The idea that the best way to deal with amazingly profitable and slightly addictive substances is to let the most thieving and murderous people in our country sell them, and kill anyone who’d mention this to the regulators, also doesn’t strike me as top notch.
Sadly, it was also one of the lines that Sunny decided to edit out of this piece.
Got to confess, this paragraph still doesn’t make sense to me. Specifically, it’s this sentence that buggers everything up:
“and kill anyone who’d mention this to the regulators”
And although I think John B basically has the right end of the stick, he doesn’t half write in a cackarsed way.
The problem is with that word “let”. In theory we don’t let them. In reality we do.
But if we legalised drugs, we would still have that group of murderous thugs out there doing other things. Not nice things either.
So the sensible policy is to stop letting them do it by, say, hanging them. Thus Britain would be a better place.
So Much For Subtlety,
1. You don’t understand what the word “let” means (so I suppose your monicker is apt).
2. In the USA, they implement incredibly harsh penal sancations against drug use and dealing. Has this resulted in the problem going away? Er let’s see…noooo, no it hasn’t.
Paul Sagar – “1. You don’t understand what the word “let” means (so I suppose your monicker is apt).”
By all means, feel free to explain what the subtle distinction I am missing is.
“2. In the USA, they implement incredibly harsh penal sancations against drug use and dealing. Has this resulted in the problem going away? Er let’s see…noooo, no it hasn’t.”
No they don’t. Actually. Since the 1960s, in the US as in the rest of the West, people tend to get away with drug use. And it has seen a massive expansion in the problem. But even if it hadn’t, it would be irrelevant as the problem is not the drug use. The problem is, as I said, the murderous criminals. Now they happen to make money from drugs. If drugs were legal they would still be murderous criminals.
Since the 1960s, in the US as in the rest of the West, people tend to get away with drug use.
Reality intervenes…
Perhaps the single greatest force behind the growth of the prison population has been the national “war on drugs.” The number of incarcerated drug offenders has increased twelvefold since 1980. In 2000, 22 percent of those in federal and state prisons were convicted on drug charges…
SMFS, although wrong-headed, is technically correct. A lot of people are in jail in the US for using drugs, but a much higher proportion of people in the US have used drugs but not been sent to jail (since 40% of people in the US have used drugs, but only 3% have been to jail).
There are two approaches to drug use that broadly work: the Saudi one (where people who have a bottle of whisky or a joint *do* get flogged, and people who sell them *do* get hanged) and the Netherlands one.
The former is barbaric and vile and would only be backed by deranged authoritarians, but it does definitely cut drug use.