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

To: KLP who wrote (8244)	1/3/2006 9:06:08 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541348

With proof that prohibition does NOT work, because we already had experience with alcohol, we already gambled hugely on the "War on Drugs"- it's given us a prison population that makes us look like Soviet Russia (and which is expensive to boot), a system that is an incubator for organized crime, and a system that makes flouting the law something ordinary people do all the time. And you think legalization is the gamble? We're already gambled, and lost. It's time to rethink the first VERY stupid gamble, which hasn't worked out for us. Anyone looking at just our non-violent drug "crime" prison population can see we've done a very very stupid thing. We have the data of our prison population- those people would not be in prison but for our drug laws. Those people are sons and daughters to someone. Those people would not be costing the state money, and would not be in prisons, but for our drug laws. We have data on terrorist groups- we know they raise a considerable amount of money through drugs. If the profit isn't there, those groups have to find something else to do. My guess is human traffic would increase a bit as a result, but it's much harder to smuggle people, so I don't think it's as attractive a business. The diversion of billions to the war on drugs is taking away money from all sorts of other things. Think how safe you could make our borders with all that money wasted on catching and imprisoning our own US citizens. You could go after terrorsts instead- and wouldn't that be more fun?

To: KLP who wrote (8244)	1/3/2006 9:39:34 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541348

With no proof that things would be better for our kids coming up if we legalized drugs We never have any proof in advance of how any program we institute will play out, but we often have good models. I think you mentioned the other day doing a demonstration project on this in a couple of states, which would indicate you are receptive to the concept. In this case we already have an excellent model, prohibition. We can study what happened when alcohol was made illegal and then made legal. Models don't get any better than that.

To: KLP who wrote (8244)	1/5/2006 3:13:42 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541348

If the current system worked very well, or even fairly well, maybe it would be reasonable to ask for some solid evidence that new ideas would work well, but the current system works very poorly. without any control data at all? How would you get any such control data? Tim