[Language+Insults+Spam=Delete]

[Language, insults, etc.]

[Language+Insults+Spam=Delete]

I'll just wait you out. Pretty sure I'll win this one. Probably soon.

Of course they're establishing the authority of the state to kill children.

Why would the state waste money on undesirables?

Thank you for conceding all of my arguments (and making it clear you either didn't read them or didn't understand them). My task here is complete. Any third-party viewer can read what I wrote and see that you were either entirely unwilling or unable to respond to any of it in any way.

To recap, I argued that the "drug war" causes far more harm than it does good, if it in fact does any good at all (with various citations for this skepticism). I argued that, because of all of this harm, it's worth talking about our current policies.

I listed and explained some of the many levels on which the "drug war" harms all of our society, and foreign societies not governed by our laws at all. (again peppered with citations--I'd provide more, but nobody disputed a word of what I said)

Einstein and The Yell then responded with spam, made vague references to topics which support my position (without explanation), then spammed some more. I haven't even had a single argument to respond to. Nobody's made any, let alone good ones.

I find it embarrassing to read this level of drivel. I've made my arguments and supported them.

An incomplete statement to explain this dismissal of your spam: (Though admittedly your inability to respond to anything I posted is even more damning, either of your intentions or your abilities.)

Einstein,

I'm not sure how you think British foreign aggression centuries ago is somehow an argument for the "drug war." It's certainly not a response to anything I posted, and  you certainly haven't explained how a British attack on China centuries ago supports your position. You didn't have a point, or you'd have made it. That's not argumentation at all, let alone strong. You're just spamming in place of providing arguments and responding to what I posted because you have nothing else to say.

I already brought up diseases spread by drug use, or should I say diseases spread by the "drug war." I explained how syringes are cheap and that, if buying [currently illegal] drugs was handled like buying legal stuff is now (such as vitamin B, for instance), they'd be sold in new, clean syringes (which vitamin B is).

No business would sell drugs in their current forms if not for laws against drugs and black markets. Syringes cost less than 50 cents (http://tinyurl.com/l3v8643). Selling drugs in them would be a no-brainer (healthier clients live to buy more!) and this would obliterate the spread of diseases by drug users. The topic of diseases completely supports my position, and I have previously explained how this is so (with a little recap here for your convenience).

But you brought it back up, not to respond to what I posted, but to vaguely reference the topic. Because "diseases" are "bad." So if you use "diseases" and "drugs" in the same sentence, you clearly supported your position, right?

You obviously either didn't read what I posted, or you lack the necessary reading comprehension to respond. I already brought up the topic in support of my position. I clearly explained my reasoning. Your response? No response. Just a vague reference to the topic which supports my position.

Nobody is convinced by you stating "a no substance post" in response to my posts here. I clearly laid out my arguments. You failed to respond to any of them. Nobody is childish enough to read your proclamation that my posts lack substance and forget this.

The Yell,

The drug business is not inherently a hugely lucrative and violent business. The fact that we have such a large legal pharmaceutical business in the USA which causes no violence is evidence of this. The "drug war" makes it unnaturally profitable and unnaturally a part of a black (unregulated, ie policed) market.

I described all of this in detail, explaining it. I didn't link a lot of evidence for this because there's SO much of it, it's SO easy to find, and it's undisputed. People who discount it have faith that so many people must be saved by laws against drugs that it's worth ANY cost! But they don't make arguments that it's not true.

You missed the point. Did you even read the posts? Again no response. Just another vague reference to another topic which supports my position.

Then you go on to misquote the 41% reference which is not "drug users" but merely "people who have tried pot at least once." It's plain to see that you did not, in fact, read anything I wrote.

You can't discuss or debate a topic with someone if you refuse to read what they wrote or respond to it in any way. You lost this debate by refusing to take part in it.

So keep spamming. I'll give you the last word.

A whole lot of spam and a stated desire to murder people who have smoked pot. Which is 41%+ of Americans. (http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/NSDUH/2K8NSDUH/tabs/toc.htm)

Libertarians cringe when they see what you say because you claim to value liberty and States' rights as they do, yet you're a complete lunatic (in their view) when it comes to other topics such as abortion and homosexuality.

That's the problem they have with you. Your positions on gay-police and no-abortions-for-rape-victims reflect poorly on rational people when these views are clumped together with issues of liberty (when it comes to taxes, for instance) and states' rights (when it comes to environmental regulations, for instance).

No libertarian thinker has ever been upset by your "arguments" because you rarely make any, and you never respond to theirs. They're disappointed that you split the vote on matters of freedom by merging them with the primarily cultural issues of homosexuality and abortion--which happen regardless of law.

Nobody has made a single claim or cited a single source for lives/money supposedly saved by the "drug war." You know that you have no way to quantify any actual benefits of it whatsoever, let alone to compare such benefits to the known costs. That's what I meant by pointing out that your position is one of faith, not evidence.

I have posted numerous links to support my claim that laws against drugs have a usually negligible effect on usage rates (as evidenced by usage rates not changing or changing very little when drugs are decriminalized/legalized). You have no response. No evidence to the contrary. No explanation of skepticism of the reasoning/methods of these claims. Nothing.

Therefore, I argued, there's little to no evidence of the "drug war" accomplishing anything positive--certainly nothing remotely comparable to the damage it does. Nobody made any attempt to refute this claim.

It's pretty obvious that making drugs illegal drives up their prices drastically and makes the production of those drugs more profitable to the people willing to do so. This results in drug lords, drug wars, and a lot of people killed both nationally and internationally. (http://drogriporter.hu/en/celebrate) And massive amounts of money spent supposedly combating  the import of drugs--which I have suggested is often combating competition to the CIA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_trafficking for a start--it'd be no trouble providing more!) making money off of the artificially inflated, extra profitable black-market US drug trade.

On top of these deaths, more people are killed--users, sellers, police, and innocent bystanders/witnesses--enforcing drug laws inside the USA.

And on top of these deaths, more people are killed by unknown doses and unknown additives to drugs in the unregulated black market the "drug war" creates--You've stated that you don't care that the policy you support kills these people, but they're just one pile of dead among many created solely by the "drug war."

On top of those deaths, more lives are ruined by prison sentences and records which are often far more harmful to people than the drugs they supposedly exist to protect people from. I suppose your retort is that 41% of Americans would have benefited from prison sentences and criminal records, if only they'd all been caught? That's ridiculous, everyone knows it, and that's why more and more states are decriminalizing/legalizing pot.

Supposedly you support the "drug war" because it saves people from drugs (though you don't have any evidence of that, and there's plenty to the contrary), but at the same time you don't have a problem KILLING people who use drugs (you've stated that you don't care that the "drug war" causes the market to be unregulated and causes unknown doses/additives which kill people).

How can you support these laws because they supposedly save people, yet you do you not care when these same laws kill those same people? Here, again, we see that your position is faith-based (+fear-based), and not related in any way to the laws you support doing society any good. You, at the same time, claim that "saving" these people is worth all of the death and harm I''ve outlined above, and that they deserve to be killed. That's extremely logically inconsistent.

That's a lot of evidence of harm caused by the "drug war" compared to... what? Where's your evidence of the "drug war" helping anybody? Random rants about how drugs are bad for you are not responses to nor refutations of anything I've posted. My core arguments that opened this thread haven't been responded to in any way. Points conceded, eh?

And The Yell hits us with sound logic which would also indict gun-manufacturers when guns are used in crimes and prosecute the makers of unhealthy food for fatasses the world over! And positively is a clear argument for the prohibition of alcohol!

It's not like Dr. William Stewart Halsted, AKA "father of modern surgery" was on heroin for decades!

Or this link contains a bunch of other badass people who've given the world more than you or I!
http://www.popcrunch.com/15-geniuses-wh … g-addicts/

No! You've decided that people don't own their own bodies! You do!

And regardless that you're not remotely equipped to compare the massive harm done by "Drug War" to the benefits you imagine (because apparently illegality and social inability to score drugs on the huge black market are the only things keeping you clean--although you may be a drinker, taking you beyond irrationality to hypocrisy too), you rant for your position based on faith because you can't logically argue for your faith.

I don't dispute that drugs are harmful to people. You haven't argued against anything I actually posted.

Dear lord it's hard to research a topic so spammed by political hacks and organizations trying to sell stuff.

I saw a doctor on the tele talking about how 1% of heroin users die from overdose annually, and that most heroin addicts stop by their '40s (largely because it's economically unfeasible to keep it up). I've found a few repeats of this 1% annual claim online but can't find an original source for it--nor can I find any claims conflicting it.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2039886/ roughly correlates this, finding that "[o]n average, addicts in this cohort [heroin users] lost 18.3 years" (years of potential life lost).

The fact that none of the plethora of anti-drug websites cite an annual mortality rate strongly suggests it's certainly not "[o]dds are that they will die" from anything relating to heroin.

My search for a source for this statistic also taught me that heroin overdose is almost always from impure heroin (a result of the "drug war"), diseases contracted from needles (also a result of the "drug war"--needles are cheap) and mixing heroin with other drugs--not a result of heroin dosage by itself. (http://tinyurl.com/mzubphh / http://tinyurl.com/kakj4w3) I'm shocked to be learning that heroin itself is not as potentially fatal as I thought when I started reading today.

First time users are dying because of the "drug war" and the impure heroin they're buying from an unregulated black market, not pure heroin. The deaths you fear are another example for my argument that the "drug war" is more harmful than drugs, not an example of heroin being dangerous in its pure form (which it would be in, were it regulated like OTC meds).

In any event, that people who use drugs are "asking for it" is not a response to my post. If someone died because a bottle of bourbon was poisoned, that'd be a poisoning fatality, not death by alcoholism.

Now you've made a guess that maybe the "drug war" is keeping drugs out of the hands of the children. Well, for the children, of course I can turn off my brain and give in to emotion. But, can we find any evidence that this is actually true? Does drug criminalization (which certainly kills people) prevent children from abusing drugs?

"Ten Years After Decriminalization, Drug Abuse Down by Half in Portugal"
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/20 … -portugal/

Lucky me. NORML did some research for me (and included citation):
"Marijuana Decriminalization & Its Impact on Use" (This one's just about cannabis, but if we're going to generalize let's generalize)
http://norml.org/aboutmarijuana/item/ma … t-on-use-2

"Global report: Decriminalization does not increase rates of drug use"
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/07/g … -drug-use/

An interesting read:
"Supply-Side Drug Policy: Will It Ever Work?" (includes citation)
http://faculty.winthrop.edu/stonebraker … edrugs.htm

I'm not finding evidence that the "drug war" is saving the children. Most people don't do drugs because most people don't want to. Tons of drugs still cascade over the US border, but most people still aren't using.

As for those who use (more proof that the "drug war" is a complete failure), prohibition didn't stop alcohol consumption, and the "war on drugs" isn't stopping millions of Americans from using drugs. You're dismissing people we know the "drug war" is hurting and killing by comparing them to people you imagine it saves. You're not remotely equipped to make the calculation that the "drug war" is harming less people than it's supposedly saving from themselves. You don't have evidence; you have faith.

It's not productive to cry in public when someone has more knowledge, education, and/or intellect than you. It just embarrasses oneself.

Put up or shut up. Nobody cares about your personal emotional issues.

You think Singapore has "fair rule of law"? Or that China's "growth" numbers mean anything?

Hahahahahahahahhahahahahahaha. Good stuff.