Prohibition of drugs. Criminals love to see it. Why do we make their day?

What I posted is fact. What you posted is opinion that means nothing.

As I said God has allowed the use of drugs for medical purposes and has forbidden the use for recreational purposes. If someone still use drugs for recreational purpose then they choose to do so even when God warned them about it.

Learn the lesson from very first story we have known about human beings, that is the story of Adam and Eve. Just like God tested Adam and Even by saying them not to go near a certain tree. God tests us in this world as well by allowing us to do certain things and by telling us not to do certain things. If someone still insists on doing what is forbidden then he/she makes the choice by using the free will given by God and he/she is responsible for his/her own actions.

Remember life on this earth is nothing but just a test to see how does the best actions according to the Divine guidance given by God.

This doesn't address his lack of foresight.

I'll go my own way, thank you very much.

If everyone policed their own behavior, it wouldn't be necessary to police others' behavior for them.


I've come to realize that when people say things like you are saying, it's just propaganda for weakening the war on drugs as much as possible to make it as easy as possible for drug magnates and their henchman to perpetrate genocide.

Drugs are just poison that feels good. The pleasurable effects of recreational drugs have the same function as sugar does when added pesticide to induce vermin to eat it and thus kill themselves.

The only difference is that drug magnates make more money by addicting their prey and keeping them alive to milk them and their friends, families, victims, and communities for money. It pays more to enslave your victims before killing them than to kill them off straight away.

Concern yourself with policing your own behavior, e.g. don't do drugs, have sex for procreational purposes only, etc. Don't impose these choices on others.

The things I am saying have nothing to do with drug magnates and their henchmen. It has to do with addressing drug use and abuse as health issues primarily instead of police and military issues.

From today's The Independent UK

Britain’s past holds the key to breaking the deadly cycle of heroin addiction and crime

Britain’s “war on drugs”, which began nearly half a century ago, is failing. As drug users have entered prisons rather than treatment programmes, the cycle of addiction and crime has not just continued but taken an even tighter hold, with a boom in organised crime gangs now running supply lines from the cities into rural areas. So what is the answer to breaking the cycle? Where can we look for an alternative way to approach the issue?

The answer could lie in Britain’s own past. In 1926, heeding the advice of medical experts, the Conservative Party began prescribing heroin, paid for by the taxpayer, to great success – with countries across the world following suit. Indeed, the policy continues today on a far smaller scale. Hundreds of people across the UK are currently prescribed medical-grade heroin (diamorphine), quelling their need for unpredictable and sometimes deadly street drugs and taking power away from increasingly violent organised crime groups.

...

Dr Prun Bijral had about 70 patients as a frontline doctor in 2010, many of whom received prescription diamorphine. He is now medical director at the UK’s largest drug treatment provider, Change Grow Live. “I witnessed how it can help transform people’s lives and give them stability where previous things hadn’t been successful,” he says.

Although this figure now pales in comparison to the number of people receiving methadone (around 0.002 of patients are prescribed the drug), Britain successfully used heroin as its major form of treatment for 50 years. As it was the only country in the world to do so, this became known colloquially as the “British System”.

...

Despite warnings from experts that it would simply open up the heroin market to exploitation by crime groups, the Dangerous Drugs Act was passed in 1967, which stopped GPs from prescribing diamorphine, leaving methadone and morphine as the only alternatives. The Act also legally entitled GPs to refer addicted patients to the Home Office, after which they could be offered diamorphine by specialist doctors in new “drug treatment centres”. But there were delays in the building of these specialist treatment centres, and those that eventually opened operated a policy to reduce the number of patients eligible for diamorphine.

...

Our “war on drugs” had begun. The heroin epidemic that unfolded over the following two decades is notorious. By the mid-1990s, nearly half a million people in the UK were addicted. Neil Woods, a former police detective who spent 14 years undercover infiltrating increasingly violent and widespread gang networks, has co-written a book detailing the British System called Drug Wars. He says most people in the grips of heroin dependence have three main ways of funding a habit: they can allow themselves to be sexually exploited, they can steal or, vitally, they can find new customers.

Woods believes the heroin epidemic was largely caused by the demise of the British System. Organised crime stepped in with a tactic of encouraging users to become dealers and fund their own use by turning new people on to the drug, at a time when war in Afghanistan stimulated unprecedented supply to Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

...

Heroin accounts for 90 per cent of the county lines problem and fuels organised crime more than any other drug, according to former undercover detective Woods. He recalled meeting a “cheeky 16-year-old” gang member while undercover in Leicester. Six months later the boy was a “terrifying 17-year-old” because “that’s what the trade made him ... the most successful drug dealers are the ones who are most intimidating because they don’t get grassed up. By policing drugs we’ve created this Darwinian situation and the personalities of our young men are being changed as a result.”

Drug users are simply “caught in the crossfire in this war”. Woods is now chairman of Law Enforcement Action Partnership UK, which advocates an end to the war on drugs. “Policing never reduces demand,” he explained. “It never reduces the size of the market and it never can because this is a health issue.”

...

While the UK’s first heroin crisis spiralled out of control and the British System was largely forgotten, other countries looked to our history for a potential solution. In 1989, Swiss researchers visited Dr John Marks’ clinic in Merseyside and were reportedly impressed by the health and wellbeing of his patients. Five years later, Switzerland created the first heroin-assisted treatment (HAT) centre.

Expanding upon the British System’s basic premise of take-home heroin, the drug (diamorphine) is prescribed two to three times daily by specialist doctors and self-administered in the presence of healthcare professionals. The treatment is available only to those for whom two less intensive treatments, methadone and buprenorphine, have been unsuccessful – around 10 per cent of users. This cohort, now catered for by the government, used to account for 50 per cent of the country’s entire heroin market.

Since its introduction, Switzerland has seen street prostitution eliminated, drug deaths drop by two-thirds and burglary reduced by 50 per cent.

...

HAT is proven to be an effective treatment for many in this group where others have failed and, it’s widely believed that in conjunction with reinvestment in existing services, could play a key role in reversing the fortunes of some of the most vulnerable in our society.

“Heroin may be the most destructive and difficult drug but it’s certainly the easiest one to regulate and it’s the one that will have the biggest impact on society if we get to grips with it,” Woods said. “Even if people don’t care about the plight of somebody self-medicating with heroin to deal with childhood trauma, once it’s explained that this can significantly reduce crime like no other policy, they start to get it.

“Once you explain you’re taking this money away from gangsters by taking their business away from them, they really start to get it.”

This, he says, is the first step in that journey.

Much, much more...

Then you're ignoring the root cause and the bigger picture to focus on the symptoms.

Your position would be like someone defending smoking in restaurants before it was prohibited; and then claiming that if people don't want to breathe smoke they can cook at home or start their own restaurants that don't allow smoking.

You're confused about the root cause and bigger picture of drug use. It isn't drug pushing. The root cause and bigger picture is people's predilection to intoxicate themselves. You're approach is to deal with these through police and military approaches rather than with public health approaches.

You're wrong about my position in regard to smoking. I'm for smoke free public places as well as places dedicated to the smoking public.

That's like saying the root cause of rape and/or sexual harassment is people's predilection to be traumatized by unwanted sexual aggression and therefore that people should choose not to react emotionally and thus be traumatized by sexual violence, and then it won't be pushed on them.


Do you think it's bad/wrong to deal with rape and sexual harassment by police and military approaches instead of with public health approaches?

What if you tried to stop rape and sexual harassment with public health and information campaigns and it wasn't working? Would you want to just let the problem continue and worsen or increase vigilance to try to stop it or at least cut it down/back?


Then why aren't you for drug-free communities/societies/economies? Why do you see tobacco smoke as different/worse than other recreational drug smells/behaviors/economic-effects/health-effects?

Your analogy is utterly false based on your convoluted understanding of cause and effect.

You're confusing voluntary behavior like drug use with victimization through sexual assault. No one chooses sexual assault voluntarily.

Did you ever see the movie Indecent Proposal, where Robert Redford's character lures a couple into splitting up by offering them money to let him seduce the wife?

That is like what happens with drugs. People get lured into pushing/marketing drugs with money, which seduces users into using in various ways, and then the users get addicted, which allows them to be milked for money, and that funds the pushers and higher-ups in the supply chain.

Why can't you see that it is a corrupt business that exploits people and causes all sorts of social harm, which results in profits of various kinds?

The pleasures of intoxication are just a means to an exploitative end. It's like the old expression goes; "there's no such thing as a free drink."

The business doesn't create social harm, it's individuals' behavior that creates social harm.

Your argument is like blaming the auto industry for traffic fatalities.

Don't let yourself get exploited.

Or like blaming the gun industry for shootings?

I think you have to get beyond the gross dichotomy of individual-v-business responsibility for social problems involving products and their usage.

Causation occurs in various complex ways, and it's simply not valid to shift blame to one part of the causal complex in order to ignore others.

With recreational drug use, there may be cases in which some individual(s) freely choose to seek out and use drugs, and the people who supply them with the drugs are not pushing or otherwise trying to manipulate or exploit them beyond the high one-time price charged for the drug.

I don't believe that is what's happening all the time, though. I think there are pushy business models in the recreational drug industry just like there are in other legal consumer products. I think that the goal is to get users hooked so that they will spend increasing amounts of money, and if they end up ruining themselves financially, ruining their health, and hurting their families and communities, I don't think the people making money from it care.

Have you ever noticed that some beer companies tell you to 'drink responsibly,' as part of their marketing campaign. Well, they may or may not be sincere when they say that; but there is a difference between saying something because you really mean it and saying it because it makes you look blameless with regard to alcoholism and other health/social problems that result from irresponsible drinking.

You can deny that there are terrible social, economic, and health problems resulting from recreational drug use, but there are. You could legalize such drugs and tell people. like the beer companies do, "please use recreational drugs responsibly," but if it doesn't happen in practice, do you just ignore the problems or seek to do something more than just issue warnings and education?

We are facing the same issue with guns and terrorism. Ideally, respect for liberty should be sufficient to enable people to have access to guns and ammunition without it resulting in terrorism and crime. Likewise, the right to bear arms should also enable law-abiding people to deter crime by responding to it when it occurs. When the 'supply' and 'demand' of good and evil gun violence don't meet and cause terrorism and crime to back down, the question is why and what to do about it.

Presumably, as with drug pushing/trafficking, there is a disconnect between the people making the big money and those risking their lives as pawns in the game. If information firewalls can protect higher-levels of management from being known by their employees, the employees will not be able to reveal their sources. Likewise, if there is sufficient power to threaten them and their families if they disclose valuable information to law enforcement, then they may also protect their higher-ups, even if they face significant penalties for not doing so.

So you can just as easily ask why drug pushers/traffickers risk so much to perpetrate their crimes as why terrorist shooters risk their lives to perpetrate their murderous acts. Both types of criminality should be deterred by the threat of law-enforcement and/or civilian violence against them, but somehow they have yet to back down. The challenge is understanding why based on figuring out how the networks of power operate.