Do you care to show me the studies that show how criminalizing drugs consistently cause a reduction in abuse?
Use is easier than abuse. Because of course abuse is subject to interpretation. But you picked Portugal as an example. Portugal decriminalized possession, which is far short of legalization. Portugal experienced increases in most areas with some areas doubling.
Decriminalizing use might very well lead to an increase in use and a decrease in abuse. But the original claim was that it would have no effect on use and that's just false.
Do you think that by legalising drugs, people would immediately jump at the chance and start using?
Yes. The question is how many more would.
It's similar to countries that have legalised prostitution. It happens, but to similar extent like the rest of the world. It's just regulated and kept out of the slums (for the most part).
I agree that prostitution is similar. When prostitution was legal, regularized and had state sponsorship in most cities about 2% of the female population worked in the industry. In cities that were high like London it was 4%. The numbers were much much higher. If for example you measure percentage of men who have paid for sex at least once it is about 15-20% in the USA and 27-45% in most of Europe. On the other hand in places where it has community sanction it comes in around 75-80%.
There are multiple classes of homeless. One of those classes are people with drug or alcohol problems. The claim was that drug use did not cause homelessness. The data disproves that.
People with mental health problems being homeless is not a problem of drugs. That's a separate problem.
1) Ending people drinking away the family money. 2) Stopping men from going out by themselves whoring and drinking 3) Creating a culture of temperance
(1) decreased sharply though this likely had more to do with increased wages (2) bars became both men and women. So both sexes much less whoring went on. I'd called this a failure. (3) was a huge success. The US to this day has a culture of temperance and negative attitudes towards alcohol unheard of in any other developed country. In addition low alcohol usage rates.
I don't see influencing personal decision making and lifestyle choice as a legitimate role of government. So I don't see how any of this can be a success at anything that the government should actually be doing.
Because you are adding that extra clause "the government should actually be doing". We don't grade the success of policies on whether we agree with their desired ends but rather whether they achieved their desired ends. Your argument is not with the success of Prohibition but a disagreement with the whole idea of a government which is protecting the common welfare. That's fine, it is a legitimate position, but it is has nothing to do with whether prohibition was a success or not.
The issue is what collateral damage prohibition causes, compared with the damage caused by the drug itself.
Agree. Illegality has been incredibly destructive and expensive. Which is why I'm arguing for regulation.
The question isn't really whether or not prohibition increased or decreased the amount of alcohol consumed. From what I can gather from reading the literature, it's extremely hard to tell. Accurate statistics of how much alcohol was consumed during prohibition are very hard to come by, and studies look at other secondary indicators for their data. It seems that the effect on consumption wasn't enormous, and didn't last long anyway. I'd love to see where your data backing up your claim of a correlation between usage and restrictions comes from.
I agree it is messy. Well there are 3 groups of statistics:
a) comparing wet to dry counties prior to national prohibition. These numbers are striking. The problem is that people went from dry counties to wet counties to drink. Sort of like people today going to Las Vegas or Atlantic City to gamble.
b) Once national prohibition went into effect you have solid secondary effects: cirrhosis death rates for men were 29.5 per 100,000 in 1911 and 10.7 in 1929. Admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholic psychosis declined from 10.1 per 100,000 in 1919 to 4.7 in 1928. Now those might have decreased anyway. There was an anti-drinking movement and those numbers were dropping.
c) The amount of production in the USA before and after prohibition. My argument is that prohibition semi-permanently shifted USA consumption patterns down. Alcohol was heavily taxed both before and after prohibition so we have very good data on usage. Once alcohol became legal people bought less than half what they had before.
Much like the teenage binge drinking rate is almost non-existent in places where it's not a taboo.
That's not quite true. In places where alcohol is normalized usage is much higher. It may very well be that having teenagers binge 3x a year is far preferable to having them drink to intoxication 100x a year.
And they used to be sold in drug stores. With no prescription.
Yes. And the 19th century is filled with books about rampant abuse of laudanum, and opium parlors. I'm not sure how that disproves my point about increased usage.
I don't know how you make that leap that the current non-users are the future non abusers. Many people are potential abusers but don't have enough exposure for that potential to be actualized. Take gambling problems. There are far more problem gamblers among kids and adults who grow in Las Vegas than similar populations in say New York.
Remember this is an example of where education has failed.
As an aside I think we should stop subsidizing corn syrup. Then we should tax its usage, heavily. I don't think we need a ban, but I'd like to see the usage drop by 90+%.
I'm curious to know if you think that criminalization of speed has worked out as well or better than the criminalization of alcohol
I have no way of knowing. Through most of human history alcohol has been legal. Since sugars convert into alcohol if allowed to rot without oxygen (like in a container) there is no way to stop people from making alcohol in low quantities. Speed seems to be more complex to manufacture and thus controls were easier.
Once amphetamines started to exist in 1908 their use exploded in the population. The army fed them to soldiers during the Korean war. There were diet pills loaded with them that women developed heart problems from. Kids used them to study for tests. We know what heavy alcohol usage looks like we don't know what happens with unlimited speed. What happens if it doesn't get progressively banned? What are the numbers of users?
If amphetamines remain America's primary means of dieting as obesity grows. Or if amphetamines replace coffee as a way to get longer hours out of employees? Heck yeah the ban was a huge success.
On the other hand if the amphetamine ban is what created smoked low quality meth then it is making the problem far worse.
Where do you get the deformed and retarded babies from? The most worrisome drugs ion general make a drug using woman unlikely to give live birth at all.
Meanwhile, the one recreational drug with a proven track record of causing problems for a baby is legal.
I disagree with "one". But absolutely alcohol is bad and I'm thrilled that through education and social pressure we've been able to reduce drinking among pregnant women. That's an example where education and social pressure worked really well, so legal remedies weren't needed.
Many non-recreational drugs also cause harm to a fetus and they remain in use.
Sure. I take a pill currently which is 100% fatal to infants if used by nursing mothers. But it is by prescription, and that is probably one of the many reasons why.
____
Most vice enforcement does not cause the level of breakdown between law enforcement and community that drug enforcement has.
I'm not sure. I'd argue the anti-contraception movement of the mid 19th to mid 20th century was likely more serious in similar ways. I'll agree it is rare.
They didn't (for example) commission Dali to produce 'Hooker madness'.
Yeah. The Victorian moralizers restructured society and wages so as to make early marriage a norm for the lower classes. They didn't produce a few propaganda films they changed the whole economic wage structure to get the rate of prostitution down from what it was in the early 19th century. I'm not sure how that example advances your point. What the Victorians did in fighting prostitution goes way beyond what's being done for the war on drugs.
No question prohibition is more expensive than education. Where education can be effective I and more or less everyone thinks it should be used. I'm not sure I know of anyone on the anti-drug education side.
Most cars have speed limiters. Alcohol and smoking are heavily regulated. As is television. Sex is regulated regarding types that are seen as harmful (primarily involving minors).
I agree. Conspiracy for dealing should not carry a 24 year sentence. The US criminal justice system has insane sentences. I think a real injustice was done.
If 30m people starting using meth yes we could get 6m death in a year. Obviously we wouldn't sustain that rate. We don't have a plague or anything right now killing huge chunks of people.
I agree it is unlikely but unlikely ain't impossible.
I don't agree that alcohol creates euphoria at all. Certainly not beyond a low level of extra happiness and no I don't agree that higher doses of alcohol create more.
That's quite possibly true. And better yet would be more diluted forms of cocaine like chewing cocoa leaves. If that happens on its own, great. If it requires a little push from regulation I can live with that.
That's correct. First of all tiers. Where say pot and MDMA are lightly regulated. More serious regulation for drugs that have some risks like LSD and narcotics possibly cocaine say like we do with alcohol and tobacco. And then for a small class of drugs like meth or glue we continue the current policies.
Through all this, you still want to solve it with regulation?
Yes. If we agree that what happened after prohibition was a success... the alcohol industry in the USA is heavily regulated. What we had before prohibition was bad. In the post prohibition world usage dropped in part because government discourages usage but doesn't prohibit it.
its unjustified meddling in peoples personal lives and rights over their own body and mind.
What in your system would constitute justified meddling?
Yes. Look at the number of who drink. The CDC did a study where they estimated the percentage of smokers in a hypothetical USA where:
a) Tobacco companies could freely advertise b) Age restrictions were never passed or kept where they had been in the 20's c) Addictive chemicals could still be added d) Smoking was permitted or encouraged in most workplaces and restaurants...
They came up with an 80% smoking rate. Like I said, refined sugars are used heavily by far more than that percentage.
Do I think 80% would do meth? No but 5% but would disastrous.
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Do you care to show me the studies that show how criminalizing drugs consistently cause a reduction in abuse?
Use is easier than abuse. Because of course abuse is subject to interpretation. But you picked Portugal as an example. Portugal decriminalized possession, which is far short of legalization. Portugal experienced increases in most areas with some areas doubling.
Decriminalizing use might very well lead to an increase in use and a decrease in abuse. But the original claim was that it would have no effect on use and that's just false.
Do you think that by legalising drugs, people would immediately jump at the chance and start using?
Yes. The question is how many more would.
It's similar to countries that have legalised prostitution. It happens, but to similar extent like the rest of the world. It's just regulated and kept out of the slums (for the most part).
I agree that prostitution is similar. When prostitution was legal, regularized and had state sponsorship in most cities about 2% of the female population worked in the industry. In cities that were high like London it was 4%. The numbers were much much higher. If for example you measure percentage of men who have paid for sex at least once it is about 15-20% in the USA and 27-45% in most of Europe. On the other hand in places where it has community sanction it comes in around 75-80%.
How are 38% and 26% about normal? The percent who even used an illegal drug 1x in the past month is 6%.
There are multiple classes of homeless. One of those classes are people with drug or alcohol problems. The claim was that drug use did not cause homelessness. The data disproves that.
People with mental health problems being homeless is not a problem of drugs. That's a separate problem.
Success? what do you mean by success?
Prohibition should be judged by its objectives.
1) Ending people drinking away the family money.
2) Stopping men from going out by themselves whoring and drinking
3) Creating a culture of temperance
(1) decreased sharply though this likely had more to do with increased wages
(2) bars became both men and women. So both sexes much less whoring went on. I'd called this a failure.
(3) was a huge success. The US to this day has a culture of temperance and negative attitudes towards alcohol unheard of in any other developed country. In addition low alcohol usage rates.
I don't see influencing personal decision making and lifestyle choice as a legitimate role of government. So I don't see how any of this can be a success at anything that the government should actually be doing.
Because you are adding that extra clause "the government should actually be doing". We don't grade the success of policies on whether we agree with their desired ends but rather whether they achieved their desired ends. Your argument is not with the success of Prohibition but a disagreement with the whole idea of a government which is protecting the common welfare. That's fine, it is a legitimate position, but it is has nothing to do with whether prohibition was a success or not.
The issue is what collateral damage prohibition causes, compared with the damage caused by the drug itself.
Agree. Illegality has been incredibly destructive and expensive. Which is why I'm arguing for regulation.
The question isn't really whether or not prohibition increased or decreased the amount of alcohol consumed. From what I can gather from reading the literature, it's extremely hard to tell. Accurate statistics of how much alcohol was consumed during prohibition are very hard to come by, and studies look at other secondary indicators for their data. It seems that the effect on consumption wasn't enormous, and didn't last long anyway. I'd love to see where your data backing up your claim of a correlation between usage and restrictions comes from.
I agree it is messy. Well there are 3 groups of statistics:
a) comparing wet to dry counties prior to national prohibition. These numbers are striking. The problem is that people went from dry counties to wet counties to drink. Sort of like people today going to Las Vegas or Atlantic City to gamble.
b) Once national prohibition went into effect you have solid secondary effects: cirrhosis death rates for men were 29.5 per 100,000 in 1911 and 10.7 in 1929. Admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholic psychosis declined from 10.1 per 100,000 in 1919 to 4.7 in 1928. Now those might have decreased anyway. There was an anti-drinking movement and those numbers were dropping.
c) The amount of production in the USA before and after prohibition. My argument is that prohibition semi-permanently shifted USA consumption patterns down. Alcohol was heavily taxed both before and after prohibition so we have very good data on usage. Once alcohol became legal people bought less than half what they had before.
A good source for a lot of data is: http://www.nber.org/papers/w3675.pdf?new_window=1
I've never seen any study that didn't show a large drop. Which ones are you looking at that say there were no effects?
Very good point. It helps on both ends.
Addicts have a much higher rate of staying off than alcoholics and smokers.
Much like the teenage binge drinking rate is almost non-existent in places where it's not a taboo.
That's not quite true. In places where alcohol is normalized usage is much higher. It may very well be that having teenagers binge 3x a year is far preferable to having them drink to intoxication 100x a year.
And they used to be sold in drug stores. With no prescription.
Yes. And the 19th century is filled with books about rampant abuse of laudanum, and opium parlors. I'm not sure how that disproves my point about increased usage.
Would there be so many meth addicts if 'better' drugs were easy and cheap to get?
Probably not. The question is whether there would so many more amphetamine users that it would swamp the current meth problems.
And no question that ability to function of addicts would increase with legalization. I agree there.
I don't know how you make that leap that the current non-users are the future non abusers. Many people are potential abusers but don't have enough exposure for that potential to be actualized. Take gambling problems. There are far more problem gamblers among kids and adults who grow in Las Vegas than similar populations in say New York.
I don't see this article giving any figures at all. They just indicate their aren't hordes, and I'd agree with that.
Here are some figures which show the increases:
http://www.beckleyfoundation.org/bib/doc/bf/2010_Caitlin_211621_1.pdf
I agree. But it proves that education doesn't always work which was the original claim.
Sugar obviously the best first step is to stop the subidies and move towards heavy taxes on food that have low ANDIs.
Remember this is an example of where education has failed.
As an aside I think we should stop subsidizing corn syrup. Then we should tax its usage, heavily. I don't think we need a ban, but I'd like to see the usage drop by 90+%.
I'm curious to know if you think that criminalization of speed has worked out as well or better than the criminalization of alcohol
I have no way of knowing. Through most of human history alcohol has been legal. Since sugars convert into alcohol if allowed to rot without oxygen (like in a container) there is no way to stop people from making alcohol in low quantities. Speed seems to be more complex to manufacture and thus controls were easier.
Once amphetamines started to exist in 1908 their use exploded in the population. The army fed them to soldiers during the Korean war. There were diet pills loaded with them that women developed heart problems from. Kids used them to study for tests. We know what heavy alcohol usage looks like we don't know what happens with unlimited speed. What happens if it doesn't get progressively banned? What are the numbers of users?
If amphetamines remain America's primary means of dieting as obesity grows. Or if amphetamines replace coffee as a way to get longer hours out of employees? Heck yeah the ban was a huge success.
On the other hand if the amphetamine ban is what created smoked low quality meth then it is making the problem far worse.
Where do you get the deformed and retarded babies from? The most worrisome drugs ion general make a drug using woman unlikely to give live birth at all.
Huh? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure
Meanwhile, the one recreational drug with a proven track record of causing problems for a baby is legal.
I disagree with "one". But absolutely alcohol is bad and I'm thrilled that through education and social pressure we've been able to reduce drinking among pregnant women. That's an example where education and social pressure worked really well, so legal remedies weren't needed.
Many non-recreational drugs also cause harm to a fetus and they remain in use.
Sure. I take a pill currently which is 100% fatal to infants if used by nursing mothers. But it is by prescription, and that is probably one of the many reasons why.
____
Most vice enforcement does not cause the level of breakdown between law enforcement and community that drug enforcement has.
I'm not sure. I'd argue the anti-contraception movement of the mid 19th to mid 20th century was likely more serious in similar ways. I'll agree it is rare.
They didn't (for example) commission Dali to produce 'Hooker madness'.
Yeah. The Victorian moralizers restructured society and wages so as to make early marriage a norm for the lower classes. They didn't produce a few propaganda films they changed the whole economic wage structure to get the rate of prostitution down from what it was in the early 19th century. I'm not sure how that example advances your point. What the Victorians did in fighting prostitution goes way beyond what's being done for the war on drugs.
No question prohibition is more expensive than education. Where education can be effective I and more or less everyone thinks it should be used. I'm not sure I know of anyone on the anti-drug education side.
Most cars have speed limiters. Alcohol and smoking are heavily regulated. As is television. Sex is regulated regarding types that are seen as harmful (primarily involving minors).
Yeah that is the world we live in.
I agree. Conspiracy for dealing should not carry a 24 year sentence. The US criminal justice system has insane sentences. I think a real injustice was done.
If 30m people starting using meth yes we could get 6m death in a year. Obviously we wouldn't sustain that rate. We don't have a plague or anything right now killing huge chunks of people.
I agree it is unlikely but unlikely ain't impossible.
I don't agree that alcohol creates euphoria at all. Certainly not beyond a low level of extra happiness and no I don't agree that higher doses of alcohol create more.
If it did... things might be much more similar.
That's quite possibly true. And better yet would be more diluted forms of cocaine like chewing cocoa leaves. If that happens on its own, great. If it requires a little push from regulation I can live with that.
The debate is about what if it doesn't happen.
That's correct. First of all tiers. Where say pot and MDMA are lightly regulated. More serious regulation for drugs that have some risks like LSD and narcotics possibly cocaine say like we do with alcohol and tobacco. And then for a small class of drugs like meth or glue we continue the current policies.
Through all this, you still want to solve it with regulation?
Yes. If we agree that what happened after prohibition was a success... the alcohol industry in the USA is heavily regulated. What we had before prohibition was bad. In the post prohibition world usage dropped in part because government discourages usage but doesn't prohibit it.
its unjustified meddling in peoples personal lives and rights over their own body and mind.
What in your system would constitute justified meddling?
Yes. Look at the number of who drink. The CDC did a study where they estimated the percentage of smokers in a hypothetical USA where:
a) Tobacco companies could freely advertise
b) Age restrictions were never passed or kept where they had been in the 20's
c) Addictive chemicals could still be added
d) Smoking was permitted or encouraged in most workplaces and restaurants...
They came up with an 80% smoking rate. Like I said, refined sugars are used heavily by far more than that percentage.
Do I think 80% would do meth? No but 5% but would disastrous.