My own experience suggests that the war against heroin has been successful, at least in Northern Virginia. I am a lawyer, and while I don't specialize in criminal defense, I have handled quite a few drug cases, but never one for heroin. Lots of marijuana, crack, Ecstasy, and prescription pain killers, never heroin.
As for the rest of what you say - my reductionist answer is that you are talking about two things.
First, you are troubled by the moral ambiguities of waging war, which is normal, and good, although I don't think most people are troubled by it. Shows you have a conscience.
Second, you are troubled by the moral ambiguities of _not_ waging war, which is also good, although I think even fewer are troubled by this. So you not only have a conscience, it's highly developed.
I don't have any good answers except to suggest that you find a group of people who like to talk about ethical dilemmas, and discuss it with them. Doctors who take care of dying people have ethical dilemmas, lawyers who represent murderers have ethical dilemmas, I would think that being a soldier presents some of the toughest ethical dilemmas, or maybe being a politician. Sometimes (often) life isn't black or white and ethics are not cut and dried.
I think the issues you raise are very germane to a discussion of foreign policy, but my experience on this thread and others is that SI threads are not all that conducive to a nuanced discussion of ethics vis-a-vis foreign policy. People don't seem to be able to agree upon the facts well enough to discuss ethics, and so there is a never-ending round-robin of finger-pointing that leads nowhere.
It's hard enough to talk about facts here. |
