyone"?
This isn't a question of what you think, it's the truth. In motor vehicle collisions involving fatalities, parties having consumed alcohol were found to be highly likely to be the culpable party, while those who had consumed only marijuana were no more likely to be culpable than those who did not take any drugs.
K.W. Terhune et al., The Incidence and Role of Drugs in Fatally Injured Drivers, NHTSA Report # DOT-HS-808-065 (1994).
On a related note, laws against suicide are even more inane than laws against drugs. There can be no deterrent effect to someone who plans on committing suicide.
You seem to think that legal and required are the same words.
Yes they have. The slippery slope is that there is no logical reason to ban cannabis, MDMA (ecstasy), and amphetamine but allow tobacco, morphine, and alcohol. As soon as you realize that we already have harmful legal drugs, it's incredibly difficult (if not impossible) to find an argument for why this drug should be banned, but that one shouldn't.
Ask yourself the following question: should we consider your girlfriend a criminal? If drugs are illegal, her addiction meant that would she have been caught, she would have been sent to prison. I don't know where you are, but possession of methamphetamine tends to carry a penalty around 5-7 years and a fine of a few tens of thousands dollars in most places in the US.
That her boyfriend was abusive is not an issue in the debate of whether drugs should be illegal. Her situation is tragic, yes, but abuse is wrong regardless of whether it's driven by drugs, and the penalty should be the same. It doesn't matter whether he was abusive because his judgment was impaired by drugs or because he enjoyed abusing people. The real problem was his abuse of other people, not his abuse of drugs.
I do agree that this shouldn't be a valid defense. Any sort of impaired state of mind should be irrelevant if going into that state of mind was an intentional decision made by the person on trial.
This is a false comparison that has been cropping up a lot in this thread, so I'm just going to use this post as my example.
The "legalize all drugs" argument isn't necessarily "legalize all drugs for all ages". If the problem is "kids will be pressured into it since they won't be able to say that it's illegal", I would say we keep recreational drugs illegal to people under 18. This completely negates any "peer pressure as a kid" argument, and also negates the above argument. Heroin, for instance, would still be illegal for children.
As for condemning people for choices they make as a kid, isn't that was criminalizing drugs does? Someone gets addicted to a hard drug as a kid, and a few years down the road they're caught and imprisoned for a few years because of it.
I agree with Deck Knight on this one. I really question the idea of a drug clinic in which tax-payer money goes to fund someone's addiction. The most I could see myself possibly supporting would be a deferred payment plan (with interest, obviously... have to account for inflation + time value of money), but I don't know that even that would be a good role for the government.
You're contradicting yourself. Either they're illegal because of this high demand, in which case people would be demanding such drugs, or else they're illegal for other reasons, in which case demand is irrelevant.
Methamphetamine is easy to make.
This is counteracted by the legalization leading to an increased likelihood of people seeking treatment, which is why it's not a given that legalization leads to greater use overall. It might lead to a small increase in the number of people who have ever used, but it will also most likely lead to more people who are users of currently illicit drugs ceasing use of said drugs.
The purpose of laws is to protect people from others. If you say that the role of government is to protect you from yourself, and to tell you what's right and wrong, then what you are saying is that you are not free.
The question of legalization of drugs really boils down to who owns you. If you believe that you are owned by the government, then yes, drugs should be illegal because they are harmful. If, like me, you believe that nobody owns you but yourself, then drugs should be legal, no matter how harmful they are to any individual. You are the final arbiter of what you do and what is done to you, not the government. You own your body.
But they did have a choice to buy those drugs to begin with. I also fail to see how this is taking advantage of people.
I disagree with a sales tax in most cases, and this is no exception. I don’t see why we need to put a “morality tax” on anything, including heroin, alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, or anything else. The only time I see a justification for a sales tax is to fund something specifically related to the use of the product (in this case, a tax on drugs to fund education about and treatment for said drugs).
Who? Is there anyone reading this thread who, of heroin were legal tomorrow, would go out and try it, but since it’s illegal are not going to? I don’t think this gap is as wide as you propose. However, it doesn’t matter if absolutely everyone decided to try drugs if they were legal, it’s still a question of whether the government owns you.
No one is denying this. The most amount of drugs I’ve ever done is an Ibuprofin once every year or two when I have a bad headache.
Just because something is harmful doesn’t mean that it should be illegal. McDonald’s is legal, even though the food is unhealthy. Getting angry is legal, even though it raises your blood pressure. It’s perfectly legal to punch a wall, even though that gives you cuts and bruises. If I so desire, I can sit at home all day watching TV until I get bedsores and die, and that’s perfectly legal. I can drink alcohol until I develop jaundice and Korsakoff's syndrome, and the government won’t stop me. Smoke a joint of marijuana? Suddenly it’s illegal because it’s bad for me.
This is false.
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)60464-4/fulltext (requires registration)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/5230006.stm
I do not know of a single case of a person dying of ecstasy (MDMA) alone (ecstasy related deaths involve it being mixed with other drugs, which is where the real harm comes from). On that list, ecstasy, a drug that is illegal globally (by UN decree), is illegal with the same penalty as cocaine, despite being significantly less harmful than tobacco or alcohol (it’s actually rated lower than cannabis). The law makes no sense with regard to penalties and legality of drugs compared to the harmfulness of their effects.
"Harvard economist Jeffrey A. Miron has estimated that legalizing drugs would inject $76.8 billion a year into the U.S. economy—$44.1 billion from law enforcement savings, and at least $32.7 billion in tax revenue ($6.7 billion from marijuana, $22.5 billion from cocaine and heroin, remainder from other drugs)." (from Wikipedia)
About 20% of the population of state prisons are classified as "drug-related offenses", and about 53% of federal prisoners fit the same category. Admittedly, some of these would still be in prison under a “legalize all drugs” approach (for example, those who dealt to minors), but I’m assuming a vast majority would not.
"According to the American Corrections Association, the average daily cost per state prison inmate per day in the US is $67.55. State prisons held 253,300 inmates for drug offenses in 2005. That means states spent approximately $17,110,415 per day to imprison drug offenders, or $6,245,301,475 per year."
http://drugwarfacts.org/cms/?q=node/62
This has a few hidden assumptions.
First, it assumes that the number of people using the drug will increase if it is made legal. Second, it assumes that the threat of a heroin addict in a society in which the drug is legal remains roughly the same as the threat in a society in which the drug is illegal. I don't see any justification for either of these premises.
If heroin were made legal, would you suddenly have a desire to use it? I know I wouldn't. I don't know of anyone who would, actually. I have friends who drink alcohol, smoke marijuana, and / or take ecstasy. I don't know anyone who uses heroin. The reason my friends don't use heroin isn't because it's illegal (ecstasy carries the same penalty as heroin), but because of how harmful it is.
"Everyone"?
This isn't a question of what you think, it's the truth. In motor vehicle collisions involving fatalities, parties having consumed alcohol were found to be highly likely to be the culpable party, while those who had consumed only marijuana were no more likely to be culpable than those who did not take any drugs.
K.W. Terhune et al., The Incidence and Role of Drugs in Fatally Injured Drivers, NHTSA Report # DOT-HS-808-065 (1994).
On a related note, laws against suicide are even more inane than laws against drugs. There can be no deterrent effect to someone who plans on committing suicide.
You seem to think that legal and required are the same words.
Yes they have. The slippery slope is that there is no logical reason to ban cannabis, MDMA (ecstasy), and amphetamine but allow tobacco, morphine, and alcohol. As soon as you realize that we already have harmful legal drugs, it's incredibly difficult (if not impossible) to find an argument for why this drug should be banned, but that one shouldn't.
Ask yourself the following question: should we consider your girlfriend a criminal? If drugs are illegal, her addiction meant that would she have been caught, she would have been sent to prison. I don't know where you are, but possession of methamphetamine tends to carry a penalty around 5-7 years and a fine of a few tens of thousands dollars in most places in the US.
That her boyfriend was abusive is not an issue in the debate of whether drugs should be illegal. Her situation is tragic, yes, but abuse is wrong regardless of whether it's driven by drugs, and the penalty should be the same. It doesn't matter whether he was abusive because his judgment was impaired by drugs or because he enjoyed abusing people. The real problem was his abuse of other people, not his abuse of drugs.
I do agree that this shouldn't be a valid defense. Any sort of impaired state of mind should be irrelevant if going into that state of mind was an intentional decision made by the person on trial.
This is a false comparison that has been cropping up a lot in this thread, so I'm just going to use this post as my example.
The "legalize all drugs" argument isn't necessarily "legalize all drugs for all ages". If the problem is "kids will be pressured into it since they won't be able to say that it's illegal", I would say we keep recreational drugs illegal to people under 18. This completely negates any "peer pressure as a kid" argument, and also negates the above argument. Heroin, for instance, would still be illegal for children.
As for condemning people for choices they make as a kid, isn't that was criminalizing drugs does? Someone gets addicted to a hard drug as a kid, and a few years down the road they're caught and imprisoned for a few years because of it.
I agree with Deck Knight on this one. I really question the idea of a drug clinic in which tax-payer money goes to fund someone's addiction. The most I could see myself possibly supporting would be a deferred payment plan (with interest, obviously... have to account for inflation + time value of money), but I don't know that even that would be a good role for the government.
You're contradicting yourself. Either they're illegal because of this high demand, in which case people would be demanding such drugs, or else they're illegal for other reasons, in which case demand is irrelevant.
Methamphetamine is easy to make.
This is counteracted by the legalization leading to an increased likelihood of people seeking treatment, which is why it's not a given that legalization leads to greater use overall. It might lead to a small increase in the number of people who have ever used, but it will also most likely lead to more people who are users of currently illicit drugs ceasing use of said drugs.
The purpose of laws is to protect people from others. If you say that the role of government is to protect you from yourself, and to tell you what's right and wrong, then what you are saying is that you are not free.
The question of legalization of drugs really boils down to who owns you. If you believe that you are owned by the government, then yes, drugs should be illegal because they are harmful. If, like me, you believe that nobody owns you but yourself, then drugs should be legal, no matter how harmful they are to any individual. You are the final arbiter of what you do and what is done to you, not the government. You own your body.
But they did have a choice to buy those drugs to begin with. I also fail to see how this is taking advantage of people.
I disagree with a sales tax in most cases, and this is no exception. I don’t see why we need to put a “morality tax” on anything, including heroin, alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, or anything else. The only time I see a justification for a sales tax is to fund something specifically related to the use of the product (in this case, a tax on drugs to fund education about and treatment for said drugs).
Who? Is there anyone reading this thread who, of heroin were legal tomorrow, would go out and try it, but since it’s illegal are not going to? I don’t think this gap is as wide as you propose. However, it doesn’t matter if absolutely everyone decided to try drugs if they were legal, it’s still a question of whether the government owns you.
No one is denying this. The most amount of drugs I’ve ever done is an Ibuprofin once every year or two when I have a bad headache.
Just because something is harmful doesn’t mean that it should be illegal. McDonald’s is legal, even though the food is unhealthy. Getting angry is legal, even though it raises your blood pressure. It’s perfectly legal to punch a wall, even though that gives you cuts and bruises. If I so desire, I can sit at home all day watching TV until I get bedsores and die, and that’s perfectly legal. I can drink alcohol until I develop jaundice and Korsakoff's syndrome, and the government won’t stop me. Smoke a joint of marijuana? Suddenly it’s illegal because it’s bad for me.
This is false.
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)60464-4/fulltext (requires registration)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/5230006.stm
I do not know of a single case of a person dying of ecstasy (MDMA) alone (ecstasy related deaths involve it being mixed with other drugs, which is where the real harm comes from). On that list, ecstasy, a drug that is illegal globally (by UN decree), is illegal with the same penalty as cocaine, despite being significantly less harmful than tobacco or alcohol (it’s actually rated lower than cannabis). The law makes no sense with regard to penalties and legality of drugs compared to the harmfulness of their effects.
