[Jabberwalker]

Curtman Curtman:

Jabberwalker Jabberwalker:

I will hunt you down and kill you.

You are a crazy person.

No, Im a father. Let's take a poll on here. If some srsehole down on Hastings Street tries to shoot up one of their children with heroin for the first time, how many of you would feel justified to find the sub-human lizard that would do such a thing and kill him?

Someone must "turn on" kids like that or the junkies numbers would dwindle and die off. There are subhuman lizards doing things like that to our precious children and they should be removed from our society with extreme prejudice.

[andyt]

Many paths to addiction, but you make it seem the pusher just pushes drugs on poor victims. The user makes a choice to use. Now that choice may be because their life is such a misery anyway - abuse, poverty, mental illness, etc. But as I've said, cigs are the main gateway to other addictions.

Many pushers are themselves addicts, so are they are "turned on" kid victim or a subhuman lizard?

[saturn_656]

Like the lowlife that picked up a 16 year old girl and got her hooked on drugs. Father attempted using multiple legal means to save her to no effect, and ended up shooting him dead in a confrontation. He got 5 1/2 years jail time for manslaughter.

His daughter recovered, and has been drug free ever since.

http://www.cbc.ca/m/touch/canada/saskat ... /1.1042261

[Curtman]

saturn_656 saturn_656:

Like the lowlife that picked up a 16 year old girl and got her hooked on drugs. Father attempted using multiple legal means to save her to no effect, and ended up shooting him dead in a confrontation. He got 5 1/2 years jail time for manslaughter.

His daughter recovered, and has been drug free ever since.

http://www.cbc.ca/m/touch/canada/saskat ... /1.1042261

Of course. Because of prohibition, that wasn't possible?

Oh wait.....

[saturn_656]

Curtman Curtman:

saturn_656 saturn_656:

Like the lowlife that picked up a 16 year old girl and got her hooked on drugs. Father attempted using multiple legal means to save her to no effect, and ended up shooting him dead in a confrontation. He got 5 1/2 years jail time for manslaughter.

His daughter recovered, and has been drug free ever since.

http://www.cbc.ca/m/touch/canada/saskat ... /1.1042261

Of course. Because of prohibition, that wasn't possible?

Oh wait.....

So if drugs were all legal, he wouldn't have been able to get her hooked?

[Curtman]

saturn_656 saturn_656:

Curtman Curtman:

saturn_656 saturn_656:

Like the lowlife that picked up a 16 year old girl and got her hooked on drugs. Father attempted using multiple legal means to save her to no effect, and ended up shooting him dead in a confrontation. He got 5 1/2 years jail time for manslaughter.

His daughter recovered, and has been drug free ever since.

http://www.cbc.ca/m/touch/canada/saskat ... /1.1042261

Of course. Because of prohibition, that wasn't possible?

Oh wait.....

So if drugs were all legal, he wouldn't have been able to get her hooked?

You think? Prohibition wasn't able to stop him. That's all we know for sure.

[saturn_656]

Curtman Curtman:

You think? Prohibition wasn't able to stop him. That's all we know for sure.

No law can prevent a crime, drug related or not. Example: Laws against speeding don't prevent drivers from speeding, so should we give up on speed limits?

[desertdude]

Yeah, but probably stopped many more clowns than we know from doing so, and I'm on this one that if it even saves one person and one family from this scourge. Then its all been worth it.

Ofcourse the attack also has to focus on demand more that it is now than just supply, demonize it to the extent that someone will think a million times before even trying it, something like they have done with cigarettes only a 1000 times more and criminalize it further, there will be a price to pay for that but in the long run it will be worth it IMO

[Lemmy]

I'd like to know the cost of this naval mission. How many dollars did it cost to net this collar? Is this an ongoing narcotics search mission in international waters by our navy? How much does that cost every day?

And that's a piss-poor equivalency, saturn_656, drug laws and speed limits. You can't possibly compare people in a hurry to people hooked on narcotics. People don't become desperate to speed, so much so that they'd rob you in order to speed. People don't get high on speeding. There's different motivations at work.

Yes, people speed despite the law and people use drugs despite the law. But that doesn't equate them. You need to employs some cost-benefit analysis. We don't piss a gazillion dollars away each year enforcing speed limits. We generate revenue from the effort. There's calculable benefit to enforcing speed limits beyond the obvious safety ones. And we don't throw speeders in jail unless they hurt someone else. When drug users hurt someone else, we have laws against that (robbery, theft, child neglect, etc) in the Criminal Code. Why do we need to bust them if they're not hurting someone else? And people vastly over-estimate even HARD drugs' cost as a social problem. Most HARD drug users have jobs and pay taxes and don't break any other laws than the possession law. So why do we want to put folks doing every other thing in their lives by the law in prison?

Enforcing the law isn't stopping the behaviour, so how about spending that money on things that DO stop the behaviour: education and treatment.

[Jabberwalker]

Lemmy Lemmy:

I'd like to know the cost of this naval mission. How many dollars did it cost to net this collar? Is this an ongoing narcotics search mission in international waters by our navy? How much does that cost every day?

And that's a piss-poor equivalency, saturn_656, drug laws and speed limits. You can't possibly compare people in a hurry to people hooked on narcotics. People don't become desperate to speed, so much so that they'd rob you in order to speed. People don't get high on speeding. And people don't only endanger themselves by speeding.

Yes, people speed despite the law and people use drugs despite the law. But that doesn't equate them. You need to employs some cost-benefit analysis. We don't piss a gazillion dollars away each year enforcing speed limits. We generate revenue from the effort. There's calculable benefit to enforcing speed limits beyond the obvious safety ones. And we don't throw speeders in jail unless they hurt someone else. When drug users hurt someone else, we have laws against that (robbery, theft, child neglect, etc) in the Criminal Code. We don't need to bust them unless they hurt someone else. Enforcing the law isn't stopping the behaviour, so how about spending that money on things that DO stop the behaviour: education and treatment.

We have treaty obligations ... we're part of multilateral agreements ... that lead us to patrolling for pirates, drug smuggling and, constantly, we are included in a standing fleet that patrols the Persian Gulf/Arabian Sea that has been there since the First Gulf War. Each one of these is not productive enough on it's own to stand up to the straight scrutiny of cost of mission against, say, cost of drugs destroyed. It is our obligation as a citizen nation of the World to participate in these activities. Our diplomatic footprint has diminished greatly since we stopped our peacekeepinmg missions. I dare say that it would evaporate completely if we stopped things like drug interdiction patrols. Yes, it doesn't appear to be cost effective but we are citizens of this planet.

[Lemmy]

Hey, fair enough. I don't mind, when a cop's on patrol for speeders, if catches an armed robber while he's at it. I'm not down-playing the navy's presence on patrol. But what did this bust do for Canadians? Let's presume (and I don't know if this is true) that this is a significant bust. Is it 1% of the yearly imported heroin quantity? I doubt it's anywhere close to even 0.0000001%, but let's presume this bust had a measurable impact on supply. The effect of shortening the supply would be to increase the price and decrease the quality (safety) of the product on the street. Will it stop a SINGLE person from getting exactly as much heroin as they want? No. Will it make them poorer to consume it? Yes. For those who will steal/rob/kill for it, do they now have greater motivation to do so? Yes.

So while it makes a nice headline, the navy boys should have just brought the shit home and given it to the addicts on the streets of Vancouver. At least they wouldn't have to break into anybody's homes this week to get high.

[herbie]

800 kms off the Horn of Africa? International waters?
Who's the pirates in this case?

[andyt]

The problems/costs of hard drugs are nothing compared to alcohol or tobacco. Just not that many addicts using compared to those two substances. Just makes for lurid headlines, that's all.

$1:

Alcohol and tobacco are the most widely used psychoactive drugs in Canada, and cause by far the greatest number of harms and costs to the population. The most widely used illicit drug is marijuana which causes relatively few harms for its level of use. By far the most direct harms from licit and illicit drugs occur in high-risk populations such as injectors, street youth, the inner- city poor, and Natives (obviously many of these groups overlap) . The indirect harms and costs of illicit drugs by far outweigh direct harms and are completely disproportionate to their level of use; these indirect harms and costs are the result of drug policy and legislation, not the drugs per se.

http://www.parl.gc.ca/Content/SEN/Commi ... ov98-e.htm

$1:

And alcohol is a drug, one that ranks high along most dimensions of risk. Among intoxicants (that is, excluding caffeine and nicotine), alcohol abuse accounts for more than three-quarters of total substance abuse in the United States, and for more death, illness, crime, violence and arrests than all illicit drugs combined. A drug abuse control policy that ignores alcohol is as defective as a naval policy that ignores the Pacific. - See more at: http://www.the-american-interest.com/ar ... ZKq8T.dpuf


All illicit markets are bad; just how bad depends on the size of the market, the flagrancy of the distribution mechanism, and the social mix of users and dealers. At relatively low cost, regulation and prohibition can be effective in preventing the emergence of new problem drug markets, and sometimes in keeping drugs already entrenched in some areas from extending their geographic reach. But once a drug has an established mass market, more enforcement cannot greatly shrink the problem; existing customers will seek out new suppliers, and imprisoned dealers, seized drugs and even dismantled organizations are replaced. Moreover, the effectiveness of enforcement tends to fall over time as the illicit industries learn to adapt. We have 15 times as many drug dealers in prison today as we had in 1980, yet the prices of cocaine and heroin have fallen by more than 80 percent.

Aggressive enforcement against mass drug markets generates mass imprisonment. Imprisonment is necessarily horrible, and most imprisonment in the United States is worse than necessary. Dealers emerging from prison have limited economic opportunities outside the drug trade, forcing down drug-dealing wages and thus drug prices; that seems to have happened with crack.

- See more at: http://www.the-american-interest.com/ar ... ZKq8T.dpuf

The mantra, “Drug abuse is a chronic, relapsing condition”, is true of only a minority of substance abusers. That group seems typical to casual observers only because its members fill the jails and the treatment programs. Most substance abuse disorders resolve “spontaneously”; that is, without formal treatment. (Of those who have met diagnostic criteria for substance abuse disorder during their lifetimes, fewer than a quarter still do, and only a tiny proportion of those who have recovered have ever been treated professionally.) - See more at: http://www.the-american-interest.com/ar ... ZKq8T.dpuf

hese facts having now been set out, five principles might reasonably guide our policy choices. First, the overarching goal of policy should be to minimize the damage done to drug users and to others from the risks of the drugs themselves (toxicity, intoxicated behavior and addiction) and from control measures and efforts to evade them.

That implies a second principle: No harm, no foul. Mere use of an abusable drug does not constitute a problem demanding public intervention. “Drug users” are not the enemy, and a achieving a “drug-free society” is not only impossible but unnecessary to achieve the purposes for which the drug laws were enacted.

Third, one size does not fit all: Drugs, users, markets and dealers all differ, and policies need to be as differentiated as the situations they address.

Fourth, all drug control policies, including enforcement, should be subjected to cost-benefit tests: We should act only when we can do more good than harm, not merely to express our righteousness. Since lawbreakers and their families are human beings, their suffering counts, too: Arrests and prison terms are costs, not benefits, of policy. Policymakers should learn from their mistakes and abandon unsuccessful efforts, which means that organizational learning must be built into organizational design. In drug policy as in most other policy arenas, feedback is the breakfast of champions.

Fifth, in discussing programmatic innovations we should focus on programs that can be scaled up sufficiently to put a substantial dent in major problems. With drug abusers numbered in the millions, programs that affect only thousands are barely worth thinking about unless they show growth potential.

- See more at: http://www.the-american-interest.com/ar ... ZKq8T.dpuf


Raise the tax on alcohol, especially beer. The average excise tax (Federal plus state) on a can of beer is about a dime. The average damage done by that can of beer to people other than its drinker is closer to a dollar. Those costs consist mostly of crimes, accidents and the health care costs redistributed through insurance—and the one-dollar figure doesn’t count the costs to the families and friends of drinkers. - See more at: http://www.the-american-interest.com/ar ... ZKq8T.dpuf

[saturn_656]

Lemmy Lemmy:

And that's a piss-poor equivalency, saturn_656, drug laws and speed limits. You can't possibly compare people in a hurry to people hooked on narcotics. People don't become desperate to speed, so much so that they'd rob you in order to speed. People don't get high on speeding. There's different motivations at work.

You missed the point. Just because laws are violated doesn't mean you scrap the laws for being "ineffective". That is Curtmans logic, and it's seriously flawed.

$1:

Most HARD drug users have jobs and pay taxes and don't break any other laws than the possession law. So why do we want to put folks doing every other thing in their lives by the law in prison?

Most HARD drug users are otherwise completely law abiding middle/upper class Canadians?

You know many coke, meth, heroin, etc. users?

I don't buy this. Not for one second.

[saturn_656]

Lemmy Lemmy:

So while it makes a nice headline, the navy boys should have just brought the shit home and given it to the addicts on the streets of Vancouver. At least they wouldn't have to break into anybody's homes this week to get high.

The Navy boys should have brought it back, hung it from a crane 20 feet off the ground, and seen how badly they wanted to cover that 20 foot gap to get their next fix.

Wonder if they'd cooperate to get it or kill each other over it.