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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (8172)	12/31/2005 5:18:27 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541348

I am making the point that even with the baggage that alcohol carries, it's still better to have it legal. If you know anything about prohibition, and what happened then, you know WHY it is better. If you apply the lessons learned during prohibition to the drug problem, you can easily see why the two situations are related. As I said, in terms of costs (which you say concern you) alcohol costs more than drugs- in terms of social costs that YOU seem to mention (crime- especially of assault and rape). The costs I am most concerned with, in terms of drugs, (since I think all the costs are reduced by legalization) are the huge costs of incarceration and lost productivity and family destruction due to incarceration- and these are eliminated ( Remember, every parent incarcerated probably puts several children at risk, because we know there are statistical risks associated with having a parent in jail), and the problem of gang related drug crime will be nearly eliminated I think. Gangs don't deal in alcohol, I just don't think the profits are there- so I doubt they would deal in legalized drugs. At the end of prohibition the bootleggers went out of business over night- and the money that supported the organized crime rings that ran the alcohol distribution systems dried up. The same would happen with the drug cartels. I see no way for them to establish other types of businesses with the same kinds of profits as the drug trade. The cost of incarcerating drug criminals is estimated to be as follows- and pay PARTICULAR attention to the fact that many of these are NON- VIOLENT: "The cost of this massive growth in incarceration is staggering. Americans will spend nearly $40 billion on prisons and jails in the year 2000. Almost $24 billion of that will go to incarcerate 1.2 million nonviolent offenders.4 Meanwhile, in two of our nation's largest states, California and New York, the prison budgets outstripped the budgets for higher education during the mid-1990s.5 The number of people behind bars not only dwarfs America's historical incarceration rates; it defies international comparisons as well. While America has about 5% of the world's population, almost one in four persons incarcerated worldwide are incarcerated in the US.6 While substantial increases in all categories of inmates have contributed to America's mushrooming incarceration rates, the use of imprisonment for drug offenders has increased particularly sharply, drawing increased attention by researchers and policy makers alike. In 1999, the Sentencing Project reported that between 1980 and 1997, drug arrests tripled in the United States. In 1997, four out of five drug arrests (79.5%) were for possession, with 44% of those arrests for marijuana offenses. Between 1980 and 1997, while the number of drug offenders entering prisons skyrocketed, the proportion of state prison space housing violent offenders declined from 55% to 47%.7 Fully 76% of the increase in admissions to America's prisons from 1978 to 1996 was attributable to non-violent offenders, much of that to persons incarcerated for drug offenses.8 Data like these prompted retired General Barry McCaffrey, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, to refer to America's prison system as an "American gulag."9 And indeed, with an incarceration rate second to only Russia's, the drug czar's choice of language is fitting.10" cjcj.org