Thanks Bill, I knew I liked you for some reason. You make sense! Walt
On 4/11/08, William Robb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I listened to a documentary about cocaine addiction a few years ago. The > fellow being > interviewed was of the opinion that banning drugs is a fools game (look how > successful your > country's "war on drugs" has been), in that all it does is give the banned > substance a cachet > value which makes it more enticing, and increases secondary crime, since the > price of the > product goes up with the risk factor. > In a nutshell, banning drugs, be it meth, coke, marijuana or alcohol has > little negative effect > on consumption, but has a tremendous positive effect on crimes like break and > enter, armed > robbery and murder, as the addicts will tend to do whatever they need to do > to feed their > addiction. > OTOH, if you decriminalize the stuff, the risk factors of production and > selling go down a lot, > the price goes down a lot, addicts no longer need to be marginalized into a > criminal element > that may be very violent and abusive (yer basic street whore is often dead > before she hits 30), > and since you are no longer building jails to hold the people you have > criminalized > unnecessarily, you have a lot more funds for treatment programs to help > people get off whatever > is jonesing them to death. > > What we are doing now isn't working, and will never work. The choice we have > is to continue > playing the fools game or try a different approach, perhaps finding something > that will work. > > William Robb -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
