Neocon,
Some good points. Your point on legalization and the acceleration of usage is probably correct. I agree in that it might be accelerated, but it was going to happen to those people anyway.
I do not agree with your basic concept that society would do more if the current levels of use were not tolerable. That tolerance means nothing to mother who will lose a child to a stray bullet from a banger's gun sometime next week...or maybe in the best case the week after. That might be tolerable from my front porch, but not hers. Value judgement...I really don't understand that statement, and I have thought about it. You last statement tells me that you don't think we are doing enough, and of course I agree with that.
It is possible to monitor resale if the amount of drugs provided to one person is limited (at say 1.5 the lethal dose per unit of time for hard drugs and for the soft drugs a distribution based on duration of effect at say the same 1.5 times the unit of time between allowing resupply). This way a single person is limited in his ability to profit from resale. Of course non-using people could get on the program and then resell their allotment to someone else resulting in a resale system, but in most cases the stigma of the label might be greater than the profit realized. A cornerstone of any plan must be that the cost to obtain the drugs is very cheap. This should not be a problem as most drug sales at all levels have excellent margins. Many professional people use pot, coke, and various designer drugs. There would be a market for these, but again very stiff penalties for resale would have to be enforced.
I do not disagree that there are many levels of drug use for each drug. I have seen very few examples of gateway progressions. IMO, the few that I have seen migrate from the relatively benign to the almost certainly malignant would have made those leaps because of their addictive personalty. One good friend from childhood did follow that stepping-stone path and is now just a shell of his former self. He calls about every three years and it is a difficult conversation for me. I would agree that the recreational user might reduce his consumption if there was a price increase, but I highly doubt it. A hard working friend of mine has a regular drug habit. Everyone knows it and no one seems to mind. It is his choice and he works as hard as any of us. He will pay whatever the price is. He may not like it, but he is going to pay. Of course for the harder drugs there is no valid debate. Any substance that monkeys will self-administer until they convulse and die is going to sell to those that need it.
The objective is to remove the return for those that will use violence to advance their efforts to move the product. They are certainly targeting the kids, so should our first priority not be to remove them? They are actively seeking to promote the use of drugs. It would seem to me that managing a controlled government distribution system would be better than allowing drug dealers to actively promote drug use with kids. I do not accept that the market to juveniles grows as I hold the opinion that those juveniles that want to do drugs are going to do them anyway. In addition, if we control the quality of the drugs we don't have kids using designer drugs that some chemist has produced with an error in the chain. I remember one from a few years back called "White China" that produced permanent symptoms like parkinson's.
Do you really think that our society and the people that we elect to serve it, want to stop the drug trade and drug use.
I am really not a grassy knoll guy, but I do not believe that we want to stop drugs. Drugs are good business.
HAGO
TH |
