Drug users and tax payers. Is it time to make the pushers pay for the party?

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Greatest I am, Mar 20, 2012.

  1. Greatest I am Valued Senior Member

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    3,740
    Drug users and tax payers. Is it time to make the pushers pay for the party?

    The drug trade is controlled by Governments and their laws. They are controlling drug pushers. Our masters profit while we suffer financially and morally. Drug users and tax payers pay heavily for rich elitist parties.

    Tax payers have been underwriting the taxes that the drug trade has not been paying for a long time. That is thousands of dollars to the tax payer every year. The Governments are thus punishing the taxpayer twice. We pay them to war against us.

    For a war we are losing and that was never justified and is counter to Governmental reports. Governments are not taking their own advice.

    Drug users and tax payers have been paying the largest price in this war while the rich get richer.

    Tax payers and drug users.

    Had enough of this yet?

    http://imgur.com/a/90sTN



    Regards
    DL

    http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/royal-commission-on-the-nonmedical-use-of-drugs

    books.google.ca/books?id=L_5gu-eUfE8C&am...cannabis&f=false
     
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  3. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    If you want to control drug use by regulation, it is stupid to punish the sellers of drugs and not the users. The economics are clear, the enforcement against dealers is a cost to them that ultimately pushes prices for the drugs through the roof. While most dealers wind up being losers in that scenario: (A) the high prices make for potentially large profits that that encourages dealers to use violence to defend those profits, and (B) even though the average dealer loses, a minority, bouyed by the high prices, become very wealthy.

    The winners in that game are far more conspicuous than the losers (much as it's far easier to see rock stars and Hollywood superstars than it is to see all the musicians and actors whose careers never took off), and the "profession" begins to look relatively more attractive than it should.

    Punish the users though, and drug prices fall. There will then still be dealers, but the dealers will be earning far less money.

    In the U.S., though, I think we have rational two choices...only one of which is politically feasible. We have a mixed system where we punish users and dealers, but dealers are treated far more harshly. We can either switch to a system that is more focused on punishing users than dealers (which doesn't have to mean prison time, we could simply assess massive fines against them) or we could legalize the trade and regulate only the directly adverse consequences (like regulating those who would drive or operate heavy machinery while high). Only the latter is on the table, and therefore feasible, because people don't really grok the economics.

    I do agree that maintaining the status quo is simply pissing money away.
     
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  5. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    They've deregulated everything else....
    Why not simply wipe the anti-drug laws off the books and let private enterprise duke it out for market-share? Save a bundle of public money on apprehension, legal processing and "corrections"; free up the cops, jails and customs officials for hunting terrorists, controlling crowds and roughing up protesters. Plus, you can tax the profits. In case of a bout of bleeding-heart liberalism at some future date, you can still have rehabilitation programs.
     
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  7. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    As I said, you can simply stop jailing users and fine them. That should collect as much or more revenue as the taxes and would lower drug use below market levels if the fines were both high and exclusively imposed on users. Plus, if we were ever to legalize, we still need to design a whole new regime of regulations and put them in place to mirror the treatment of alcohol...and that is mostly done at the level of the 50 states, some of which will want to see the drugs only from state-run stores (as some states do with alcohol).

    For that matter though, if we are freeing up cocaine, what justification is there for requiring prescriptions for other (far less dangerous) drugs, like Paxil, Viagra, ProVigil, Zocor, Norvasc, Ritalin, etc.?

    Legalization requires a lot of work at a lot of levels.

    Legalization
     
  8. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    Okay, so the biggest opposition will come from big pharma? Yes, that's likely. But then they could take over and produce to FDA standard the drugs that are now outlawed, therefore unregulated and sometimes contaminated.
    As for laws, why not simply extend the same ones that already apply to alcohol?
    These are made-up problems, caused by J. Edgar and the boys not wanting to lose their budget and power when prohibition was repealed.

    Fining the users is impractical, since the ones that are easy to catch are broke and will have to commit more crimes to cover the fine as well as their habit. And what do you spend the fines on? More police to catch more users to fine. Still the same people profit.
     
  9. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    3,634
    I'm not sure. Cocaine hasn't been shown to be either "safe" or "effective" for the treatment of a known ailment in clinical trials in a way that would satisfy the FDA (in fact, it's can be dangerous and is known to be addictive). So, if it were legal, why should any pharmaceutical be held to a higher standard? That means no more FDA testing for safety which the pharmaceutical companies would love.

    I think it's unlikely that big pharma will get into illicit drugs. They can't patent them, and they won't have a monopoly. They don't even like marketing drugs for which the patents have expired, let alone getting into unpatentable substances.

    They certainly would have a research edge in creating newer, more pleasurable, more addictive substances, patenting them, and marketing those.

    They may do that, but it has to be done state by state, as alcohol regulation presently is. plus, do you regulate them like alcohol, or like drugs. Alcohol doesn't go through years of clinical trials to prove it's not lethal.

    Do you really want Pfizer to patent a new more addictive, more potent Meth+ and not do any safety testing?

    It seems to me that once research labs and budgets are unleashed, more addictive substances are inevitable. We could outlaw addictive substances, but then that includes many illicit drugs we're talking about legalizing. We could outlaw making them more addictive, but most of these substances have been refined over the years to make them more addictive. Crack is more addictive to chewing raw coca leaves, for example.

    I think at a minimum we need to extend the current alcohol laws to cover legalized drugs, but I am not sure that's the end of what would be needed.

    Having dealt with people with serious addictions, I don't think that's entirely correct. People don't get addicted "because the Feds made it illegal" they did so because they are by nature adrenaline junkies, and they wanted to experience the highs.

    That is not always true. Cocaine users are not, in general, poor. Second, all we have to do is garnish their wages or put liens on their property (just like we do with criminal fines already). As for what we'd do with the cash, we'd spend it on roads, and the military, and government salaries and everything else in the federal budget. In fact we'd save money because we wouldn't need as much prison space. Some people would be unable to pay, that's true, but that is also true with respect to every criminal fine, and we get by.

    If people willfully defy the fines, then we incarcerate (in jail or by house arrest) as a backup. (Or find some other punishment, publishing their names in the paper, revoking their driver's licenses, forcing them to sit in a public dunk tank on display to be ridiculed...but incarceration is more likely.)

    The point is that if you shift the cost of punishment to the users, and leave the dealers alone, the demand curve shifts down. By taking penalties off dealers, the supply curve also shifts down. The net result is very prices for these drugs, and very low prices make it harder for dealers to become extremely rich. When there is less upside in the game, dealers are less likely to risk things like murder just to make a meager profit.

    It's not clear, though, whether people would be doing less drugs. That could decline, increase or stay the same.

    This is pie in the sky, though, as this is the solution we'd never use, but it's completely feasible in theory.
     
  10. Greatest I am Valued Senior Member

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    3,740
    Yet you favor it to a change of even more repression, costs and legal abuse instead of the medical model.

    You war against yourself. Enjoy.

    Regards
    DL
     
  11. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    On the other hand, the illegal drugs, when used by otherwise healthy individuals can and do lead to problems. Addiction is not something that happens because of the illegality; it's innate to the nature of many drugs. The lives touched are not just that of the user either, but the user's children and spouse, with concomitant adverse effects on other family, friends, etc. None of these problems would go away with legalization...a meth addict would still be a meth addict.

    In other words, there is a "negative externality" to most recreational drug use. Where there is a negative externality, imo, there is room for legislative intervention in the choices people would make.

    (I am in fact not opposed to legalization, but I am opposed to recreational drug use, whether legal or not. It's a disgusting habit of people who are wasting their potential and harming those around them in the process. In that belief, I simply do not see legalization as the only option to the current useless and wasteful "war on drugs." That said, I think much the same of those who smoke cigarettes, and I am okay with those being legal too.)

    In any event, I am not at war with myself at all, as the hardest drug I use is the occasional aspirin, and as I indicated I think a "user" based enforcement system would pay for itself (and think of the jobs it saves in law enforcement). My lack of a drug habit wouldn't change if they were legalized. I may be at metaphorical war with people who want to be users *and* don't want there to be legal consequences. To them I say that even if drugs are made legal, that will not make their use ethical.
     
  12. desi Valued Senior Member

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    1,616
    You want to make the pushers pay? I've heard the CIA has deep pockets so go for it.
     
  13. Greatest I am Valued Senior Member

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    3,740
    Do you see it as ethical that 50 thousand Mexicans have to die in the last few years so that California's largest cash crop for the last 50 years can be maintained and protected?

    Regards
    DL
     
  14. Greatest I am Valued Senior Member

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    3,740
    Is that the same CIA that sold arms for cocaine?

    Regards
    DL
     
  15. desi Valued Senior Member

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    1,616
    You don't say.

    "CIA are drug smugglers." - Federal Judge Bonner, head of DEA

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_UbAmRGSYw
     
  16. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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  17. Greatest I am Valued Senior Member

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    3,740
    Thanks for this.

    Unfortunately, it is the tip of the iceberg my friend.

    Regards
    DL
     
  18. desi Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,616
    I heard the Chinese have an effective way of dealing with drug addicts.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/world/asia/08china.html?_r=0

    "Han Wei, 38, a recovering heroin addict who was released from a Beijing detention center in October, said the guards would use electric prods on the recalcitrant. “At least they’d give us helmets so we wouldn’t injure our heads during convulsions,” he said.

    Meals consisted of steamed buns and, occasionally, cabbage-based swill. Showers were allowed once a month. And the remedy for heroin withdrawal symptoms was a pail of cold water in the face. “They didn’t give me a single pill or a bit of counseling,” Mr. Han said.

    Despite the deprivations, Mr. Han, a former nightclub owner, said his two-year sentence achieved the desired goal: it persuaded him to kick a habit he began in 1998. “I’m never going back,” he said."
     
  19. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    Do you see legalization as the only solution to that problem? I don't.
     
  20. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    What else would you suggest?
     

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