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- cross-posted to:
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Rising GOP support for the U.S. taking unilateral military action in Mexico against drug cartels is increasingly rattling people on both sides of the border who worry talk of an attack is getting normalized.
Wednesday’s Republican presidential primary debate featured high-stakes policy disagreements on a range of issues from abortion to the environment — but found near-unanimous consensus on the idea of using American military force to fight drug smuggling and migration.
You don’t need guns to kill the Cartels. You need to legalize drigs and regulate them. The war on drugs is what made the cartels what they are today.
That’s completely out of the question in the Nanny States of America. The republicans want their “small government” to tell you what you’re allowed to put in or do to your own body, so free will would never be acceptable.
I’m sorry, but do you have the same position on gun laws (about nannies)?
Cause we are talking about heavy narcotics, that usually don’t give you a second chance. Guns don’t make you physically, medically dependent and unable to reconsider.
If that’s your point of view on narcotics, then in it one should also be able to own an Abrams tank with all the weaponry, legally.
Now, light drugs are fine, but Mexican cartels don’t deal in that.
I think the difference is drugs do damage to mostly yourself while guns do damage to mostly others.
Under influence of drugs you can inflict any conceivable damage on others, which you wouldn’t without drugs.
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What, that psychoactive substances make one inadequate while taking them? FFS, just encountering such people as yourself reinforces my belief that these should be controlled.
The drug most commonly implicated in acts of violence (particularly domestic violence) is alcohol, and there’s ads for that plastered all over the damn country. The violence associated with “hard” drugs like heroin or cocaine is usually tied to their acquisition or sale. Alcohol is the one that causes violence via consumption, and it’s one of the only drugs that its withdrawal can very easily kill you. Opiate withdrawal sucks, but it’s typically not lethal.
I’m not excluding alcohol.
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Yeah, I’m definitely not trying to teach this particular pigeon play chess.
Taking a drug is a choice, getting shot is not. Stop being obtuse and conflating separate issues. Shame on you.
Yes, it’s a choice that you are going to possibly lose control of yourself and do various things you wouldn’t usually. If we are treating intoxication by cocaine or anything else as negligible while determining criminal responsibility for murders etc, that is, that every act under intoxication was intentional - then I’m fine with legalizing all drugs.
Don’t know what you’re talking about, every act under intoxication is already legally intentional. “It’s not rape officer, I was drunk!” Doesn’t hold up in court
Well, then fine. The more coke sniffers - the fewer coke sniffers, rephrasing the joke about suicides.
Pretty sure the “I was super coked out” defense has yet to be tried in court, but I can’t imagine it would be effective
Where I live (a red state), things like weed and mushrooms are still extremely illegal. I have a multiple AR’s that I built myself. And I respect those guns and would never use them in an irresponsible manner. But knowing how insanely stupid half the country is, it terrifies me that almost ANYBODY can legally own an AR. We need to have better control over who is allowed near these extremely dangerous weapons. And yes, they are extremely dangerous. If you’ve seen what high velocity rounds do to things, it’s understandable. But there’s no reason to restrict responsible gun owners from owning them. Ban AR’s and people will still have access to other weapons that are just as dangerous.
But telling people what they’re allowed to do with their own bodies, whether it be weed, mushrooms, abortions, etc is a complete distortion of the spirit of the constitution. If we made safer drugs legal, people would be far less likely to use more potent and deadly drugs. Sometimes people just want to get high, and if they can’t get weed they get so desperate that they are making soda bottle meth. Or buying who knows what from some shady dude on a corner somewhere. If you legalize something, then we can regulate it, and people feel safer seeking help with their addictions.
Put it this way. If there isn’t a victim, then it shouldn’t be a crime.
Yes, I meant that guns increase the damage from an irresponsible person, while drugs make them more irresponsible. So somewhat comparable as factors.
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Yeah, I’m not gonna argue with a person who thinks that allowing oneself to get intoxicated while having access to a gun is responsible. Just not worth it, like playing chess against a pigeon.
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And your opinion is worth posting here why exactly?
Drugs you put into your body. Bullets you put into someone else’s. They are not the same.
They are not the same, but they both affect the probability of bullets being put anywhere.
I’ll formulate this differently - if a person taking drugs is legally fully responsible for everything done under their effect, then I’m all for full legalization. No excuses, like what a mental health problem would be, because taking drugs is a choice.
Good news for you- they are responsible.
Well, then there’s nothing to argue about for us, but you’ll see various kinds of unofficial social discrimination of the users of such drugs through every loophole possible. Even being a person who takes medicine to not see hallucinations or not have impaired judgement is unpleasant socially. Nobody wants to live near a person who takes medicine in order to see hallucinations and get their judgement impaired to feel good. Except for other such people.
EDIT: I mean, similar to alcohol, nothing really new here.
A) You should try to avoid fallacious arguments. Comparing drugs with guns is a terrible false equivalence. It’s also just flat out wrong.
B) You’re “guns don’t make you unable to reconsider” is one of the dumbest takes possible. If you use a gun for it’s sole intended purpose, you could kill yourself or someone else. That’s absolutely something you can’t reconsider. Dead is dead.
Drugs have the potential to kill ONE person, the person who made the decision to ingest them. Guns have the potential to kill many people.
There are SO many other arguments you could have made against relaxing drug policy, you chose poorly.
It can be right or wrong depending on the set of criteria to compare them. Since I haven’t said anything as absolute as you did in your “A” statement, I’d say you’re the one to do fallacies here.
Drugs make your judgement impaired, so by extension they have the potential to make you do anything, including killing any amount of people.
I don’t think I choose my arguments poorly. Natural languages are fuzzy, and when you immediately start with dubious interpretations of what I wrote with a clear goal to prove that someone’s right and someone’s wrong and not reach the truth possibly by asking questions or having conditional logic in your answers, you just discredit yourself and not me.
What you just said, literally, is the textbook definition of a false equivalence fallacy.
“If everything and everyone is portrayed negatively, there’s a leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans.”
But that’s all irrelevant anyways since you’re basically just regurgitating DARE propaganda that has little basis in fact.
The fact is that drugs won’t cause a normally reasonable person to suddenly go on a murderous rampage. There are people who have done terrible things under the influence of drugs, but there were always aggravating circumstances. Meanwhile there are millions of recreational drug users who go about their lives every day as productive members of society. You almost definitely know some personally.
No, you just have a problem trying to understand what’s said to you, fighting some imagined war in text instead. For what?
I’m equating equal things. There hasn’t been an argument here on a level above them.
Also you are imagining a lot of what I’m saying instead of asking me when it’s unclear, I think this is deliberate but circumstances of upbringing made you think it’s not easy to notice, while it is and also discredits your argument.
Trying to present your opponent as a medium for some entity’s propaganda, thus attempting to diminish them as a subject of conversation, is something clearly incompatible with the image you are trying to create with that tone.
A person who’d kill an attacker in self-defense - which is perfectly reasonable - can kill an innocent person under a drug causing hallucinations. That’s a very simple and a bit cinematographic example.
Anyway, use of alcohol does that. Of course there are accompanying circumstances, there always are, that’s not a counterargument.
The conversation is about cocaine, so irrelevant.
IRL - no, I live in a country where harmless weed gets you a sentence similar to one for heroine. Ex-Soviet laws and all that.
Well, there was one guy, and yes, he’s normal morally, but I wouldn’t say adequate enough to entrust something important.
They need to manufacture a new “war on terror” to distract the media and population through their coup and robbery.
Unfortunately the cartels saw this coming with marijuana legalization and now aare in every industry in mexico. Avocados are already legal and the cartel makes a lot of money from them already. The cats out of the bag and it’s frankly to late to just end the war on drugs and see the country revert. Also even if meth is legal to consume are we saying that the US goverment would start producing meth?
Ah, then it is too late. Enjoy the hellscape that we have hand crafted I guess. Also, the US gov already produces drugs. Their half the reason crack is so prevalent in the first place.
but that’s literally never going to happen - not at a Federal level, anyway.
Arizona going to send state troopers to Mexico?
They’re like Apple: Create a problem, provide a solution that others have to pay you for, make bank
That’s a naive view. Do you think cartels will dismiss themselves at that point? Or that mobs will somehow become lawful citizens?
Also, do you think there is a positive scenario of consuming cocaine or opiates? Those drugs induce heavy addiction and take a great toll from your mind and body.
💀
Leave those cases to medical professionals. They already have access to opiates, by the way.
That doesn’t sound very mature of you.
And the topic is very complex and had more than one aspect. One of them - cartels. Another - drugs they sell.
So you’re in favor of banning alcohol and sugar, right?
Alcohol - yes. Though it seems there are ways of consuming it without getting addiction. And that’s not the case with cocaine and opiates.
Sugar - not so much. Addiction and physical harm is real, but not on the same level. Also it’s very hard to effectively forbid sugar. I think it’s unreal.
you falsely assume all users of cocaine and opiates to be addicted. If that would be the case, then medical use wouldnt be possible.
These substances are very addictive and need to be treated with great respect and caution. Something that is not possible in the environment created by their criminalization.
Exactly. They are dangerous to the level I don’t trust ordinary people to use them, only medical professionals
criminalization fails to prevent use by “ordinary people”.
It is the same like with sex ed. People who teach their teenagers about the risks and how to minimize them have much better success at preventing teen pregnancy or stds for their children than those that go the “wait till marriage or go to hell!” way.
In the same way countries that have introduced programs for harm reduction like drug checking, consume rooms, needle exchanges etc. suffer much less drug related deaths, or problems like HIV and Hep C.
But you cannot do harm reduction, social care and addiction prevention in an environment where the only people that drug users can talk about drugs with are other users and dealers.
Very invasive and authoritarian of you.
Preach
How high are you right meow?
Not high at all. You?
You’re joking right? Or you’re a kid? Opiates are some of the most important drugs in global medicine, have been for a century and probably will be for another.
Even Cocaine has numerous medical uses today.
Medical professionals already have legal access to it.
Everyone should have legal access to these drugs. These drugs being illegal just increases the harm caused, we know how the drug war goes. Going to war in Mexico is only going to make problems around these drugs worse.
But it allows for some people to get involved in this lucrative trade. The US has been involved in the global Cocaine and Heroine trade since a long time and will continue to do so.
Are you serious? We’re talking about coke and opiates! Not some weed and shrooms.
You cannot trust yourself to use those substances “recreationally and in safe way”, no matter how smart you are. Ask any user of it.
And by the way: I don’t support war intervention. My point is that legalisation of these drugs won’t make cartels disappear, but will cause immense harm.
I just think what it takes to forcefully keep these drugs from everyone is worse than the problems the drugs themselves create. I can get opiates if I wanted but I choose not to. Pretty sure people get addicted to illegal opiates mostly after a painful medical situation or from living in a desperate hopeless situation. Healthy people with opportunity don’t very often decide to risk their lives to get high when there are safer alternatives available.
I’ve done coke at parties with friends or in Vegas or whatever several times over the decades since I was young, never been addicted and my life was not ruined and I could say the same for many of my friends who have gone on to have families and jobs etc. But my life very much could’ve been ruined had I been arrested for it.
There’s also the issue of some people being more likely to get addicted than others.
Say, with the way addictions to tea, sugar, little portions of alcohol, ahem, porn, internet news, kinds of music, whatever else take me personally for long periods of time, I’d never voluntarily try something that serious in effect.
Maybe there’s a way to measure the reaction, I don’t know? Like with guns you need a medical examination, with heavy drugs it wouldn’t be that bad to have one. So that legally getting them would require at least that.
Alcohol addiction is honestly a much bigger problem than most other drug addiction simply because of the potentially lethal withdrawal of you try to quit without help.
Anecdotes are irrelevant with problem of such a scale.
I, for example, have used cocaine once with my friend. I found that I’m not a fan of effect. My friend, on the other hand, went wild and do it every weekend if he has any money.
But again, anecdotes are irrelevant. Let’s believe medical professionals.
Would your life have been better had you been arrested that one time you did coke?
Mobs? What mobs? Cartels are not dynamic groups of temporary people. Cartels are organized institutions adept at dealing illegal goods. It would be trivial to harm their business by undercutting prices and making drug use safe in sanctioned areas. Reducing their cash flow is paramount to reducing their power. That can be easily done by legalizing and regulating drugs. It doesn’t matter if the substances are dangerous. Would you do crack or heroine just because it is legal? I wouldn’t. I know its unpopular, but legalizing drugs is the best way to harm the cartels. People are already doing theme at epidemic levels with them being illegal, I do not see legalization exacerbating that situation. Especially if sanctioned spaces are provided to keep them off the streets.
Then they will gladly offer drugs to anybody who is disqualified to get it legally. And anywhere, not only in sanctioned area. And / or will offer “more potent”, but illegal forms of drugs.
As you mentioned, it’s organised institutions. They won’t go away peacefully.
I won’t too. But it’s just anecdotes. People are always looking for new pleasures. Where do you think new opiate users comes from?
New (street) opiate users usually come from people who have had mismanaged chronic pain conditions because of the absolutely horrific campaign by the pharmaceutical companies to push opioids. If we had better, non-pharmaceutical pain management programs involving stuff like physical therapy and mental healthcare, then there would be more viable options than opioids. Also, modifying the medical system to be more accessible so people can get care before something becomes a chronic pain problem would be helpful.
The other necessary modification is to change the system so that doctors can spend more than ten minutes with each patient, but that would require an overhaul of the medical education system from undergrad through residency to create more physicians.
You are exactly correct. We can legalize and sell marijuana (and certain other drugs, probably psychadelics. That’s for experts to decide.) like is already being done, but you simply cannot have recreational use of drugs like narcotics and cocaine.
They are simply too irresistible. It would lead to a massive public health crisis with phenomenal social consequences and so, so much death.
Now, I think drug abuse needs to be treated not criminally, but as the health issue that it is.
However, there will still be demand, and that will have to be fulfilled illicitly.
The idea that Cocaine is simpy too irresistible is not convincing to me. As a matter of fact availability is not really an issue, yet most people are not cocaine addicts. Also of regular users the majority is not addicted in the sense of needing it daily. Further it is much easier to develop problematic drug use patterns, like with any addictive things, when it is socially taboo, so people cannot talk about it with people outside of their circle of users and hide it from friends and family.
Addiction always is a social and psychological issue, whether it is cocaine, gambling or video games. Getting it out of the taboo is an important step to lower addiction.
I didn’t say most people are addicts.
What would happen, though, is there would be a great deal more addicts.
Cocaine isn’t really as available as you, it seems, trying to show. Weed was / is.
If cocaine will become drug of choice instead of weed, consequences will be dire.
Cocaine is available everywhere to anybody. Stop lying.
We have quite different understanding of “available everywhere to anybody”, apparently. Stop exaggerating.
You will find a cocaine dealer in every mid sized town. It is not difficult to get hooked up with any drug in most places, be it weed, cocaine or opiates. Availability is not the limitinf factor to consumption or addiction in the same way it isnt for weed.
I mean, alcohol is available and is the drug of choice.
And it’s significantly worse, than weed in terms of dependency, physical harm and violent behaviour.
Do we need to add cocaine to the cocktail? I think not.
Yeah, I’m more on your side. Maybe with heavy regulation and medical examination to allow a person to legally take them.
Sorry for being obnoxious, but everything discussed, including alcohol, nicotine and caffeine, is a narcotic.
I guess you mean ones causing serious dependency (the three I mentioned are kinda as bad as coke in this) and serious harm at the same time (alcohol is still one the list, but coke and heroine, ofc, are worse).
You are technically incorrect. Narcotics are the name for opiates and opiate containing drugs.
It is the people that call all drugs narcotics who are doing so technically incorrectly. I’d prefer people use words correctly, but I refuse to be a prescriptivist.
OK, maybe, in my language everything causing addiction is called narcotics. I mean, not maybe, you are right.
Have you experienced either? I didn’t think so.
That’s your argument? Really?
Have you?