The Global War on Drugs has failed

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Certainly a respectable stance to take.

Good job, imo, and I have had exactly the same kind of thing happen in "church" (about religious stuff)!

My younger daughter came away from a similar presentation related to motorcycles with a "stay completely away for the sake of personal safety" kind of thinking, and I wish I had been there in her class that day to do exactly as you had done.

I am not really convinced that we are fighting a 'war on drugs' in any serious way. I am looking forward to Peter Hitchens upcoming book, 'the war we never fought' on the subject.

It might need a cultural change to be more tolerative but accepting persé to addiction, but I guess it will work when people don't need as compensation it in the first place.

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Yeah, addiction is a broad term so I like to narrow it down to which has a coupling with substance addiction (nicotine for example).

I'm not saying a replacement, but an alternative. Although it's hard to say that drug usage only affect the users themselves, since directly and indirectly it has influence on others in different gradations ( the users behaviour, mood, judgement, health, etc. before, while and after the usage have a mixed (positive and negative) influence on others in short-term and long-term states).

Although subjective and hard to solidify, not unimportant to talk about since this subject isn't a local issue.

Friendly reminder, there is only one candidate(well two if you want to count Gary Johnson) who promises to end the drug war and pardon all non-violent drug offenders in federal prisons. That man is Ron Paul. He also promises to end the all the wars and foreign occupations; and restore our civil liberties. Sometimes I feel like a broken record here but I don't understand how anybody could support Obama besides blind partisanship.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cldRh1SkRok&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Adam Kokesh, the guy asking the question, is a pretty awesome dude btw.

Last edited by Jacoby on 02 Jun 2011, 9:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

The problem, however, is the complete (or at least the inevitable) failure of any kind of social engineering trying to bring that about.

Blinded by emotion, people say yes to alot of things .

Drug prohibition might be the stupidest, most destructive law of any modern liberal democracy.

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Atleast if it isn't reached faster then drugs can, so I guess that will be tricky.
And since everybody feels down from time to time from disease, stress, trouble, loss or simply growing up.
I guess it will be an endless battle, so all you can do is preventive actions and offer alternatives. I'm thinking about introducing classes for dealing with daily life situations and to learn to improvise when it's not a standard situation.

the same can be said of any action a human does, bhought a new microwave?, well that will hurt someone somewhere, everything does.
my point is when it comes to these all to subjective issues, there is no right and wrong, it all depends on the individual.

it is not unimportant to think of the causal consequences of the war on drugs either, how many farmers, forced to grow drugs by poverty(for some that poverty is a direct consequence of seemingly inocent actions here in the west), have been robbed, killed or taken away from their families?
how many drug users have been demonized and psychologically "killed" by an attitude that only help a fraction?

one could go on...

now to be honest (and playing contrarian aside)
what i got from your posts was more along the lines of developing a better attitude, that better attitude would in turn allow for genuine support where other support might have been rejected.
i feel that to be the only realistic (and in many ways best) way of dealing with a rising drug consumption.
some drugs could benefit from the same kind of regulation found on alcohol or ciggarettes.
many of the health risks associated with some particular drugs, come from the fact that they are illegally produced.

You misunderstood it. It is not a war against drugs, it is a war on drugs.

Welcome to WP!

Doing drugs isn't unhealthy. Doctors prescribe them all the time. I'm taking Concerta with nothing but good effects. If someone takes drugs the provenance of which is unknown, e.g. cocaine or heroin cut with who knows what, that is what causes the problems in addition to the fact that there is no medical supervision. People who do illegal drugs ingest toxic substances, share needles, don't eat properly, don't take care of personal hygiene, have unprotected sex, prostitute themselves(not that that's a bad thing but it is when you're riddled with disease) and commit all kinds of criminal acts in the pursuit of both the money to pay for the drugs and the drugs themselves.

People who take pharmaceutically pure drugs, like heroin, under medical supervision, which was the case in the UK until the late sixties, early seventies: UK drug addicts were few in number and legally treated with the drugs by their doctors. Drug addiction wasn't a huge problem at all until the hippy culture emerged and the moralists were able to act on the back of public disapproval and fear.

Unfortunately, the genie is going to be very difficult to put back in the bottle. However, with modern pharmaceutical knowledge and a legal market, I am sure many drugs could be developed which are better and safer than alcohol and nicotine. They would have short half-lives enabling people to have a pleasant high for an evening and be back to normal the next day. Prescribed by doctors, taken under medical supervision and sold under licence in chemists.

Ask yourself why this hasn't happened? Our glorious leaders would have fewer criminals to scare us with, less reason to take billions in tax to fund police and military activity and a concomitant loss of power which is really the problem.

The hollistic view isn't as false as it might seem, but in gradation global drug use is on an other level then one person buying and using a new microwave.
Since people in general don't fully control themselves in equal ways (even from an individual point of view), it's hard to judge what people will do with it.
Not suggesting mass total control here!!

I know alot of people have a hard time seeing the bigger picture or even want to think of the impact of their own actions since they are trying to make ends meet, but I hope that working to a more stable situation in the future this can be made possible.

Thank you for the recognition, I appreciate that.
Legalisation of drugs and strict guidelines on production, distribution, sale, ownership and usage can make the drugs safer, cleaner and used to a lesser extent. Here in Holland we have a very liberal sale on marihuana but it isn't used as much as I hear in from other countries.
Illegal makes it exciting, being legal makes it ordinairy and less special.

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I hadn't thought about it that thouroughly, but I was implicating real life school classes. Since I think that this is where the most of the drug usage starts - daily living complications.
Ofcourse this will not prevent 100%, but atleast a good part of the trouble depending on the quality of education.

Really?!

I doubt there really is much of any such thing as "prevention" apart from something else being compromised, and I use the experience of my younger daughter's "Driver's Ed" class scaring her completely away from motorcycles as an example of that. True, she might now never be injured simply because she will never ride, but then neither will she ever be able to make her own well-informed decision and/or actually find out for herself about riding. And then ...

I suppose you might be familiar with one of more of the "Scared Straight" kinds of models, and in my own case it was actually one of those that helped drive me toward some experimentation of my own when that particular "class" seemed to make it apparent my having still-previously been told "You shall surely die" might not actually be true. After all, the guy speaking at that time was obviously enjoying "cookies and milk at Grandma's house" now (and even being paid to tell all the rest of us all about all of that).