From January 21, 2012 Fox News:
FRESNO, Calif.-- When a Central California woman shot dead her two toddlers and a cousin, gravely wounded her husband then killed herself last Sunday, investigators were not surprised she had smoked methamphetamine before the carnage.
Authorities say meth has been involved some of the nation's most horrific cases of child killings committed by parents. Chronic use leads to schizophrenia-like symptoms, including hearing voices and hallucinations.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/01/21/horrific-murder-no-surprise-in-meth-capital-us-111273260/?intcmp=obinsite#ixzz1lALUJxYA
Unfortunately, this is a problem with a lot of intoxicants. Most people don't do crazy things from getting high. But it isn't exactly rare, either.
This post is utter BS.
ReplyDelete450,000 dead due to tobacco
75,000 dead due to alcohol
<15,000 dead due to ALL ILLEGAL DRUGS and most of those 15,000 dead are due to the illegality of drugs, e.g. a drug deal gone wrong. Almost no one dies in the situation you describe.
Tobacco and alcohol are legal, yet meth isn't? I think it's hilarious that drug warriors, people who are responsible for ruining the lives of millions of people every year bring out the most extreme examples as evidence. All events have extremes. Drug warriors know that if they tote out the typical drug user, the support for the drug war would disappear.
Except that the problems of violent crimes induced by intoxicants such as alcohol, meth, and heroin, really aren't particularly extreme or rare. I will agree that marijuana usually doesn't make people violent, but this is by no means a certainty.
ReplyDeleteIt's not precisely clear how much of a relationship there is between the low quality of the illegal meth, with all of the impurities that stem from the way it's produced, and the resultant behavioral and mental health problems.
ReplyDeleteYou also have the other issue: That of correlation. How stable was this woman before she began her meth use? Was she self-medicating with the meth?
Personally, I suspect that when and if they legalize drugs, we're going to find that we have the exact same rate of abuse as we have right now, just like we did before we chose to make narcotics illegal. Like alcohol, there is a certain subset of any given population group that is susceptible to becoming abusers.
About the only effective approach, I fear, is to breed these traits out of society. My own solution would be to legalize everything, pass draconian laws against obtaining drugs from outside the legally-established framework, and ensure that that framework ameliorated the worst effects on society as a whole. Such a framework would include mandatory sterilization and removal of children once your drug use went above a certain level, and/or you proved via an encounter with the legal system that you lack the ability to use and still follow the other laws of society.
I really doubt that you can somehow legislate in contravention of natural traits, period. We tried that with Prohibition, it didn't work then, and the current counter-narcotics regime isn't working now.
Except that the problems of violent crimes induced by intoxicants such as alcohol, meth, and heroin, really aren't particularly extreme or rare.
ReplyDeleteCan you cite credible statistics proving this? And please define what you mean by rare, particularly when compared to the statistics of other violent actions; and yes the burden is on you to provide this information since it's you who wants to reduce liberty and throw people in jail. You need to have a good reason to do that, not just anecdotes.
Including alcohol in your list of problem drugs only weakens your argument for keeping the other drugs illegal. It's nearly universally recognized that although alcohol causes problems the problems that arose through prohibition far exceeded the social problems of alcohol consumption: the rise of organized crime due to the immensely profitable selling of illegal alcohol and most importantly the government corruption. This is all in addition to the problem of turning your back on the fundamental virtue the country was founded upon: liberty.
Additionally, acting extremely violent is all ready illegal. Making drugs illegal doesn't do anything about the legality of violence, but it does give politicians and police excuses to violate people's constitutionally guaranteed rights on a regular basis (pretty much all amendments in the bill of rights has been significantly eroded directly due to the drug war). Also, politicians and police profit immensely because they can always scare the citizenry into thinking these drugs are scary into raising taxes and passing ghastly forfeiture laws.
Certainly, problems exist with people using alcohol, heroin (of which I think you'd be hard pressed in finding any evidence that this drug "causes" any violence whatsoever), cocaine, meth, etc., these problems pale in comparison to the problems and costs associated prohibition, as well as violating the core American principle of liberty.
People who get hopped up on whatever and commit violence (or any crime) should be locked up. People who get hopped up on whatever and don't commit crimes shouldn't be locked up. It should also be noted that the latter make up the vast majority of all drug users.
This is a self correcting problem.
ReplyDeleteTo bad about the kids but at what point to the problems of a few over-ride the rights of the many?
Of course, one should also figure in the number of people murdered by the frequent use of SWAT teams for dead-of-night, no-knock raids on typically non-violent drug users (as well as the frequent murders of innocents by such thugs when the thugs have incorrect addresses, which seems a common occurrence).
ReplyDeleteAllen: there are people killed by no-knock warrants. Every one is too many, but are there even five a year who are killed in no-knock warrants? I would be a bit surprised. Of course, you don't need no-knock warrants to enforce drug laws. The rationalize for them is that evidence will be flushed down the toilet. But unless it is a huge quantity, no-knock warrants are absurd, and if it is a huge quantity, they can't flush them that quit.
ReplyDeletemacweave: Do you have any relatives who have gotten themselves into a serious drug or alcohol problem? If so, you might be less cavalier about the consequences.
Ken: I'll dig out the statistics in the near future. (I'm on a break from a movie right now.) But yes, typically 80-90% of murders are the result of intoxication: alcohol, illegal drugs, or the combination. And yes, even heroin, oddly enough, is a factor in many violent crimes because it reduces inhibitions. My wife went to school with a boy who was beaten to death with a roofing hammer by two high on heroin burglars, who had just finished raping and murdering his little sister. (She got home from junior before him.)
I do not doubt that impurities are part of the problem, but a great many intoxicants create serious problems not because of impurities, but reduced inhibitions.
I'm interested to see the statistics you have. I'm curious also to see what the definition of a "drug related" is. For example, if two drug dealers, stone cold sober, get in a violent beef over drug turf, is this classified as drug related? So the 80-90% of murders may not be the result of drug use, but due to the illegal nature of the drugs.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, I seriously doubt the two murders you mentioned, high on heroin, committed the murder because they were high on heroin. Drugs are an easy fall guy for situations like this, but the reality is that these two were most likely seriously mentally damaged. Drug abuse is usually a symptom of underlying psychological problems and almost never the cause of them. If heroin caused violence, then there would be an epidemic of violence among patience using opiods for pain medication.
Blaming violence on drugs, when that violence is most likely caused by underlying problems (and yes exacerbated by, but not caused by, drug use), simply avoids the problems, incarcerates violent people for drug use without any thought given to the root cause.
A good place to start for drug statistics for both costs and benefits of prohibition is probably Jeffrey Myron. He is for drug legalization, but knows a lot about statistics and data sets.
Also, you keep lumping in alcohol with everything meth and think meth should remain illegal, do you believe alcohol should be prohibited again?
Lastly, alcohol prohibition could only be enacted through a constitutional amendment, it stands to reason that drug prohibition needs a constitutional amendment as well. Since one hasn't been passed, it stands to reason that drug prohibition, at the federal level anyway, is unconstitutional.
Ken: The reason that drug prohibition didn't need a constitutional amendment is the rather curious way they implemented it: through a federal tax stamp. Technically, possession of marijuana was not illegal; possession without the federal marijuana tax stamp was illegal.
ReplyDeleteSeriously: do you not know people who do things when high that they would not do when sober? Or is alcohol the only drug that makes people willing to sing karoke, make fools of themselves, and cause them to get belligerent?