. . . given the abysmal failure of the War On Drugs: is it time to just let this stuff come in, and allow the drug addiction problem to solve itself through natural selection? After all, drugs - particularly 'hard' drugs - are today much easier to find, and far more affordable, than they were at the start of the War On Drugs in 1971.
And then there's this:
Methinks Einstein had the right of it:
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again
and expecting different results.
*Sigh*
Peter
It only works if you require a drug test to receive welfare or any government benefit including medicaid. Then you can thin the ranks. But that's not how we do it, is it?
ReplyDeleteLet it in, let 'em take as much as they want, but NO treatment for ODs. And if they kill somebody while high, death sentence for them.
ReplyDeletemy daughter has medicaid and i resent the implication that every disabled person is a drug addict
ReplyDeletethe pregnant female needs to be incarcerated in a pleasant secure place with good books, soft classical music, and good nutrition.
when the baby arrives it should be immediately adopted--closed adoption-- and the female should receive tubal ligation.
where we used to live in new jersey one hospital had an entire ward of abandoned crack babies. the screaming was constant.
i used to be a social worker. my take is that, instead of funding the wrong end of the stick, we should promise food stamps, a medical card, and welfare to those who, after the first illegitimate child, will undergo tubal ligation instead of birthing another unwanted, addicted baby every few years in order o extend their welfare benefits.
should cut the welfare budget in half in about 20 years.
have i mentioned that i hate recaptcha? my eyes aren't that good any more. you have a lot of older readers and i have unripe cataracts, too. thanks.
It's not an implication that every disabled person is a drug addict. It is that anyone receiving MY tax dollars needs to prove to ME that they are NOT WASTING MY money on drugs. If you don't like having to abide by my rules, don't take my money.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, if you go back and read the first post again, you will see the OP suggested: 1. Allow drugs to come in as Pete put forth in his post, 2. THEN require drug testing to receive welfare and government benefits. THAT post posits a scenario of requiring drug testing before allowing benefits to be collected in an environment where people can freely make the choice for themselves of what drugs they want to partake. Nobody said welfare recipients would be the only ones making that choice; only that if you did decide to do drugs, we're not going to fund the habit out of public coffers.
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2017/09/file-under-opioid-deaths-i-told-you-so.html
ReplyDeleteLast I looked, the War On Murder's been going on since Cain and Abel.
Shall we surrender there too, since it's self-evidently obviously pointless and fruitless?
What About The Wars On Robbery, Rape, Kidnapping, Jaywalking, and the War On Speeding?
Show your work.
If we're going to have a war, let's start shooting the enemy.
Ask me how that's going after a decade of that policy, applied as ruthlessly as the air strikes on the Kuwait-Baghdad Highway in 1991.
Everybody who rolls gets LWOP'ed to the Chateau D'If, last guy holding the bag with no one higher to point to gets whacked, same week.
Drug dealing would suddenly become as prevalent as peddling stolen plutonium, by about two weeks from Friday.
What we have in place of that is the War To Maximize Cartel Profits (with trickle-downs to cops/judges/congressmen: how convenient).
If - and only if - everyone in the so-called "system" could be required to allow Natural Selection to take its course, then OK, run drug dispensaries like liquor stores, remove naloxone from ambulances and fire and police vehicles, and hire low skilled people to run the "Bring Out Your Dead" wagons a la Monty Python, dump the contents in the landfill.
ReplyDeleteBut.......there isn't anyone in the "system" with the guts to do that. Were it to be implemented there would be a magnificantly high death toll for a few months, followed by a steady low number per week. In other words, a self-solving problem.
The mere hint of deaths would bring the hand wringers and pearl clutchers out of the woodwork to insist that "we must do something." I would suggest that "something" be defined as each of the worriers taking two druggies home with them to live in their house.
Which they could do right now, today.
The War on Drugs has been unsuccessful for the same reason we lost the Vietnam War and we are still in Iraq and Afganistan (and Korea, oh yeah, Korea.) Because our politicians and our 'people' are, sorry to be so vitriolic, Pussies. Big, assed Pussies.
ReplyDeleteWars should be fought violently, hard, with harsh outcomes for the violators and the enemy.
I worked at a local Drug Enforcement unit. Saw all sorts of horrible crap (I don't know how many videos of pot and meth smoke filled rooms with toddlers careening in and out of billowing clouds and stupid jackasses laughing.) Saw families lose their houses, not from the enforcement, but because of the actions of the drug-seekers (theft, robbery, murder of family members, arson, et al.)
And then I saw our wonderful court system plead down major felonies to misdemeanors, drug treatment, fines (which were never paid) and probation. To people who have been arrested multiple times for the same crap, gone to treatment (hey, no riders about successful treatment, most of them just showed up for the first day or so) and the cycle continued. One guy we arrested 3 times in one week, with guns and huge amounts of drugs each time (and a convicted felon, by the way) and he would bond out (what????) and be at it the next day. How did he pay his bond, do you ask? Well, some bimbo living in public housing would show up with $20k or so each time and bail him out. How can you live in public housing if you have $20k in cash?
Harsher penalties for users. Make the prison sentences harsh. Working outside cleaning up waste, handsorting garbage for recyclables, working on road crews, cleaning brush and dead trees from forests. Bring back the chain gangs.
And to the filth that brings this crap to the end-user? Death. Death to the peddlers of Death.
And to people who overdose on this crap? If they don't have a prescription, screw them. I feel the same way about the sloppy drunk who just poisoned themselves with alcohol. Let them die.
Right now there is a public health hazard going down in liberal cities where horrible diseases are being passed around and increasing in number due to drugs and people crapping and pissing in public areas. This has to stop now.
Eliminate these enemies of our society, by incarceration or death.
Aesop, by your logic we should reinstitute alcohol prohibition. LOTS of people die due to alcohol related disease and accident.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we were smarter as a nation in the 1930s, able to learn from our failures. We sure aren't today.
Prohibition was one of the Grand Slam of Progressive idiocies: the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth amendments.
ReplyDeleteProhibition failed, not only because it tried to prohibit something readily available since Noah's time (and hey, look up how that worked out for him, and get back to us) because it was never taken seriously, by anyone, nor ever would be, precisely as this imaginary "war" isn't, and never has been.
If you want to solve the alcohol problem, try the same approach I suggested: make DUI attempted murder, which it is, and let it be chargeable as such. Seize the vehicle as contraband, prima facie. A second offense becomes a ten-year sentence. A third strike gets you LWOP'ed. We'd have the DUI rate of Singapore or Saudi Arabia in about a month, if not a day.
(Bonus point: do a study with graph coupling the criminalization of DUI under MADD impetus, with the blossoming of the "homeless" problem, and tell me how many people have descended to third world living under the new model of zero tolerance. Extrapolate that by including drugs along with alcohol. Now see if you can figure out who the "homeless" are, and why "helping" them merely prolongs the problem, and society suffering under it.)
By my logic, no such Prohibition is required. But thanks for trying the reductio ad absurdum defense.
Simply fight a war on drugs, as a war on drugs.
No more, no less.
We've never done that for so much as one continuous minute at any point in our national history.
If not, stop calling it one, and thereby building a Straw Man to hastily dispatch and abandon. That's two fallacies for the price of one.
If you think we can somehow go back to the country that existed in 1900, explain how that will work with the current crop of citizenry: i.e., what makes you think that the people now are even a fraction as responsible as the ones from 117 years or more ago? And if that model worked so well, why did we change it? Because it was working, or because it had already empirically failed long since?
But if your point about Prohibition being the template were true, then please explain to the class how abandoning all criminal penalties works better than the current model, and what that form of government is called.
Or instead of gainsaying the proposition, show me how the legalization of everything argument will work, in practice.
Tell me how everyone having ready access to opiates like heroin and fentanyl, and everything else, will make society safer, more productive, and better, because people have shown over the last century that they can be trusted with that kind of liberty.
I'm open to logical persuasion.
Your ball, sir.
OK - let's come at it from a different perspective.
ReplyDeleteSay, for the sake of the discussion, there is a drug dealer who supplies a daily fix to 100 addicts. Arrest and incarcerate him and you still have 100 addicts needing/wanting their daily fix. Some other guy spots the first drug dealers mistakes and takes over supplying our 100 addicts. He will last a while until he in turn is taken out and you STILL have the problem of 100 addicts wanting their fix.
This simply breeds a smarter, faster, better adapted drug dealer without addressing the fundamental problem of 100 addicts wanting their drugs.
If the market is not there then the drug trade would wither and, if not exactly die, be reduced to a very low level.
So eliminate the addicts by whatever method you deem suitable(kill them, let them die, Government taking over supplying the drugs and lacing it with poison at an irregular but frequent interval, incarcerate them in a deep coal mine and let them live in the society they want, simply sending down a cage full of food every week etc.).
Unless and until the powers that be actually start making the game not worth the candle for the addicts, then the motivation for the drug dealers (i.e. profit and easy money with a guaranteed customer base) to continue operating will exist in perpetuity.
Phil B
Phil, doesn't that presuppose that most dealers are not themselves addicts paying for their habit?
ReplyDelete'cus most dealers are addicts paying for their habit, at least in the injectables and snortables.
Heroin is cheaper than beer. Prescription medication is the ultimate gateway drug. If we want to know who to blame, we need a mirror, a doctor's phone number or a family portrait.
Right, Paul.
ReplyDeletebecause when your femur is sticking out of your thigh, it's your fault for getting hit by a drunk driver, so you should suffer in silence, for the good of society.
Well-played.
Heroin I s cheaper than beer, because there's very little effort made to remove the distribution chain.
@Anonymous:
Tell me who wants to be the next 10 dealers after the first 10 get it in the neck.
My society is down ten wastes of skin.
If, despite that, you have an endless conga-line supply of dealers waiting in the wings, drugs aren't your notional society's biggest problem, are they?
Paul, Dammit!, add the foolish do-gooders who overrode physicians' protests back in the 1990s and insisted that no patient be allowed to be in pain, and required the prescription of far too many opioids, so that patients 1) wouldn't complain about being in pain and 2) ran a very, very high risk of getting hooked. And then the same sort of do-gooders wailed about too many people being addicted, leading to people with legitimate need for pain management having trouble getting those levels of drugs that they needed, and follies like people in hospice with weeks or less to live being told "We can't give you more morphine because of the risk of your becoming addicted." *facepalm*
ReplyDeleteLittleRed1