With the recession...a possible solution?

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ben stein is a schmekel.

edit: check out his words on nixon (one of his favorite presidents)

"Can anyone even remember now what Nixon did that was so terrible? He ended the war in Vietnam, brought home the POW's, ended the war in the Mideast, opened relations with China, started the first nuclear weapons reduction treaty, saved Eretz Israel's life, started the Environmental Protection Administration. Does anyone remember what he did that was bad? Oh, now I remember. He lied. He was a politician who lied. How remarkable. He lied to protect his subordinates who were covering up a ridiculous burglary that no one to this date has any clue about its purpose. He lied so he could stay in office and keep his agenda of peace going. That was his crime. He was a peacemaker and he wanted to make a world where there was a generation of peace. And he succeeded. That is his legacy. He was a peacemaker. He was a lying, conniving, covering up peacemaker. He was not a lying, conniving drug addict like JFK, a lying, conniving war starter like LBJ, a lying, conniving seducer like Clinton—a lying, conniving peacemaker."

I've been saying this for years, but I'd go even further and at least decriminalize even the hard drugs. I just can't see many more people rushing out to buy heroin if it where legal than do now, and we could save billions annually that could go to much better purposes. Most of the ill effects of drugs come from exposure to the legal system, and or the impurity caused by clandestine manufacture. Bizarre as this may sound, legalizing the harder drugs would also remove much of the "glamor" that certain subcultures see in selling them, further breaking the backs of the gangs that profit. It's pretty hard to get any street cred from rapping about your former career retailing a legal product now, isn't it?

Switzerland has decriminalized heroin (even offers prescriptions for it!) and it seems to be working out quite well for them.

I heard something about that, if I recall they've actually had it decriminalized for some time now, and it has generally worked well for them. Heroin does not "make" people who use it into criminals, there is simply so much money to be made with it being illegal that the high price causes addicts to turn to crime to purchase it. Same thing on the supply side, so long as it is illegal and so highly profitable, there will always be people willing to turn to violence to control the trade in it. Legalization nips both of these problems in the bud by taking the profit out of it, and dropping the price to a point where heroin addiction doesn't force the afflicted to turn to crime to support it. Quite aside from the domestic benefits to legalizing, which are significant, many low intensity conflicts are fueled with drug money, as are many terrorists organizations and regional warlords. Cutting off their supply of money would be much easier, and less costly in terms of lives lost, than attempting to fight them head on. It really is a compound benefit solution, it saves money that would have been squandered, generates new revenue in taxes and industry, and takes money away from people that we may have had to spend more money fighting. All that, plus it would lower our violent crime rates to boot. What other idea can claim that sort of efficiency?

I agree. And you would think that the US with its focus on rugged individualism and libertarianism would have been at the forefront of such measures to return decisions over drug use to personal responsibility instead of this byzantine big brother approach they have now.

Politically speaking, the puritanical elements of American society are a stronger voting block than the libertarians.

Do you think that is because there are actually more of them, or that they are simply better organized? My experience with libertarians is that they are not a terribly homogeneous group, and tend to by fairly scattered with no real way of harnessing them to a cause. Contrast this with the religious bloc, who's very signature event is a weekly meeting of like minded individuals. This factor alone could probably do much to explain their success at influencing US policy all out of proportion to their numbers, since a small but organized group is often more effective at politics than a larger but more distributed one. I was just reading an economics book talking about this very principle when it comes to subsidizing industries, that a small industry requires very little sacrifice from the majority of people to receive a substantial subsidy, and so is likely to be very vocal and persistent in their lobbying. Where as the majority is only being asked to cough up a small amount individually, they are more likely to give in to the demand, if only to shut the minority up. This is how the US government ended up subsidizing mohair farmers for 30 years, the burden on the individual was low enough that no one really thought it was worth it to complain, whereas the small group of mohair farmers was reaping a windfall at the taxpayer's expense for 3 decades. Seems like a similar principal could apply to the evangelicals in this country.

I don't know about that.... Legalization would make it cheaper, which means people could buy more. That would make them more addicted and would likely lead to MORE crime (they have to run out of money sometime).

Switzerland's experience is contrary to your predictions.

Aside from what Orwell said, who really commits the most drug related crimes, drug addicts or drug dealers? They also commit different crimes, a typical drug addict crime is shoplifting or petty theft, a typical drug dealer crime is murder or assault. Which would you prefer to eliminate? A cheap supply of legal drugs would eliminate the incentive to become a drug dealer, so the people who might have chosen that career path will be forced to go into another industry, hopefully a legal one. In a way, drug dealing is like a safety net for certain people, if they don't do well in school or work hard in the private sector, they can always make money selling drugs. Before the drugs came around, there was also no money in running a street gang, people maybe belonged to one during their teen years as something to do, then grew out of it. Drugs made gangs profitable, and thus prolonged their natural life as people stuck around in them as they were a viable alternative to traditional work. Take the money away and all of that comes crashing down, it may be nasty in the short run as out of work gangsters cause trouble when their money is cut off, but in the long run it will be an improvement for society as a whole.

Also, with drugs legal the pharmaceutical industry will have a large incentive to spend money on addiction research, since a pill that say cures heroin addiction will now have a larger market that can afford to pay for it. Some of that government money that has been freed up by no longer interdicting drugs, incarcerating drug offenders, or enforcing drug law may even be used to sweeten that pot, maybe in the form of a "bounty" to the first company to create a viable addiction cure.

I also doubt that we'd really have skyrocketing rates of addiction with legal drugs, the social stigmas will still be there, and most people that really want to try drugs already have, legal or not. I just can't see otherwise normal businessmen rushing out to try meth since it's now legal, I don't think it really holds that much appeal to most people. As has been said, countries that have experimented with relaxed drug laws haven't had addicts lying in the streets or wild eyed junkies everywhere, so I don't see any reason why we would either.

Among these though, there are certain things I have to think should still stay as they are - methamphetamine for example - just because they wield far too much destructive power. Certain things could be legalized and cause a far better outcome, others - while they wouldn't completely unravel society - do too much to the brain and would cause enough senseless acts of violence that things would not get better but rather far worse. Sure, its up to each person to make the call on what they do to their own bodies but its what they can end up doing to the next person that's of greater concern. Even hallucinogens - some people can gain great insights from them (I'd include myself in that category) but there are some people who should never touch them at all and the outcomes in the later group can be similarly bad; that takes legalization but doing so under strict regulation perhaps in the realm of psychotherapy or at least under strict supervision of a doctor who has plenty of niacin on hand if things go sideways.

I sometimes wonder. There are plenty of things I do not do simply because they are illegal.

Methamphetamine does hold at least one angle of white collar appeal - as some of the entrepreneurs who got hooked on it can say. When you can stay up longer than the competition, work longer, don't need breaks, its a momentary productivity-booster. If someone's already burning the candle at both ends and wishes they could do more, speeds can be a real temptation.

that's their prerogative to work harder via substances if they want.

That's ignoring that the problem is less with them. Its possible that some white collar people might go into information and identity theft to support a habit, its possible that they could flip out and have physical altercations or worst case exercise their 2nd amendment rights in the workplace. This stuff destabilizes people - badly, you can't lose sight of that. You'll also find that the people who have nothing to lose, who don't really want to live, who are practically on a suicide-mission with the stuff; they'll often enough get crazy ideas about taking other people out with them. While I wouldn't say its the general its still an explosive enough minority to where we really can't just rationalize it away. Anything that quite literally drives someone insane and takes their mental health can easily turn them into a threat to society, that's not something to play with.

So the difference between amphetamines and say, caffeine pills or ephedra tablets is simply one of degree. I'm not well versed enough in chemistry to say so for certain, but I'd be willing to bet that many if not most of the bad long term effects from amphetamine use are caused by the impurity of the street product, seeing how it is made in trailers using household chemicals by amateurs. I would say that trading all of the problems now associated with methamphetamine for the possibility of strung out business people is a good deal, if meth were dirt cheap, that would cut out 90% of the problems right there. Could you really say that coming into work with a meth or coke hangover is so much worse than coming in with an alcohol hangover, or that those products are signifigantly more addictive than alcohol? I would also argue that business culture would mitigate against abuse in the pursuit of an edge, any performance gains would probably be offset by the crashes and surliness of users, as well as the bad image that even legalized drugs would give.