The general decline in standards today

[LizzieMaine]

Gee, he looks like a fine upstanding citizen. :rofl:

And people wonder why I keep a gun in my nightstand.

 

[jamespowers]

And people wonder why I keep a gun in my nightstand.

Geez, I would also have a shotgun and an AR15 if I had to see this guy every day.:eeek::eusa_doh:

 

[LizzieMaine]

I wonder if he has my mop?

 

[vitanola]

I wonder if he has my mop?

If not, it appears that he could use it.


Good riddance to bad rubbish.

 

[jamespowers]

I wonder if he has my mop?

He probably did. He was so stoned that he thought it was hobby horse.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

He probably did. He was so stoned that he thought it was hobby horse.

or something else...

 

[Stanley Doble]

You get into drug voluntarily. No one sneaks up on you and injects you with dope. Seagrams ain't sneaking up on your and forcing their product down your throat. Once you get addicted then it takes willpower to get rid of them addiction. That is a completely different situation.
So human nature means people are too stupid to walk around with money in their pockets. They are morons and you can sell them anything. They have no willpower, free will or ability to think for themselves. Heck they would drown if the government didn't tell them not to look up when it rains.
Seriously? We have fast food restaurants all around here and I hardly ever go in. Once in a while is fine. It is called will power and realizing that something is not going to be good for you if you eat it everyday. You do have fools who are incapable of making rational decisions though. To make the situation worse by legalizing something that will mentally impare people permanenetly is far worse than opening up a bunch of fast food restaurants.

OK, I don't claim to know everything. Let's say you are right, I am wrong. Everyone has free will, everyone has perfect control of their appetites, everyone is rational, no one ever makes mistakes, and any addiction can be cured instantly by simple will power.

So, how do you account for 2/3 of your fellow citizens being obese in certain states? How do you account for alcoholism and drug addiction? I am not joking or jesting, I seriously want to know the answer to these problems.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Here is another question. If no one had ever heard of alcohol, and some drug company invented it tomorrow, do you think any government would allow it to be sold to the public, knowing its side effects?

Or are you one of those people who believes alcohol, drugs, and poisons of all kinds should be sold anywhere, anytime without restrictions as they were before 1906?

 

[Atticus Finch]

When a relatively large segment of society demands an illegal substance, a black market almost always results. The greater the demand, the more lucrative the black market. The more lucrative the black market is, the more potentially violent it is. Few people in law enforcement doubt that the trade in illegal drugs is a very lucrative and violent black market. Few people in law enforcement think that a large portion of crime, including violent crime, is other than drug related. And few people in law enforcement will tell you that we are winning the “war” on drugs. In fact, the only people I know of that would try to convince you that we’re winning the war on drugs, are bureaucrats whose paychecks depend on that war being won.

So, at some point we’re going to have to decide whether to stay this current course and continue dumping huge amounts of money into a eighty year old system that has, thus far, yielded scant results. Or, are we going reevaluate the problem and change the paradigm. And in this time of spending cuts and government scale backs, that decision is probably going to be forced upon us sooner rather than later.

Truthfully, I care little what happens to drug addicts. I agree with some others here that people have choices in life and that bad choices can be expected to result in bad consequences. If the controlled legalization of drugs causes a sudden frenzy of crazed drug use and drug overdose among addicts…so be it. They are curently dying by the thousands, anyhow. Not a day goes by that I don’t see emaciated addicts sitting in my court. They are often in the end stages of HIV, hepatitis C, malnutrition, dementia and Lord knows what else.

But if I don’t care about drug addicts, here’s what I do care about…

I really care about the innocent mom who is robbed or burglarized or assaulted or stolen from by some drug addict who is seeking to maintain a two-thousand dollar a day drug habit. I really care about the child who is sleeping in her bed when a 9mm round, fired by some drug-dealing thug in a turf war, comes through the window and takes her life. I really care about the wife who wakes up HIV positive one morning because her husband, at sometime in the past, has had unprotected sex with an HIV positive, drug addicted prostitute. In short, I really care about all of the other crap that the black market in illegal drugs inflicts upon our society.

And I know this sort of stuff happens and I know it happens a lot. I care not what the DEA or anyone else says. I know it happens because I get to interview the sobbing witness and read the graphic police reports and prosecute the strung-out defendants when it does. Maybe I should have Michele Leonhart come spend a week or two with me. Maybe what she sees would change her mind about whether illegal drugs are related to the violent crime in our nation.

Is all this a moot argument? Probably so. Legalized drugs are probably a long time and many more violent crimes away. The controlled legalization of drugs would require a drastic change in the way our culture thinks...and that would require an effort that would make the batle to repeal of the 18th Amendment look like childs play. But, from where I stand, I really don’t see a workable alterative.

AF

 

[LizzieMaine]

I don't think anyone with any sense is saying drugs *aren't* related to violent crime, in the cities, or in the small towns, or anywhere else. What I myself am saying is that I don't believe for one minute that "legal drugs" would eliminate that crime. The drug cartels would be transformed into "legitimate businessmen," but they'd still be cheap, filthy thugs operating under the cloak of the "free market." And anyone who doesn't think Big Pharma would just love to get its bloody hooks into the "recreational drugs" market is far more trusting and naive than they ought to be -- and who do you think they'd target for their prime customers? Where do you find the sleaziest cut-rate liquor stores today, stocked with every kind of fortified wine and malt liquor to go?

And aside from that kind of legalized exploitation, the black-market traffickers would still be there, the kitchen-table chemists would still be there, the addicts would still be there, and they'll be just as desperate to get hold of their poisons as they are now. And since addicts won't be able to afford to pay for them at retail prices, well, too bad about the people who get in their way. Some idiot whacked out of his head on crack or bath salts isn't going to stop and think, "oh wait, I don't really have a twelve-foot-high phosphorescent porcupine chasing me that I have to attack with this knife, drugs are legal now."

I don't think there *is* a rational solution to the problem, to be honest. It's obvious we can't lock up or kill all the traffickers and drug lords even if we wanted to. But all the smarmy middle-class-libertarian "drugs expand your mind, help you relax, make you creative, look at Portgual, come on, legalize drugs" propaganda you see on the internet is just as ridiculous. Those people don't care about crime in the inner city. They don't care where the drugs come from or who suffers along the way, or what addiction does to families, just so long as they can get baked.

 

[Atticus Finch]

I don't think anyone with any sense is saying drugs *aren't* related to violent crime, in the cities, or in the small towns, or anywhere else. What I myself am saying is that I don't believe for one minute that "legal drugs" would eliminate that crime. The drug cartels would be transformed into "legitimate businessmen," but they'd still be cheap, filthy thugs operating under the cloak of the "free market." And anyone who doesn't think Big Pharma would just love to get its bloody hooks into the "recreational drugs" market is far more trusting and naive than they ought to be. The black-market traffickers would still be there, the kitchen-table chemists would still be there, the addicts would still be there, and they'll be just as desperate to get hold of their poisons as they are now. And since addicts won't be able to afford to pay for them at retail prices, well, too bad about the people who get in their way. Some idiot whacked out of his head on crack or bath salts isn't going to stop and think, "oh wait, I don't really have a twelve-foot-high phosphorescent porcupine chasing me that I have to attack with this knife, drugs are legal now."

I don't think there *is* a rational solution to the problem, to be honest. It's obvious we can't lock up or kill all the traffickers and drug lords even if we wanted to. But all the smarmy middle-class-libertarian "drugs expand your mind, help you relax, make you creative, look at Portgual, come on, legalize drugs" propaganda you see on the internet is just as ridiculous. Those people don't care about crime in the inner city. They don't care where the drugs come from or who suffers along the way, or what addiction does to families, just so long as they can get baked.

I think the key is how drugs would have to be legalized. Again, I care not a whit about the well being of drug addicts. My goal is to reduce if not eliminate the black market in illegal drugs. If the existing drug laws were simply repealed and not replaced with some other system, not much would be accomplished. But if we could employ a system wherein safe, legal drugs could be distributed in way perhaps SIMILAR to the way that alcohol is now distributed, much of the profit margin now existent in illegal drug sales would be eliminated. Not all. I understand that. I understand that because I now prosecute many precription drug cases wherein legal drugs are sold on a black market. But I’m not seeking absolutes. I’m just trying to conceive of a system that would reduce the plague of ancillary crime that is clearly endemic to our current system.

Folks, we've been dancing this dance for decades now. If the current system was ever going to work, it would have already happened. Instead, it has accomplished little in the way of stemming the tide of the drug trade and has given rise to one of the largest and most violent black markets the world has ever known. And I'll say it again. It is the ancillary black market crime that is society's real problem with drugs.

AF

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's a global problem, and any solution would have to be global in scope. And I'm not at all trusting of any solution that would put the power in the hands of Corporate America -- which has time and again shown itself incapable of controlling its tendency to exploit the poorest and the weakest elements in the population in its quest for the bottom line. The distilleries and the breweries have hardly been responsible in the way they market their products, as you'll see any weekend on any college campus. Big Pharma has given us a generation of Americans hopelessly dependent on drugs to help them sleep, to help them wake up, to help them reproduce, to help them not reproduce, to digest their food, to not digest their food, to gain weight, to lose weight, to concentrate, to relax, to grow hair on bald places, take hair off hairy places, and to pretend they aren't subject to the aging process. I have absolutely *no* confidence that any scheme for legalization would produce a responsible system for the distribution of recreational drugs while at the same time discouraging their use. Turning drugs over to the "free market" is like appointing Willie Sutton as a trustee of your bank.

I *do* care about the addicts, or more properly, I care about the people their addiction affects -- their families, their workmates, their employers, their neighbors, the people they rob or kill to get their fix, their communities as a whole. A girl who used to work for me had her life completely ruined by bath salts -- 24 years old, and all she can think of is getting out of jail so she can get her next dose. That upsets me. She was a good kid, and she let herself be destroyed because she listened to the "drugs are fun" propaganda. I had to fire her from the theatre when I caught her stealing from the safe to buy her dope. And bath salts were *legal* when she got hooked -- you could buy them at gas stations.

As I said earlier in the thread, no community is stronger than its weakest member -- and addicts, whether they're addicted to booze or dope, are the weakest members of any community. It's not just *their* problem, it's the problem of everyone their lives touch. And until we start thinking, as a nation, as a human race, on that basis, there won't be any solution.

 

[jamespowers]

It's a global problem, and any solution would have to be global in scope. And I'm not at all trusting of any solution that would put the power in the hands of Corporate America -- which has time and again shown itself incapable of controlling its tendency to exploit the poorest and the weakest elements in the population in its quest for the bottom line. The distilleries and the breweries have hardly been responsible in the way they market their products, as you'll see any weekend on any college campus. Big Pharma has given us a generation of Americans hopelessly dependent on drugs to help them sleep, to help them wake up, to help them reproduce, to help them not reproduce, to digest their food, to not digest their food, to gain weight, to lose weight, to concentrate, to relax, to grow hair on bald places, take hair off hairy places, and to pretend they aren't subject to the aging process. I have absolutely *no* confidence that any scheme for legalization would produce a responsible system for the distribution of recreational drugs while at the same time discouraging their use. Turning drugs over to the "free market" is like appointing Willie Sutton as a trustee of your bank.

I *do* care about the addicts, or more properly, I care about the people their addiction affects -- their families, their workmates, their employers, their neighbors, the people they rob or kill to get their fix, their communities as a whole. A girl who used to work for me had her life completely ruined by bath salts -- 24 years old, and all she can think of is getting out of jail so she can get her next dose. That upsets me. She was a good kid, and she let herself be destroyed because she listened to the "drugs are fun" propaganda. I had to fire her from the theatre when I caught her stealing from the safe to buy her dope. And bath salts were *legal* when she got hooked -- you could buy them at gas stations.

As I said earlier in the thread, no community is stronger than its weakest member -- and addicts, whether they're addicted to booze or dope, are the weakest members of any community. It's not just *their* problem, it's the problem of everyone their lives touch. And until we start thinking, as a nation, as a human race, on that basis, there won't be any solution.

Amen! I need not comment further. :clap:

 

[Stanley Doble]

When a relatively large segment of society demands an illegal substance, a black market almost always results. The greater the demand, the more lucrative the black market. The more lucrative the black market is, the more potentially violent it is. Few people in law enforcement doubt that the trade in illegal drugs is a very lucrative and violent black market. Few people in law enforcement think that a large portion of crime, including violent crime, is other than drug related. And few people in law enforcement will tell you that we are winning the “war” on drugs. In fact, the only people I know of that would try to convince you that we’re winning the war on drugs, are bureaucrats whose paychecks depend on that war being won.

So, at some point we’re going to have to decide whether to stay this current course and continue dumping huge amounts of money into a eighty year old system that has, thus far, yielded scant results. Or, are we going reevaluate the problem and change the paradigm. And in this time of spending cuts and government scale backs, that decision is probably going to be forced upon us sooner rather than later.

Truthfully, I care little what happens to drug addicts. I agree with some others here that people have choices in life and that bad choices can be expected to result in bad consequences. If the controlled legalization of drugs causes a sudden frenzy of crazed drug use and drug overdose among addicts…so be it. They are curently dying by the thousands, anyhow. Not a day goes by that I don’t see emaciated addicts sitting in my court. They are often in the end stages of HIV, hepatitis C, malnutrition, dementia and Lord knows what else.

But if I don’t care about drug addicts, here’s what I do care about…

I really care about the innocent mom who is robbed or burglarized or assaulted or stolen from by some drug addict who is seeking to maintain a two-thousand dollar a day drug habit. I really care about the child who is sleeping in her bed when a 9mm round, fired by some drug-dealing thug in a turf war, comes through the window and takes her life. I really care about the wife who wakes up HIV positive one morning because her husband, at sometime in the past, has had unprotected sex with an HIV positive, drug addicted prostitute. In short, I really care about all of the other crap that the black market in illegal drugs inflicts upon our society.

And I know this sort of stuff happens and I know it happens a lot. I care not what the DEA or anyone else says. I know it happens because I get to interview the sobbing witness and read the graphic police reports and prosecute the strung-out defendants when it does. Maybe I should have Michele Leonhart come spend a week or two with me. Maybe what she sees would change her mind about whether illegal drugs are related to the violent crime in our nation.

Is all this a moot argument? Probably so. Legalized drugs are probably a long time and many more violent crimes away. The controlled legalization of drugs would require a drastic change in the way our culture thinks...and that would require an effort that would make the batle to repeal of the 18th Amendment look like childs play. But, from where I stand, I really don’t see a workable alterative.

AF

Demand? What do you mean demand? NO country has ever "Demanded" a drug problem. Drugs are not bought, they are sold. The British forced drugs on China in the 1840s because they needed the money for their imperialist objectives in India. The CIA forced drugs on America because they needed the money for their imperialist objectives in Europe, Vietnam, South America, and the Middle East.

What do the people have to say about it? What do the police have to say about it when their government tells them to back off and not prosecute the sellers of drugs and illegal firearms?

 

[Foxer55]

LizzieMaine,

As I said earlier in the thread, no community is stronger than its weakest member -- and addicts, whether they're addicted to booze or dope, are the weakest members of any community. It's not just *their* problem, it's the problem of everyone their lives touch. And until we start thinking, as a nation, as a human race, on that basis, there won't be any solution.

Yeah, but its a problem you can't fix, its here to stay. Somone just like you will be saying this very same thing 100 years from now.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Yeah, but its a problem you can't fix, its here to stay. Somone just like you will be saying this very same thing 100 years from now.

One of many reasons I'm glad I won't be alive then.

 

[Lady Day]

LizzieMaine,
Yeah, but its a problem you can't fix, its here to stay. Somone just like you will be saying this very same thing 100 years from now.

Well, that's a defeatist attitude. Don't do something because you can't 'fix' it 100%? I think *this* is the true and honest decline of standards. This absolutist attitude toward everything. It has to be 100% or not worth doing. Everything we do in our lives everyday is even remotely 100% of what we expect or desire as an outcome? Please. That's the fluctuation of being alive. Isn't trying the human condition?

 

[jamespowers]

Well, that's a defeatist attitude. Don't do something because you can't 'fix' it 100%? I think *this* is the true and honest decline of standards. This absolutist attitude toward everything. It has to be 100% or not worth doing. Everything we do in our lives everyday is even remotely 100% of what we expect or desire as an outcome? Please. That's the fluctuation of being alive. Isn't trying the human condition?

Good point. You have the "why try?" generation that just lets things get worse because of it. Standards spiral down as people just accept that things are just going to be that way. Holding people to a higher standard is the answer, not giving in to the lowest common denominator.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land." -- Deut. 15:11

 

[LizzieMaine]

Meanwhile, here's an interesting piece on the reality of cigarette smuggling in the modern era -- a global problem involving the collusion of, among others, worldwide tobacco corporations, Chinese and Russian "entrepreneurs," organized crime in North America and Europe, and Indian tribes in both Canada and the United States. Over 600 billion cigarettes a year -- 11 percent of the total world production -- are distributed on the black market.