Why exactly are drugs illegal?

[Deleted]

to make money off of incarceration in private prisons, and also because it would be really awkward if the cia just started selling coke straight to consumers in america, instead of using a cartel as a go between.

This is a bug surprise. First reply comes up with facts already to answer the question. Nice!

If you want another answer: historical reasons. If you look up the "common" drugs, you always find a funny answer as to why it was forbidden.


Oh and as others stated, there are many legal drugs as well, some of which are more dangerous than the illegal ones - just as you stated.

[Freighter]

people still break the law therefore it's "effective" a fraction of the time.

That's a pretty logically unsound argument. People still murder despite it being illegal, so it's only effective a fraction of the time. Do away with murder laws since it doesn't prevent all cases.

[Eats Compost]

https://mic.com/articles/110344/14-y...ing#.5itjJDxVx
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.6e730e7a2168

keep in mind this has more to do with weed, and this is on top of the fact Portugal takes a dramatically different approach to drug addiction then the US which is probably a bigger factor than just legalizing it. with legalization comes avenues for people to seek treatment, which is the take away from this if you ask me.

Two things;

1. Portugal decriminalised possession. I agree with doing that, but what I'm arguing against is the decriminalisation/legalisation of supply. Making it legal to create/sell drugs is very different to decriminalising use/possession.
2. Your second link actually supports my point strongly. It demonstrates a fall in the amount of kids using marijuana, but it also shows a way sharper increase in the amount of adults using it. That's fine and dandy for weed, but if you had that kind of outcome with a harder drug with negative effects on users' health, that's a pretty terrible result.

[Sky High]

That is debatable, considering drug addicts who have children in the home have often been incarcerated not only for their drug use/possession, but also at times because their neglect of their child/children getting exposed to the drugs have killed the children, or as I have mentioned here already the user has physically or sexually abused the child while high, resulting in the child's death.

Stop pretending that drug use happens in a perfect little vacuum, where some poor addict safely gets high in a park for the night or a secluded alleyway and the drug use ONLY affects that one user. Your arguments are pitifully and unrealistically clean and simple.

addicts should be given the means to treat their problems that doesn't involve going to jail, now if they go to jail FOR CHILD ABUSE, that's a different fucking story. oooooooooooooooooooooobviously.

[raveger]

If your goal is to reduce the amounts of addicts you have, don't have drugs be illegal. We already have the example of portugal that's been linked multiple times in this thread. Your ideology pales in the face of pragmatism.

i don't really care about Portugal, nor do i care about ideology, I care about how people blatantly disregard their health with drugs that can LITERALLY KILL YOU and yet are readily available on the street, but hey, why not make it legal so everyone can go out and get meth and shoot up whenever they want, why not, f*** it, let everyone have drugs! Hell, a majority of millennial's already smokes pot and disregards traffic laws anyways, lets just add to the mess!
also nice use of a textbook definition of pragmatism. Did you copy paste it?
but you're just trolling so w/e

[Sky High]

Two things;

1. Portugal decriminalised possession. I agree with doing that, but what in arguing against is the decriminalisation/legalisation of supply. Making it legal to create/sell drugs is very different to decriminalising use/possession.
2. Your second link actually supports my point strongly. It demonstrates a fall in the amount of kids using marijuana, but it also shows a way sharper increase in the amount of adults using it. That's fine and dandy for weed, but if you had that kind of outcome with a harder drug with negative effects on users' health, that's a pretty terrible result.

which is why you give them ways to treat their problems, the two go hand in hand. the reasons weed use went up is yeah it's legal, but people are more likely to use weed rather than heroin or meth to deal with their problems. but again it has to be combined with programs to treat addict. that's the more important part of legalization of any substance that's addictive.

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That's a pretty logically unsound argument. People still murder despite it being illegal, so it's only effective a fraction of the time. Do away with murder laws since it doesn't prevent all cases.

yeah I'm not seeing you actually refuting my argument here... soo...

[Freighter]

yeah I'm not seeing you actually refuting my argument here... soo...

Your argument is tantamount to shit. You're saying to get rid of a law because people break the law. What kind of fucked up logic is that? It's not logically sound at all.

[Sky High]

Your argument is tantamount to shit. You're saying to get rid of a law because people break the law. What kind of fucked up logic is that? It's not logically sound at all.

the law is murder which I already established is considered a cardinal sin in society already. if it's already a crime then labeling it "a crime" is redundant. that's the only argument I'm making on that.

[Pantalaimon]

addicts should be given the means to treat their problems that doesn't involve going to jail, now if they go to jail FOR CHILD ABUSE, that's a different fucking story. oooooooooooooooooooooobviously.

Again you are oversimplifying this. It isn't that people go to prison for drug use/distribution OR child abuse, it is actually drug abusers that are one of the highest, if not the highest, portion of the population to engage in the most destructive forms of child abuse. Sure, make drug use a public health concern/aim for treatment instead of a criminal offense, but if you go so far as legalizing distribution and manufacturing then all you are doing is adding to related problems that are directly tied to drug use, such as child abuse. Do you really expect a person who is able to legally get high on amphetamines in the home will not naturally pose a risk to the very same children living under that roof? The risks would be directly related to each other.

[Eats Compost]

which is why you give them ways to treat their problems, the two go hand in hand. the reasons weed use went up is yeah it's legal, but people are more likely to use weed rather than heroin or meth to deal with their problems. but again it has to be combined with programs to treat addict. that's the more important part of legalization of any substance that's addictive.

I think you're mixing up the benefits of decriminalisation of possession and supply, here. In cases like Portugal, their programs worked so well because they were combinations of decriminalisation of possession + rehabilitation programs. Legalizing supply as well would be counterproductive in Portugal's case, because they want less people using drugs, not more.

[Whitedragon]

So I've been thinking on this topic for a while to be, for the past few years there has been a surge in research chemicals and synthetic drugs that either mimic the effects of illegal drugs or are monocularly identical to illegal drugs. Some have caught the attention of the media and been outlawed, but only about 1>% of these chemicals have actually been outlawed. Many of these chemicals are more dangerous for human consumption than the drugs we spent billions of dollars to keep off the streets and some aren't as dangerous.

The point is what exactly is the point of the War on Drugs? We incarcerate people for this and only 2 things have happened. 1 is the obvious which is making a black market controlled by cartels (which everyone knows). The second is we have created another market of research chemicals that is growing to soon become just as profitable as the illegal drug market. These research chemicals are flooding the American streets and young people are buying them thinking they are whatever the person selling them says they are (mdma, coke, lsd etc). Because there are hundreds of different chemicals on the market right now that mimic every popular street drug right now and are perfectly legal to buy online. And most of these chemicals haven't been around long enough for people to actually know the health risk of taking them unlike illegal stuff.

This goverment "war" is backfiring very quickly.

Because if we didn't people would start to expect continuous treatment for long term use. The way it is now we just louse them in back ally crack dens because most are to ashamed of their own actions, and because of this we don't have to pay for them. In the end it's kind of sad, but we do end up shaving off the bottom % of our populace.

[Dangg]

At the time drug laws where created they were probably necessary due to lack of information about the danger. Nowadays it seems redundant.

[Deleted]

Becuase you cant really have a war on drugs ,if they are not illegal.

[Sky High]

I think you're mixing up the benefits of decriminalisation of possession and supply, here. In cases like Portugal, their programs worked so well because they were combinations of decriminalisation of possession + rehabilitation programs. Legalizing supply would be counterproductive in Portugal's case, because they want less people using drugs, not more.

alright well if your issue hangs on "use" then I got nothing to really argue against since I don't see "drug use" weather its up or down to be a good or bad thing. so long as treatment is readily available.

[Ripster42]

Not only is that a bit of a stretch, but you're neglecting the fact that you'd still be creating a new grey/black market for the resale of these substances, which would definitely see a lot of use (in the same way that it already does for alcohol). There's no guarantee that it wouldn't be even easier for kids to get their hands on these things, and even if it weren't, you're still banking on the reduction in underage users being greater than the potential increase in adult users.

As a general rule, allowing for the legal supply and sale of a thing is a very poor way to stop people from having or using that thing. There are exceptions, obviously, but it's a terrible idea to do that for drugs where the goal is to minimise the amount of people using them.

You're not creating a grey/black market. That market is already there, except the supply becomes more regulated as it starts within a legal environment. The illegal market wouldn't be as well structured/profitable/pervasive as the one we have now as it would only be supplying kids, who, as a rule, don't exactly have a shit load of money.

Yes, I'm banking on the reduction in underage users being greater than the increase in adult population because people don't normally start using drugs as an adult. There's already a social stigma involved that is a strong disincentive to start using as an adult, which doesn't really apply when to kids in their rebellious phase. Again, not really interested in trying meth and becoming a fuck up even if I could buy it at the grocery store.

Drugs being illegal is an effective deterrent as can be evidenced by singapores harsh stance on it.

Singapore does not provide an example that is morally acceptable in the western world. Mandatory minimums in the US are more likely to be removed then lengthened. We're also not willing to use corporal as it's unconstitutional.

[Sky High]

Again you are oversimplifying this. It isn't that people go to prison for drug use/distribution OR child abuse, it is actually drug abusers that are one of the highest, if not the highest, portion of the population to engage in the most destructive forms of child abuse. Sure, make drug use a public health concern/aim for treatment instead of a criminal offense, but if you go so far as legalizing distribution and manufacturing then all you are doing is adding to related problems that are directly tied to drug use, such as child abuse. Do you really expect a person who is able to legally get high on amphetamines in the home will not naturally pose a risk to the very same children living under that roof? The risks would be directly related to each other.

that depends on the person and I'm far from being the right person to ask on how to regulate every single persons behavior, nor am I interested in that.

[Ripster42]

i don't really care about Portugal, nor do i care about ideology, I care about how people blatantly disregard their health with drugs that can LITERALLY KILL YOU and yet are readily available on the street, but hey, why not make it legal so everyone can go out and get meth and shoot up whenever they want, why not, f*** it, let everyone have drugs! Hell, a majority of millennial's already smokes pot and disregards traffic laws anyways, lets just add to the mess!
also nice use of a textbook definition of pragmatism. Did you copy paste it?
but you're just trolling so w/e

I mean, welcome to ignore?

[Eats Compost]

You're not creating a grey/black market. That market is already there, except the supply becomes more regulated as it starts within a legal environment. The illegal market wouldn't be as well structured/profitable/pervasive as the one we have now as it would only be supplying kids, who, as a rule, don't exactly have a shit load of money.

Yes, I'm banking on the reduction in underage users being greater than the increase in adult population because people don't normally start using drugs as an adult. There's already a social stigma involved that is a strong disincentive to start using as an adult, which doesn't really apply when to kids in their rebellious phase. Again, not really interested in trying meth and becoming a fuck up even if I could buy it at the grocery store.



Singapore does not provide an example that is morally acceptable in the western world. Mandatory minimums in the US are more likely to be removed then lengthened. We're also not willing to use corporal as it's unconstitutional.

There's a world of difference between grey/black markets where someone is creating and selling something from a bathtub in a basement, and where someone is reselling something that they can walk into a store and buy just because they're an adult. You are gravely and naively underestimating how prolific the latter can be when it is given an opportunity to thrive.

As for the kids thing, you're still leaning way to hard on the angle of less kids doing it. Sky High even had a source that rather neatly displayed how much higher the increase in adult weed use was than the decrease in underage weed use post-legalisation.

[kail]

Politics, nanny government, prison quotas; take your pick.

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the amount of people that blame the govt for the illegal drugs is laughable. People must not understand that Cocaine/LSD/Methamphetamines and other drugs of the sort are literally toxic for the human body/mind/psyche, hell even artists have acknowledged this in songs (shine on you crazy diamond is one example as it is based on what happened to Syd Barrett)
Look at the population that did cocain meth lsd etc and tell me they all came out alright with nothing wrong, no stunted mental growth, their teeth are all in tact, they dont have anything wrong with them. I mean hell, look at what happened to members of the US military during the Vietnam war that were given different types of amphetamines.
They are illegal to protect you.
If you want to do them, its easy to get a hold of them, by all means go ahead and destroy your life with addiction and depression. After you reach rock bottom you will understand (i hope) that they are bad.
D(rug).A(buse).R(esistance).E(ducation). it existed for a reason bro, even if funding was cut.

bash me for my post if you want, idc, this topic makes me question if millennial's (me being one) deserve to even run things if you cant even grasp that drugs are bad mm'kay?

Doubt you advocated in banning Sharpies or paint thinner. Perfectly legal items that can get you high but cause irreparable damage to your brain, lungs, heart, etc. The war on drugs for the sake of principle has been riddled with failure throughout history.

[Deleted]

Because there a lot more people that drugs can do harm to than there are people drugs could help. There are more stupid and lesser people in the world, hence drugs are illegal.