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So, what your proposal means in practice?
Cannabis is already illegal in Kyrgyzstan where your friend lives. He was able to easily evade these laws.
Therefore, valiant law enforcement of Kyrgyzstan should be more active and less lazy, should be given more power and really put their remaining gloves off, should double, quartuple and octuple their efforts.
Kyrgyzstan needs more arrests, more early morning raids, more prisons, more torture, more rape, more gouging of eyes and cutting off tongues, more skinning people alive, more boiling people alive in cauldrons. For great justice, for great freedom of free choices.
East Asian countries managed to do it, you would say. Japan, Singapore etc. are, for all practical purposes, drug free paradises.
True, and they are also completely gun free countries - something you, if I remember your stance correctly, very much disapprove of.
(IIRC, you strongly supported gun ownership not only for mainstream self defense reasons, but as a mean for the people to independently and preemptively hunt down bad hombres, very much in @KulakRevolt style. Someone with such attitude also supporting War of Drugs is not something I can grok.)
And this is connected. You cannot have war on drugs when everyone is armed, if you want to sent people to hell prison if they ingest the wrong substance, you need to disarm them first to the last nail clipper.
My view? Old timey internet view, I had no reason to update.
Drugs are bad.
Drug dealers, drug gangs, drug cartels are among the worst scum of the world.
War on drugs (started century ago for openly and proudly racist reasons and on completely false pretenses that make WMDs in Iraq look like pinnacle of transparency) is worse by several magnitudes, on every metric you can imagine.
How hard is it to simply shoot the drug dealers? Their whole revenue model is based upon getting access to the least valuable, least intelligent sections of society. That's also the recruiting base for the rank and file. In one case I'm aware of, the idiot drug dealers did their whole meeting/buying and selling under a visible, working CCTV camera.
The stupidest, drug-addled people are able to find drug dealers! Why can't police, with their wiretapping, forensics, drones, satellites, training and organization?
I've brought this up before and people say 'it can't be done', that we can't credibly threaten death for anyone who doesn't rat out their supplier, that billion-dollar bureaucracies can't just force their way up the supply chain and root out the whole network, killing anyone who doesn't comply.
Well it can be done! Shooting drug dealers is not hard. Rival gangs understand how to do it, that's how they secure their market share. They intimidate dealers from other gangs so they won't sell in their turf. States can do it, the Chinese did it. Opium is not a big problem in China anymore.
The war on drugs is not a serious effort, I agree. But it does not follow that serious efforts are impossible.
It is simple and easy to root out drug trafficking for rich, well-organized countries if they make a genuine effort. Even a moderately wealthy, organized country can manage it. It is only that American-style liberal democracies struggle with this fairly simple concept - these are the same states who managed to lose a war against impoverished, illiterate Afghan goatherders with no backing from anyone. That's because we didn't know what we wanted to do or why we were there, it was a clusterfuck of trying to manipulate the media, massage interest groups, make things look good, spend money on clients, reduce casualties. The war on drugs is the same.
Easy. Without shooting whoever-is-disliked-by-local-police? Hard.
We already have 'shooting whoever is disliked by local police and planting weapons on the body'. That's why they put body cameras on police, to prevent that sort of thing. I'm not saying that body cameras are a bad idea. Maybe there should be a camera drone with a recharging port on the car that police can use as well. It could also provide another angle for oversight - all too often these cameras are turned off when they're actually needed.
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Cartels and gangs presumably aren't overly worried about getting the wrong guy once in a while.
We're already getting the wrong guy once in a while, it's rather similar to the 'collateral damage' in Afghanistan. There's collateral damage, yet no chance of victory. We're already reaping the rewards of drug addiction, organized crime, policing costs, second order impacts. There are enormous numbers of youths leaving society via overdose. More and more new and exciting drugs are coming online - fentanyl and similar. There's no obvious sign that this trend will change.
If we turn the 'war' into a war, we would be able to win as opposed to spinning our wheels in the mud, wrecking a great many people's lives without even achieving our ostensible goals.
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The amount of guns has very little to do with overall violence. Homicide rate in the US white population (1-2 guns per citizen) is about the same as in Czech Republic (.2 gun per citizen, only 1-2% of population licensed to own guns, illegal guns are rather rare).
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With that, do you think you deserve any charity at any point hereafter, or would I be justified in writing you off as a two-bit leftist crank?
Tone that down, yo. Yes, the logical leap they're making is questionable, but that isn't justification for this kind of antagonism.
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If you wish the end (of drug free world) you must wish the means. There is no third way.
If being skeptical about war on drugs narrative makes me "leftist", so be it.
BTW, happy new year to you, hopefully it will be better than this one.
This fictional dialogue sounds absurd, because you are not engaging the actual arguments for drug war and penal system in general. Here, check out this one instead.
Now, you might of course dispute the effectiveness of the prevention effect, or argue that it is wrong to sacrifice someone to serve as an example, even if it will prevent great amounts of suffering, but if you prefer to insist that it is just about pure sadism, and there is nothing more to it. instead of engaging the argument, you might as well go back to Reddit.
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Claims that one's outgroup is motivated by sadism instead of whatever they claim their motives are should be a warning sign about the state of one's epistimological soul, as there are many more occasions where one wants to believe it than when it is actually true.
My outgroup...
Who is the outgroup here?
1/People who support war on drugs?
Official purpose of this enterprise is protecting life and health (one of original purposes more than century ago when WOD began was to stop race mixing, this had been, for some reason, dropped).
Now, does it work? It does not seem to work. After century of war, drugs are more plentiful and more dangerous than ever, drug fueled violence and death is higher than ever all over the world, drug powered organized crime groups, bot state and non state, are more wealthy, powerful and influential than ever.
Reasonable people would reconsider their premise, reasonable people would ask: maybe we are doing something wrong? And people who do not want to reconsider, people who want to continue the course - there can be some doubt about their real motives.
2/People who support prisons, especially American prisons as they currently exist?
Official purpose of prisons is to make prisoners into better people, turn them into good law abiding citizens.
This is obviously not happening. Now, people who know well what is going on inside and heartily approve of it, people who love witty prison rape jokes? There is absolutely no doubt possible what motivates them.
Try 1914, with the Harrison Narcotics Act.
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Official primary purpose of prisons is to keep criminals out of public and keep them from doing various crimes against the non-criminals. Prisons would look very different if their official primary purpose were rehabilitation.
Official secondary purpose is to turn criminals into non-criminals, and it would take a lot more money to do that. Would it be worth it? Depends on efficacy of methods used. Study which prisons worldwide release good people at end of sentence, which ones release recidivists. Copy the formers’ methods, not the latter… but correct for confounding factors! Note prison demographics of “best” prisons: all factors and mixes/combos of factors, regardless of whose biases they affirm.
Also remember that prison gangs basically run America’s criminal underworld. Correct for that.
Thought you were going to link this piece from our own Kulak.
I would have if I could have found it. That’s actually the piece I was thinking of.
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