Where did it all go so wrong?

>harmless drugs like marijuana
Go back to Vice

This is objectively conspiracy theory though. It's an internet truism: it's repeated everywhere but there's no legitimate evidence

>MUH BRAIN CELLS
Give me a fucking break, it's no worse than alcohol.

unlike alochol, marijuana is a foreign substance from a foreign culture and its influence directly undermines the culture of the nation

What the fuck is a "foreign substance" and how does it undermine the culture of a nation?

alcohol harms literally every system in your body, while marijuana doesn't. not to mention alcohol has crazy amounts of empty calories.

white bois don't have the genes to tolerate marihuana and cocaine the same way injuns can't tolerate alcohol

that belief isn't just widespread on the internet. people irl believe it just like it's common to belief jfk wasn't killed by a lone gunman

Alcoholic drinks were first made by the Babylonians. Wouldn't that make it a 'foreign substance'? Same with tobacco, which was first used by the American Indians.

>The plant is indigenous to central Asia and the Indian subcontinent
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis

at this point, anyone that thinks alcohol is better than weed is just delusional, you are just more accustomed to seeing drunkards, so you think they are better than stoners

So the consumption/presence/use (within our borders?) of a substance that originates outside of North America undermines the culture of the U.S.?

I just want to make sure I understand your argument.

by his logic, you could say the presence of non-injun cultures is what is actually undermining north american culture

1/10

troll harder nigger

The difference being an angry drunk beats anyone that happens to be around him, whereas a paranoid stoner will just lock themselves in their room

You really showed that obvious black supremacist shill.

Literally nobody gets violent when their drunk except for babbys first trip to the bar or violent assholes who are violent anyway, meanwhile every regular smoker goes on to become a paranoid mess eventually.

>Literally nobody

except the tens of thousands of domestic abuse cases every year. let's not even mention drunk driving.

>meanwhile every regular smoker goes on to become a paranoid mess eventually.

And what happens to every regular drinker? Cardiovascular disease?

Do you guys have credible research to back up these claims?

No they don't and they don't need to. You people and your facts sheesh

While I agree we are incarcerating far too many people, for far too many stupid reasons... And few things seem to be more fundamental a violation of adult human freedom than one human dictating to another as to what he or she can and cannot ingest...

...The problem that comes in, is the correlation between that chart, and this chart.

anecdotal as fuck, thats literally just your opinion, a proponent of marijuana could make the same exact argument for his drug

also, a person does not need to feel violent impulses to harm others, the majority of alcohol casualties are caused by irresponsible behaviour like drunk driving

Privatization of prison.

So much this

NIGGA NIGGA NIGGA NIGGA NIGGA NIGGA NIGGA IM ONE HUNDRED PERCENT NIGGA

>American Indians

There's several problems with drug laws...

For starters, you're prosecuting a crime before it's actually happened. Just because someone is using drugs, does not necessarily mean they are causing any harm to anyone but themselves. You are presupposing harm to others is going to happen, and prosecuting them before they've actually caused any.

Now, I don't think one should get off any easier, for committing an actual crime, simply because on is on drugs. If anything, it should be an aggravating circumstance, as if you are an addict, it seems you are more likely to repeat it. But prosecuting someone for nearly using or possessing drugs, is essentially jailing them on the basis they *might* cause a crime... And anyone might cause a crime at any time, you can justify incarcerating anyone on that basis.

More importantly, you create a black market, with no access to the society's law enforcement or courts. Therefore, it is left to the participants of this black market to police themselves, and inevitably, eventually, violent mafias are created to do so. The violence this generates extends to people who do not use drugs. So suddenly, you've taken a personal choice for personal harm, and turned it into a harm that affects everyone, user or not.

And the history of prohibition, coupled with the state of some unstable nations, should tell you that these mafias can extend in such power and scope they can threaten to overtake the legitimate government itself. Without such drug laws, these mafias have no financial backing or motivation.

Additionally, when you start drug testing on entry level jobs, where mild inebriation is no real detriment, addicts have no way to make money to feed their habit - except through crime. They have no way to be producers in the society, and can only be a criminal element, whereas otherwise they might have been simply basic functional citizens.

Or to put the TL;DR to memetoon:
youtube.com/watch?v=wJUXLqNHCaI

First chart: early 80s
You're chart: mid 90s

No correlation

Privitization of US prisons making them for-profit. Now states have prison quotas they have to meet and are maxing out sentences on nonviolent crimes.

Bleh, so many typos, wish I could edit sometimes...

>Additionally, when you start drug testing on entry level jobs, where mild inebriation is no real detriment, addicts have no way to make money to feed their habit - except through crime.

this always bothered me inmensely, society says they want to help these people get out of the hole but the actual actions they take imply they just want to get rid of them

Society doesn't want to promote drugs. If people want to drug themselves into poverty, its their own choice.

What does smoking marijuana in people's free time have to do with job performance at walmart?

Epic meme.

helping people get out of drugs is promoting drugs?, what kind of retarded logic is that?

I'll be honest. In my opinion violent video games actually do cause less violent crime. People just let out their frustrations on pixels.

>walmart
>marijuana
>job performance
Do you understand what you're actually typing?

I'll spell it out for you. Walmart is at the lowest end of job. Even that requires bit of attention span to either help customers, stock inventories, both, etc.

There's helping people get of drugs and then there's promoting drug habits at work.

...

>I'll spell it out for you. Walmart is at the lowest end of job. Even that requires bit of attention span to either help customers, stock inventories, both, etc.

Again, what does that have to do with getting high in your free time? You think marijuana keeps you high for days?

Why don't you adjust that graph for population growth pal

let's get away from war on drugs angle. What else could impact this?

Three strikes law? began being enacted in many states in the early 90s then by federal gov in 95.

Mandatory minimums?

Digital crimes did not exist before mid late 90s.

What else could contribute to rise in 80s?

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- About 10,000 people in the United States may be wrongfully convicted of serious crimes each year, a new study suggests.

The results are based on a survey of 188 judges, prosecuting attorneys, public defenders, sheriffs and police chiefs in Ohio and 41 state attorneys general.

The study also found that the most important factor leading to wrongful conviction is eyewitness misidentification.

These findings are included in the new book Convicted But Innocent: Wrongful Conviction and Public Policy (Sage Publications, 1996). The book was written by C. Ronald Huff, director of the Criminal Justice Research Center and the School of Public Policy and Management at Ohio State University; Arye Rattner, professor of sociology at the University of Haifa, Israel; and the late Edward Sagarin, who was a professor of sociology at City College and City University of New York.
researchnews.osu.edu/archive/ronhuff.htm

rockefeller laws

>let's get away from war on drugs angle
>What else could contribute to rise in 80s

It all comes back to drugs.

here you go

Because the alternative is to test employees at work directly and monitor their health at all times on work.

This is not only a hassle for both parties, but it will involve many different agencies, government regulations, law changes, etc. It will also be very expensive.

If you want to smoke marijuana all the time, then just go do drugs on street.

The staggering cost of R&D and drug approvals

Lost in the discussion is the truly staggering cost of what it takes to develop a drug from start to finish. For context, it's important to understand that taking a drug from the discovery stage to pharmacy shelves is extremely rare. Medscape pegs the ratio of researched drugs to eventually approved therapies at between 5,000-to-1 and 10,000-to-1. However, if a drug manages to gain FDA approval, the cumulative direct and indirect expenses are huge.

How much you do you think it costs to develop a drug and see it to market approval? One hundred million? Five hundred million? One billion? Even if we added these figures together, we wouldn't even be in the ballpark according to a 2014 study released by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development.
google.com/amp/s/www.fool.com/amp/investing/general/2016/04/30/the-cost-of-developing-an-fda-approved-drug-is-tru.aspx?client=safari

Nope, it's drugs.

Granted, these are the federal prison numbers, but I'm sure the state numbers are even more severely weighted towards that conclusion.

War on drugs
And, related, for privatized prisons + corrupt lawmakers

>Because the alternative is to test employees at work directly

You mean like monitoring their performance and talking to employees? I mean, it's like the same with alcohol. You can't stop an employee from coming in drunk as shit but you can clearly see they're fucked up and get rid of them.

The film implies that the drug and vitamin regime promoted by Woodroof was safer and more effective than the drugs being issued in hospitals and tested by the FDA at the time, but this has been criticized by numerous observers. Daniel D'Addario, in an article in Salon, suggests that "the film's take is perilously close to endorsing pseudoscience."[103]
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Buyers_Club#

And that mentality is why kids are breaking into houses and stripping out all the copper wiring to melt down and sell to a recycler.

That's some seriously hard labor for what amounts to considerably less than minimum wage.

I don't care if the kid at Taco Bell 420's errayday, just so long as he doesn't get the munchies and eat my doritos.

It basically makes anyone who can't beat their addiction in short order a lifelong criminal. (Even if you do beat your addiction later, that lack of employment history in your youth leaves you all but unemployable.)

Wasn't long ago I had my damn catalytic converter stolen off my car - while I was parked in a very good neighbor, nonetheless - proving that transportation means the crime this generates isn't entirely restricted to the ghetto. Seriously, no one would do this sorta crap if Micky D's wasn't drug testing.

Actually you can stop an employee from coming in as drunk.

By firing them.

When you applied for the job, you did it as a rational person with sound judgment. This is what the employer is looking for at work.

When you compromise your sound judgment and rationality with drugs, it not only affects yourself but also the customers, the employers, your co-workers and the company.

If you work at a bar then maybe you can get by with drinking at work and smoking weed. As the customers, company, co-workers all have certain expectations and therefore caution is well placed. Otherwise, at a store where families, kids, people of all types work and buy things, druggies are a possible source of menace.

Druggies have lower inhibitions and thus make rash and ill-informed/mannered decisions.

This is why I never trust food from third parties.

>Actually you can stop an employee from coming in as drunk. By firing them.

Same thing for marijuana.

>When you compromise your sound judgment and rationality with drugs, it not only affects yourself but also the customers, the employers, your co-workers and the company.

Have you ever even tried marijuana? You really think getting high in your off time affects you once you come down? This is only the case for heavy uses, just like heavy users of alcohol.

Not him, but I don't what argument you've made there to separate drugs from alcohol.

It wasn't long ago I was witness to a black manager and Subway firing a white kid for failing to pass his drug test, because he was smoking weed.

Said manager was being extremely apologetic towards the poor kid, and even said, "You're the best worker I have, so this is really sad."

Again, it's same with the potential for crime - there's plenty of high functioning addicts out there. If you're going to prevent them from working, or imprison them, on the basis they *might* fuck up, that's just wrong. You're creating crime where is none, and forcing folks to a life of crime to boot.

Treat it like alcohol - where everything is fine until it turns out you can't hold your damned liquor. We ended prohibition for a reason.

Its not the off-site marijuana "hobby" that affects your work, its the on-work.

If you do it off-work, you do it on-work. Anyone saying otherwise is a liar. This is guaranteed across time.

>x will cause y, so we need to prevent x
>why not just crack down on y directly and avoid any collateral damage or wasted resources
>X DETECTED GET OUT OF HERE BEFORE YOU HARM THE CHILDREN

Authoritarian busybodies like this are the cancer of human civilization

>If you do it off-work, you do it on-work. Anyone saying otherwise is a liar. This is guaranteed across time.

Evidence? I did 6 years in the Navy, work and am a full time student. Once all of my responsibilities are done I may get high on the weekends.

Well if you're net letting anyone handle your food, that's neither here nor there. But we let people who drink a beer on the weekend be employed, why not someone who does the same with a joint? How much could this possibly affect their performance in a job where you literally hire retards to fill positions?

Minimum sentences can also play a large role. If you a minimum of 25 years for low level drug holding it means you are not only taking more people than before, but keeping people for far longer than before.

Well yeah, but that's mostly minimum sentences - for drugs. You know, the offense that made minimum sentences a thing to begin with?

$340 million
Children 5 (Theodora, Alexandra, Marlon, Tara, Angela) More StatsView More.
About Keith Richards. English musician and singer-songwriter Keith Richards has an estimated net worth of $340 million. He is best recognized as one of the members of Rolling Stones, an English rock band.
Keith Richards Net Worth - TheRichest
www.therichest.com › celeb › musician

>How much could this possibly affect their performance in a job where you literally hire retards to fill positions?
This, if the mentally retarded can do the job, you don't drug test for it.

Its too late when you can't hold your liquor.

We ended prohibition because moral reasons. The same reason we started prohibition for moral reasons. The result of prohibition is millions of lives saved.

Its not authoritarian to fire a druggie. You do work at employer's request. If you fail to meet minimum standards, you're fired. Its no different from raping a women a work or killing someone or stealing or fighting or lying, etc.

Either you're a liar or you're the statistical anomaly. I have plenty of experiences myself and vast majority have impaired judgment when on drugs.

You do realize that alcohol is a drug, right?

Yes and?

Time is on your side
No more need in runnin'
No more need to hide
No more need to cry

Time is on my side, yes it is.
Time is on my side, yes it is.
Now you all were saying that you want to be free
But you'll come runnin' back (I said you would baby),
You'll come runnin' back (like I told you so many times before),
You'll come runnin' back to me.

Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul to waste

And yet people who drink are employed no problem.

>The result of prohibition is millions of lives saved.
Dude, prohibition propelled the mafia which killed thousands individuals who weren't even drinking, and said crooks got so rich and took so many positions in local and even federal government that nearly took over the nation!

>Its no different from raping a women a work or killing someone
Yes, smoking a joint on the weekend is literally the equivalent of rape and murder.

If something actually affects your job performance negatively enough, fine, fire them. But in this country, innocent into proven guilty. I mean doctors (which we usually don't test) and police, sure... But in a job where your qualifications are so low that you're hiring people with down syndrome? No, all you're doing is generating crime.

Only at bars.

We're not talking about drinking or smoking weed on the fucking job here. Nearly everyone in this nation drinks from time to time - you're almost considered a social pariah or a religious nut if you don't. Yet the vast majority of those people remain employed.

Hell, on a lot jobs you have meeting at the fucking bar.

or you're a liar or a stastitical anomaly. what reason do I have to trust your words over his?

Crack cocaine, nigguh!

Prohibition didn't create the mafia. Mafia were from Italy. Mussolini was cracking down on mafia hard during his tenure. This forced the mafia to migrate to US. They became rich due to them already being power taking over areas without organized crime.

Its a childish to assume prohibition gave birth to mafia or their riches.

Also it seems you have selective reading regarding my comments. It was to show the violation of contractual agreements between employer and employee.

People did drink on job before the advent of anti-drinking campaigns.

There is a huge problem of society drinking itself to death and yet not making it illegal. Powerful corporations, social standings, etc all welcome alcohol. There's strict social rules regarding drinking on work and offwork. Marijuana hasn't entered the fray yet except to the young and hippie generation. Thus these people don't have the rigid social structure needed to control themselves.

I view neither positively. Two wrongs don't make a right.

On the late evening of June 9, 1980, during the making of the film Bustin' Loose, after days of freebasing cocaine, Pryor poured 151-proof rum all over himself and lit himself on fire. While ablaze, he ran down Parthenia Street from his Los Angeles, California home, until being subdued by police. He was taken to a hospital, where he was treated for second and third degree burns covering more than half of his body. Pryor spent six weeks in recovery at the Grossman Burn Center at Sherman Oaks Hospital. His daughter, Rain, stated that the incident happened as a result of a bout of drug-induced psychosis;[26] later, however, in an on-camera interview, Pryor said: "I tried to commit suicide. Next question."[27]
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pryor#Freebase_cocaine_incident

Because I'm bad, I'm bad come on
You know I'm bad, I'm bad come on, you know
You know I'm bad, I'm bad come on, you know
And the whole world has to
Answer right now
Just to tell you once again
Who's bad

You are half-right, which is politically the best kind but diametrically the worst.

The mafia wasn't a power in the US until Prohibition became its life blood. If wasn't the mafia, it would have been some other criminal organization. Creating massively profitable black markets is a formula for corruption and rampant crime.

>There's strict social rules regarding drinking on work and offwork. Marijuana hasn't entered the fray yet
And I don't think pot being legal is going to somehow make it okay to smoke it at fucking work - given that you can't drink or smoke cigarettes on the job either. Rather well demonstrated by the fact that it doesn't happen where is legal.

But, because it's legal and not tested for, causal alcohol use doesn't generate organized crime, nor force people into a life of crime by the fact that they are unemployable because they had a beer on Saturday.

Making legal reduces the harm, period. Making it illegal extends that harm from the user and those immediately affected by him - to the entire population.

Social pressures and harm reduction programs are more than sufficient to reduce drug use, as we've seen time and again - you don't need to make them illegal and spiral into existence all this extra crime and violence, all while making the drugs themselves stronger and more destructive.

Well they said you was high-classed
Well, that was just a lie
Yeah they said you was high-classed
Well, that was just a lie
Well, you ain't never caught a rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine

Dark Alliance by Gary Webb

the percentage of prisoners in for drug related crimes have only gone up by 10% since 1974.

Privately owned for profit prisons

A recent variant of anarchistic theory, which is befuddling some of the younger advocates of freedom, is a weird absurdity called “competing governments.” Accepting the basic premise of the modern statists—who see no difference between the functions of government and the functions of industry, between force and production, and who advocate government ownership of business—the proponents of “competing governments” take the other side of the same coin and declare that since competition is so beneficial to business, it should also be applied to government. Instead of a single, monopolistic government, they declare, there should be a number of different governments in the same geographical area, competing for the allegiance of individual citizens, with every citizen free to “shop” and to patronize whatever government he chooses.

Remember that forcible restraint of men is the only service a government has to offer. Ask yourself what a competition in forcible restraint would have to mean.

One cannot call this theory a contradiction in terms, since it is obviously devoid of any understanding of the terms “competition” and “government.” Nor can one call it a floating abstraction, since it is devoid of any contact with or reference to reality and cannot be concretized at all, not even roughly or approximately. One illustration will be sufficient: suppose Mr. Smith, a customer of Government A, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, a customer of Government B, has robbed him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr. Jones’ house and is met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that they do not accept the validity of Mr. Smith’s complaint and do not recognize the authority of Government A. What happens then? You take it from there.

The Virtue of Selfishness “The Nature of Government,”
The Virtue of Selfishness, 112

>there are 1,358,875 people in state prisons. Of them, 16 percent have a drug crime as their most serious offense
the incarceration rate per 100,000 people would drop from 725 to 625 if all drug offenders were released.
There's been a huge increase of all kind of crime in the past fifty years, blaming it on drugs is not going to solve the problem.

30% fed 60% state increase over the 70's.
120%/110% increase over the 80's.
and another 110%/60% increase over the 90's.
and a yet another 45%/15% increase in the 2000's (as various states started to legalize.)

nap.edu/read/18613/chapter/18#423

So if you mean around a 250%+10% increase, then yeah, sure.

He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Thoreau is sometimes referred to as an anarchist.[4][5] Though "Civil Disobedience" seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government—"I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government"[6]—the direction of this improvement points toward anarchism: "'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have."[6]
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau

Hm

>the incarceration rate per 100,000 people would drop from 725 to 625 if all drug offenders were released.

From the same article you quoting:
>According to the Bureau of Prisons, there are 207,847 people incarcerated in federal prisons. Roughly half (48.6 percent) are in for drug offenses.
Just because drugs aren't your most serious offense, doesn't mean your offense isn't drug related, nor that said offense wasn't partly due to the fact you had to fund your illegal habit, illegally, or were involved in the crime surrounding that illegality.

>There's been a huge increase of all kind of crime in the past fifty years
Wuuuuuuuuuuuutt. Not in the fucking USA - quite the opposite, the crime rate has been going nowhere but down for fifty years - which is usually the main justification used for the drug laws.