Gender: Male Location: The Proud Nation of Kekistan
Can I give up the Republican party's antipathy towards weed? Even though I don't support their antipathy towards weed? In exchange for something else I want?
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Shadilay my brothers and sisters. With any luck we will throw off the shackles of normie oppression. We have nothing to lose but our chains! Praise Kek!
THE MOTTO IS "IN KEK WE TRUST"
You can but that'd be a ***** answer because it's a Republican stance that's collapsing already. Within ten years weed will be legal in every state.
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"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
Gender: Male Location: The Proud Nation of Kekistan
Can I give up other republican stances I don't like, such as the private prison system? In exchange for making abortion illegal, cept for danger to mother's life?
__________________
Shadilay my brothers and sisters. With any luck we will throw off the shackles of normie oppression. We have nothing to lose but our chains! Praise Kek!
THE MOTTO IS "IN KEK WE TRUST"
"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
Gender: Male Location: The Proud Nation of Kekistan
Definitely psychedelics too. Want those legalized.
__________________
Shadilay my brothers and sisters. With any luck we will throw off the shackles of normie oppression. We have nothing to lose but our chains! Praise Kek!
THE MOTTO IS "IN KEK WE TRUST"
Yes, all of them. Drug addiction is not a criminal problem: it's a medical problem.
Prohibitions of things that people WILL 100% use only create black markets and violence to protect those black markets. Decriminalizing all of it removes much of the purpose for those black markets.
It's a choice that often starts as a mental problem that ends up a medical problem. If you had the option to implement a policy that reduced, in raw pure numbers, all violent crime by 25%, eliminated or greatly reduced operations for or even eliminated most drug cartels, decreased non-violent deaths, and decreased government costs, would you implement it? It's a tough pill to swallow (pun intended) that decriminalizing things like crack cocaine and heroin is actually a good thing. There's a difference between making legal for personal use and decriminalizing.
That's fair, but what do you replace it with? To me, it seems that while you have removed black market crime, there could be an uptick in violent crime because more people are on drugs (mainly Crack/cocaine, PCP, etc. ) Are we making these drugs more affordable and thus easier for the masses to obtain? Or are we keeping them at the current price and having addicts do crazy things to obtain them? I don't think all users will be criminals, but I do think you up the percentages by allowing more people the opportunity to obtain them (mainly the people who refrained because they were against the law).
Am with you on stopping all from of crimes even if the number were just 0.1% a year. Am all for it. But at the same time, I cant just get behind the idea someone destroying their lives through drugs always falls under mental problems. I just can’t.
Agree with weed. But their have also being people that abuses and have cause some pretty bad damages.
With th gun thing. Some people are just evil, it’s not a medical problem, their just evil.
Both topics are bipartisan that I mentioned. Both democrats nd republicans support, on average, criminalization of drugs. Both also support our foregin military-war-stuff.
That's not what happens, though. Drug use decreases when drug prohibitions end. And the young people use the drugs less, too.
Almost all people who use drugs cannot afford drug use.
You're still thinking in prohibition terms, still. Those are prohibition measures that do not effectively reduce drug use so post-prohibition, your question doesn't matter. When you no longer have a drug prohibition, questions like the one you ask here are moot. Drug prices - for the purposes of making drugs harder to obtain - doesn't even matter.
But here's a breakdown of the costs of drugs over time during the Great Drug Prohibition in the US:
This is not correct. All illegal drug users are criminals because that's how it works. So many are "uncaught and un-prosecuted." That's under the current system.
Just simply decriminalizing is not enough. As The Netherlands discovered, you must provide programs that help people "clean up" AND get mental and medical help.
It costs far less to provide those programs than it does to maintain our Drug Prohibitions.
What if we spent the $7.6 billion that we did in Afghanistan to stop poppy production (which was to stop the opiate empire) on schools or drug-addiction programs? What would have happened with drug use?
Personally, I think the US has a very serious problem with tackling symptoms but not solving the underlying problems. It's sexier to see photos of massive drug busts. And they all throw bust parties, pat each other on the back, and the people in congress jerk each other off to these photos while saying, "See, our policies resulted in this major drug cartel being taken out. We're such good law makers." But, in reality, one falls, 3 spring up. Because the prohibition is still in place. And there's still an incentive for criminals to do criminally crimey crimes. The problem is the prohibition, but they keep tackling people who are taking advantage of the system prohibition creates.
They want to stop drug use? Why don't they stop drug use? Seems simple, right? You don't stop drug use by breaking up drug makers. That's not how it works and that's not how it will ever work.
My position comes from two places:
Libertarianism AND conservatism. Libertarian, obviously, because you shouldn't be able to tell an adult what they can or cannot put into their body. Conservatism because it's simply a fiscal problem to keep Drug Prohibitions in place. Spend a tenth of the amount of money on drug addiction treatment or even better, provide universal healthcare that includes mental healthcare (this is still a conservative position but US conservatives are too dumb, obstinate, and ignorant to realize that UHC is actually a conservative position).
Also, agreed with you about the weed users destroying their lives. I've seen great people get too far into "smoking a bowl" that they got too lazy to do...anything. Laundry, school, exercise, etc. They just wanted to smoke weed all day and sit on their couch. It wasn't that they were lazy before the weed. They weren't. Not at all. They started smoking weed and THEN became lazy. As one of my friends described it, "I get anxious about all the things I have to do so I smoke a bowl to relax. Then after I smoke a bowl, I don't want to do anything. And I don't."
Oh, and SquallX, you're right about evil people, too. It's not that we disagree on the underlying things. We don't. We just disagree on what might be the best path to solve those underlying things.
I personally think that better access to free healthcare and mental healthcare will help with our violence problems. It won't solve it. But it will help with it. The UHC solution MUST include mental health. And America needs to mature on their perspective of mental healthcare. We need to view it as "getting my annual checkup." Instead of, "Well..only crazy people need to see a shrink."