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from the stop-treating-medical-issues-as-legal-problems dept.
The old rat-with-drug-laced-water "experiment" is a sham. The only choice the rat in the empty cage has is drinking plain water or drinking drugged water. They never show you a CONTROL where there is a rat with a cage full of cool rat toys and rat friends.
Johann Hari reports via Alternet:
The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection. [...] just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop [smoking by] using nicotine patches.
[...]Nearly 15 years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe [...] They decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug addicts and spend it instead on reconnecting them--to their own feelings and to the wider society.
[...]The [sic] most crucial step is to get [addicts] secure housing [as well as] subsidized jobs so they have a purpose in life and something to get out of bed for. I watched as they are helped, in warm and welcoming clinics, to learn how to reconnect with their feelings after years of trauma and stunning them into silence with drugs.
[...]An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that, since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen and injecting drug use is down by 50 percent.
[...]The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country's top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings that we would expect: more crime, more addicts; but when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass--and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal's example.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Saturday February 14 2015, @01:56AM
Amazing right? It took what...like 10 years for us to figure out that alcohol prohibition did nothing aside from a) creating a lucrative black market with all the crime and death that goes along with it, and b) to turn otherwise upstanding citizens into "criminals". Yet we've spent the last 60 or more years proving all that over and over again, to the point where major parts of the world are controlled by that black market, and to the point where the U.S. has more people in prison per-capita than the Soviet Union in Stalen's time...all the while pretending we're getting somewhere.
All the arguments I hear supporting drug prohibition amount to no more than "b-b-b-but...it's wrong!"...with no regard for the fact that the laws not only do no good, but make everything involved 1000 times worse at 1000 times the cost. Pure craziness.
You could make the same pointless arguments for doing away with "safe haven" laws, which for all intents and purposed decriminalize child abandonment. For some reason, in that case, there seems to be the wisdom that the only thing with a worse outcome than allowing that sort of thing is in fact to attempt to criminalize it. Yet somehow in the drug war we take some retarded moral high ground despite the prooven failures.
Don't get me started...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 14 2015, @08:39PM
Webb--Kenyon Act passed - 1913
(Regulated interstate transport of alcoholic beverages.)
18th Amendment ratified - January 16, 1919
Volstead Act passed - October 28, 1919
Prohibition starts - January 17, 1920
21st Amendment ratified* - December 5, 1933
* The only amendment to have ever been ratified by state conventions.
(North Carolina and South Carolina rejected it, of course.)
Control was turned over to the individual states.
(Some continued to stay "dry" for many years.)
-- gewg_