After a long time thinking about it, and after reading Radley Balko's latest, I'm pretty much convinced that the War on Drugs is the United States' single greatest policy failure of the last half century.
Or, rephrasing the title of this post, the War on Drugs is indefensibly irrational.
1 comment:
He makes a good case that there are severe problems with the way the war is being waged, but doesn't give good arguments for legalization.
For starters, a drug adict can lose most personal autonomy and become adicted to a chemical while unable to find a work to pay for it-- even if the chemical were legalized, a serious adict would need to rely on welfare or resort to crime.
Likewise, because of people desperatly needing drugs there will still be a black market in smugled and unregulated drugs that are cheaper than the legalized, taxed, and regulated kind.
And even in the less serious cases, in any kind of semi-liberal healthcare system, everyone else would have to pay for damages someone inflicts on themself by choice. Unfortunately this is also true of legal drugs such as tobacco or the extreeme abuse of alchohol. (Which is different since it may even have health benifits if used responsibly.)
I feel like the legalization of drugs would make a great LD debate topic. Unfortunatly, they probably don't want teenagers debating about drugs, even though researching them will probably do more to disuade people.
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