After watching the incomparably horrific Da Vinci Code film (I still maintain that the book was worse) Sophie Neveu finds a junkie in a park, and destroys his heroin gear.
You hear of horrible stories about junkies every day. Scotlands very bad for it; there's a baby girl in hospital right now, with suspected heroin poisoning. These people live in hovels.
The drug trade generates a significant percentage of the world's organised crime. Girls are taken off the street, hooked on heroin by a merciless pimp, and then kept; they work for the junk, and keep coming back for more. There's no-one to protect them, because they're classed as criminals. Hundreds are killed every year through drug crime. There's a million more scenarios, i'm sure. Governments spend untold amounts on policing and trying to stop the trade. The War on Drugs, remember it?
So. What would happen if the whole lot was just legalised? the Governments could impose checks and balances, strict age controls and so on. Suddenly the crime would drop; the trapped working girls would have a way out. The cartels and the drug lords would suddenly find themselves floating around in a flooded market. It's like New York's failed alcohol prohibition. Make it illegal, and there'll always be someone to capitalise. People will always get hurt by it, and through it.
Or, would the junkies still be social outcasts, permenantly hooked on the drug? Would they still go to the dealers before the pharmacists?
I'm not really decided on the subject; I only know that something has to change. If not legislation, then what? Or perhaps just the legalisation of certain drugs?
One thing to remember though I think; the War(s) on Drugs will never, ever be won. That's just the way it is.
So. Complete legalisation: the next big thing, or an idea doomed to fail?
Another thing which inspired me on this subject is that I just got through watching an episode of Penn and Teller: Bullshit. The episode was on the "War on Drugs". It was proven that the War on Drugs caused the drug abuse to actually increase than decrease. Basically, it was a load of Bullshit.
It would I think be better to actually legalize everything so it could be controlled and people wouldn't die of overdosing. But people don't seem to realize this.
Re:Legalise it or not.
« Reply #1 on: 2006-11-29 12:18:13 »
[Bass] It would I think be better to actually legalize everything so it could be controlled and people wouldn't die of overdosing. But people don't seem to realize this.
[Hermit] Welcome to sanity.
[Hermit] Unfortunately, I don't think it is going to happen anytime soon. To achieve this will take a body of people able and prepared to vote about it, who are not only able to think for themselves, but are able to withstand the huge number of slippery slope arguments, and demonization of legalization advocates (including the many ex-heads of police and enforcement bodies advocating legalization) that will be added to the discussion by the special interests identified below, who will be joining the chorus of existing politicians (who benefit hugely from having a target population they can torture, any time they need to look "tough-on-crime"). Looking at the vast numbers of sheep surrounding me, I see no sign of this body of intelligent, activist voters developing.
[Hermit] The following identification of opposition focal points and special interests is not all inclusive. For example most schools have spent the last 40 years arguing for "drug-free" societies "for the children." These are now typically funded, entrenched programs with large staffs. We can expect to see these schools, their staff and their boards fighting legalization. Another example would be the very many marketing, media and publishing companies involved in waging "the war on drugs" on our behalf, whose very existence is seen (probably correctly) as being as dependent on continued government expenditure in the "war on drugs", as the equilibrium of their staff and management is dependent on coke, crack and other drugs.
[Hermit] Full legalization (which now will mean undoing the mesh of interlocking treaties and agreements outlawing drugs and establishing the illegality of the drug trade we have foisted onto the rest of the world1), with a small portion of the current "Drug War" money being spent on the provision of treatment2 would be a very good thing for a whole lot of reasons. Naturally this would imply the release of all current non-violent drug incarcerates3, 4 & 5. Ideally, it would mean that the "drugs" would be registered like any other drugs6, and suppliers would fall under the same regulations as other manufacturers, and become liable for their staff, environment and the standard and quality of their goods, establishing a tort7 were their clients to come to unintentional harm from goods they supply.
Regards
Hermit 1 This will be resisted because much supposed US "Aid" is tied to anti-drug activity. 2 I anticipate huge resistance from the staff of numerous authorities whose budgets are dependent on the "war on drugs." 3 I anticipate that numerous of the prison companies will object - many of them will threaten to sue, on the grounds that they were assured of growing incomes forever when they built the prisons, and they will hardly be happy at the idea of the prison population declining by 80% and the sudden loss, possibly forever, of the millions of instances of the $35 to $140 they are charging their inmates, and where that is not possible, society, for these "uncomfortable hotels," per inmate-day. 4 I anticipate many cities and communities objecting to a sudden flood of unemployables descending on them. After all, the official unemployment statistics, currently representing around 20% to 40% of the actual jobless, is dramatically depressed by the 2% of the population currently held in jail. 5 A small percentage of the complaints will be valid, as police have traditionally used drugs to frame people they had no evidence against, yet were convinced are evil-doers. In a few of these cases, the police will be shown to have been correct once they demonstrate their incompetence by once again becoming suspects after their release from the criminal-training-programs they are currently attending at state expense. 6 I expect existing suppliers of "legal" drugs to entirely displace the "illegal" suppliers as, like transport regulations, the current maze of regulations and law is IMO designed to utterly suppress the instigation of any meaningful competition. 7 While this would mean continued drug related income for some lawyers, they would be different from the current drug-matter related criminal lawyers and assorted judges and their staffs who would see a massive reduction in their business were legalization to occur. Being the closest thing to professional slippery slope surfers and skiers we have, we should never underestimate the legal profession's capablitity to be persuasive when its interests are threatened.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Legalise it or not.
« Reply #2 on: 2006-11-29 20:38:20 »
Some nice insight there Hermit.
I have also heard arguments for against the legalization on drugs though. As far as I can make it out I have heard many say that any legalization would prove unsuccessful, and not lasting for long if it happened. Basically the goverment would end up treating it like cigarettes and taxing substances like crazy, which would turn away all potential customers because they've been getting it tax free from their dealers for years. Selling drugs without licenses would still be illegal, which makes the drug trade no different than before.
In otherwords there's nothing in it for the goverment, and they know this. Some even remain strongly convinced that this is the main reason behind the fact that most drugs have been made illegal in the first place; and that if they cared solely about people dying cigarettes would be illegal too. And also that many addicts end up very poor as a result of their addiction, and will take what they can get for the cheapest price they can get it. An addict is not going to wait and scrape up an added couple of dollars to buy it legally if they can get the fix they need for less. Recreational drug users probably wouldn't mind, but the addicts who outnumber them would.
Re:Legalise it or not.
« Reply #3 on: 2006-11-30 09:49:10 »
[Blunderov] Gateway drug locked down.
November 28, 2006 War on Drugs Expands to Catnip by Fred E. Foldvary
Drug warriors scored a virtual victory after the 2006 U.S. elections when they hurriedly extended the War on Drugs to a psychoactive substance previously exempt: nepetalactone, the main psychoactive ingredient in catnip. It is well known that the sniffing of catnip makes some cats "turn on." Their eyes open wide, they roll over on the floor, they hug and bite the catnip toy and kick it with the feet, and they friskily run to and fro, similar to human beings who go crazy ingesting psychoactive drugs.
While catnip does not have the same effect on human beings, the advocates of banning catnip have pointed out that children who give their cats catnip and then see the cat being "happy" might get dangerous ideas about getting high. They think, if the cat can feel good, why not them too? Indeed, the first step to marijuana addiction may well be catnip! According to the drug warriors, catnip has been a major gateway to the human abuse of drugs, and yet there has been no prohibition.
The U.S. federal ban on drugs began in 1914 with the Harrison Narcotic Act to control opium. Alcohol was prohibited by the 18th Amendment in 1919, in an era where the U.S. Constitution was still respected, but the Amendment was repealed by the 21st Amendment in 1933.
In 1937, convinced that marijuana causes insanity, Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act, which effectively prohibited that substance. The full-scale war on psychoactive substances started with Nixon's declaration in 1969 that such drugs were "America's public enemy number one." Congress formally declared the War on Drugs with the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. The agency that prosecutes this war is the Drug Enforcement Administration.
In 1988, the Reagan Administration created the Office of National Drug Control Policy to bring together all federal departments and agencies into a united war campaign. In accord with America's traditional admiration of the Roman dictator Caesar, the director of ONDCP is called the Drug Czar, and the recognition of the War on Drugs as America's number one bipartisan obsession was made clear by raising the Drug Czar to cabinet-level status by President Bill Clinton in 1993.
Now the last great loophole in the abuse of drugs by both children and adults has been closed. The enforcement of the prohibition of catnip will begin nationally with the first full eclipse of the sun in 2007, to symbolize the eclipse of the libertine and lascivious feline attitudes that have led to catnip abuse. Americans will receive orders to destroy all catnip in their homes before the eclipse.
The War on Catnip has started already as a pilot program in the so-called "red zone" of Washington, DC. The assistant to the Drug Czar for federal territory is Ima Tyrant, who was transferred to the ONDCP from the Federal Communications Commission's "Office of Philosophy and Economics," which has been enforcing a ban on philosophic and economic indecency.
Some Washington red-zone residents stubbornly refused to destroy their illicit catnip. For example, Dr. Felix thought that nobody would know that he still had some catnip in his cabinet. But Ima Tyrant sent dog patrols down the red-zone streets of Washington, hounds who were trained to detect minute particles of catnip. The dogs howled at Dr. Felix's front door, and the catnip SWAT teem stormed into the house and went through all the closets, cabinets and shelves, dumping everything on the floor until they finally found the catnip. Dr. Felix is now in federal prison on a life sentence for the possession of catnip.
But, like marijuana, there is also the problem of controlling the catnip plants, scientifically called Nepeta cataria. Catnip is a member of the mint family, and the plant grows all over North America. The 2006 Prohibition of the Possession of Nepetalactone and Catnip Plants Act makes it a federal crime to grow catnip on one's land, even if the landowner does not know that the plants are present. Large-scale spraying with toxic chemicals will occur during 2006 everywhere that satellites detect catnip plants. Unfortunately, sometimes spearmint and basil plants look like catnip, and these may also be sprayed. Americans will be warned to avoid ingesting any herbs of the mint family after the spraying.
"Catnip is a much greater drug problem than most people realize," said Ima Tyrant in a recently televised interview. "Some teenagers have experimented with smoking catnip. People also make tea from catnip, and have used it in folk medicines. We can no longer tolerate this big loophole in drug abuse. The prohibition of catnip will the "cat-stone" to America's War on Drugs.
"But why is alcohol not included in banned substances, as it causes much more trouble than catnip?" asked the interviewer. Ima Tyrant replied, "Alcohol is not really a drug. That's a myth perpetuated by those who foolishly want to legalize drugs. Alcohol is a normal drink, and like fatty foods, sure it can be abused, but to call alcohol a drug is sheer propaganda."
You hip cats have only a limited time to enjoy your cataria until the eclipse of your feline liberty. The dogs of war will then come barking, so beware.
This article first appeared in the Progress Report, www.progress.org. Reprinted with permission.
Dr. Fred Foldvary teaches economics at Santa Clara University and is the author of several books: The Soul of Liberty, Public Goods and Private Communities, and the Dictionary of Free-Market Economics.
In Oliver Cromwell's eloquent words, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" about the course you and President Bush urge us to adopt to fight drugs. The path you propose of more police, more jails, use of the military in foreign countries, harsh penalties for drug users, and a whole panoply of repressive measures can only make a bad situation worse. The drug war cannot be won by those tactics without undermining the human liberty and individual freedom that you and I cherish.
You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are a scourge that is devastating our society. You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are tearing asunder our social fabric, ruining the lives of many young people, and imposing heavy costs on some of the most disadvantaged among us. You are not mistaken in believing that the majority of the public share your concerns. In short, you are not mistaken in the end you seek to achieve.
Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favor are a major source of the evils you deplore. Of course the problem is demand, but it is not only demand, it is demand that must operate through repressed and illegal channels. Illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords; illegality leads to the corruption of law enforcement officials; illegality monopolizes the efforts of honest law forces so that they are starved for resources to fight the simpler crimes of robbery, theft and assault.
Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike. Our experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages.
I append excerpts from a column that I wrote in 1972 on "Prohibition and Drugs." The major problem then was heroin from Marseilles; today, it is cocaine from Latin America. Today, also, the problem is far more serious than it was 17 years ago: more addicts, more innocent victims; more drug pushers, more law enforcement officials; more money spent to enforce prohibition, more money spent to circumvent prohibition.
Had drugs been decriminalized 17 years ago, "crack" would never have been invented (it was invented because the high cost of illegal drugs made it profitable to provide a cheaper version) and there would today be far fewer addicts. The lives of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent victims would have been saved, and not only in the U.S. The ghettos of our major cities would not be drug-and-crime-infested no-man's lands. Fewer people would be in jails, and fewer jails would have been built.
Columbia, Bolivia and Peru would not be suffering from narco-terror, and we would not be distorting our foreign policy because of narco-terror. Hell would not, in the words with which Billy Sunday welcomed Prohibition, "be forever for rent," but it would be a lot emptier.
Decriminalizing drugs is even more urgent now than in 1972, but we must recognize that the harm done in the interim cannot be wiped out, certainly not immediately. Postponing decriminalization will only make matters worse, and make the problem appear even more intractable.
Alcohol and tobacco cause many more deaths in users than do drugs. Decriminalization would not prevent us from treating drugs as we now treat alcohol and tobacco: prohibiting sales of drugs to minors, outlawing the advertising of drugs and similar measures. Such measures could be enforced, while outright prohibition cannot be. Moreover, if even a small fraction of the money we now spend on trying to enforce drug prohibition were devoted to treatment and rehabilitation, in an atmosphere of compassion not punishment, the reduction in drug usage and in the harm done to the users could be dramatic.
This plea comes from the bottom of my heart. Every friend of freedom, and I know you are one, must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence. A country in which shooting down unidentified planes "on suspicion" can be seriously considered as a drug-war tactic is not the kind of United States that either you or I want to hand on to future generations.
Professor Friedman, 1976 Nobel Laureate in economics, now serves as Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. This letter appeared in the September 7, 1989, issue of The Wall Street Journal. Reprinted by permission of Professor Friedman and The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Co., Inc., 1989.
The most famous and influential American economist of the past century died in November. Milton Friedman was not the most famous and influential economist in the world — that honour belongs to John Maynard Keynes. But Milton Friedman ran a close second.
From one perspective, Friedman was the star pupil of, successor to, and completer of Keynes’s work. Keynes, in his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, set out the framework that nearly all macroeconomists use today. That framework is based on spending and demand, the determinants of the components of spending, the liquidity-preference theory of short-run interest rates, and the requirement that government make strategic but powerful interventions in the economy to keep it on an even keel and avoid extremes of depression and manic excess. As Friedman said, “We are all Keynesians now.”
But Keynes’s theory was incomplete: his was a theory of employment, interest, and money. It was not a theory of prices. To Keynes’s framework, Friedman added a theory of prices and inflation, based on the idea of the natural rate of unemployment and the limits of government policy in stabilising the economy around its long-run growth trend — limits beyond which intervention would trigger uncontrollable and destructive inflation.
Moreover, Friedman corrected Keynes’s framework in one very important respect. The experience of the Great Depression led Keynes and his more orthodox successors to greatly underestimate the role and influence of monetary policy. Friedman, in a 30-year campaign starting with his and Anna J Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States, restored the balance. As Friedman also said, “and none of us are Keynesian.”
From another perspective, Friedman was the arch-opponent and enemy of Keynes and his successors. Friedman and Keynes both agreed that successful macroeconomic management was necessary — that the private economy on its own might well be subject to unbearable instability and that strategic, powerful, but limited economic intervention by the government was necessary to maintain stability. But, while for Keynes, the key was to keep the sum of government spending and private investment stable, for Friedman the key was to keep the money supply — the amount of purchasing power in readily spendable form in the hands of businesses and households — stable.
A relatively minor, technical difference in means, you might say. A difference of opinion that rested on different judgments about how the world works, which could, and ultimately was, resolved by empirical research, you might say. And you would be half right. For this difference in means, tactics, and empirical judgments rested on top of deep gulf in Keynes and Friedman’s moral philosophy.
Keynes saw himself as the enemy of laissez-faire and an advocate of public management. Clever government officials of goodwill, he thought, could design economic institutions that would be superior to the market — or could at least tweak the market with taxes, subsidies, and regulations to produce superior outcomes. It was simply not the case, Keynes argued, that the private incentives of those active in the marketplace were aligned with the public good. Technocracy was Keynes’s faith: skilled experts designing and fine-tuning institutions out of the goodness of their hearts to make possible general prosperity — as Keynes, indeed, did at Bretton Woods where the World Bank and IMF were created.
Friedman disagreed vociferously. In his view, it usually was the case that private market interests were aligned with the public good: episodes of important and significant market failure were the exception, rather than the rule, and laissez-faire was a good first approximation. Moreover, Friedman believed that even when private interests were not aligned with public interests, government could not be relied on to fix the problem.
Government failures, Friedman argued, were greater and more terrible than market failures. Governments were corrupt. Governments were inept. The kinds of people who staffed governments were the kinds of people who liked ordering others around.
At the same time, Friedman believed that even when the market equilibrium was not the utilitarian social-welfare optimum, and even when government could be used to improve matters from a utilitarian point of view, there was still an additional value in letting human freedom have the widest berth possible. There was, Friedman believed, something intrinsically bad about government commanding and ordering people about — even if the government did know what it was doing.
I do not know whether Keynes or Friedman was more right in their deep orientation. But I do think that the tension between their two views has been a very valuable driving force for human progress over the past hundred years. —DT-PS
J Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley, was Assistant US Treasury Secretary during the Clinton administration
Re:Legalise it or not.
« Reply #5 on: 2006-12-10 03:26:53 »
U.S. has most prisoners in world due to tough laws
Source: Reuters Authors: James Vicini Dated: 2006-12-09
Tough sentencing laws, record numbers of drug offenders and high crime rates have contributed to the United States having the largest prison population and the highest rate of incarceration in the world, according to criminal justice experts.
A U.S. Justice Department report released on November 30 showed that a record 7 million people -- or one in every 32 American adults -- were behind bars, on probation or on parole at the end of last year. Of the total, 2.2 million were in prison or jail.
According to the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College in London, more people are behind bars in the United States than in any other country. China ranks second with 1.5 million prisoners, followed by Russia with 870,000.
The U.S. incarceration rate of 737 per 100,000 people in the highest, followed by 611 in Russia and 547 for St. Kitts and Nevis. In contrast, the incarceration rates in many Western industrial nations range around 100 per 100,000 people.
Groups advocating reform of U.S. sentencing laws seized on the latest U.S. prison population figures showing admissions of inmates have been rising even faster than the numbers of prisoners who have been released.
"The United States has 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population. We rank first in the world in locking up our fellow citizens," said Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, which supports alternatives in the war on drugs.
"We now imprison more people for drug law violations than all of western Europe, with a much larger population, incarcerates for all offenses."
Ryan King, a policy analyst at The Sentencing Project, a group advocating sentencing reform, said the United States has a more punitive criminal justice system than other countries.
MORE PEOPLE TO PRISON
"We send more people to prison, for more different offenses, for longer periods of time than anybody else," he said.
Drug offenders account for about 2 million of the 7 million in prison, on probation or parole, King said, adding that other countries often stress treatment instead of incarceration.
Commenting on what the prison figures show about U.S. society, King said various social programs, including those dealing with education, poverty, urban development, health care and child care, have failed.
"There are a number of social programs we have failed to deliver. There are systemic failures going on," he said. "A lot of these people then end up in the criminal justice system."
Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in California, said the high prison numbers represented a proper response to the crime problem in the United States. Locking up more criminals has contributed to lower crime rates, he said.
"The hand-wringing over the incarceration rate is missing the mark," he said.
Scheidegger said the high prison population reflected cultural differences, with the United States having far higher crimes rates than European nations or Japan. "We have more crime. More crime gets you more prisoners."[Hermit says: Less social security gives you more crime. More crime costs more than better social security. More crime and less social security causes harm to far more people, individuals and groups, victims and perpetrators alike. Spending more money to get more harmful results is stupid. I leave the completion of the syllogism to the student.]
Julie Stewart, president of the group Families Against Mandatory Minimums, cited the Justice Department report and said drug offenders are clogging the U.S. justice system.
"Why are so many people in prison? Blame mandatory sentencing laws and the record number of nonviolent drug offenders subject to them," she said.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
In a mind-boggling act of sadistic legal legal buck-passing (I can't bring myself to glorify it with the word "reasoning"), the Florida District Court of Appeals upheld a 25 year mandatory minimum sentence for a Florida man convicted of "drug trafficking" for possessing his own pain medication.
Richard Paey is a wheelchair-bound father of three young children.
He has no prior criminal record-- in fact, he's an Ivy League law school graduate. He has not one, but two extensively documented and excruciatingly painful chronic disorders: multiple sclerosis and chronic back pain due to an injury suffered in a car accident that was treated by a surgery that made matters worse. (This surgery was so egregiously misguided that TV exposes and numerous large malpractice judgments resulted). Paey has already been in prison for three long years.
In prison-- a place not exactly known for medical kindness-- he has been given a morphine pump, which now daily gives him similar or higher doses of medication than he was convicted of possessing illegally.
So why is he serving 25 years? Tipped off by a pharmacist ignorant of pain management, Florida authorities decided that the doses of painkillers he was receiving were so high that he had to be selling the drugs, not taking them. They found no evidence of this, however, even after putting him under surveillance for months.
But they did manage to convince his New Jersey doctor-- who Paey claims authorized his prescriptions-- to testify that, in fact, Paey was forging them. The doctor was told that he would face a similarly lengthy prison sentence for trafficking if he'd authorized such high doses for a patient who had moved from New Jersey to Florida. (See here for why he had reason to fear[Hermit: Next], despite prescribing legitimately and appropriately).
To add to the exquisite ironies of the case, the reason Paey qualified for such a lengthy sentence was due largely to his possession of acetaminophen (Tylenol), not opioids. Paey was taking pills that included acetaminophen and oxycodone-- but the state counted the weight of the acetaminophen towards the weight of illegal drugs when it determined the charges that led to his sentence.
In upholding his sentence, the majority argued that it was not so "grossly disproportionate" as to be "cruel or unusual" under Florida's constitution. It is the legislature's role, they said, to determine the appropriate laws based on harm done by drugs to the community and prior case has law upheld lengthy mandatory minimums for drug crimes.
Essentially, since Paey's sentence wasn't death or life without parole, it was OK, even though it was a nonviolent first offense committed by a person suffering extreme pain without evidence that he was actually planning on selling drugs. Paey's family-- who had been hoping he'd be home for Christmas-- will have to wait.
The bottom line, for the majority, was that the law had been applied appropriately. Because the outcome was unjust in this particular case, Paey should seek clemency from the governor, not appellate court relief. Noting that the facts of the case "evoke sympathy" for Paey, they concluded that "Mr. Paey's argument about his sentences does not fall on deaf ears, but it falls on the wrong ears."
The only glimmer of hope was the thundering dissent by Judge James Seals. He gave hypothetical examples of situations in which an innocent person could be similarly convicted of drug trafficking by dint of simple possession of large quantities of drugs. He then concluded:
I suggest that it is cruel for a man with an undisputed medical need for a substantial amount of daily medication management to go to prison for twenty-five years for using self-help means to obtain and amply supply himself with the medicine he needed...
I suggest that it is unusual, illogical, and unjust that Mr. Paey could conceivably go to prison for a longer stretch for peacefully but unlawfully purchasing 100 oxycodone pills from a pharmacist than had he robbed the pharmacist at knife point, stolen fifty oxycodone pills which he intended to sell to children waiting outside, and then stabbed the pharmacist...
It is illogical, absurd, cruel, and unusual for the government to put Mr. Paey in prison for twenty-five years for foolishly and desperately pursuing his self-help solution to his medical management problems, and then go to prison only to find that the prison medical staff is prescribing the same or similar medication he had sought on the outside but could not legitimately obtain. That fact alone clearly proves what his intent for purchasing the drugs was. What a tragic irony.
In a letter to the governor requesting clemency, Paey's attorney, John Flannery, wrote, "In more than thirty years of practice as an appellate law clerk in the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and a federal prosecutor and as a practicing appellate and trial lawyer, I have never seen an opinion such as this in which the Court agreed the sentence was wrong but could not agree on how to correct it."
This is a sorry time for justice in America-- and an even sorrier time for the media, which continues to ignore the ongoing disgrace of our drug laws and their enforcement. (For more information and to help support Paey and others caught up in the war on pain doctors and their patients, visit the Pain Relief Network.)
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Legalise it or not.
« Reply #7 on: 2006-12-19 16:51:42 »
Dr. Feelscared
Drug warriors put the fear of prosecution in physicians who dare to treat pain.
[Hermit: If I find time, I will hopefully return to add external links and italics from the original article. In the meantime, I suggest you read it there, treating this as a back-up in case the original vanishes.]
On February 1, 2002, Cecil Knox was seeing patients in his Roanoke, Virginia, clinic when more than a dozen federal agents burst through the doors with guns drawn. Helmeted, shielded, and wearing bullet-proof vests, they terrified waiting patients and employees. One worker later told the Pain Relief Network, a patient advocacy group, she thought she and her husband, who was helping her in the office that day, would be shot. She looked on in horror as an agent put a gun to his head and ordered, "Get off the phone! Now!"
Knox, a pain management specialist who had been practicing medicine in Roanoke for seven years, was dragged out in handcuffs and leg irons. The local U.S. attorney's wife, a TV reporter, was among the journalists tipped about the raid in advance. She stood outside with a gaggle of other media people to announce her husband's triumph. Knox's assets were frozen and bond set at $200,000. He and several employees soon faced a 313-count indictment, including charges of drug distribution resulting in death or serious bodily injury, prescription of drugs without a medical purpose, conspiracy, mail fraud, and health care fraud. Prosecutors said Knox had illegally distributed millions of dollars' worth of OxyContin, a timed-release version of the narcotic painkiller oxycodone.
William Hurwitz, a McLean, Virginia, internist and prominent pain specialist, received similarly heavy-handed treatment when he was arrested last fall. Hurwitz, who is Jewish, was visiting his children on Rosh Hashanah eve when federal agents descended upon his ex-wife's house in McLean and took him away in handcuffs. As with Knox, the government froze Hurwitz's assets; his bail was set at $2 million. He was charged with 49 felony counts, including drug trafficking resulting in death or serious injury, conspiracy, and running a criminal enterprise.
Like Knox, Hurwitz attracted attention largely because of his OxyContin prescriptions. Attorney General John Ashcroft said "the indictment and arrests in Virginia demonstrate our commitment to bring to justice all those who traffic in this very dangerous drug." Prosecutors said Hurwitz was "no better than a street corner crack dealer" who "dispenses misery and death." Assistant U.S. Attorney Gene Rossi had earlier declared that the feds would "root out" such doctors "like the Taliban."
Knox and Hurwitz are just two recent targets of an aggressive push by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to impose their judgments about the proper use of opioid painkillers (drugs derived from opium and synthetics that resemble them) on doctors throughout the country. In their attempt to prevent prescription drug abuse, the DEA and the DOJ in effect have taken upon themselves the authority to regulate the practice of medicine, traditionally the province of the states. Worse, they have transformed disagreements about treatment decisions into criminal prosecutions, scaring physicians away from opioids and compounding the suffering of patients who have trouble getting the drugs they need to relieve their pain.
Drug Control vs. Pain Control
Few disagree that pain is already poorly treated in the U.S. "Even the DEA admits that 30 to 50 million people are undertreated for pain," says Ronald Libby, a professor of political science at the University of North Florida who has studied the issue. A 1999 survey of 805 chronic pain patients conducted by Roper Starch for the American Pain Society and Jannsen Pharmaceutica found that roughly half of those with serious chronic pain could not find relief -- and that the more severe the pain, the less likely it was to be alleviated. Other surveys have yielded similar results. Only a tiny fraction of the nation's nearly 1 million health care professionals licensed to prescribe controlled substances are willing to consistently use opioid medications, recognized as the best drugs for severe pain. A 2003 analysis by the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel found that less than 3 percent of Florida's doctors prescribed the majority of opioids for Medicaid patients there.
During the 1990s, pain experts, patient advocates, and drug makers sought to reduce exaggerated fears about opioids and increase prescribing. Research and clinical experience had shown that few patients without a prior history of serious drug abuse get hooked on narcotics during pain treatment, resulting in addiction rates no higher than those seen in the general population. In one important study, reported in the journal Pain in 1982, the researchers surveyed 181 staffers of 93 burn units who had seen more than 10,000 patients and worked in the field an average of six years. Most patients had been given opioids to cope with agonizing debridement treatments, but the staff could recall no cases of addiction in anyone without a prior history of it. A study of 100 people taking opioids for chronic pain over prolonged periods, reported in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management in 1992, likewise found that none became addicted. No new evidence has contradicted this research, and a study of prescribing from 1990 to 1996, published in 2000 in The Journal of the American Medical Association, found that massive increases in the use of particular opioids were not associated with proportional increases in misuse; in fact, as use of some medications rose, emergency room "mentions" of them dropped.
But in the minds of police and prosecutors, such reassuring findings were overwhelmed by concerns about what was dubbed the OxyContin "epidemic." Introduced by Purdue in 1995, OxyContin was designed to deliver steady pain relief over an extended period of time, avoiding the peaks and valleys of shorter-acting pills that have to be taken several times a day. It soon became a $1 billion blockbuster. When illegal drug users figured out how to defeat its timed-release mechanism and get all the oxycodone at once, street demand -- and media coverage -- soared. (See "The Agony and the Ecstasy," April 2003.)
Most news stories neglected to mention that OxyContin abusers generally were not new addicts freshly minted from innocent patients by irresponsible doctors. Rather, they were drug aficionados who scammed physicians for the latest media-hyped high. According to data from the federal government's National Survey on Drug Use and Health, some 90 percent of illicit OxyContin users have also used cocaine, psychedelics, and other painkillers. The typical profile is a person who has abused many drugs in many combinations for many years. OxyContin poses no greater addiction risk than other opioids when taken as directed. But the media helped teach addicts and thrill seekers how to do otherwise.
In 2002 the Charleston Daily Mail quoted former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop as saying "exaggerated news stories" have "hyped [OxyContin] for recreational use into being almost irresistible." In some cases, OxyContin-related pharmacy robberies followed local exposés. On February 16, 2001, less than a week after the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported on the OxyContin "epidemic," someone robbed a local pharmacy at gunpoint, taking only OxyContin. The Cleveland Free Times quoted a drug dealer who said a customer had shown him a newspaper clipping about OxyContin, asking where he could get it.
While the OxyContin panic does not seem to have deterred addicts, it has scared doctors. "Every time there is one of these trials," says Libby, "another 50 to 60 doctors drop off from prescribing." Among the doctors recently targeted by federal or state prosecutors are Frank Fisher of Anderson, California, charged with three counts of murder and 24 drug- and fraud-related charges; Jeri Hassman of Tucson, Arizona, charged with 362 counts of "drug dealing with a pen"; James Graves of Pace, Florida, convicted in 2002 of causing the deaths of four patients and sentenced to 63 years in prison; Denis Deonarine of West Palm Beach, Florida, charged with 79 felony counts, including first-degree murder, based on a patient's death from a self-administered overdose; and Deborah Bordeaux of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, who in February was sentenced to eight years in prison for working less than two months at a pain clinic targeted by the feds as a "pill mill."
The sheer number of charges in these cases makes defending the doctors difficult because it's natural for jurors to think that with so many counts, some crime must have occurred. But this impression is misleading. The essence of the prosecutors' cases is that ordinary events in a doctor's office become criminal when the doctor steps outside the bounds of legitimate medicine. It's easy to generate lengthy indictments by portraying the doctor's entire practice as a criminal enterprise and redefining everyday activities related to the practice as offenses.
Each prescription of a controlled substance can be made into several crimes. In addition to drug distribution, it can be described as health care fraud because charging or billing third parties for practices that aren't really medicine is illegal. If the prescription or a bill has been sent through the mail, it can also be mail fraud. Every deposit of the physician's paycheck becomes money laundering. Seeing a patient who turns out to be a drug dealer or addict can lead to a conspiracy count, as can working with one's colleagues. Most shocking of all, any death that can in any way be connected to use of the doctor's prescriptions becomes a charge of drug dispensing resulting in death or serious injury -- even if the person who died stole the drug from a legitimate patient, lied to get the drug, used it with other drugs or alcohol, or expired while suffering from a potentially fatal illness.
Physicians face these daunting indictments with their assets frozen, their bail set as if they were drug kingpins, and their livelihoods ruined by license suspensions or bail conditions. In these circumstances, mounting a defense is extremely difficult. "It makes it impossible to retain private counsel," says Virginia attorney James Hundley, who represented William Hurwitz prior to his indictment. (He is now using a public defender.) California attorney Patrick Hallinan, who has represented Frank Fisher and has advised Hurwitz, says, "They're throwing the entire penal code at them."
The tremendous pressure that such charges bring to bear is illustrated by the 2002 federal indictment of eight doctors who worked at the Comprehensive Care and Pain Management Center in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Threatened with hundreds of years in prison and fearful that his wife (an employee) could also be indicted, clinic owner Michael Woodward pleaded guilty and testified that he had schemed with the other doctors, including Deborah Bordeaux, to sell drugs. South Carolina is a conservative state, and Woodward had seen his clinic repeatedly attacked in the news media. The Woodwards may also have feared that their young children could lose both parents to long prison terms.
Another clinic doctor, Benjamin Moore, told Siobhan Reynolds, founder of the Pain Relief Network, that he and his colleagues had done nothing wrong. When he, too, found that he faced life in prison, he pleaded guilty in desperation. But according to his brother, he could not go through with testifying against co-workers he believed to be innocent. Instead he hanged himself from a tree in his mother's backyard.
Doctors As Dealers
In fiscal year 2003, according to the DEA, the federal government investigated 557 physicians and arrested 34. Betsy Willis, chief of the Operations Section of the DEA's Office of Diversion Control, says "the numbers of federal prosecutions have been relatively consistent for the last four years." The DEA reports 81 arrests in fiscal year 1999, 83 in fiscal year 2000, 78 in fiscal year 2001, and 68 in fiscal year 2002.
Even if the number of federal prosecutions has declined, they have received much more attention since the news media began highlighting OxyContin abuse in 2001. And the alarm about OxyContin clearly has led to increased enforcement efforts: Last year the DEA doubled controlled substance licensing fees for health care providers to fund more investigations, and in March the Office of National Drug Control Policy unveiled "a coordinated drug strategy to confront the illegal diversion and abuse of prescription drugs."
The strategy includes closer monitoring of prescriptions, coupled with "outreach" and "education" aimed at making doctors more skeptical of patient requests for painkillers.
Until recently, investigators would approach a physician if they suspected a patient of diversion; now they try to build a case against the doctor. "This is new in my experience, and I have been doing this for 25 years," says David Brushwood, a professor of pharmacy at the University of Florida. "I've always seen drug control and health care work together....They were never really at odds until the last two years....The way it used to be was that when drug control officials saw the beginnings of a pattern of diversion, they would say to the doctor, 'It looks like a problem is developing; let's work together to fix it.' Now when they see a small problem, they conduct surveillance and wait for it to be-come big, then swoop in with a massive show of force."
Even when there is no direct evidence of diversion, investigators and prosecutors may decide a doctor is being too generous with painkillers because they are influenced by an outmoded view of addiction. According to this view, the essence of addiction is "physical dependence," changes in the body that result in withdrawal symptoms when drug use is halted. Based on this criterion, all pain patients become addicts when they take opioids long enough.
In recent decades, researchers have recognized the inadequacy of this definition. On the one hand, some drugs that don't cause physical withdrawal symptoms (for example, cocaine) clearly can produce a potentially self-destructive desire for more. On the other hand, the vast majority of those who try even the most addictive substances don't develop lasting habits. Researchers therefore redefined addiction to emphasize craving and negative consequences rather than withdrawal symptoms. The diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association now recognizes that physical dependence is neither necessary nor sufficient for addiction, which is characterized by continued use of a substance despite ongoing drug-related problems. For pain patients, of course, the drug produces fewer problems and greater functioning, rather than the reverse.
Some patient advocates say drug warriors can't accept this reality because it undermines the logic of prohibition: If most people don't get hooked when exposed to the "hardest" of all categories of drugs, if patients' lives get dramatically better and they function perfectly well on doses that are supposed to incapacitate, stupefy, and derange, why is it so important for the government to protect us from these substances? From this point of view, the DEA must fight pain control because functional patients on high doses of opioids threaten its authority.
"It completely puts the lie to the whole criminal approach because it shows that these molecules are not evil, that people can and do function well on them," says the Pain Relief Network's Siobhan Reynolds. "It undermines the whole basis for the war on drugs and makes it a strictly scientific/medical issue."
Whatever their reasons, law enforcement officials (along with most of the public and many physicians) still cling to the old-fashioned view of addiction as a biochemical process that inevitably results from extended use of certain drugs. In the Myrtle Beach case, federal prosecutors said in court (before being forced to retract their claim due to contrary testimony) that none of the clinic's 3,000 patients was "legitimate"; in other words, in their view every pain patient of all eight doctors was an addict.
The DEA defines addicts as "habitual" users of narcotics who have "lost the power of self control with reference to [their] addiction" or whose use "endangers the public morals, health, safety, or welfare." From this perspective, pain patients could be considered addicts who have "lost control" in the sense of needing the drug to function.
Many prosecutors do not understand the distinction between addiction and physical dependence or recognize the growing acceptance of opioids in medicine. Says John Burke, vice president of the National Association of Drug Diversion Investigators, "Do I think some prosecutors and law enforcement officers are not well educated? Absolutely." A 2003 study published in the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics found that nearly three-quarters of prosecutors in four states believed simply taking opiates poses a moderate or high risk of addiction. Holding that view was one of the best predictors of who would choose to prosecute physicians in a hypothetical case designed to reflect good pain practice. Just under half of prosecutors surveyed said they would recommend a police investigation merely on the basis of evidence that a physician was prescribing high doses of opioids to some patients for more than a month, something that is perfectly legitimate in cases involving severe chronic pain.
Prescriptions for Trouble
Frank Fisher seems to have been targeted based on just this sort of suspicion. At his Northern California clinic, the Harvard Medical School graduate accepted patients on Medicaid and Medi-Cal (California's health insurance for the poor) that most other physicians refused, and he tried to treat their pain as aggressively as he would treat anyone else's. In February 1999 state law enforcement agents raided Fisher's clinic and arrested him for drug dealing, fraud, and murder. His bail was set at $15 million. State prosecutors accused him of "creating a public health epidemic" of OxyContin abuse and death. They implied that he must be a drug dealer because he was the largest prescriber of the drug under Medi-Cal.
But in a context where fear of prosecution leads most doctors to under-prescribe, anyone who prescribes what is necessary for severe pain will be a top prescriber. Even Burke admits that prosecuting doctors has a chilling effect on their colleagues' treatment decisions. "I know from lecturing thousands of physicians that there is no question but that it does," he says. "The thing we don't want to happen is that physicians don't prescribe appropriately because of these cases, but I know that it happens. I have to be honest." Burke also recognizes that there is no ceiling on opioid doses: When patients develop tolerance, they may need massive doses that would kill someone who had never taken the drug. "Physicians should not be targeted simply on volume," he says. "That can be a huge mistake."
The DEA insists physicians aren't targeted based on volume alone. But Fisher believes he was. While patients with moderate pain can be treated effectively with low doses of opioids, he explains, severe pain requires that the dose be adjusted ("titrated") to a level that maximizes pain relief and minimizes side effects. "To get a sense," he says, "I titrated about two dozen patients, and they ended up taking almost half of the OxyContin 80-milligram pills prescribed in California in 1998. What that tells you is that nobody else titrated."
Fisher was jailed for five months, during which time the prosecution's case began to evaporate. First, the murder charges were reduced to manslaughter by the judge, who saw no proof of intent. Then the truth about these "killings" came out. One death involved a passenger who died when her spine was severed in a van accident. Fisher was charged with her "murder" because she had high levels of OxyContin in her blood. Another "victim" had taken drugs stolen from a patient, while a third died of a self-administered overdose two weeks after Fisher was incarcerated.
During cross-examination in pretrial hearings, it was revealed that seven attempts by undercover agents to get drugs from Fisher had been rebuffed. "I had a screening process for those who tried to get controlled substances," he says. "I screened out 60 percent of those, and apparently the agents were amongst them."
In January 2003, four years after Fisher's arrest, a state judge dismissed all the charges against him because prosecutors had tried repeatedly to delay the trial. But this year prosecutors decided to pursue another set of charges against him. Instead of homicide, drug dealing, and felony fraud involving $2 million in Medi-Cal reimbursements, they charged him with eight misdemeanor counts of fraud. Prosecutors would not put a dollar value on the offenses, but Fisher said they added up to $150. The jury agreed with Fisher's expert, who said the billings in question didn't warrant civil penalties, let alone criminal charges, and he was acquitted of all counts in May. He still faces possible disciplinary action by the state medical board as well as civil suits by patients' relatives. Fisher forwarded an e-mail message from a juror who said: "Now that I am home and can read about you on the Internet, my heart really goes out to you...I was upset that the prosecutor wasted my time and the court's time on such a weak case. But now that I know what you have really been through I feel embarrassed and selfish to be thinking about my own time. I hope you can reopen your clinic some day and get back to practicing medicine...Thanks for doing the job most doctors won't."
Unlike Fisher, other doctors fighting prosecutions based on their opioid prescriptions so far have enjoyed only partial victories. Last fall Cecil Knox's federal trial in Virginia got off to an inauspicious start for prosecutors when their first witness, who claimed Knox had traded prescriptions for marijuana, couldn't identify him in the courtroom or from photographs. The jurors ultimately acquitted Knox of about 30 out of 69 charges. But due to a single holdout who voted guilty, they hung on the remaining charges, including the most serious. In January prosecutors refiled the case, this time with 95 charges.
Also in January 2004, federal prosecutors agreed to drop 358 of their 362 charges against Tucson pain specialist Jeri Hassman, who pleaded guilty only to four counts of failing to report patients for infractions such as taking a recently deceased relative's OxyContin. On the same day, a Florida judge rejected a first-degree murder charge against West Palm Beach physician Denis Deonarine, based on the death of a patient who succumbed to "polydrug toxicity" after a night of drinking and drug use. But in March state prosecutors filed a new murder charge under a different statute, and Deonarine also faces 79 other charges stemming from his prescription of OxyContin and other opioids.
Second Opinions
Eli Stutsman, an appeals attorney who is representing Myrtle Beach physician Deborah Bordeaux at the behest of the Pain Relief Network, thinks he may have found a way to stop such prosecutions, at least at the federal level. Stutsman also represents the state of Oregon in its thus-far successful battle with Attorney General Ashcroft over physician-assisted suicide, a dispute that hinges on what the federal drug laws mean and how they should be enforced. A federal appeals court's decision in that case suggests the DEA is overstepping its statutory authority when it tells doctors how controlled substances should be prescribed.
In 2001 Ashcroft tried to nullify Oregon's assisted suicide law with a directive that declared the prescription of drugs for suicide a violation of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).
Under the CSA, a prescription is "authorized" if it is "issued for a legitimate medical purpose by an individual practitioner acting in the usual course of professional practice." If a doctor writes prescriptions to order for money, trades drugs for sex, or prescribes drugs for resale, he is operating outside "the usual course of professional practice." In such cases, the CSA authorizes the DEA to revoke the registration that allows physicians to prescribe controlled substances and to pursue criminal charges.
But Stutsman concluded that in recent cases the DEA has taken the statute's language out of context, improperly reading "for a legitimate medical purpose" as a requirement separate from prescribing in "the usual course of professional practice." Instead of claiming that the accused doctors weren't sincerely trying to treat patients, federal prosecutors have argued that the defendants wrote prescriptions that weren't "medically necessary" or that had no "legitimate medical purpose." Thus the DEA claims the authority to determine what doses of which drugs a doctor may use and what medical purposes are legitimate. Those are questions about the standard of medical care -- the sort of questions addressed in malpractice litigation and civil actions by state medical boards.
The DEA insists it is correctly interpreting the law. "We're only looking at instances where we have information [that] practices outside of the norm are taking place," says Pat Good, acting deputy director of the DEA's Division of Diversion Control. "We're not talking about avant-garde medicine where patients are doing really well. We're talking about cases where patients are selling drugs on the street, using fictitious names on prescriptions, overdosing, and getting arrested."
But in Oregon v. Ashcroft, the assisted suicide case, U.S. District Judge Robert Jones found Stutsman's reasoning compelling. Ashcroft had argued that the CSA gave federal prosecutors the right to decide that assisting suicide is not part of legitimate medical practice. Jones disagreed: "The CSA was never intended, and the USDOJ and the DEA were never authorized, to establish a national medical practice [standard] or act as a national medical board. To allow an attorney general -- an appointed executive whose tenure depends entirely on whatever administration occupies the White House -- to determine the legitimacy of a particular medical practice without a specific congressional grant of such authority would be unprecedented and extraordinary." Last May the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit affirmed Jones' decision, finding that "the attorney general's unilateral attemp to regulate general medical practices historically entrusted to state lawmakers...far exceeds the scope of his authority under federal law."
Stutsman intends to use similar reasoning in his appeal of Deborah Bordeaux's conviction. Her prescribing never exceeded manufacturers' recommendations or those of her state medical board; there was no exchange of drugs for sex or other evidence that she was not practicing real medicine. "What makes this particularly outrageous," says Stutsman, "is their confusion of civil and criminal standards to start with. It's an excessive exercise of federal power based on a misapplication of federal law."
Suicide Is Painless
Kathryn Serkes, spokesperson for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), sees these cases as part of a long-term trend toward increased prosecutorial power that includes sentencing guidelines, mandatory minimums, and forfeiture laws. The Coalition Against Prosecutorial Abuses, a group she is organizing to fight this trend, declares: "There's still one group of trial lawyers that has been left alone to go about their dirty work with few restrictions -- and all at taxpayers' expense. These are the government prosecutors."
The AAPS, along with the Pain Relief Network, has been vocal in denouncing the federal and state doctor prosecutions. The group's Web site warns: "If you're thinking about getting into pain management using opioids as appropriate: DON'T. Forget what you learned in medical school -- drug agents now set medical standards." The AAPS urges doctors inclined to ignore this advice to be aware of the risks, including "years of harassment and legal fees," loss of income and assets, and professional ostracism.
Despite increasing outrage from physicians and patient advocates, the DEA maintains that people in pain have nothing to fear from the crackdown. "A legitimate patient with legitimate medical problems should have no problem getting another doctor if their doctor has been arrested," says the DEA's Willis.
Anti-pain activists vigorously dispute that. "This is causing doctors not to prescribe," says the Pain Relief Network's Siobhan Reynolds, "and that means patients will be in hell." Several of the prosecutions have been associated with suicides by devastated patients who couldn't get effective treatment elsewhere. Common Sense for Drug Policy reports that one of William Hurwitz's patients killed herself on March 16. Frank Fisher says one of his patients drove her car in front of a train.
In a forthcoming documentary by Reynolds, pain patient Skip Baker says, "It's a devastating health care crisis, to the point that thousands are committing suicide that nobody knows about. Most pain patients know -- everybody's planning to run into this bridge abutment or that tree or whatever to make it look like an accident." Ronald Myers, a Mississippi physician and minister who founded the American Pain Institute, observes:
"They want to talk about deaths associated with OxyContin. But no one wants to talk about these deaths. There's been an epidemic of suicide."
Laura Cooper, an attorney with multiple sclerosis and a former patient of Hurwitz, moved to Oregon when his practice was shutting down. Her new doctor "is also under the microscope," she says. "All of these guys are on their way out -- if not on their own, the government is on the way to putting them out. Anybody who would treat me the way I need to be treated is not long for American medicine. When my doctor goes down, I don't know what I'll do."
Since Cooper lives in Oregon, she notes, "by law I can get drugs to kill myself, but not to treat my pain. The doctor could say, in effect, 'I'm not trying to treat pain; I'm trying to kill her,' and that would be more acceptable. Clearly, something's a little off kilter. My medical needs are less important than their war on drugs."
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Legalise it or not.
« Reply #8 on: 2007-07-15 23:52:22 »
Of interest to some. The legalization of marijuana, hmm... good thing?
I think I'm beginning to have second thoughts on some of what I earlier said since (after some experience) I found that hash is a dangerous substance; it's addictive. There are many people who do not use because its illegal, but, if you legalized it, that percentage will be lit from dusk til dawn. And while I don't think Marijuana is the devil most have made it out to be, it does make you socially and motivationally inept. Think of the great scores of people who would lose jobs, wives, husbands, babies, houses, lives because they were smoking pot every day. I used to smoke far too much of it, and it still has my best friend in a deathlock. Nobody can get him away from it and he's lost 2 jobs and his girlfriend of two years over it.
In saying that, legalising it would bring in controls, which could prevent young people from getting to the drug...but people drink before they're old enough, what's to stop them getting hold of a joint or ten?
Cannabis is proven to alter the brain development of people who use it before they're 18 or 19. It affects the dopamine neurotransmitter, and that's a dangerous thing to do; imbalances in the dopamine transmitter are what's thought to be the main cause of schizophrenia.
And it doesn't clear your lungs out at all. Most joints contain tobacco; nicotine is more addictive than heroin, never mind alcohol.
And then there's emphysema - excuse my spelling. Anyway, there's research underway at the moment about consistent cannabis use leading to emphysema in people as young as 34. There's a stock of articles to be found at www.bbc.co.uk/news.
And while alochol is addictive and generally very bad, why add a whole new world of stoners to one filled with drunkards? It doesn't make sense. I feel that alcohol definetly needs more attention than it's getting; people binge drink so much these days, start fights, crash cars, you name it...and then get sober and lecture me about the dangers of smoking. The government really needs to get its priorities right.
I do think that the fact that legalisation would remove the criminal element is very important, and probably the one reason that might lead me to support legalising the drug. The things that happen because of drug money...
I would support it if I didn't think it posed such a threat to minors, and the people who would use it as a crutch in the place of alcohol. Perhaps legalise it only for people suffering from disease that can be alleviated by smoking it?
An understatement if ever ... "nice" ... a pie, is nice!
Quote:
I have also heard arguments for against the legalization on drugs though. As far as I can make it out I have heard many say that any legalization would prove unsuccessful, and not lasting for long if it happened. Basically the goverment would end up treating it like cigarettes and taxing substances like crazy, which would turn away all potential customers because they've been getting it tax free from their dealers for years. Selling drugs without licenses would still be illegal, which makes the drug trade no different than before.
"all potential customers" ... one black swan and all that ... personally I would pay a premium for regulated access to drugs. In fact, so would the majority of people I know.
Tax free in this case would more often than not imply quality free ... and this ain't one of those areas in ones life to be skimping on.
Quote:
In otherwords there's nothing in it for the goverment, and they know this. Some even remain strongly convinced that this is the main reason behind the fact that most drugs have been made illegal in the first place; and that if they cared solely about people dying cigarettes would be illegal too. And also that many addicts end up very poor as a result of their addiction, and will take what they can get for the cheapest price they can get it. An addict is not going to wait and scrape up an added couple of dollars to buy it legally if they can get the fix they need for less. Recreational drug users probably wouldn't mind, but the addicts who outnumber them would.
Addicts, however, do not "outnumber them" !!!! Emphatically not (at least not at the level you imply)!
Re:Legalise it or not.
« Reply #10 on: 2007-07-18 05:59:02 »
In South Africa (where I live) suicide is illegal. I'm not sure if this is law in other countries, but around here the fleshy envelope that you call home is in fact the property of the state. I imagine that this is the reason why the state feels that they have the right to tell the people of this country what they may and may not do to their bodies - they are after all state property. Next they will make tattoos and fried foods illegal too, so that we can all be healthy, long-lived, productive, skinny, miserable drones in our nightmarish corporate society. Regards Letheomaniac
Re:Legalise it or not.
« Reply #11 on: 2007-07-19 22:15:55 »
Delighted to see you active here :-)
The "Suicide is illegal" idea is courtesy of English rather than Roman-Dutch law, and does in fact date from the days of serfdom, where service was owed to the villein's Lord. Due to the fact that failing to render service was a capital crime, and the law having no concept of irony, the punishment for failed suicide was of course, as for so many other crimes, death.
This bizarre regulation was inherited by most English colonies, including South Africa and the Americas.
The most ridiculous example of which I am aware of how this could work out in practice dates from the 1800s, when some poor London clerk decided life was not worth living. Guns being rare, expensive and unreliable, he proceeded, with more determination than sense, to saw through his throat with a blunt knife. His friends found him bubbling away, and for whatever reasons, cobbled him, literally, back together again. Having escaped death by a thread seems to have cured his depression, as the would be suicide went back to work scribbling for another month; with his friend's rather crude handiwork camouflaged by the high stock and collars then in fashion.
His downfall was showing off the crude handiwork which allowed him to puff a pipe through a hole in his neck. Somehow or other word of his secondary smile spread. The poor unfortunate was dragged up before the magistrates and promptly sentenced to be hanged for attempted suicide.
Upon being hanged, the twine - or the stitches, the tale is not quite clear which, holding his neck together, gave way, and he proceeded - in no little discomfort - to continue breathing through his ready made, if a little rough, tracheotomy. This went on for some time, and the classic "assist" of the executioner hanging on his legs failing, the hangman then proceeded, to the immense amusement of the crowd, to stuff up the tracheotomy hole with clay, one little wad at a time. History does not record whether the executee regarded death as a relief or not, although I suspect that it probably was.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Legalise it or not.
« Reply #12 on: 2007-07-21 00:43:27 »
Eh? Since when did this become a topic on suicide?
*shrugs*
I've always been honest with my opinion about suicide. I don't like it. I happen to think it's a selfish and unwise act that is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Some may even say that its completely stupid, and I'd be very tempted to agree with them.
The time when depressed people first begin treatment is the most dangerous. When they're at the bottom of their depression, a lot of the time, they don't have the energy to kill themselves. But when they first get on antidepressents, they get some of their energy and strength back. But they're still feeling badly. And if you're not careful, they can take that energy and use it to end everything.
And most of them don't want to give up their lives forever. They just want the pain to go away. And somewhere in the backs of their minds is this thought of "I'll come back." They don't want to be dead forever. Another friend of mine attempted, but they found him hanging in time to take him to the hospital where he was put on life support. He was lucky enough to wake up again. He has no memory of doing it, or why he was doing it in the first place. He probably won't attempt again. If only all suicides could get that second chance to see how terrifying ending your own life is. But a lot of people don't.
The act of suicide is a mistake, in my opinion. They're human, and they needed help that they didn't see coming.
... I'm sure that drugs (and legalization) apply here somewhere.
<snip> Eh? Since when did this become a topic on suicide?
*shrugs*
I've always been honest with my opinion about suicide. I don't like it. I happen to think it's a selfish and unwise act that is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Some may even say that its completely stupid, and I'd be very tempted to agree with them.]</snip>
[Blunderov] <wicked glint in eye> If one suicide would save one life, would it be justified? A thousand lives? What if they were American lives; would that fact justify LOTS of suicides (by force if necessary)? If "yes", was this more true after 9/11 or before?
Question about Suicide - Thomas Pogge responds 19 July 2007, 22:32:11 Is it ever rational to commit suicide?
Response from: Thomas Pogge
Yes: when the ends that matter to one are better served by suicide than by staying alive. Jan Palach killed himself to make a powerful point against the Soviet invasion of his country -- plausibly believing that nothing else he could have done would have had as great an effect (see question 1518). Victims of the Gestapo have killed (or tried to kill) themselves in order to avoid betraying their comrades. Admiral Chester Nimitz and his wife Joan killed themselves in old age, seeking to end their lives on their own terms rather than incapacitated in some medical facility. Each of these people had an end to which they gave more weight than to their own survival -- the end of ending Soviet domination, the end of defeating the Nazis, the end of dying on one's own terms. There is nothing irrational in ranking these ends above an additional period of life for oneself.
Re:Legalise it or not.
« Reply #14 on: 2007-07-30 13:51:40 »
I can't say I like suicide either, but I also can't say I feel its the government's place to decide whether I'm allowed to die or not.
And in the examples of acceptable suicide, I'm going to throw in assisted suicide, as in the case of a terminal illness that will only end slowly and in great pain. I think if I were in this position, or even not terminally ill but if I were about to be horribly tortured, I'd imagine i'd put suicide above taking all the pain. In the latter example the downside is that you may be able to live through it and be happy afterwards, but I've always been apprehensive of pain and don't think that thought would convince me to stay alive.
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