It's Official: I am Turning into a Hippie...

[DKW 86 7,419]

 

Quote

 

If America wants to stop the migrant crisis, it should decriminalize drugs

The monumental heartlessness of separating families has rightly garnered overwhelming media attention. But it's worth stepping back to examine just why people are seeking asylum in America in the first place. They are, in the main, fleeing violence and political instability — problems which could be powerfully alleviated by decriminalizing illegal drugs in the United States.

The major population of refugees entering the U.S. are coming from four countries in Central America: Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, which comprise the "Northern Triangle." Violence there is apocalyptically bad — especially in El Salvador, where the murder rate was an eye-popping 60 per 100,000 in 2017 (and that is itself a sharp decline from 81.2 in 2016 and over 100 the year before that.)

By way of comparison: El Salvador is about the same size as Denmark, both with roughly 6 million inhabitants. But the 6,657 murders in El Salvador in 2015 amount to 190 times the number suffered by Denmark that same year — indeed, more even than the entire European Union put together.

Then, of course, there is an ungodly amount of assault, rape, burglary, kidnapping, and extortion.

Incidentally, all this should add some important perspective to the idea that asylum seekers need to be "deterred" from making the attempt to come to the United States (endorsed most notoriously by Trump adviser Stephen "Waffen-SS" Miller, but also Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton). Just about anything is worth chancing when one is facing down the possibility of being decapitated or dissolved in acid by gang assassins.

What's driving the crime? In brief, these countries have a severe gang problem, rooted in the drug trade and decades of political instability. The United States bears a great deal of responsibility for both. The U.S. startedand then fueled a decades-long civil war in Guatemala that killed some 200,000 civilians. It fueled the 12-year civil war in El Salvador with money and arms. It armed right-wing death squads in Nicaragua that used Honduras as an operating base. Most of the big gangs are directly descended from demobilized soldiers and militias.

Then there is the drug trade, which is a major profit center for gangs. Central America is the biggest conduit for cocaine coming from growers in South America to customers in the U.S., and trafficking is both immensely profitable and the cause of violent turf wars. Again the U.S. both created the conditions for drug profits through its domestic drug prohibition policy, and directly fueled violent conflict by pushing a policy throughout the region of attacking drug gangs with the military. Disrupting existing gangs turned out to actually escalate violence dramatically, as new gangs fought to control the vacated territory and business.

It's hard to imagine how the United States could directly help these struggling states build strong institutions. Given our abysmal record in that department, probably the best thing we could do is leave them alone.

However, we could quickly and easily delete the major gang profit source by decriminalizing drugs like cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. There are many different ways to do it — personally I would favor a prescription-based method, where addicts certified by a doctor can receive a supply made by a government monopoly, because under no circumstances can for-profit private businesses be allowed to deal in such addictive substances — but the foreign policy goal would be to somehow remove the drug supply business from the black market. With that established, evidence-based addiction treatment policy can set to work.

It wouldn't get rid of gangs overnight, as they have many other sources of revenue. But it would kick out one of their strongest props at a stroke, and just maybe shift the balance of power between the ordinary people of Central America and the gangs.

 

 

 

 

[alexava 6,973]

 How would this be any different than the opioid crisis? 

[DKW 86 7,419]

5 hours ago, alexava said:

 How would this be any different than the opioid crisis? 

Oh yeah, I forgot about all the runaway street violence in American Cities...Only there isnt any. We have been on a downward trend in overall violent crime for years.

But due to con artist media types driving and fueling an agenda, the American People believe just the opposite.

 

[channonc 466]

Agree DKW. You may find this article of interest, if you haven't already read it.

Portugal's Radical Drug Policy is Working. Why Hasn't the World Copied it?

[AU64 10,122]

15 minutes ago, channonc said:

Agree DKW. You may find this article of interest, if you haven't already read it.

Portugal's Radical Drug Policy is Working. Why Hasn't the World Copied it?

A small country with a mostly homogenous population of 10 million.....smaller than  many large US cities so gotta wonder why anyone thinks a policy like that would extrapolate up to a diverse country of 300 million people?      As for the world not copying it......maybe it's something that works on a small scale ?  'cause lots of European countries have loose policies on drugs.   

[alexava 6,973]

6 hours ago, DKW 86 said:

Oh yeah, I forgot about all the runaway street violence in American Cities...Only there isnt any. We have been on a downward trend in overall violent crime for years.

But due to con artist media types driving and fueling an agenda, the American People believe just the opposite.

 

I meant that opioids are legal and “controlled “ yet there’s still a black market. 

[AuburnNTexas 7,134]

On 6/27/2018 at 8:52 PM, DKW 86 said:

 

 

 

I am going to surprise a lot of people by basically agreeing with you.  While I am against big government If we did this is a capitalist for profit method there would be an incentive to addict people to make more money. This is one of the few areas I see government being better than business. This will help the Central American countries but will not resolve many long standing issues.  As for the US being behind the issues in Central America that is only partially true. At the height of the Cold War the Russians and the Cubans were sending money into those countries to destabilize them and we were supporting corrupt right wing governments. 

In 1998 Maria Dolores Albiac wrote a book about the 100 families in El Salvador. All the Central American families have a huge disparity in wealth with a very small wealthy class and a huge poor class and an almost non-existent middle class (which has actually grown with people sending money back from US, Canada and Europe. Corrupt governments, an unneeded military (Except Costa Rica) and Drug issues which your idea would help address. That said it would not be a panacea and could easily become abused. Life is not simple and neither is drug addiction. 

[DKW 86 7,419]

I think we already have an Addiction issue here in the US. We just need to monetarize the profits and make them taxable.