paperburn1 wrote:. . .if this is truly a war on drugs we must be willing to take acceptable losses to win. To win a war your goal is to break things and kill people until the other side gives up. This means some people will die. You can not legislation a morality.
I disagree. I think Diogenes has hit the nail on the head here--the goal is not to win a war but rather to fight a mitigating action. I don't think anyone ever believed we could win the war in Afghanistan in any conventional sense, and this is one of the reasons Bush pushed to go to war in Iraq as well--there was a sense in which one could win. In Afghanistan, the war is one of attrition. A "win" there would mean we have removed enough Taliban leadership and sufficiently altered the culture at large that it would grow into a peaceful place over time. Projections for an outcome like that are much more than a decade's work, and necessarily include removing the poppies. All by itself, removing the poppies and replacing them with food crops the people can then live off, must take more than a generation. We'll probably quit before we can win such a war.
The war on drugs is not even a war of attrition, but rather a mitigating action--it holds back the flood waters that would otherwise engulf our society. If one looks at the results of Meth, and the function of cannabis as a gateway to things like Meth, it is obvious the problems we have with drugs would be magnified many times were there no war on drugs. So it's not a case of losing a battle to win a war. Letting people who would otherwise be functioning citizens who would contribute to society, live off the backs of others because of their addictions (people like simon) is not an answer. It is fuel for the fire. It is the parasites like simon who are pushing our republic toward the end of its days because we simply cannot carry such a large portion of the populous on the backs of those who work. We agree we need to carry the elderly, the disabled, those going through temporary hardship, etc. We do not need to carry tens of millions of people who would be working like the rest of us were they not druggies--people like simon
These people need to be freed from drugs just the same as women need to be freed from Sharia law and abandoned kids beed to be freed from the sex trade. Treating drug use as a victimless crime ignores all the vast plethora of its consequences. I'm sure people like simon would love us all to ignore the fact he's living off our hard work, but that is the truth and there is no reason for it, except that he's made himself a worthless druggie.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis