3 thoughts on “Vox Spins a Fantasy About Benefits of the War on Drugs”
"It's not in our interest to legalize," Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert [and probably beneficiary of multi-year, multi-million-dollar DEA grants] at Carnegie Mellon University, told me. "Because the benefits the US gets from having the drugs be less available, not advertised, more expensive outweigh the costs for us of crime and violence and corruption in our own borders."</blockquote
what a pantload- a net benefit? For whom, the people being paid to fight the drug war? All the counsellors and rehab centers? Cops? Judges? Lawyers? Drugs are more prevalent than ever and quality is generally up. All the high prices do is force addicts to resort to crime to pay for their habit. Maybe only 1 in 5 are serving time for direct drug violations, but when you factor in all the other indirect incarcerations that number skyrockets. Those high prices not only drive up crime, they contribute to corruption at all levels. And the legal status of all those illicit drugs just drives users into the shadows, making otherwise law abiding productive citizens into criminals, scaring addicts away from treatment and creating the de facto police state we now have. Just the incredible erosion of our civil liberties alone should be cause to end this ridiculous prohibition, but Vox just hand waves those away like they don't really count.
DEA has a lot of money to throw around at other agencies and make itself popular, just like DHS and DOD. They're burrowed in so deep it may be impossible to get rid of them, like the Coast Guard. Their new honcho was on "60 Minutes" Sunday and argued against legalizing marijuana because it "leads to lower IQs." He's gay, which is interesting and irrelevant, and a recovered alcoholic, which he thinks is relevant but probably is not.
what a pantload- a net benefit? For whom, the people being paid to fight the drug war? All the counsellors and rehab centers? Cops? Judges? Lawyers? Drugs are more prevalent than ever and quality is generally up. All the high prices do is force addicts to resort to crime to pay for their habit. Maybe only 1 in 5 are serving time for direct drug violations, but when you factor in all the other indirect incarcerations that number skyrockets. Those high prices not only drive up crime, they contribute to corruption at all levels. And the legal status of all those illicit drugs just drives users into the shadows, making otherwise law abiding productive citizens into criminals, scaring addicts away from treatment and creating the de facto police state we now have. Just the incredible erosion of our civil liberties alone should be cause to end this ridiculous prohibition, but Vox just hand waves those away like they don't really count.
DEA has a lot of money to throw around at other agencies and make itself popular, just like DHS and DOD. They're burrowed in so deep it may be impossible to get rid of them, like the Coast Guard. Their new honcho was on "60 Minutes" Sunday and argued against legalizing marijuana because it "leads to lower IQs." He's gay, which is interesting and irrelevant, and a recovered alcoholic, which he thinks is relevant but probably is not.