Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post

Great job putting words in my mouth about something totally unrelated.

Sodomy laws were religion-based. I have never once come out here to defend religious-based laws.

All drugs have a consequence upon society, but hard drugs are especially bad. We can't simply say, "Legalize all drugs for all adults and let them make their own decisions", because then it falls in society's lap to take care of these people when they become addicts.

There is also an incorrect left-wing belief that decriminalizing drugs would end the mass incarceration problem.

Wrong.

Again, most of the people in prison for drug offenses are there because they were dealing. These people were dealing as a way to make quick money that wouldn't be available to them legally. If you take away the drug avenue for making money, they will simply resort to other illegal methods to obtain money, such as robbery, burglary, auto theft, extortion, and scamming. It is a left-wing fantasy that today's drug dealers will morph into productive members of society if drugs are legalized.

Complete decriminalization of drugs in this country would simply lead to a much worse addiction problem than we already have.

Look at the growing addiction to prescription pain medication. This has grown sharply in the past decade due to one factor: Availability. Due to their legal status, these pills are easy to obtain, whether by shady doctors who prescribe them like candy or buying them from someone who obtained them from said doctors.

The same people clamoring for complete legalization of drugs will be the ones demanding that society absorb the new increased addiction problem. If we don't spend loads of money treating these addicts, supporting them on disability when they can't work, and forgiving them for crimes they committed while high, those same people will accuse us of being cold and callous. It's a vicious cycle.

This is not a matter of "freedom", because those who abuse this freedom will look to society to cure them.
Sodomy laws and war on drugs are both laws based morality. There is no tangible damage that either one causes. One has it's basis on religion and the other in western culture. Both are born out of a desire to tell others what they can and can't do at the privacy of their of homes.

Regarding hard drugs what you're essentially saying is that drugs are bad mmmkay and you can tell this by all the horror stories of drug abuse from the last 45 years when drugs have been illegal. I don't quite understand how that is in anyway an argument favoring prohibition of drugs ? Like i understand how you can use the argument that drugs are bad mmmkay in 1971, but when the horror stories haven't stopped in 45 years it just doesn't make any sense.

Then we can move on to the evil addicts that fall on the society's lap for treatment and shit. What the fuck do you think happens now? Are you somehow under the assumption that with the current legislation they don't fall on society's lap? That's kinda the only way how your argument isn't completely retarded.

And then we can move on to mass incarceration. Let's just assume for simplicity's sake that it's merely a coincidence that the start of war on drugs sparked an 800% increase in prisoners in the span of 40 years. This way we can get faster to your arguments about the issue. You started with a sentence that had the word "incorrect" in it. That's almost an argument. Then you followed it with the lone word "wrong". It had the capital W and a strong decisive period at the end. Sadly it's even less of an argument.

Your only actual argument was that people in the drug trade would resort to other illegal endeavors. I assume that's because you think that people in the system for drug offenses are hardened versatile criminals that made a lot money for their part in the trade. That hasn't been true for a long time. The large majority people in the system are street level peons that for all intents and purposes worked in the service industry. "Robbery, burglary, auto theft, extortion, and scamming" are already all much better paying fields of crime and well above the average skill set possessed by your typical black market fast food worker.

And then we move back to addiction. Large majority of all studies about addiction say the same thing. Prohibition increases the amount of people that have a problem with addiction and it makes their issue worse. Go figure that losing your job and/or having more limited options regarding employment, getting incarcerated and then having even more limited options regarding employment, sprinkling of a social stigma, spending excessive amounts of time with unsavory characters while getting your drugs that are rarely that pure and sometimes not quite what the label said, really doesn't help addicts.

But for arguments sake lets assume that addiction skyrockets after you end the war on drugs. You can just pay for it by taxing a 100 billion dollar industry that's not currently properly taxed. If that's not enough through a few coins from the billions you save when you suddenly have quite a few less people to run through the system. If we go by Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports then in 2007 there were about 1,841,200 state and local arrests for drug abuse violations in the United States. Roughly 80% of all those arrest were for possession.