NOT police abuse: Police Raid Home, Find Nothing

[Dominus Atheos]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- ... -policing/

A couple in Owego, New York was recently wrongly targeted by local police, who had apparently mistaken them for some pretty big time drug distributers. From local TV news outlet WNBF:

Steven Dunlap says he was pulled over by police while he was on his way to meet some friends for pizza. He says they took him into custody at gunpoint.

A short time later, Cindy Dunlap received a call from one of her husband’s friends letting her know he hadn’t arrived.

Fearing Steve had been in a crash, Cindy rushed to retrace his likely route. Then she also was pulled over and taken into custody.

When police transported Cindy back to her home, they told her they had warrants to search the place. She pleaded with them not to use the battering ram they brought with them.

Investigators entered the couple’s home through the unlocked front door. They thoroughly search the house and its outbuildings.

The Dunlap family dog, Lily, remained inside, curling up in her tiny bed while police looked for evidence of illegal activity.

What they found were fabrics and equipment used in Cindy’s long-established quilting business.

Search warrants signed by Broome County and Tioga County judges less than 24 hours before the raid indicated investigators were looking for methamphetamine, crack cocaine and firearms, among other things.

I’m sure the experience was traumatizing for the Dunlaps, and I don’t mean to undermine what they endured. Before going further, I’d also add that I don’t think the police should be serving search warrants for consensual crimes at all, because I don’t think consensual activities should be crimes. I’d also obviously prefer that police not make mistakes when it comes to arresting people and searching their homes.

That said, in much of the country, this could have been a lot worse. The WBNF headline for this story is “Tioga Terror.” The subhead is, “Police Raid Home, Find Nothing.” But this wasn’t really a raid. In fact, if the police must serve search warrants on suspected drug offenders, this is exactly the way to do it. They pulled Mr. Dunlap over as he was leaving his home, they didn’t rush the home in the middle of the night. They entered through an unlocked door, not with a battering ram. I’m sure it was traumatizing for the Dunlaps to be falsely arrested and held at gunpoint, but that’s quite a bit better than being woken up with a flash grenade, thrown to the ground, and stepped on, all with a gun to the back of the head. And the Dunlaps’ dog is alive to bark another day.

Again, this isn’t to diminish the undoubtably scary experience of getting falsely arrested. There is the larger problem of how and why the local cops mistook a quilting business with a meth lab. And exactly how much scrutiny local judges and prosecutors could possibly be giving these warrants to have signed off on such an egregious mistake. The lack of an apology is also troubling (though not uncommon).

But because drug crimes take no direct victims, there’s no one to report to police that a crime has been committed. Therefore, the police have to rely on informants and undercover officers. This means that drug policing will necessarily be done with dirty information, which means there will always be mistakes. It’s just the nature of business. When the cops get the wrong house or target the wrong suspects, we chastise them for unnecessarily terrorizing innocence. Why not do a surround and call-out? Or better yet, why not just wait until the suspect leaves the house, then pull him over, and then search the house without the commando tactics?

That’s exactly what the police did here. No innocents were shot. No cops were shot. No drug offenders were shot. Perhaps I’m engaging in what the previous president called “the soft bigotry of low expectations” here, but if we must have a drug war, let’s at least minimize the collateral damage. This is the correct way to make a drug war mistake. It could have been a lot worse. Ask the family of David Hooks. Or Jason Westcott. Or Derek Cruice. Or Bounkham Phonesavah. Or Andrew Cornish.

[Alyeska]

Shouldn't be serving warrants for consensual crimes? Meth is a dangerous fucking business. And it is one of the few drugs that has no redeeming values. There are bad police busts, and its clear there evidence here was bullshit. But that complaint that warrants should never be served for drugs is horseshit. They serve warrants for illegal alcohol for christs sake.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

What a surprise, these people are white.

[Broomstick]

Meth a victimless crime? Let me take you on a tour of former meth labs in my area, houses that have burned to the ground and are now considered hazardous waste sites.

We had an entire city block burn down a few years ago because an amateur meth lab blew up and the damn fire spread.

[Terralthra]

Meth labs are dangerous because they're illegal. If it weren't illegal to manufacture, they'd be no less safe than any other moderately complex chemical synthesis lab. Because they're illegal, they have to use odd ingredients with poor quality control in shabby conditions. Surprise surprise, safety does not ensue.

Whether meth itself is victimless is a separate argument, but saying that meth isn't victimless because meth labs are unsafe is like saying weed isn't victimless because gangs fight turf wars over places to sell. They do that because it's illegal; it isn't inherent to the drug.

[Broomstick]

And... your point...?

Drug addiction is nasty enough that gives people an incentive to do illegal, dangerous things like amateur chemistry while high and turf wars. Those are real harms. Hell, tobacco is a legal drug yet it does immense harm every year. Can with dispense with the bullshit that drugs are somehow harmless fun? They aren't. Every goddamned one of them has a downside. How much harm is involved is debatable and depends on context, and I'm willing to entertain arguments that outlawing them can be more harmful than permitting them, but they aren't without consequences.

[General Zod]

Meth labs are dangerous because they're illegal. If it weren't illegal to manufacture, they'd be no less safe than any other moderately complex chemical synthesis lab. Because they're illegal, they have to use odd ingredients with poor quality control in shabby conditions. Surprise surprise, safety does not ensue.

Whether meth itself is victimless is a separate argument, but saying that meth isn't victimless because meth labs are unsafe is like saying weed isn't victimless because gangs fight turf wars over places to sell. They do that because it's illegal; it isn't inherent to the drug.

Being legal doesn't have any bearing on something's safety. I'm not arguing meth labs are safe, just that you have it backwards.

[Simon_Jester]

Meth labs are dangerous because they're illegal. If it weren't illegal to manufacture, they'd be no less safe than any other moderately complex chemical synthesis lab. Because they're illegal, they have to use odd ingredients with poor quality control in shabby conditions. Surprise surprise, safety does not ensue.

Whether meth itself is victimless is a separate argument, but saying that meth isn't victimless because meth labs are unsafe is like saying weed isn't victimless because gangs fight turf wars over places to sell. They do that because it's illegal; it isn't inherent to the drug.

Methamphetamines are inherently unsafe because of what they do to you and how efficiently they do it.

In addition, methamphetamines are a tricky substance to synthesize and their production can only be done safely in special facilities. Other chemical substances that match this description are typically controlled and regulated in a manner consistent with the useful purposes that the substance has.

Since meth is very bad for you and doesn't do any useful thing that isn't done better by other substances, the most obvious, logical regulation/control regime for meth is very simple:

"No. Just no."

[Grumman]

Being legal doesn't have any bearing on something's safety. I'm not arguing meth labs are safe, just that you have it backwards.

I believe that Terralthra's argument is that if methamphetamine was not illegal, supply would be met by professionals working with the sort of safety standards one might expect from a fireworks factory instead of by a cottage industry run by addicts and half-witted thugs. But even if the methamphetamine factory was legal, the idiots and their cottage industry would not, and what they're doing would still be a crime.

And to return to the original comment, I don't think you can call selling meth a "consensual crime". It's not as bad as krokodil is, but the majority of your customers are still going to be people chemically rendered incapable of giving legitimate consent.

[Terralthra]

Meth labs are dangerous because they're illegal. If it weren't illegal to manufacture, they'd be no less safe than any other moderately complex chemical synthesis lab. Because they're illegal, they have to use odd ingredients with poor quality control in shabby conditions. Surprise surprise, safety does not ensue.

Whether meth itself is victimless is a separate argument, but saying that meth isn't victimless because meth labs are unsafe is like saying weed isn't victimless because gangs fight turf wars over places to sell. They do that because it's illegal; it isn't inherent to the drug.

Methamphetamines are inherently unsafe because of what they do to you and how efficiently they do it.

In addition, methamphetamines are a tricky substance to synthesize and their production can only be done safely in special facilities. Other chemical substances that match this description are typically controlled and regulated in a manner consistent with the useful purposes that the substance has.

Since meth is very bad for you and doesn't do any useful thing that isn't done better by other substances, the most obvious, logical regulation/control regime for meth is very simple:

"No. Just no."

Well, I guess you should move to a different country, then, because in the US, methamphetamines are a schedule II controlled substance, indicating that there's a high potential for abuse and addiction, but that they have a currently accepted medical use. Doctors can prescribe methamphetamines. The regulatory regime is not "No. Just no."

Additionally, as I already said, the synthesis of methamphetamines is not that tricky. Certainly no less or more so than half a dozen legal drugs. The thing that makes it tricky is that methylamine, a necessary precursor, is DEA-controlled and monitored along with most other precursors, leading to illegal meth labs doing all sorts of dangerous reductions on not-particularly-friendly chemicals in order to obtain the necessary reactants. In addition, because they need to at least make an effort to hide, they are often cramped, have inadequate ventilation, and their safety standards are lax, to say the least.

Is meth harmful? Should meth be illegal? Those are questions you can only answer by discussing the drug itself, its addictive potential, its primary and side effects, and so on. You'll note that I have staked no position on that particular question, and pretending that I have is therefore an obvious strawman.

The danger a meth lab poses to the surrounding residential neighborhood is an effect of the regulatory regime restricting its manufacture; saying that illicit meth labs are dangerous, therefore meth is harmful and should be illegal is an elaborate circular argument.

[Broomstick]

Since meth is very bad for you and doesn't do any useful thing that isn't done better by other substances, the most obvious, logical regulation/control regime for meth is very simple:

Um... actually, methamphetamine does have some potential legitimate uses, just as morphine does. Again, the question is whether/when the benefits outweigh the harms, and how to maximize beneficial use while minimizing bad outcomes.

And to return to the original comment, I don't think you can call selling meth a "consensual crime". It's not as bad as krokodil is, but the majority of your customers are still going to be people chemically rendered incapable of giving legitimate consent.

Is anything as bad as krokodil? God, I hope not.

Again - the problem there is NOT the "active ingredient", it's the amateur chemistry and contaminants. That's why addiction is not clean, harmless fun. Not because the amateur chemistry is illegal, but because the addiction drives people to such self-harm.

That's why prohibition tactics are so debatable - addiction drives people to break laws and do unsafe things. Are the benefits of prohibition (reduced access, discouraging experimentation by non-addicts) worth the drawbacks?

[Simon_Jester]

Since meth is very bad for you and doesn't do any useful thing that isn't done better by other substances, the most obvious, logical regulation/control regime for meth is very simple:

Um... actually, methamphetamine does have some potential legitimate uses, just as morphine does. Again, the question is whether/when the benefits outweigh the harms, and how to maximize beneficial use while minimizing bad outcomes.

To be clear, are these uses for which methamphetamine is preferable to any viable substitute?

if so, I stand corrected- but in that case it should be very tightly controlled and used only for those purposes.

Again - the problem there is NOT the "active ingredient", it's the amateur chemistry and contaminants. That's why addiction is not clean, harmless fun. Not because the amateur chemistry is illegal, but because the addiction drives people to such self-harm.

That's why prohibition tactics are so debatable - addiction drives people to break laws and do unsafe things. Are the benefits of prohibition (reduced access, discouraging experimentation by non-addicts) worth the drawbacks?

Just to make sure I understand...

What you are saying is, I think, this:

We make the drug illegal, not because of the harm caused by shoddy drugs, but because the drugs make users willing to court that harm. The mere fact that addicts are willing to steal and kill and take immense risks with their health in order to feed their addiction is, all by itself, evidence of a problem. And evidence that the drugs should be banned.

Would you consider it an illustrative example to say the following...

Compare, say, cocaine and lemons.

If lemons were made as illegal as cocaine, no one would sell lemons, there would be no massive murderous black market in lemons. A few people might have them as delicacies but it wouldn't fund massive illicit lemon trafficking. The reason is simple: lemons aren't addictive. No one thinks lemons are so important that it's worth dying to get your next lemon 'fix,' or breaking a law because you ran out of money because you spent it all on lemons.

Whereas cocaine is exactly addictive enough to make you do this.

[NoXion]

We make the drug illegal, not because of the harm caused by shoddy drugs, but because the drugs make users willing to court that harm. The mere fact that addicts are willing to steal and kill and take immense risks with their health in order to feed their addiction is, all by itself, evidence of a problem. And evidence that the drugs should be banned.

I don't know if that's the argument that Broomstick is making, but I've seen similar arguments made by others outside this forum and I think they're all a steaming heap of crap. Comparing cocaine and lemons? Why not actually compare like with like? For example...

Alcohol is addictive; indeed, a sufficiently alcoholic person can die if they suddenly stop drinking, and the behaviour of your typical alcoholic (or for that matter, many a binge drinker) is far from that of a model citizen. Also, as far as I am aware there are no strictly medical uses for imbibed alcohol. IIRC some jurisdictions have laws against selling alcohol to people who are shitfaced, but I imagine that alcoholics (and certainly most binge drinkers, whose habits may not be as continually problematic as that of the alcoholic's) can easily circumvent that kind of thing. In addition, alcohol causes a great deal of harm both personally and socially relative to other drugs, as detailed in a Lancet study:


image source

Yet despite all that, alcohol remains legal in most countries, while cocaine remains illegal. I have yet to see a drug-prohibitionist argument that doesn't use fallacies, hypocrisy or special pleading to somehow exclude alcohol from their arguments.

[Grumman]

I don't know if that's the argument that Broomstick is making, but I've seen similar arguments made by others outside this forum and I think they're all a steaming heap of crap. Comparing cocaine and lemons? Why not actually compare like with like? For example...

You are not comparing like with like. You are comparing the damage done by alcohol while comparatively unrestrained and the damage done by other drugs while doing everything in our power to suppress them.

[Gaidin]

I believe that Terralthra's argument is that if methamphetamine was not illegal, supply would be met by professionals working with the sort of safety standards one might expect from a fireworks factory instead of by a cottage industry run by addicts and half-witted thugs. But even if the methamphetamine factory was legal, the idiots and their cottage industry would not, and what they're doing would still be a crime.

And to return to the original comment, I don't think you can call selling meth a "consensual crime". It's not as bad as krokodil is, but the majority of your customers are still going to be people chemically rendered incapable of giving legitimate consent.

It's a Schedule II substance in the US at least. It is literally manufactured as Desoxyn by Ovation Pharmaceuticals however rarely it is actually prescribed, as I understand it. That, however, does not stop people from being stupid, and will not and should not prevent law enforcement from doing their job if they can do their job correctly with a substance like this.

[Simon_Jester]

We make the drug illegal, not because of the harm caused by shoddy drugs, but because the drugs make users willing to court that harm. The mere fact that addicts are willing to steal and kill and take immense risks with their health in order to feed their addiction is, all by itself, evidence of a problem. And evidence that the drugs should be banned.

I don't know if that's the argument that Broomstick is making, but I've seen similar arguments made by others outside this forum and I think they're all a steaming heap of crap. Comparing cocaine and lemons? Why not actually compare like with like? For example...

Well, I pointed out lemons because lemons are a good example of something you can really legalize without harm.

Alcohol... is not such an example. More on that later.

Alcohol is addictive; indeed, a sufficiently alcoholic person can die if they suddenly stop drinking, and the behaviour of your typical alcoholic (or for that matter, many a binge drinker) is far from that of a model citizen. Also, as far as I am aware there are no strictly medical uses for imbibed alcohol. IIRC some jurisdictions have laws against selling alcohol to people who are shitfaced, but I imagine that alcoholics (and certainly most binge drinkers, whose habits may not be as continually problematic as that of the alcoholic's) can easily circumvent that kind of thing. In addition, alcohol causes a great deal of harm both personally and socially relative to other drugs, as detailed in a Lancet study:...

[snip mongo graph]

The Lancet's graph is judging the harm caused in the opinion of a panel of sixteen experts- has anyone tried backing it up with actual math? That said, I'm not just going to throw the result away out of hand. More on my response in a moment.

Yet despite all that, alcohol remains legal in most countries, while cocaine remains illegal. I have yet to see a drug-prohibitionist argument that doesn't use fallacies, hypocrisy or special pleading to somehow exclude alcohol from their arguments.

If I thought it were practical to outlaw alcohol I would be in favor of it. As it happens the experiment was tried, and entire new enforcement agencies were created to carry it out, and it failed. At least in the US, and I see no reason to expect better results in any other developed nation.

This is the case in large part because alcohol has, in the US alone, a hundred million or more non-addicted recreational users. About six or seven recreational users per addict from the cursory research I spent a minute or two doing; I can throw in links if you like.

I do not consider this situation satisfactory, or acceptable. If the Eighteenth Amendment were proposed again today, I would oppose it only because I oppose any unenforceable law; such things encourage disrespect for the law in general.

Unfortunately, attempting to ban alcohol is a doomed battle, and therefore should not be fought, even if it would be desirable to do so. And since it is possible for, oh, six or seven out of every eight alcohol users to avoid addiction, we can at least mostly mitigate the harm caused by alcohol through regulation and (tragically necessary) programs to protect those who would otherwise suffer from being addicts or being close to addicts.

Cocaine is about as harmful, by contrast- but so far as I know it is considerably more addictive. The odds of avoiding addiction once you become a recreational cocaine user are, so far as I know, not six or seven chances out of eight.

If I'm not wrong about that...

Well, in that case if you legalize the stuff, suppose only twenty percent of the population tries it. I'd consider that optimistic. That's about fifty million adults... in which case I imagine that the seventeen million alcoholics our nation already suffers under the influence of will be joined by ten or twenty million more cocaine-aholics.

And then we'll really be in the soup.

This is not special pleading. This is not wanting to let them break the other leg when we're already limping around on crutches from breaking the first one.

[Broomstick]

Since meth is very bad for you and doesn't do any useful thing that isn't done better by other substances, the most obvious, logical regulation/control regime for meth is very simple:

Um... actually, methamphetamine does have some potential legitimate uses, just as morphine does. Again, the question is whether/when the benefits outweigh the harms, and how to maximize beneficial use while minimizing bad outcomes.

To be clear, are these uses for which methamphetamine is preferable to any viable substitute?

It has a use in treating exogenous obesity (obesity due to factors outside the patient/patient's will power) and narcolepsy (sudden uncontrollable episodes of sleep). Yes, there are other drugs, but the truth is both of those conditions are not consistently well treated by anything. Some patients respond better to methamphetamine than the alternatives.

if so, I stand corrected- but in that case it should be very tightly controlled and used only for those purposes.

It is.

What you are saying is, I think, this:

We make the drug illegal, not because of the harm caused by shoddy drugs, but because the drugs make users willing to court that harm. The mere fact that addicts are willing to steal and kill and take immense risks with their health in order to feed their addiction is, all by itself, evidence of a problem. And evidence that the drugs should be banned.

Not exactly.

“Shoddy” drugs and the abuse of drugs do cause harm. Even legitimate uses of drugs can and do cause harm. The drive of addiction is a harm in addition to those other harms. Addiction causes harm even when the drug involved is legal and very beneficial, for drugs with marginal uses and great addiction potential it weighs against those drugs even more.

If lemons were made as illegal as cocaine, no one would sell lemons, there would be no massive murderous black market in lemons. A few people might have them as delicacies but it wouldn't fund massive illicit lemon trafficking. The reason is simple: lemons aren't addictive. No one thinks lemons are so important that it's worth dying to get your next lemon 'fix,' or breaking a law because you ran out of money because you spent it all on lemons.

Whereas cocaine is exactly addictive enough to make you do this.

I say this is a factor in the overall problem and how it is/should be handled. “Lemon” smuggling – used as a stand in for anything banned but without high demand – is not a problem. Illicit drug smuggling is, because in many instances addicts will choose their drug over food or loved ones. When people are willing to risk death for something simply outlawing it will not get rid of it.

Alcohol is addictive; indeed, a sufficiently alcoholic person can die if they suddenly stop drinking, and the behaviour of your typical alcoholic (or for that matter, many a binge drinker) is far from that of a model citizen. Also, as far as I am aware there are no strictly medical uses for imbibed alcohol.

There are two medical applications for ethanol that I know about. One is in the treatment of methanol (wood alcohol) poisoning, where it enables the body to eliminate the toxic breakdown products of methanol and excrete it rather than proceeding along a metabolic chain that leads to blindness, central nervous system damage, and death. It's usually administered by IV for more precise control.

The second use is to halt premature labor in women. It is seldom used for this in the developed world since there are other, better drugs for it but it still has applications in less developed areas due to availability and cheapness.

That is, of course, beyond its use in sanitizing wipes, hand cleaners, and the like where it does the job without being particularly toxic.

Yet despite all that, alcohol remains legal in most countries, while cocaine remains illegal. I have yet to see a drug-prohibitionist argument that doesn't use fallacies, hypocrisy or special pleading to somehow exclude alcohol from their arguments.

One important difference between alcohol and cocaine is the method of administration.

It is very, very rare for recreational users to consume pure or nearly pure alcohol. Most recreational use is in beverages of considerably lower percentage, sometimes as little as 5-6%, often consumed over time and with food, which slows down absorption.

Abuse of cocaine in most countries is in much higher purity and consumed quickly. It hits a hell of a lot quicker and harder.

Contrast this with traditional use of cocaine in its native land. There, it is consumed either as leaves that are chewed or in a tea. Both of those uses are of very low percentage and consumed over time – like most recreational alcohol. In that context most users are not addicts in the sense typically used (more like a coffee or tea addict) and it causes little to no harm.

If we purified alcohol – or, for that matter, nicotine or caffeine – to the same levels as purity as crack and then mainlined it alcohol would be a hell of a lot worse drug. Actually, due to the availability of pure, powdered caffeine over the internet the US is starting to have a problem with kids/young adults and caffeine overdoses which can be fatal.

Precursors to methamphetamine can be found in naturally occurring plants like ephedra, which are legal in the US and about as potent as a cup of coffee. Which might be why ephedra is still legal. No one is going to set up a massive black market in illicit ephedra even if you do make it illegal, they'll just switch to coffee or tea (unless, maybe, you're a Mormon – there's a reason ephedra is also known as “Mormon tea”).

We have more problem with alcohol because alcohol is legal, easy to obtain, and if you don't give a damn about flavor it's also relatively cheap. Prohibition in the US actually worked to the extent that casual, recreational alcohol use/abuse was drastically reduced – the problem was the side effects of prohibition, which included crime and the problems of contaminated alcohol which blinded, maimed, and killed people. We traded organized crime and various other fall out of prohibition for increased recreational use, more frank addicts, and increased drunk driving.

That will be the trade off in legalizing any drug.

Those who are in favor of legalizing drugs would do well to investigate the history of prohibition laws. It wasn't solely a matter of religious fervor. Completely legal opiates, cocaine, methamphetamine/speed, and the like really did cause problems, sometimes serious ones, just as legal alcohol does. That is why they were regulated in the first place, it was an attempt to reduce harms.

[Channel72]

Methamphetamines are inherently unsafe because of what they do to you and how efficiently they do it.

In addition, methamphetamines are a tricky substance to synthesize and their production can only be done safely in special facilities. Other chemical substances that match this description are typically controlled and regulated in a manner consistent with the useful purposes that the substance has.

Since meth is very bad for you and doesn't do any useful thing that isn't done better by other substances, the most obvious, logical regulation/control regime for meth is very simple:

"No. Just no."

If you want to legally and safely use methamphetamines in the US, no problem! Just get your friendly local psychiatrist to prescribe some Adderall. It's just like Meth, but without all those unwanted explosions.

... because thousands of college students can't be wrong!

[General Zod]

I'd say racism played a bigger part toward prohibition laws than religion did. Weren't opium laws basically just a fuck you to the Chinese?

[Broomstick]

To some extent - it was certainly a factor.

Likewise, the notion that blacks were particularly prone to misuse of pot and cocaine, or rages while using those drugs, was a factor in laws restricting/outlawing those drugs.

[Dominus Atheos]

I heard the opposite, when it was only poor black people the authorities didn't care, it was only when white women started doing drugs that people started talking about outlawing them.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, there were whites using cocaine in the 19th century, so... [shrugs]

This is one of those cases where multiple conflicting narratives can be in play at the same time. Drugs spreading into rich communities means people with political pull are afraid of their children getting addicted and demand action. At the same time drugs spreading into poor communities means more poor people committing crimes for drug money, which creates a fear of drug-related crime, and people demand action. And while both of those things are going on, you can have latent racism and the idea of "reefer madness..." or the far more sensible "cocaine madness" or "PCP madness" fears since those actually can make you violent and berserk... and the idea that these things somehow disproportionately affect blacks, because in the mind of a white person born in the 1920s or '30s, it is actually plausible that there's something uniquely, biologically 'savage' about black people.

The simple answer is that use of potent drugs of all kinds escalated sharply in the late 19th century, and again in the mid-20th century, and both times it caused some very negative reactions from a society that was having trouble dealing with the consequences.

____________

And as for legalization of current highly addictive substances:

The problem is that the niche for recreational mild stimulant use is already full, in effect. Whereas there is a much wider variety of demand for 'hard' drugs that cause intense highs at a severe price. And there's no easy way to force people to consume cocaine (or for that matter caffeine) in non-insane concentrations. So... legalizing it would basically lead, at best, to coca leaf tea becoming a minor niche competitor to existing caffeinated beverages, while we still would have to run around cracking down on the high-end super-concentrated cocaine powder and crack.

[Hillary]

The issue should surely be "How do we ensure the least harm to the population?". Are recreational drugs harmful? Of course they are, but banning them has simply placed supply into the hands of the criminal fraternity in all its forms.

However much you try and ban drugs, people will still take them - the war on drugs is doomed to failure, however high you raise the stakes (even the death penalty doesn't stop it). Banning them means that you have no control over the strength and quality of the drugs people take, which makes them even more harmful.

Proper regulation of drugs would make the whole activity of recreational drug-taking safer, it would drastically reduce cash available to criminals, it would reduce costs of law-enforcement, it would eliminate the need for drug dens, it would enable drugs education (beyond "just say no") to be more acceptable to parents and would make it easier for addicts to seek treatment, as they are not criminalised. You could also tax them.

Yes, it would result in different issues/problems - I'm aware of that - but the benefits seem to me to be so overwhelming it has to be worth a try. Hell, the resources saved on law-enforcement could fund all sorts of beneficial programmes that might even reduce drug-taking below the levels they are today.

[Grumman]

However much you try and ban drugs, people will still take them...

You're approaching the question from the wrong direction. The question is not "Will people still take drugs?" It is "How many people will still take drugs?"

Do you not recognise that there is some subset people stupid enough to take addictive, destructive drugs who, for one reason or another, won't choose to break the law to take those drugs? It could be because they're afraid of punishment, or because it being a crime drives home the point that taking these drugs is a bad thing to do, or just because they wouldn't know where to start if they can't just drop down to the 7-11 to buy a box of meth. Whatever the reason is, that is a person who will not destroy themselves, thanks to prohibition.

[loomer]

Do you have a source for this idea that drug prohibition actually serves to make a significant dent in the use and addiction rates for hard drugs?