Ed, you just keep asking this very stupid question about the War on Drugs. Over and over.

Since you keep this up, I assume you’ve got some drugs you’d like legalized so the Little Admiral can take them. Care to name some?

unclesmrgol on November 21, 2008 at 2:52 AM

(Over and over? Que?)

Nothing to see here, move along, demonize the messenger… (Am I leaving anything out?) Classy.

[Captain Ed]

Forcing non-violent offenders in the drug war to serve minimum amounts of prison time may not garner the same kind of enthusiasm.

With all due deference to the Race Card, I think that even in GA, this argument won’t “work” in the sense of bringing Saxby any additional votes. At best it’s one of those topics that voters tolerate because they think they’re supposed to (i.e., the position, no matter how obnoxiously or tendentiously portrayed, is the “responsible” one), and pols like Saxby consistently put it out there because they think they’re supposed to as well (’cause that’s just what “moral, upstanding, responsible” office-seekers are supposed to do / harp on).

And in the end it doesn’t really add up to much, or move the needle one way or the other, since most voters appropriately tune it out. (Now, if anyone seriously thought that the choice of Saxby vs. Martin would make a hill of beans’ worth of difference in the actual trajectory of the War on Drugs, it might be a different story…)

Since you keep this up, I assume you’ve got some drugs you’d like legalized so the Little Admiral can take them. Care to name some?

Further, anyone who sells drugs which can be shown to have come from a narco-terrorist organization of any kind should have an abetting terrorism added to the charges.

@ sharrukin on November 20, 2008 at 5:02 PM

How about you answer why its your business or the government business if I want to have a drink of alcohol or puff on a big ole bowl of marijuana? This is another case of, if you dont want to do it, don’t. If you don’t want your children to do it, teach them that there are negative effects. Of course if you try to demonize drugs to the point that the Drug War has, with those stupid commercials, you kids will rebel when they figure out you were lying to them.

muyoso on November 20, 2008 at 5:33 PM

You live within a society you have both duties and obligations. TANSTAAFL (There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) means that there is a price to be paid for everything. You don’t get to do anything you want if you choose to accept the protection and benefits of society.

Alcohol and drugs both exact a price from society and the question is whether restricting their use, and to what degree is reasonable.

Your not the boss of me isn’t much of an argument!

Hey. where do you live? I assure you we here in GA have a lot more sense than you give us credit… I am so tired of the south being portrayed as . Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go stir my squirrel stew.

beththebaker on November 20, 2008 at 4:00 PM

I can understand your exasperation; twisting so many words to fit your dim view of things can be tiring. My comment made no mention of uneducated,backwoods, toothless cousin-marrying hicks.

I’ve lived in Georgia and have family there now. I just think GA is one of those places that responds strongly to stiff law-and-order legislators. That can sometimes create a blind spot to practicality.

Another thing, the terms “hick” and “redneck” are pejoratives. Your usage pretty much condones the usage of such terms against your oh-so-colorfully described cousins. They are not effective descriptors and promote linguistic sloth.

I’ll take Squirrel Nut Zippers to squirrel stew any day.

We’re in agreement on users – the one who uses but commits no other crime (however rare such an individual may be) deserves no attention from the law.

Still no takers on my vancomycin question. Hmmm.

I’m sorry but when was the last time a city had a spike in its murder rate because of pirated DVDs or cigarettes or stereos. Come. the f*ck on man.

DeathToMediaHacks on November 20, 2008 at 5:27 PM

High-profile killings connected to illicit tobacco networks in the Balkans have claimed journalists, intelligence officers, politicians and the criminals themselves. In the fight to control this multi-billion dollar criminal enterprise, gangsters often use the most ruthless methods to assert their authority and send a reminder of their power to the public at large.

In one of the more chilling examples of cigarette smugglers’ disregard for life, Dusko Jovanovi? was shot and killed outside the paper he worked at in Montenegro, a regional cigarette smuggling hub. The then editor-in-chief of Dan, the Montenegrin daily, was gunned down in 2004 shortly after publishing a series of articles on the illicit tobacco smuggling activities of underworld kingpins.

http://www.reportingproject.net/new/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=51&Itemid=47

How about you answer why its your business or the government business if I want to have a drink of alcohol or puff on a big ole bowl of marijuana? This is another case of, if you dont want to do it, don’t. If you don’t want your children to do it, teach them that there are negative effects. Of course if you try to demonize drugs to the point that the Drug War has, with those stupid commercials, you kids will rebel when they figure out you were lying to them.

Black market dealers smuggle and sell CD’s, DVD’s, cigarettes, electronic goods, shoes, designer label merchandise, and guns. So legalizing drugs would accomplish what? Legalizing alcohol didn’t rid us of the mafia, so why would we believe it will rid us of drug gangs?

I’m sorry but when was the last time a city had a spike in its murder rate because of pirated DVDs or cigarettes or stereos. Come. the f*ck on man. The drug war has been the biggest failure in American CJS history. It’s militarized both the police and street gangs to a ridiculous degree. It’s empowered terrorists, yes the Taliban grows poppy seed nimrod. And no one, that I know, who doesn’t smoke weed, does so because they are afraid of criminal penalties.

Drugs aren’t exactly expensive now. Ever hear of a “dime bag”? So how cheap do we have to make drugs before we remove the incentive to smuggle them? How many junkies do you know who hold down a job sufficient to finance their habit? They smash car windows for a couple of bucks in change rather than work for it. They can’t come up with $10 a day so how is legalization gonnna change that human dreg into something else?

You’re…kind of an idiot. Drugs aren’t exactly expensive? I just…Wow. So people are smuggling drugs because they AREN’T profitable? People are killing over drug territory because it’s NOT profitable? It’s so easy and cheap to supply people with drugs that there aren’t massive street gangs organized around doing NITHNG BUT THAT!?!? Oy vey.

Did prohibition create alcoholics? Does drug prohibition create addiction?

No one said anything about addiction. Addiction happens when you have nothing in your life but the drug. Not everyone who drinks is an alcoholic. Not everyone who smokes weed is a drug addict. Meth is another matter, but drugs that are natural products of the earth, i.e. pot and mushrooms should be legal.

Cocaine, meth, heroin, opium? Legalize them all? If not then what have we accomplished? If so then google meth addicts and take a look at the images. Do you really believe those people will ever stop? Ever get a job at a McDonalds? Do we really want pharmaceutical manufacturers getting into the business of selling these drugs to the public?

Alot of the people who die from overdoses do so because they aren’t actually smoking the drug they are supposed to be smoking. It’s been laced with something or cut with something. If its regulated that will not happen as much. And people who abuse drugs will commit crimes and then they should be jailed. In fact the penalties for crimes while under the influence should equal the penalties now for felony distribution. That’s how you get people to be responsible. Not by saying no.
Show me one example of a place where legalization has been enacted that has actually had the positive effect envisioned by its supporters. Look at England after heroin users were given a regular supply. Not pretty.

Tell China how harmless opium is! The British used opium as a means to break the Chinese state and it came close to working. The United States had 400,000 opium addicts around the same time. It was outlawed for a reason in both China and the United States.

here’s a brilliant idea, maybe someone should give me a reason to vote for saxby… the chicken little tactics aren’t working

Either we decriminalize all or impose Sharia law…
sayabule1 on November 20, 2008 at 4:42 PM

The Strawman Lives!

My argument is less about drugs specifically, and more about predatory types who make their living from others’ misery. Those are the types our society needs rid of. I could care less about the average bowl-burner who splits a bag with his buddy.

Should just anybody be able to buy vancomycin?

Black market dealers smuggle and sell CD’s, DVD’s, cigarettes, electronic goods, shoes, designer label merchandise, and guns. So legalizing drugs would accomplish what? Legalizing alcohol didn’t rid us of the mafia, so why would we believe it will rid us of drug gangs?

Drugs aren’t exactly expensive now. Ever hear of a “dime bag”? So how cheap do we have to make drugs before we remove the incentive to smuggle them? How many junkies do you know who hold down a job sufficient to finance their habit? They smash car windows for a couple of bucks in change rather than work for it. They can’t come up with $10 a day so how is legalization gonnna change that human dreg into something else?

Did prohibition create alcoholics? Does drug prohibition create addiction?

Cocaine, meth, heroin, opium? Legalize them all? If not then what have we accomplished? If so then google meth addicts and take a look at the images. Do you really believe those people will ever stop? Ever get a job at a McDonalds? Do we really want pharmaceutical manufacturers getting into the business of selling these drugs to the public?

Show me one example of a place where legalization has been enacted that has actually had the positive effect envisioned by its supporters. Look at England after heroin users were given a regular supply. Not pretty.

Tell China how harmless opium is! The British used opium as a means to break the Chinese state and it came close to working. The United States had 400,000 opium addicts around the same time. It was outlawed for a reason in both China and the United States.

It is all or nothing brother. Either we decriminalize all or impose Sharia law (which, btw, is not much different than what we have now) with respect to drugs. I agree that we should increase enforcement for those who provide drugs to children under 18, otherwise, we really need to grow up and let people make (and live with) their own decisions…

The drug war still matters inasmuch as it provides an excuse for politicians to sound tough on crime by publicly favoring stronger sentences. For whatever reason, many people think the drug war is an end unto itself, and don’t appreciate the damage it has caused to American civil liberties, so politicians keep pushing it. Even Obama, who has admitted to trying cocaine and pot, hasn’t indicated he will roll back the drug war, probably because he assumes it would be very unpopular.

I blame parents. As soon as people have children, they suddenly become very irrational about the state’s responsibility to protect their children from any bizarre thing that may happen to them. Most people can’t intuit how the war on drugs causes tremendous harm – all they know is that their precious little child might some day smoke a joint, and so the government better lock up anyone who has a bag of weed in their pocket.

This nonsense has to stop. The drug war fills our prisons with non-violent dealers who are simply selling adults a product they want to buy. The violence that comes with the drug trade would disappear if drugs were legal – after all, violence is the only way to settle disputes in a black market. If drugs were legal, drug dealers wouldn’t have to resort to violence, they’d just be competing entrepreneurs.

We’ve spent billions of dollars on trying to stamp out the natural human drive to self-intoxicate, and the one thing we haven’t done is reduce the market for drugs. The war on drugs has been a failure. Parents seem to be concerned that giving up the war on drugs will send their children the wrong message. But the message we’re currently sending is that it’s sensible to waste money, incarcerate non-violent Americans, and otherwise put people at risk for no reason other than it gives a certain segment of the population a smug sense of self-satisfaction.

As has been observed before, the war on drugs in over – drugs won. Even if most folks aren’t as extreme as me in terms of legalizing everything, could we at least make weed legal?

Is the drug war a compelling argument any more?

No. What a waste of man-hours and money! This clean-cut non-toker says “legalize it”.

I say legalize/decriminalize and tax it. Drug testing should probably also end, as it’s not reliable enough (I’m on medication that gives false positives for speed.) Not to mention you could go home and smoke a joint and test positive for a long time after that. There’s no reason a workplace should care what you do at home in your free time (showing up to work baked is another matter.)

The problem with that proposal is that if you were to drug test lawyers, doctors, politicians, etc. there would be no lawyers, doctors, politicians left in America.

Although there is not enough time to change course in connection with the GA runoff, there really needs to be a total re-think on this issue and the only political party that will be deemed credible enough to make that change is the Republican party. The only problem is that there are not enough Republicans out there who have the courage/intellectual capacity to realize that the so called “War on Drugs” is not about conservative ideals at all. Rather, the idea of putting more and more non-violent drug addicts in jail forever and seizing their property seems like something you would learn about happening in Venezuela, Iran, Russia, or Syria – as opposed to the U.S.A.

One of the few good things about the financial crisis is that maybe (just maybe) it will make our political “leaders” (and taxpayers too) take a look at the BILLIONS of dollars per year we are wasting on this sinking ship. For many years (before Dubya), Republicans championed the idea of eliminating the Department of Education as a worthless agency that sucked tonnes of taxpayers dollars away with little benefit. I think a better plan would be to start with eliminating the DEA…

does the drug war matter any more? Have people grown tired enough of it to start scaling it back, at least? We’ve sunk hundreds of billions into long sentences, oversized enforcement, and have not made much of a dent at any level of the demand for drugs in the US.

Good of you to admit that. Mandatory minimums for a non-violent offense are a futile attempt at deterrence. If they weren’t ignored wholesale on racial grounds or due to patronage and family ties…maaaybe i could get behind them for harder drugs. But the fact of the matter is an inner city kid getting busted first time for selling weed is likely to be hit with a mandatory minimum or trumped up sentence, while the suburban white boy just the same age will not even see “intent to sell” on their charge. It is a corrupt and injust system…lets not act like it works

Stupid ad. But it should work in GA.

The Race Card on November 20, 2008 at 3:49 PM

Hey. where do you live? I assure you we here in GA have a lot more sense than you give us credit… I am so tired of the south being portrayed as uneducated,backwoods, toothless cousin-marrying hicks. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go stir my squirrel stew.