Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
Quote Originally Posted by varys View Post
Wrench your crusade here is really weird. If hes telling the truth he certainly is guilty of being a dumbass/addict but i dont see why he cant complain.

Druff is coming off much worse imo. Saying he has no problem throwing half the population of our supposedly free nation in prison (hes willing to cough up that jewgold just to make room!) for selling bags of weed for essentially minimum wage seems absurd to me.
Half the population?

What are you talking about?

If people are selling bags of weed for essentially minimum wage, they're stupid, because they can make that same minimum wage at a regular job without risking going to prison.

I am fine with the bottom-level dealers getting off without prosecution if they assist in the arrest and prosecution of the upper level dealers.

I'm not understanding what you think should be done?

Just allow people to deal drugs without consequence?

Legalize all drugs to eliminate the drug trade, and get a large percentage of our country addicted to hard drugs?

Neither of these options are realistic.
What do you have that in any way supports the notion that legalization leads to a large increase in people addicted to hard drugs? Considering that that's the only argument you have left, it's kinda important to get it right. I mean, if it isn't true, the whole war on drugs starts to look like a huge waste of money.

I gave you 3 separate prohibition of alcohol cases and they all came to the same conclusion. It just wasn't working for any of them. And when they stopped prohibition, nothing of consequence happened.

Now i'll give you Portugal. In 2001 they decriminalized all drugs. They did all they could for legalization while still following UN regulations. Specifics aren't that important (you can easily look those up). They stopped wasting resources in going after the users and restructured the way they combat addiction. Instead of shooting off large amounts of resources to policing they started using those same resources in harm reduction, treatment and employment. In the late 90's they had about 100k heroin users. Now they have about 50k and most of them under substitution programs. They currently have the lowest drug-induced death rate in Europe with 3 per million residents (5 times lower than EU average). Regarding new HIV infection they went from 1,016 cases in 2001 to 56 2012.

ps. I'll leave the specifics of the drug trade be for now since it's quite complicated. Let's just say that for the large majority of the participants that are imprisoned for it, it never was quite as lucrative as Miami Vice led us to believe. Why people are part of it, when that easy money is quite risky to make and isn't a lot, requires an ability to relate to understand why it makes sense for them.