Albert Walker said:
I got to see some innocent victims of meth today. Playing cards at my friends office and I saw a lady come in with 4 young kids trying to get her sister out of jail for a lab she had in her house, with her kids in it. They charged the woman federally and gave her a rediculus bond, and since it was federal the only way a bondsman could touch it is with 100% collateral. These kids are most likely headed for foster homes and will most likely not to get to see thier mother for a long time if ever.
So let's see... This woman is facing incredibly long prison terms solely due to the existence of Federal prohibition laws.
That part kind of sounds like the rational used by the wife abuser,
"You made me hit you..."
Meth labs and Prohibition
Albert Walker said:
You can say if it was legal she wouldn't have been arrested. Someone that would risk thier kids for a high like that, is definitely going to tweak and neglect her kids anyways. Meth destroyed that family. If it was legal meth most likely would of still destroyed that family.
This is a wee but more complex than you are suggestion it is. For one thing, one of the reasons people setup meth labs (which I am against because of their dangers) is due to the incredible profits they can produce. The other is because they can not afford to buy the drug due to the artificially high costs of the drug.
You are assuming the latter as the reason for this woman maintaining a meth lab in her home. That may or may not be the case, but you were there so I am willing to give you the benefit of a doubt that you know something which you didn't mention in your post. So let's assume that this woman's obsessive drug use led her to creating a meth lab.
My answer is, yes. If the prohibition laws did not exist, and the drug was openly distributed through opened regulation, she would have been able to obtain the drug at a reasonable cost. And the drug quality she would have been able to obtain would be far better than what she could have produced in her bathtub.
In a non-prohibition environment, there would be no use or profit incentive to maintaining a meth lab.
In regards to risk taking behavior, let's take a look at good ole' honest tried and true pot (grass, cannabis, etc.). There are people today who are serving a life prison sentence for simply having been caught smoking a single joint. The "three strikes" law provides for life terms in drug offender cases, where upon their third time of being convicted they automatically face a life sentence. Three joints, three convictions, one life term prison sentence where a family and life is destroyed by draconian prohibition laws.
Albert Walker said:
I am curious, how can you promote something like that?
I'm not promoting drug use, I am promoting drug law reform with the complete abolishment of prohibition laws.
But, if I may rephrase your question, what I believe you are actually asking me is:
"How can you want to allow the meth boogyman free rein without wanting to keep it in check?"
Good question! Glad you asked! :D
High Risk Drug seeking Behaviors
First of all, I am taking the tiger by the tail. Effectively defuse the prohibition laws as they apply to methamphetamine, and the whole of the prohibition laws come falling down like a house of cards. Additionally, methamphetamine law enforcement is no different from any other drug enforcement: in the face of prison sentences which are so harsh that they are a human rights violation, all recreational drug use is a high risk behavior.
There is no question that methamphetamine tends to create obsessive drug use in some users. So does nicotine. One can argue that nicotine does not create the risk behavior that methamphetamine does. But that argument is without merit because there is no legal risk to smoking (I won't even go into the health risks).
Yet, if you suddenly remove the availability of cigarettes from a nicotine addict they will take incredible risks to obtain cigarettes. I have seen otherwise normal and intelligent people, leave the safety of a cabin in the woods when bears were spotted in the area, and run several hundred yards to a car where their cigarettes were located. This was only an hour or so after we had seen two very large bears utterly tear apart a tent to access the food inside.
Nicotine addiction will include the same risk taking behaviors seen in methamphetamine users. Yet, we almost never see the problem that this would otherwise cause because cigarettes are readily available.
And before you comment that I am pointing my fingers elsewhere, I am not. I am making this illustration to show how different drug use is when the risk factors are removed. This has also been shown in the Dutch study, and that people will develop self-regulating strategies on their own in the absence of external risks (i.e., laws).
Massive Costs, Zero Benefits
Look, there are no blue skys to be had here. Stop pretending that I am claiming that there will be no problems if the drug laws are removed, nowhere am I claiming that. People will continue to use drugs if they are illegal or not. Some people will even become addicted to drugs and destroy their lives as a result, whether they are illegal or not.
Maintaining prohibitionist drug laws does not address the problem. And the gross costs of such laws on society exceeds 100 billion dollars per year:
(Amounts shown are in Billions of Dollars)
That close to the cost of waging an Iraq level military invasion each and every year! And it is producing
ZERO IMPROVEMENT of the problem.
End the drug war, let these folks have their drugs, keep them out of the reach of children, shore up DUI/DWI driving laws, provide treatment programs
(funded by recreational drug taxes), promote safe drug use education, and deal with drug abuse problems as we do with alcohol abuse problems, provide pharmaceutical grade substances, completely eliminate secondary black market crimes, and reduce costs to a small fraction of that maintaining the Drug War.
There is nothing difficult about that.
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![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
