From: rburns@finess.Corp.Sun.COM (Randy Burns)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc
Subject: Local Drug Regulation (was Re:Dumb Sheltered College Puke)
Date: 14 Apr 92 17:47:01 GMT
Reply-To: rburns@finess.Corp.Sun.COM
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
NNTP-Posting-Host: finess.corp.sun.com

In article 26584@kpc.com, emmett@kpc.com (Emmett Kilgariff) writes:
> In article <sd902INN2i9@caravan.ksu.ksu.edu> strat@caravan.ksu.ksu.edu (Steve Davis) writes:
> >emmett@kpc.com (Emmett Kilgariff) writes:
> >
> >
> >>	This is what scares me about legalization. It's very possible
> >>we'll have Joe Camel and Spuds McKenzie selling crack to our kids.
 > 	Many more kids drink and smoke than take drugs just because drugs
> are illegal.
I can be sympathetic to Emmett's desire to live in a drug free community. Still,
simply because he would choose to live in such a community doesn't mean that 
_everyone_ else would want to. I really think we need to go beyond the 
legalization prohibition question and ask ourselves at what level issues like
drugs should be regulated. We have a lot of technology that really can be quite
effective at creating drug-free local communities. For example, we have companies 
that have drug testing. I can imagine societies in which certain towns or 
large "condo-like" residences have periodic drug testing as a precondition for
residence.  I can imagine other people choosing to live in areas where psychedilic drugs are less heavily regulated than addictive substances like tobacco and alchohol.  Currently, our legal structure works against allowing people flexibility in these
kinds of choices. We've insisted on giving the federal government that bulk of 
resources and responsibility in handling drug problems and in _determining how
states and municipalities may handle their drug droblems_ and in creating a fairly uniform national drug policy. This is IMHO, the major source of the present mess. 
If we look back to prohibition, the banning of alchohol actually worked reasonably well, when prohibition was confined to states that had a near consensus that alchohol should be banned. It was only when prohibition was imposed on areas which lacked 
this consensus that we saw organized crime getting involved in bootlegging in a big way.

Now my sense is that the containment of segregation of the trade in addictive substances like heroin and tobacco may well be the best strategy for gradually eliminating the prevalence of the use of these substances. Right now, if we were to
announce that in Buffalo New York, heroin would be legal, but that there would be 
strict border searches of people coming out of Buffalo so that this spot
wouldn't be a source of heroin for the rest of the country, my guess is that
most of the addict population of New York and neighboring states would move to Buffalo.
I doubt if Buffalo would be a place anyone but a junkie would then want to live,
but the rest of New York would become quite a bit more pleasant to people who don't want to live around the drug trade. These are the kinds of compromises that we need to look at if we want to preserve a degree of freedom in the aftermath of a serious
problem like the spread of addictive drugs. 

 
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc