This would probably work for about 1 month. After everyone finished reeling in horror from the senseless murders of many of their families and loved ones, some subset of the people would quickly realize that all the competition had just been eliminated from the drug market, rendering it extremely profitable and lucrative. Time to stop whatever they were doing to start producing and selling drugs instead.
At which point, we kill them as well. And yes, I really am being serious.
For countries which have implemented this proposal or slightly watered down versions: see Singapore and China and note that even though they are in the middle of a drug heavy region, they have still managed to keep their countries relatively drug free.
I guess I just don't see the end goal of what you're proposing. What is the merit of having a drug-free society if it comes at the cost of damaging or destroying productive, happy human lives? Do you think the world you are describing would be a better world to live in than the one we have today? Or one in which more drugs were legal?
As various other commenters have pointed out, between prescriptions, over-the-counter pills, vitamins, and additives in the foods we buy, we're all drug users. This whole argument seems to rest upon an absolutist view that all currently illegal drugs are absolutely destructive and have no merit.
Countries like Singapore and China have radically different ideological approaches to policy than most Western nations. They are comfortable enforcing absolutist positions that limit individual freedoms. Such a position is against America's founding principles. They may statistically report less drug use, but is their society actually any better off for it?
From what I have seen from night clubs in Shanghai, there is a lot of extasy going around. And my friends in China have no problem getting hold of cannabis...
Now they are taking big risks and I wouldn't take those kind of risk if I were them but it convinced me that however strict the laws are against drug it doesn't stop people from taking them...
There are indeed places where drug dealing or use is punishable with death.
These places still have pervasive drug use -- in fact, greater use than places without such penalties.
How much more severe can you be? Seems like immediate death doesn't deter drug use. Does that idea still make sense to you? Or perhaps in all of those places it just hasn't been done correctly yet?
Prohibition (which took a constitutional amendment, btw) had zero effect on alcohol use -- it actually probably encouraged it and the organized crime that came with it. We're still cleaning that mess up.
Anything you put into your body changes the way your body and brain operate -- including tap water. So everything is a drug. It's just a matter of degree. I remember hearing about kids in the 60s who smoked pot laughing about their parents who were way more hooked on valium. In fact, misuse of legal drugs is much more pervasive than illegal drug use. We live in a society where you pop a pill for everything.
Nope -- shooting folks doesn't make much sense: unless you just don't like people and want to get rid of a few. I'm a libertarian and opposed to constraints on what government tells me I can do with my own body, but I wouldn't want crack being sold out of vending machines either. It's a tough subject, and part of the problem is that people need to acknowledge that it's tough. Only through socialization and education can we have an intelligent discussion about where the limits are -- just like we did with alcohol. Quick fixes aren't going to work.
The counter argument is that this might be true in expectation. If we caught and executed 1 out of every 50 drug users, maybe the rest would stop using. If being on drugs is half as bad as being dead, then on net you've saved 23.5 lives for every 50 users.
This is, of course, a very flimsy argument, which I would not stand by under any circumstances. But I think a better take on the subject would be "penalties against drug possession should be a net win for society", rather than what Carter said.
Last time I checked there was no data from Singapore because their government is not particularly interested in allowing independent studies to be made. There is data about their execution rate (death penalty), though. Amnesty international considers it to be amongst the highest worldwide.
Read your source again. Maybe go beyond the title this time. Here is a nice excerpt: "The lifetime prevalence rates of illicit drug use among residents age 15 years or older in high-prevalence Chinese cities increased from 1.1% in 1993 to 1.6% in 1996, and the 1-year prevalence rate increased from 0.9% to 1.2% during this period [10,11]."
Now go read that again and notice that in high-prevalence regions, use is ~1-2%. Wonder what it is in the low-prevalence regions... If the US had that kind of usage statistics, every anti-drug activist in the US and I would be very happy. Even happier if use went lower.
"Last time I checked there was no data from Singapore because their government is not particularly interested in allowing independent studies to be made. There is data about their execution rate (death penalty), though. Amnesty international considers it to be amongst the highest worldwide."
First point: Singapore gives the death penalty for quite a few crimes. By itself, it is not a useful statistic. Furthermore, AI is far from a "neutral observer" on these issues. Lastly, what exactly is the problem with a high execution rate? The lack of crime?
Second point: from the CIA Factbook on Singapore: "drug abuse limited because of aggressive law enforcement efforts"
newt0311, you can read all the reports you like. Here's what I can tell you about my experiences in Shanghai over 9 years:
Illegal drug use is on the rise and very accessible. Drugs that are _very_ easy to get: marijuana/hashish, cocaine, ecstasy. Drugs you can get if you ask around: opiates/heroine, crystal meth, ketamine.
That list is just what I have seen with my own eyes. And I'm not into the "party scene". I'm a family man that needs to go to work in the mornings. But I have seen all of it and it is very accessible.
China is working hard to fight opiate/heroine use. My info is that they are currently losing the fight as the growth is happening at the bottom of the economic pyramid. China has a clear history of what opiates can do to their country. The other stuff takes a back seat as they fight other problems, like clean water.
As for Singapore. There are lots of things that Singapore does that do not scale well to other societies. Its a city-state, an island!. You may agree with Singapore's tactics and like their results, but that does not mean these tactics can be grafted onto the U.S.
China doesn't really have a reputation for reporting real numbers (remember sars or what percentage is affected by the hiv according to them). When calculating drug use, it's always a guesstimate anyway so don't you think they just give artificially low numbers?
Like jhancock, I've had quite a few people proposing me to get drugs from the xiamen restaurant owner who proposed me to buy marijuana to my ex-girlfriend there that asked me if I want to try some meth when I asked about the people who clearly seemed high in night clubs...
As for singapore, I don't know but malaysia that has the same policies about drugs doesn't really seem to be so successful at not having drugs either.
First Point: My problem with the death penalty - as a libertarian - is that I can't imagine anything more wrong for my government to do to me than to unjustly take my life away. And if you think wrongful execution doesn't happen, you're kidding yourself. It's just a matter-of-fact combination of no system being perfect, and the law of large numbers.
Second Point: That sounds like an opinion about cause and effect, rather than a fact. Which is okay, since the CIA always gets it right, like those WMDs they found right after we conquered Iraq!
Now go read that again and notice that in high-prevalence regions, use is ~1-2%. Wonder what it is in the low-prevalence regions... If the US had that kind of usage statistics, every anti-drug activist in the US and I would be very happy. Even happier if use went lower.
Let me help you with a few quotes:
First:
In Chinese history, drug abuse and prostitution have been considered "social evils." The Chinese government typically takes "crackdown" measures and tries to eradicate these phenomena. China did achieve a success story in the 1950s. Illicit drug abuse and prostitution were eradicated through national anti-drug and anti-prostitution campaigns [3,34]. However, this success has not been repeated in the past two decades.
Second:
Illicit drug abuse and HIV/AIDS have increased rapidly in the past 10 to 20 years in China.
The study was a co-op between the University of Alabama and the Chinese Center for Disease Control. Which of them would you guess provided the absolute figures for citation?
Lastly, what exactly is the problem with a high execution rate? The lack of crime?
Well, the "killing people" part maybe?
from the CIA Factbook on Singapore: "drug abuse limited because of aggressive law enforcement efforts"
Hmm yes. Totally comprehensive.
Well, can't argue that, it's from the factbook after all.
While you're at it, why not shoot all the people who skip the bus fare? Also enforce proper adherence to schedules under the same technique. The buses, trains and planes will finally run on time, can you imagine that?
"While you're at it, why not shoot all the people who skip the bus fare?"
Because people who skip bus fare are usually not involved in large organized crime units. Also, skipping bus fair is not addictive (in the medical sense of the word).
"Also enforce proper adherence to schedules under the same technique. The buses, trains and planes will finally run on time, can you imagine that?"
So... you're suggesting that most people who use drugs are organized in large crime units rather than just hanging out with friends rolling blunts? Because I'm pretty sure the average drug user isn't involved in crime beyond buying an illegal substance.
My college supplier buys it from a guy, who buys it from another goy, who homegrows his stuff. It's a peaceful if illegal business.
Answer me this, before the conversation goes further: what is bad about using drugs, beyond their being illegal, and beyond problems started due to illegality?
I'm buying cheap shoes and clothes all the time and really can't be arsed to background-check where exactly my model of Nike or Adidas was manufactured.
I guess it's highly likely that I have owned (or even still own) at least one product that was manufactured in a sweatshop. I think it's equally likely that the same applies to you.
So welcome to the club, we are both supporters of child labor.
What now, suicide?
The vast majority of people who buy and use drugs are also usually not involved in large organized crime units. This argument doesn't hold water.
Many illegal drugs are not addictive, or significantly less addictive than nicotine or alcohol. While some drugs are highly addictive, the laws are simply not based upon addictive potential. Even some of the most highly propagandized super-scary-drugs (LSD, Mescaline, MDMA) are not physiologically addictive.
50%? Are you sure? If you're counting anybody who's tried, I'd guess the percentile is much higher than that. (Lower if we go by the assumption that marijuana shouldn't be illegal on account of near-harmlessness, but even then I'd imagine it's pretty high.)
If you really want, limit it to people in immediate knowing possession of the drugs. However the initial massacre is necessary to establish a precedent. If the US government had not squandered its credibility in law enforcement matters, this would not be necessary. We could instead offer unconditional amnesty to current users and dealers. Give them some small time period (like a week or a month -- less than half a year) to clean up their act and then put these laws into effect. As it is, it is a recognized fact that the government will not take extreme action without the n to the nth-level of bureaucratic paperwork and thus to establish an effective deterrent, the punishment needs to be exercised.
I'm going to assume that you're a younger guy? Back when I was in high school I might have thought the same way - this was before I actually made friends with some drug users and tried some myself in college.
Drug users are not bad people. Most drug dealers are not bad people. On my floor in college, the kid who sells drugs is a pretty cool kid: good student, active in sports. There's some social problems he runs across because he's "the kid that sells drugs," but he's a pretty cool guy. He's a typical college student who just happens to sell drugs to the kids who want to buy drugs.
That is not deserving of death. When you talk about killing somebody, you're talking about ending a life, unconditionally terminating a person's future. Some things are worth that (I will hold to my dying day that enjoying the Twilight book series is admitting your lack of will to live), perhaps, but drug selling and drug use? No. Not at all.
As I said: I tried marijuana a handful of times, and I thought it was pretty relaxing. Nobody was harmed. (To go to the extreme, if you use a vaporizer, you're not even risking lung damage, which means that your body seriously is not injured in any way, even minute.) It was voluntary on the part of myself and some friends. We were okay with paying for those drugs; the kid who sold them was fine with trading them for money.
Do I deserve to die because I voluntarily used chemicals? Does the dealer deserve to die because he gave a product to somebody who wanted it? Who is the criminal here?
Enforcing drug rules is basically punishing people not for actually doing anything bad, but for doing something that the government is telling you is a no-no. If I told you that it was bad to, say, whistle, and you whistled, and I told you I'd kill you if you didn't stop, maybe you'd stop, but that doesn't solve the real problem, which is "unalone is a dick who's setting arbitrary, pointless rules". The problem isn't your whistling, it's me.
It's fun thinking of things so black-and-white when you're young, but once you reach the ripe old age of 18, you'll start maturing a little bit.
You seem to be saying, in essence, "except for the drug dealing he is a pretty good kid, so therefore he is a pretty good kid." Um, what if you include the drug dealing into the equation, and all of the possible damage to the lives of people he is selling drugs to, or perhaps even to their friends, families, and loved ones?
(You didn't say the kinds of drugs, and maybe you believe that whatever he is selling is not bad, since you argue that marijuana is harmless and maybe he is selling only marijuana. But you did not say that and it is a pretty important caveat.)
While not condoning or agreeing with newt0311's argument, I wonder if whether the difference is a fundamental idsagreement with the place of individual human rights? Because newt0311 cites China and Singapore approvingly, I wonder if he believes that the harmony of society (or some other group-level values) are so important that the wishes and desires of individuals merit little consideration? In other words, drug addiction is so bad in its costs to society in general that the very lives of the individuals taking drugs are insignificant compared to the interests of society as a whole?
I only suggest this because if the disagreement is really at this level, arguing specifics and details will not be very fruitful.
Unless he's forcing people to buy from him, I don't think it makes sense to demonize the delivery guy. Gun dealers have helped introduce unimaginable pain to millions of families, but I'm sure there are some really "good guy" gun dealers.
I think unalone was just suggesting that newt0311 hasn't gotten out of the textbooks and actually studied the drug issue from the human side. That not all of these people he wants to murder are faceless mob gangsters, some are just like him.
It's easy to sit in your apartment and write Asperger's induced rants about how X is bad and that if we simply kill Y% of the population X will cease to exist and 100-Y% of the population will then enjoy Z% more happier lives. As long as the numbers work, what's the downside?
Empathy can't be taught, but ironically there are drugs that can help.
I'm a big fan of individualism. I don't remember the last time anything great was made by anything other than individual will, so perhaps I'm biased. People who think we should be cogs in a big machine can feel free to disagree with me.
You seem to be saying, in essence, "except for the drug dealing he is a pretty good kid, so therefore he is a pretty good kid."
Not quite. It's more that I'm saying drug dealers aren't just drug dealers. The people who sell drugs are rarely more or less scummy than other people. Saying you want to kill them for drug sales is ridiculous, and it's vilifying a lot of people who are more than just drug dealers.
"Um, what if you include the drug dealing into the equation, and all of the possible damage to the lives of people he is selling drugs to, or perhaps even to their friends, families, and loved ones?"
If it's their choice to buy drugs, then if he wants to peddle, he should peddle. (I honestly don't know what else he sells. I don't buy drugs at all, so I've never asked.) You can argue over whether or not drugs are good for people, if they help them relax or if they're burning people out, but in the end it's the choice of the people who want to buy the drugs. And there's some complexity to that argument - I think that the only meaningful things worth doing are the things that actively help people, but that means that I dislike people who write slush stories or directors who are sloppy with camera work or pretty much most people, if I'm going to stand absolutely by that metric. But that's not a reason to incriminate somebody. It's their choice to sell and I think they have that right.
I wish you would just make the libertarian argument that people should be allowed to do whatever damage they want to themselves, as long as they don't damage others, and be done with it. I can understand that argument, because it appeals to the idea that government action intended to stop one bad thing can lead to something much worse.
But you seem to be actively defending the idea that there is nothing immoral in a vocation that will inevitably destroy the lives of many people. You point out that the people being destroyed are complicit in their destruction, but I do not see that as a fully qualifying factor. If someone was contemplating suicide, and someone else happily persuades them to go through with it instead of trying to talk them out of it, that's a morally neutral choice?
You also seem to be equating bad camera work and writing with drug dealing, which I will assume is not what you meant because that would be pretty silly. Now, if you are just re-iterating the point that you do not want to incriminate drug dealers, that position can be defended. But if you honestly believe that there is nothing morally wrong with intentionally and actively enabling people into addiction, I doubt that the gap between our views on morality can be bridged.
I suspect there is some misunderstanding about where you are arguing for not criminalizing activities versus defending their morality. If so, could you clarify?
You state: "But if you honestly believe that there is nothing morally wrong with intentionally and actively enabling people into addiction, I doubt that the gap between our views on morality can be bridged."
Do you believe that liquor stores, grocery stores, corner shops, restaurants, and bars are all immoral? Should their owners refuse service to any customers that they believe to be at risk of alcoholism? Should pharmacies do background checks on customers purchasing Tylenol to determine whether or not they are addicted to painkillers? I think this argument boils down to legality, not morality.
I think the point originally being made was that a significant portion of drug dealers are NOT intentionally enabling people into addiction. Certainly this varies by drug dealer, and there is a big difference between selling marijuana and selling heroin or crack. A lot of these dealers are simply supplying people with a product that they are purchasing for personal use because they think it makes their life better.
I think it's also important to recognize that morality is subjective, and that it's one of America's founding principles not to legislate morality. Your belief that something is immoral, or even the belief of the majority, is not significant justification for legislation.
There's a big difference between drugs and suicide. Suicide is final. Any damage drugs do are usually temporary. I think that people using drugs should talk to people as much as people thinking about killing themselves, because with drugs you can go too far, but that's not the same thing as thinking that the people using drugs are bad people. Similarly, if you're selling drugs, you should only be selling to the people who want drugs. There's nothing immoral about selling to people who want them.
My argument was that making crappy products is a harmful thing. I recently broke up with a girl who was as close to a soul mate as I've ever found because she was insistent that everybody was like Sex and the City characters, and that my personality type was incompatible with her character. People who write and produce crap damage people's minds, and I will always find that repugnant. In my mind, making bad things is just as bad as selling bad product, possibly even worse because you ought to know better. That said, I don't think it's fair to persecute people who make crappy things. The best solution is to make better things and lead by example.
I'm not a libertarian. I think that there ought to be solutions to the drug problem. I just think that such solutions should be enticing people to do something better with their lives rather than punishing them for using.
It seems that I can't respond directly to newt0311's response to you, because the post is "[dead]". But I just wanted to say that had he started with this level of analysis, he might not have gotten so many down mods or at least got his more serious points noticed. Studies on recidivism rates are very relevant to this discussion, and it is disappointing that citations to serious studies about it are now grayed out and buried deep in a comment thread. It would be useful for the debate to have some arguments in favor of keeping drugs illegal that include empirical data, and I think newt0311 could have contributed some of that, had he not led with the "kill all the drug users" opinion.
To respond to you, the idea that the solution to the drug problem is the same as the solution to crappy writing is interesting. Not sure I agree, but interesting nonetheless.
and all of the possible damage to the lives of people he is selling drugs to
Why oh why are we always making victims of the users?
In my humble expirience the big evil dealer forcing the innocent child into a drug addiction is a myth or a very rare exception at least. The demand makes
the market, not the other way round.
I for one am a smoker. It might kill me, I should quit, it's an absolutely stupid, useless habit. Using the above logic I could comfortably blame it on the tobacco industry. They seduced me, they deal it to me.
Unfortunately that's not how life works. I can blame it on them all I want, it's still my life and my health and mydecision.
I do place some culpability on the tobacco industry. That in no way obviates your personal responsibility for your choices. But I do think that promoting a product that you know will result in addiction and ill health for many people is morally negative.
So, I place some responsibility for both you and the tobacco industry for your addiction. In the end, you bear more responsibility (and bear all of the consequences). But that does not make the tobacco industry morally neutral or good, in my opinion.
In the unlikely case that this cool, athletic drug dealer produced the drugs in his dorm room himself, I would agree with your position, but unfortunately the drug trade doesn't start in the dorm.
Do you realize how many truly good people's lives are destroyed in the process of keeping supply of drugs up with demand in America?
What about cool, athletic Juan in Mexico who was executed for refusing to join the Zetas? What about mayor Carillo who was gunned down in an intimidation assassination? What about Jake who died of an overdose in the frat house because he thought drugs were cool?
> Do I deserve to die because I voluntarily used chemicals?
I'm not going to go there, but ask yourself how innocent you really are.
I'm not going to go there, but ask yourself how innocent you really are.
I'm not innocent. I'm a human being. I've offended people and made an ass of myself and done things that I regretted. Does that make me somebody worthy of death? (Frankly, if I were to make a list of "things that would be good excuses for somebody else to kill me," drug use wouldn't be in the top 10, because at least that hurt nobody.)
What about cool, athletic Juan in Mexico who was executed for refusing to join the Zetas? What about mayor Carillo who was gunned down in an intimidation assassination?
That's a good reason to encourage legalization followed by business supervision. Used to be people were killed over alcohol. Now people have turned winemaking into an art, and not many alcohol gang deaths occur.
What about Jake who died of an overdose in the frat house because he thought drugs were cool?
What about my grandmother, who died of lung cancer? Or the people who die of alcohol abuse?
The solution is education. My college has many hard drug users, and zero hard drug deaths.
Unless you produce your own drugs and consume them secretly, that is not true.
The only people hurt were hurt due to illegality. Who is hurt when you drink wine? Used to be wine was illegal, and people got hurt until alcohol was legalized.
The reality is, drugs are not legal. You can't go there.
Drugs being illegal isn't hard reality. The solution is to legalize them rather than to stop persecuting the people who are using them.
My mindset - one that many other people share - is that you should worry less about the law and more about whether or not what you're doing is moral and good. I'll break the law if the law is bad, without feeling very guilty.
I agree with that too, but collateral consequences are not to be overlooked. If you break a bad law which, in turn, causes people to suffer, you should feel guilty.
It depends. If I'm making drugs illegally, and in doing so I shoot some guy to keep him away from my drugs, then I should feel guilty. But if I'm not directly involved in that violence, then my feeling guilty for that illegal process only encourages the people who would use your morality to enforce their own corrupt principles. Not feeling guilt for the things you didn't do forces the corrupt laws to look at themselves and eventually revise.
How do you define direct vs. indirect involvement?
If a weapons dealer sells a terrorist a bomb knowing it will hurt innocent people, the dealer might not directly detonate the bomb themselves, but I think we would still hold the dealer partly responsible for supplying the tool.
Likewise, if a buyer buys an illegal good and it is known that, somewhere down the line, people were killed in the process of getting that good to the buyer, the buyer shares responsibility for supplying the motive, money.
Have you ever gone 1 mph above the speed limit? Jaywalked? Loitered? Looked at pornography before you were old enough? Groped someone before you were of age? Had sex before you were of age? Drank underaged? Smoked underaged? Had a friend give you a few vicodin when you sprained an ankle? Given yourself a few dodgy deductibles when you filed your taxes?
All these things are fairly minor, but they are all CRIMES. Crimes that people perpetrate all the time. And we'd have to put nearly everyone in jail if we strictly followed 'reality'.
You're arguing for the other side now. You just (correctly, IMO) attributed the violence of the drug trade to the fact that it is illegal.
There's no violence in the tobacco or alcohol trades, largely because they are legal and regulated. It is a logical fallacy to blame the consumer for systemic violence.
The other side argues:
a) because illegal drugs should be legal (at this point in time),
b) contributing to demand by buying or selling illegal drugs is acceptable (at this point in time).
I'm arguing, or at least trying to argue:
a) because illegal drugs are not legal (at this point in time),
b) contributing to the demand for illegal drugs by buying or selling is not acceptable due to the violence that it fuels (at this point in time).
I define something acceptable as something morally permissible. If that makes sense.
> It is a logical fallacy to blame the consumer for systemic violence.
I would be sincerely interested in this topic, if you would like to go there. :)
> I would be sincerely interested in this topic, if you would like to go there. :)
Sure, do you blame consumers for buying clothing products that were manufactured using sweatshop labor? No, because the consumer had no intent. You blame the company that operates the sweatshops.
Do you blame civilians in Africa or the Middle East for the atrocities committed against aid workers? No, because the starving civilians have no intent of hurting aid workers. You blame the corrupt governments that perpetrate the atrocities.
Your argument when it comes to drugs rests upon the combination of current legal status and some moral presuppositions. I think the question of moral acceptability is orthogonal here. It is empirically true that people will purchase and use drugs, no matter what your moral sensibilities tell you.
Blaming the consumer is a fruitless effort when it comes to actually promoting better health and safety in society.
This argument could just as well be used to claim that our government is acting immorally by continuing to enforce policies that all evidence suggests promote violence.
In symbolic terms:
government:drug laws == consumer:drugs
We can fix things on either side. Moral arguments are irrelevant -- we should fix whichever side yields the most productive result.
jfornear, you're missing the points we've all made. The drug trade only results in violence because right now, every step to bring drugs to consumers is illegal. That means that it's unmonitored, and results in violence. Since you're breaking the law either way, no matter what you do is illegal, so there's no incentive to be peaceful in your processes.
If the drug trade were to be legalized, suddenly people could profit more by accepting business regulations, and violence would lower.
The point I've made elsewhere here is that it used to be producing alcohol led to violence, thanks to the Prohibition. Once alcohol legalized, businesses started making drinks rather than criminals, and the violence stopped.
No, I agree with your point. I just take it further by holding consumers responsible for fueling that violence when they could have done otherwise, not contributed to demand by obeying the laws.
To make an analogy, it is similar to supporting sweat shop labor by buying Nikes (or whatever companies still use sweat shop labor). The argument in the case of illegal drugs is that handing over money to people engaged in violence makes it more likely the violence will continue.
Don't you think that there is something wrong with, you know, killing people? Why not just castrate all the drug users instead? That would provide just as much of a disincentive without all the gratuitous violence.
I find it hard to believe that you are actually serious and not trolling.
Really? Are you saying that the student who screws up and decides to experiment with drugs deserves to die?
And what about all of the addicts whose drug use correlates with other serious problems? There is a strong correlation between serious mental illness like schizophrenia and drug use. And what about all the veterans? Over a quarter of soldiers in combat teams are at risk for developing PTSD. And around have of people with PTSD abuse drugs. I can't ethically support the death penalty for someone who risked their life in the army and whose only crime is abusing drugs.
Sure, every drug addict made a choice to use drugs. But I can't say that I would have not abused drugs if I was born with some serious mental illness or had gone through some traumatic event.
This would have the effect of encouraging legalization of some drugs. In some sense, the worst situation is where things are illegal but widely tolerated and practiced. This gives authorities a lot of scope for locking up people they don't like.
Currently, middle-class taxpayers who smoke pot don't worry much about getting busted, because it's fairly rare to end up in jail. But if they saw serious consequences, they'd lobby for legalization of all but a few hard drugs.
Nope. The reasoning is that continued use of this policy will convince possible dealers that the action is not worth the effort. Econ 101. If you want to reduce some activity, increase the costs of engaging in it. That is exactly what this does.
Such strong feelings about something that doesn't matter that much!
Your body makes chemicals -- these regulate your mood, control your feelings, and so on. Plants also make similar chemicals. You can consume these plants to make up for chemicals that your body doesn't make. That's what drug use is.
I don't see why there's any reason to murder someone else over this. Drugs don't really cause any of society's ills, you can commit crimes and be generally worthless without any help from "illicit" substances.
Also, why do we have such arbitrary lines drawn for what is OK and what should get you killed? Why is it OK to take Tylenol, alcohol, and caffeine, but not marijuana? (Incidentally, marijuana has never caused me ill effects, but non-prescription pain killers have. All drugs have risks, even "legal" ones!)
Anyway, if you have actual answers to these questions, I would really like to hear them.
Drugs aren't in the same category as murder (or any violence). Most obviously, they are personal. Drugs don't bust into your house at night and kill you. We don't [typically] see suicide as a crime because of that even though the result is the same.
Drugs are not completely personal. Depending on drug and supply chain, we are also talking about drug gang activity, drug-fueled economies in the developing world, social problems related to drug abuse, and so on. If you grow a harmless drug on your own or get it from a harmless source, you're probably okay, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that drugs are completely down to the individual.
Prohibition causes most of the troubles though (especially cartel violence). And I think the social aspects of any increased addiction rates would be more than offset by not imprisoning hundreds of thousands annually on drug charges.
It's vastly cheaper to subsidize rehab for the relatively small number of actual addicts than it is to pay to arrest and process a million people a year. Not to mention the effect on GDP of the lost production from all the incarcerated people.
So in other words, you're persecuting people not based on whether they've done good or not, but based on whether they're obeying drug laws that were often as not passed for political gain?
Isn't that a despicable reason to demand somebody's death?
Known medical effects has no bearing on the legality of drugs. Cocaine and heroin have known medical uses and are even currently used for medicine. Same with Cannabis. Another check in the medical use department for MDMA (ecstasy). Even meth has legitimate medical uses. Curiously, many illegal drugs are just (if not more) effective than their patented prescription drug counterparts. You want to kill people who buy heroin, but governments spend billions buying synthetic heroin for their citizens. It's madness.
If the government mobilizes to kill millions of its citizens, how are you confident that the line will be drawn at the point you think is acceptable? (Why we should let you set the line is another debate, but luckily you aren't in a position of power.) Perhaps there's someone else like you, but who takes it a step farther and believes something you do and don't think is immoral should be a capital offense. Your wanting to kill pot smokers is no more crazy than me wanting to kill coffee drinkers.
A recent study showed the benefits of red wine were linked to breaking down some of the worse components in red meat. It just happens consumption of both are so correlated that it looked like red wine in moderation was really healthy. The healthiest choice would be to drink tea and avoid red meat.
The American Heart Association, however, recommends against starting to drink to be healthier. http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4422 While light alcohol consumption does have small benefits, you could make a much, much bigger difference in your overall health by exercising and following a healthy diet. One drink a day probably does have marginal benefits, but from a public health perspective I can see why organizations don't actually recommend it -- people in the aggregate would think it is more meaningful as a recommendation than it actually is and use it as an excuse to drink to excess.
One thing to keep your eye on is Sirtris Pharmaceuticals's (now a subsidiary of GSK) amped-up resveratrol (the good stuff in red wine) derivative. The idea is to get the benefit of drinking 1000 glasses of red wine a day without actually killing yourself. It will be approved for treating diabetes but will be of interest to absolutely everyone that can afford it. http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSN0743693420080...
I've always been under the impression that you can get the health benefits from wine without drinking alcohol. Resveratrol is found naturally in foods like grapes and peanuts. So you won't be missing out on any health benefits if you don't drink.
Most of the studies about this kind of thing get messed up because they are studying it with smoked marijuana. Let's assume that such a study uses vaporized or oral cannabis. I would be surprised to see reduced heart disease as a result of cannabis consumption but I would expect to see reduced cancer of some forms and lower rates of Alzheimer's.
Seems to indicate that THC stops inflammation of blood vessels by suppressing the immune system's response. Also seems that oral delivery was used vs. smoking.
Just red wine and only in some circumstances, pg. There's no medical benefit to vodka, whisky, rum, absinthe, peppermint liquer, beer, jagermeister, goldschlager, etc etc etc.
The worst thing about drugs is drug-related violence. Cocaine and heroin are quite bad for the body, but most of the harm they do comes from their illegal status and the crime surrounding them.
Even addiction's not as terrible as it's made out to be. There are a number of drug addicts who've had productive lives. Drug addiction can be horrible, but most users don't become addicts, and not all addicts become useless, parasitic human beings. There's a wide spectrum.
Your "solution" is absurd: you're proposing that, in response to a small amount of violence, the government should respond with an absurd and unnecessary large amount of violence? I'm going to call "troll".
[Edit 1]: Naturally, this policy would be continued in the future. If anybody is ever found to be knowingly in possession of illegal drugs, they are shot.
This is basically logic programming. If you really want to do something like this, you are far better off just using a logic language like prolog and saving yourself the trouble.
Baahh... Its the old Risk v. Rewards thing all over again. Also easily explainable by standard economic theory. If some career/job/etc... carries a high risk of failure then those who succeed have to be richly rewarded to main the expected value at about the same.
As has already been mentioned, thats not a function, it is a functor. It indicates a relation between two objects. Specifically, it tells the prolog runtime that a list appended to an empty list is just the list itself and that the resultant list and the first list argument should have the same prefix. Another thing to note is that the append function piggy-backs on the prolog version of list-appended cons-cells so that append function example is a bit deceiving. However, the power of prolog should not overlooked. For example, a call to append(X, Y, [1, 2, 3]) would have returned all possible values of X and Y which append to [1, 2, 3]. Something much harder in other languages.
An extremely (imho) good source for information on logic programs and how they are implemented is here: http://www.ida.liu.se/~ulfni/lpp/
A more practical guide to actually compiling these logic programs efficiently (or as efficient as they can be) is documented in Modern Compiler Design by Dick Grune et al. They actually describe the workings of a somewhat simplified workings of a Warren Abstract Machine (WAM) which can (to my knowledge) now approach to within an order of magnitude of standard programming languages. Pretty amazing when the generality of logic programming is considered. Details on the WAM here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Abstract_Machine
"Edit; It looks like it has been sold to an Abu Dhabi holding company, probably since the book was written, but it was formerly owned by AIG. I'm not sure why their website says they're still owned by AIG. Strangely, for a bank he claims has multiple billionaire clients, it was sold for only $254 million."
Not really. Chase has ~800 billion in deposits. You don't see it being valued at $800 billion. That is because every deposit is a liability just like how cash is an asset and most of the cash is loaned out which turns it into more assets. In a well run bank, these assets and liabilities cancel each-other out very closely (wrt banking reserve requirements etc...) and don't factor directly into the value of the bank.
This is a very well informed community. Without coming off sounding like one of those guards from Slumdog Millionaire, may I ask, how do you guys know all this?
In my case, I am actually much more interested in econ. and business. CS is just something I do as well, thus my interest in banking regulation, accounting, and valuations techniques (though I am, by no means, an expert on any of those subjects...).
As it so happens, CS people are much better at computers than economists etc... though there are some excellent econ. blogs on the internet which I enjoy reading.
Its a matter of specialization. I just happen to have banks as on of the things I try to specialize in.
Very extreme jpeg pre 2000 compression would probably do considerably worse as it would degenerate into drawing in boxes of averaged color. jpeg200 would absolutely destroy this compression technique as it specifically uses a form of fourier analysis (wavelet analysis) which is provably optimal for this kind of compression. In fact, AFAIK jpeg2000 is designed so that as more bit are read from a file, it is possible to get a better and more accurate picture -- one of the benefits of using a fourier-analysis like technique. Sort of like a compression on steroids. Getting a lower res. picture is only slightly more complicated than truncating the file and requires minimal processing.
JPEG2K is a terrible format that, in practice, often comes out worse than JPEG. This is partly because wavelets are terrible from a psychovisual standpoint, but also because the format is just badly designed; Snow, a similar wavelet format, trashes it completely even when using the exact same wavelet transform.
Also, wavelets are not at all "provably optimal." The only "provably optimal" transform is the KLT, and even that isn't really, since in practice overcomplete transforms tend to have better compression efficiency than complete ones, at the cost of turning compression from a simple O(nlog(n)) frequency transform into an NP-complete problem of matching pursuits.
"Provably optimal" always involves unwarranted assumptions. For example, least-squares fitting is provably optimal, assuming all your distributions are independent and gaussian. Image compression quality is all about sensitivity of the human visual system to various kinds of errors, so nothing can be proven optimal, ever.
But thats the problem. Obama has already changed the lives of the 300M people in this country or at least helped in the process. The stimulus bill that he helped pass has permanently expanded the US federal government. His budget will go even farther in that direction.
With all due respect, what did you really expect from him? He ran on a platform of supporting the bailout and expanding the role and scope of the federal government.
So, what did I expect from him? Change.
What has he delivered? More of the status quo, big spending, bad decisions, and an extreme lack of long range vision. Instead, he's solving acute problems by putting the younger generation in even more debt. He has blown the budget deficit from $500B to over a trillion. That's not change, that more of the same.
There is a reason that nearly every book ever sold used black text on white background even in the 20th century when that was no longer the only choice. I only wish that websites would heed this advice more often.
Then line up all the drug users and shoot them.
Problem solved.
(I am being serious.)