Re: Drugs kill daughter, parents blame unscrupulous people for taking advantage of he
For a start, if half of the money allocated for the absurd "war on drugs" was used for rehabilitation and preventative measures (instead of searching and arresting people before they've even commited an intrinsically criminal act, holding them in police custody, dragging them before courts and judges then throwing them in prisons that we all get to pay for), we might have actually made a dent in the problem by now. You only need to look as far as America to see what you get when you start locking people away for the most ridiculous drug "crimes" - like smoking a goddamn joint.
Secondly, how far removed from an actual crime does something need to be before you'll stop punishing people for it? The (allegedly new) global threat of terror is so severe that all over the world new crimes are being defined, further and further removed from the 'guilty act.' You don't even have to possess (or have ever possessed) illegal drugs to be guilty of supplying them in NSW, just a few words offering to is enough for "guilt."
If the Christian right had more than half a brain between them (or cared enough about their religion to understand it), they'd probably find they're on the wrong side of this argument. It's not what goes into a man's mouth that defiles him, but what comes out of it. Given the amount of shit they tend to spew forth, I'm not particularly surprised they choose to ignore it.
The two biggest arguments I see for continued criminalization are that drug use is inherently evil (I'm still waiting for someone to explain this to me, seems indefensibly stupid), or that its necessary to prevent crime. If its the latter, maybe you can explain to me the ways in which the "war on drugs" has been successful in a sense other than ensuring all the profit goes to real criminals more than happy to use it for real crime.
There's perhaps a stronger argument to be made against decriminalizing extremely physically addictive drugs, but definitely not against the non- or negligibly addictive ones. Regardless, the mindless threat of criminal retribution is possibly the only thing guaranteed not to fix the problem. Criminal law is a political instrument, used when legislators need to placate the public (lest they appear "soft on crime" - you only need to look at some modern history to see the trend of the "hard on crime" viewpoint - retrospectively it appears barbaric and brainless) without actually solving the problem. Not all their fault though, the public is too stupid to care.
