[baldfat]

This is my fear. The "War on Drug" really is a health issue, but most people I know that are against the war basically want to smoke more and more pot and/or Libertarians and the reply to stop the war is not and we can help more people.

[panglott]

This is essentially the stereotype of legalization activists, but it's not really true. I don't smoke pot, but have long been an advocate of legalization. It's so strange to me when people assume I do smoke because of this advocacy... I'm also a straight supporter of equal marriage, and a male supporter of pro-choice policies, &c., &c.

People who want to use drugs are already using drugs.

Marijuana legalization would never have passed the ballot box in the western states if the reason people supported legalizing it was just to smoke more instead of on the policy merits.

[mc32]

I have also been a supporter of legalizing MJ and light drugs, but I'd never go far and say the same for hard drugs. I knew people in HS who got hooked on hard stuff and it ended terribly for more than I care to think about.

[Nursie]

How were they helped by the drugs being illegal?

I know this is a little bit of a canard and what people really mean is "I don't want to see more people go that way", but it strikes me that there is a need to separate these two things -

1. Some drugs, particularly opiates, are a bad thing to get into.

2. Therefore banning them and criminalising use is the right thing to do and the best way to stop more bad stuff.

Personally I think a system which decriminalises possession of hard drugs and legalises their distribution from (or use at) a well regulated medical centre would be a good thing, from a harm-reduction viewpoint. But I'd agree that not everything should be as easy to get as a can of beer.

[mc32]

I definitely agree with the treatment centers. Professionals should be able to treat addicts with the best methods possible and we should not have laws getting in the way of those treatments. Still not sold on decriminalizing any "recreational" distribution. Small use possession yes.

[Nursie]

Distribution maybe not, but possession certainly. Criminalising addiction hasn't gone very well for us so far.

--edit-- now realise we're not arguing!

I'm not sure, with heroin for instance, where recreation ends and addiction begins. By having it freely available (with a side-order of counselling and you have to take it on-site) we could reduce harm from bad needles, impure drugs etc etc. We would also reduce crime as nobody then needs to rob people to get their next fix - they can get it. In what little I've read about where this is the prevalent method (Switzerland) addicts are often able to function normally and even reduce usage quite rapidly, when the stress of finding the money and the contacts for the next hit is taken out of the equation.

It seems like a good thing to do, to me.

[panglott]

Marijuana should definitely be legal, but I'm conflicted about opiates and cocaine. We can certainly establish a rational basis for banning them based on addictive potential, dependence, &c., if we put alcohol as the worst drug we're willing to tolerate within the law. OTOH, the basis for drug policy, I think, should be harm reduction.

The prospect of heroin corporations selling advertising dirt-cheap heroin on TV is not something I would welcome.

[eric_h]

Cigarettes are legal, but you can't advertise them on TV (in the US), I see no reason why we couldn't treat heroin the same way.

[Retra]

I don't think it's a baseless stereotype. I'm in the same position as you, for instance, and if drugs or drug laws come up in a conversation, I'd agree with you.

But whenever I am part of a conversation like that, somebody inevitably makes it into a conspiracy fueled crusade -- like it is simply the most important political issue in the world -- and that person is most often a stoner. One who insists on being the loudest voice in the discussion.

[mroemore]

It's definitely not a baseless stereotype, but then again few truly are. It is however a stereotype that is pretty inaccurate and more readily accepted than it should be.

Your last statement alludes to other related stereotypes; that people who smoke cannabis are the kind of people who make this argument, or that people who smoke cannabis secretly only want to legalise it for the sake of their personal weed-greed.

This isn't targeted at you, I'm not saying that you believe these things.

[panglott]

Stereotypes are a form of knowledge. They are just a really low-grade form of knowledge. That's why they're frequently confused with ignorance ;)

[Nursie]

Or that one guy that thinks that if everyone just tried LSD the world would change overnight and we'd throw out our politicians to live a new life of harmony...

Yeah, they don't really help the drive for a pragmatic solution!

[notsony]

Please define "equal marriage".

Do you support the marriage between any two individuals? So a brother could marry their sister? Or a mother could marry their daughter?

Do you support marriage involving polygamous relationships? Can three or four people can be married?

[intopieces]

The parent comment to yours refers to same-sex marriage between two people. Please don't be disingenuous. There are no major organizations or groups of people advocating for the other situations you mentioned. You knew full well before you typed your comment what the person was talking about.

[notsony]

> There are no major organizations or groups of people advocating for the other situations you mentioned.

So you want to dismiss the ideas above because they belong to a minority and are not supported by the majority? Wow, you sound like a bigot.

Remember just a few years ago there were no major organizations or groups of people advocating for... same-sex marriage.

[nitid_name]

It's not germane to this discussion. The previous poster only brought it up to draw parallels between a straight person being for allowing gay marriage and a non-smoker being for legalization.

[tdkl]

Same-sex marriage doesn't result in higher risk for offspring with serious disadvantages.

[MichaelGG]

Yes, marriage, as far as it needs to be a government-sanctioned thing for wherever reason, should be a partnership of 2 or more consenting entities that are legally allowed to enter contracts. Like an LLC kind thing - the whole point, as far as government goes, is to provide asset management, is it not? Adding arbitrary restrictions is inelegant.

[notsony]

This. Why can't more people see it the way you have described? True marriage equality does not discriminate.

As it stands, the campaign for "marriage equality" is deceptive and has only been concerned with marriage between homosexuals - other minority groups be damned!

[dragonwriter]

> the campaign for "marriage equality" is deceptive and has only been concerned with marriage between homosexuals

No, its not. Marriage where one or both partners are homosexuals is legally permitted (and has often occurred) without marriage equality.

[pnut]

According to Chief Justice John Roberts, not exactly a liberal, marriage availability to homosexuals per the method you are describing amounts to sexual discrimination.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/30/us/gender-bias-could-tip-c...

[jliptzin]

He is clearly talking about same-sex marriage. And if you're trying to make a slippery slope argument against same-sex marriage, that's been done 1,000 times before and it hasn't served the "family values" crowd too well lately.

[notsony]

> He is clearly talking about same-sex marriage.

How do we know that? When did the word equality mean only heterosexual or homosexual couples?

It's a marketing myth that "gay marriage" is the same thing as "marriage equality". They are not the same, they are two very different things.

[dragonwriter]

> How do we know that?

Because marriage equality is a well-established term with a clear unambiguous usage in political discussions. Sort of like "pro-life" and "pro-choice", which could (divorced from context) each have a wide variety of possible meanings, but which, in the actual context of modern American political debate, have very specific meanings in terms of particular opposing positions regarding abortion policy.

> It's a marketing myth that "gay marriage" is the same thing as "marriage equality".

It would be more accurate to say that "marriage equality" is a brand that has been established by advocates of legal marriage without distinction based on the sex of the partners.

[AndrewKemendo]

I am not the OP, but I have no problem with any of those scenarios. Given how much those scenarios would be outliers I see no reason they would adversely impact anything.

[mc32]

Totally off topic, but I recall a guy who killed his father because his father disapproved of his relationship with his dog. I think that was in Maine somewhere. Guy was obviously not quite sane. He'd signed the dog's testimony with a pawprint.

[pstuart]

Replying to your other comment here because it was too deep to respond.

> Remember just a few years ago there were no major organizations or groups of people advocating for... same-sex marriage.

Is 1991 a "few years ago"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_Hawaii

[notsony]

So there was a court case in 1991 but average joe would not have known about it or cared about it. Compare that to the daily news headlines and social media discussion that exists today.

[pstuart]

The average joe cares about sports and celebrities. What's your point? Or are you just a homophobic troll?

[dragonwriter]

> Please define "equal marriage".

Equal marriage is when the government doesn't discriminate by sex in who people are permitted to marry.

[zaccus]

None of the above scenarios affect me in any way. If all parties are consenting adults, then I don't see what the issue is.

[calibraxis]

Unfortunately, the "war on drugs" is really a social control issue. Look at what it's successful at, and what it doesn't care about being successful at.

Experiment 1: Imagine what you'd think if an enemy nation had a "war on drugs" with similar results. (Highest incarceration in the world, strangling/shooting even children of a formerly enslaved ethnic minority in broad daylight, etc.)

Experiment 2: Ask yourself if you think that politicians systematically use rhetoric to basically lie about a policy's true intentions. (Without necessarily being aware of lying; powerful interests may support oblivious people who act properly.)

Experiment 3: If the "war on drugs" were really about health, what policies would be implemented? (No need to assume a supernaturally effective government; just one which makes reasonable errors but moves towards accomplishing the goal. For example, consider three policy types: prevention, treatment and punishment. How would you rate them in terms of priority, given abundant studies of their effectiveness and cost?)

[ukigumo]

I'm not sure I follow that reasoning, sorry.

The big "eureka" moment was to start treating drug usage as a health issue instead of a criminal issue. It's not legal to buy or sell drugs in Portugal and if you are found carrying drugs they will be taken away from you (in most circumstances) but it's not a crime to consume them so you won't go to jail or face any prosecution.

[dublinben]

Does it really matter why someone is against the current failed policies? There are any number of paths that could lead someone to desire change, and none is more legitimate than any other.

[coldpie]

I think your parent commenter's point was, the implied other half to ending the drug war is replacing that policy with another one. What policy does it get replaced with? Just a free-for-all market that a crazy literal libertarian would like? Some sort of regulation similar to our current legal drug market? What about rehabilitation programs? How would those be implemented and what would they cost? Suddenly you've got fiscal conservatives on your back.

Ending the drug war is good, but what do we replace it with?

[juliangregorian]

Why is this so difficult for some people to process? We have very well regulated markets for cigarettes, alcohol, prescription drugs... why would this be any different? And even if we moved to state-sponsored rehab, do you have any idea how much money is squandered on the "war"? I don't hear these aforementioned fiscal conservatives complaining about that.

[andrewla]

When you say "why is this so difficult for some people to process", what is the "this" that you're referring to? Are you making an argument for "legalize, regulate, no rehab"? The main argument amongst supporters of legalization is whether rehabilitation should replace the war on drugs, not "should the market be regulated like cigarettes or alcohol" -- only the most diehard libertarians would argue for a free-for-all.

As for the fiscal conservative angle, surely you can see the difference between offering rehab to people who freely chose to take a drug, vs. preventing people from committing a crime, even if you don't think that it should be a crime. And fiscal conservatives who do not believe that drugs should be illegal are certainly complaining about the cost of the war on drugs.

[talmand]

I imagine that when you have generations of people that have been told all their lives by authority that "this" is bad, it's rather difficult to change a mindset to "this" isn't so bad now and we wish to raise revenues with it.

If a fiscal conservative isn't complaining about the cost of the drug war at this point, I would conclude they aren't a fiscal conservative.

[fredkbloggs]

Legalisation (we'll leave the exact definition unspecified here, because it doesn't matter) neither asks nor requires anyone to change their opinions of recreational drug use. Regulating and taxing an activity do not constitute an endorsement of it; more fundamentally, this attitude inverts the foundation of American law by asserting that only those things of which the government approves should be lawful. The legalisation argument is not that recreational drug use is "not so bad". It is that the marginal harm caused by prohibition (by a large number of vectors) is greater than the marginal harm it prevents (the harm done to or by some number of people not using recreational drugs who otherwise would). The reality is that every schoolchild has been repeatedly informed of the effects and risks of the various recreational drugs on the market. It is literally easier to graduate high school illiterate than to avoid learning about recreational drugs. Those who choose to become first-time users despite prohibition do so as informed citizens. There is no evidence that prohibition discourages any great number of would-be users, though it would be naive to insist that it discourages no one. Neither do economic incentives: witness the millions of dollars lost every year by professional athletes who are penalised for violations of their employers' anti-drug policies, which are stricter even than legal prohibition. The objective is not, and should not be, to encourage recreational drug use but to limit the harm done to and by recreational drug users, and to limit their number through education and, where appropriate, rehabilitation of addicts. Neither does legalisation imply that recreational drug users who commit crimes or do other harm while under the influence will not be held responsible for their actions. Consuming alcohol is legal; drunk driving is not. Being high is no excuse for crime today and would be no excuse under the policy regime of legalisation.

Accepting legalisation as a superior alternative simply doesn't require the mental leap you're suggesting. It should appeal to most people, regardless of their overall political views.

[talmand]

I appreciate the detailed statement you just made and cannot disagree, but I just can't say that most people would hold to that viewpoint even if you think they should.

But I think your point is a slightly different issue than the problem I was attempting to describe based on the original question.

[krakensden]

We do not have a successful prescription-drug model. There is a huge black market for those.

[dalke]

As a first approximation, replace it with the system in Portugal. That's how ukigumo kicked off this thread.

[panglott]

Sure! Depending on why you want to end the drug war, you could end up replacing it with something as bad or worse.

[CWuestefeld]

but most people I know that are against the war basically want to smoke more and more pot and/or Libertarians

Downvote because of the implication that an idea expounded by libertarians is, ipso facto, a bad idea. Our political discourse needs minds considerably more open than that.

[ludamad]

Most people I know don't let legality get in the way, but would very much like to not be criminals!

[rayiner]

Mental illness is also a health issue, but our reaction to it is to criminalize homelessness, put people in prison, etc.