New type of trailhead theft

[AlpineK]

I'd say that drug problems are a health issue and not a legal issue unless the wacko actually commits a crime.

 

If you rob, ruin property, or murder then you should go to jail. If drugs are involved then the judge should force you to seek medical help, but you shouldn't go to jail just for being on drugs.

 

If we were to take Fairweathers approach then we should reestablish prohibition. Look at all the alcohol related crime and death.

 

We're spending a huge amount of tax money on imprisoning folks whose only crime was having some pot. Prisons and jails are for people who damage or hurt others or their property not for locking up somebody who might need to attend classes such as AA or see a doctor.

 

This is drug free...ok well I am drinking coffee

[mike1]

If you rob, ruin property, or murder then you should go to jail.

a life for a life I say.

 

I wish these guys would take my converter. It started ratteling the other day!

[Fairweather]

I'd say that drug problems are a health issue and not a legal issue unless the wacko actually commits a crime.

 

If you rob, ruin property, or murder then you should go to jail. If drugs are involved then the judge should force you to seek medical help, but you shouldn't go to jail just for being on drugs.

 

If we were to take Fairweathers approach then we should reestablish prohibition. Look at all the alcohol related crime and death.

 

We're spending a huge amount of tax money on imprisoning folks whose only crime was having some pot. Prisons and jails are for people who damage or hurt others or their property not for locking up somebody who might need to attend classes such as AA or see a doctor.

 

This is drug free...ok well I am drinking coffee

 

I can't even count how many ideas you have just erroneously attributed to me or how many words you have just put in my mouth--simply because I question the validity of someone's claim with the one-syllable response: "no". I'm/we're not talking about pot. We're talking about methamphetamine and comparable drugs that utterly destroy lives, families, and the societal fabric. Do you really want to argue for legalization or make the lame argument that criminal acts should be excused because the perpetrator has what you view as an "illness"? Gimme a break.

 

edit: alcohol??? Are you kidding? Have you seen what happens to someone with a DUI? I would say we're on the right track re alcohol, but you're right, it's probably worse than pot re it's negative affect on society. More than probably, actually.

Edited May 18, 2008 by Fairweather

[Fairweather]

The drug war reflects a political arrogance that the government can solve bad habits by passing laws and sending police out on the streets to arrest the way to an improved society. The collateral damage of this arrogance is clear. It is time to end the drug war, to seek education, treatment, product labeling and testing, and a more orderly yet much less profitable market for the measure of drug usage, which society cannot stem or prevent, with or without force.

www.drug-war.us

 

Your side had it's chance in the 60's, 70's, and 80's...and you blew it. 1990's moving forward; overall crime has come down, I can once again walk the streets of downtown Tacoma (and do...every day). Again; I'm not talking about pot. Can you provide stats re: small time marijuana users in prison? I've read it is incredibly small.

[Alex]

The graph is interesting in another way...from roughly 1940 to 1975, the overall murder rate was way down. Hmmm, I wonder if I could correlate that to another series of events...WW II, Korea, and Vietnam, maybe, when a significant number of our young male population was overseas killing foreign nationals instead of each other? Not saying there is actually a relationship there either, just saying that correlating murder rate to "prohibition and war on drugs" seems pretty far fetched.

 

 

[Fairweather]

What I'm saying is that virtually all liberal remedies to crime have failed. Crime is largely down the past twenty years because we stopped putting up with shit and locked up almost 1% of the population. BTW: Your premise re war and murder rates implies that males have an innate need to kill, and I couldn't disagree more. (Respectfully )

[JayB]

I'd be mighty surprised if the data supported a claim that 100% of the increase in murders in those periods where either prohibition or the W.O.D. were in effect. In addition to the percentage of young men enrolled in the military, you'd have to look at what percentage of society is composed of men in their "peak violence" years, the state of the economy, etc, etc, etc. However - it would surprise me if a careful analysis didn't show a substantial, or at least meaningful, correlation between prohibition and murder.

 

Under the various sorts of prohibition that have been attempted, the law of supply and demand pretty much guarantees that all the incentives will be in place for an incredibly lucrative trade in which the primary means of securing "market share" is violence.

 

I also don't think that any realistic legalization and treatment model will completely alleviate the various agonies of addiction, or the crime that addicts engage in to fund their addictions (short of giving the stuff away for free or for next to nothing - which would probably be quite a bit less expensive when you evaluate all of the costs we're on the hook for now). I do think it would be possible to develop a legalization/treatment model that results in substantially less harm to both society and addicts than the one that we have now, and that would cost considerably less to implement.

 

And that's just within our own borders. When you look at the violence, murder, and instability that the combination of prohibition and Americans' massive appetite for pretty much any ingestible substance that will alter their consciousness - the costs are compounded severalfold.

 

I do think it's true that everyone who buys illegal drugs is fueling crime, corruption, and murder at home and abroad - but only because our policy of prohibition makes it impossible to do otherwise. They could choose to do otherwise, perhaps, but I think that their argument that the burden of responsibility falls primarily on the state is sound and correct.

[Fairweather]

you'd have to look at...the state of the economy, etc...

 

I know this is widely assumed, but is there anything to back it up? I'm not so sure there is a relationship.

[JayB]

you'd have to look at...the state of the economy, etc...

 

I know this is widely assumed, but is there anything to back it up? I'm not so sure there is a relationship.

 

I don't know. I'm sure the analysis is complicated, but I'd be pretty surprised if there was no causal relationship at all.

 

I'm sure there's literature out there somewhere, though.

 

 

[STP]

It seems the issue is nearly always distilled down to the often partisan dialectic of individual responsibility versus systemic cause (societal reform). At one extreme are believers in free will and individual culpability while at the other extreme the individual is absolved and personal behavior is viewed through the lens of the collective.

 

Isn’t history replete with social experiments by politicians and lawmakers to mold society into their conceptions of the ideal state? I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are those who see the Bill of Rights and our liberties as an antiquated obstacle, that technology is the long sought panacea to societal ills characteristic of the human condition ( NYSE listing: ID).

 

As far as deterring theft, one area where the problem is being addressed is having a requirement for something akin to a paper trail where accountability of the seller and the buyer is produced. The burden should be put on the scrap metal dealers to not accept undocumented salvage materials.

 

Personally, I don’t believe the solutions for every problem should be examined in isolation. For example, take the drug problem. Conservatives such as the late William F. Buckley have called for the legalization of drugs as an answer to minimizing the myriad problems caused by our need for chemicals and to actually enlist this legalization as a change with more upside benefit (e.g. another revenue stream for gov’t) than downside cost (addiction/aberrant behavior) for society. So, legalization is the solution, simple enough.

 

Do I buy that? No, I’d rather see something more radical and far-reaching. For instance, changing how we view money. I can’t articulate this fully. I can only direct you to this ( How deep is the rabbit hole?).

 

[murraysovereign]

I've always understood that the single most reliable predictor of crime rates is the percentage of the population consisting of males aged 15 - 29, or some such grouping. There are plenty of other contributing factors, certainly, but they're of secondary importance after the demographics.

 

Comparing Prohibition with the current "War on Drugs" doesn't quite work, either. Prohibition attempted to take something that was regularly used by most of the population and make it illegal, with predictable results. The so-called war on drugs is little more than a concerted crack-down on a range of substances that have always been illegal, and that have never been as widely used as alcohol.

 

So that graph showing a spike in murder rates coincident with Prohibition makes sense, whereas the relationship between crime stats and the "War on Drugs" is less clear.

 

I agree with Jay that it would probably be cheaper to just give the stuff away for free, than to continue absorbing all the various costs associated with drug-related crime. If the Conservatives in Ottawa can see past their ideological objections and allow the Insight experiment to continue in Vancouver we may be able to start collecting some meaningful data, albeit on a limited geographic area and population.

[Billygoat]

What's wrong with illegal drug dealing? Nothing, and FW I, imagine, would agree.

 

It's amazing how well it works (profitable) when the government is not involved in its process. It is an exercise in pure free market capitalism. W/O regulation, the laws of supply and demand work smoothly and the profits go up with market penetration going deeper. Let's face it; people with addictive personalities are a capitive consumer base.

 

If it is the not paying tax thing is a problem I agree. We would have to legalize it though. Then we would get government regulation.

 

Tobacco, fast food and alcohol companies (to name a few) do it legally and still manage to stay afloat. Maybe we could stand to legalize it.

 

I think like you FW: That big govenrment should stay out of our business. Fuck The Reagan's and their "Just Say No" crap!!!

 

One man's illegal drug is another man's pleasure.

 

If the government can legislate who can marry who, whether or not control of one's body (abortions) is a right, and what drugs anyone can use, then they can damn well regulate business.

 

 

[JayB]

I've always understood that the single most reliable predictor of crime rates is the percentage of the population consisting of males aged 15 - 29, or some such grouping. There are plenty of other contributing factors, certainly, but they're of secondary importance after the demographics.

 

Comparing Prohibition with the current "War on Drugs" doesn't quite work, either. Prohibition attempted to take something that was regularly used by most of the population and make it illegal, with predictable results. The so-called war on drugs is little more than a concerted crack-down on a range of substances that have always been illegal, and that have never been as widely used as alcohol.

 

So that graph showing a spike in murder rates coincident with Prohibition makes sense, whereas the relationship between crime stats and the "War on Drugs" is less clear.

 

I agree with Jay that it would probably be cheaper to just give the stuff away for free, than to continue absorbing all the various costs associated with drug-related crime. If the Conservatives in Ottawa can see past their ideological objections and allow the Insight experiment to continue in Vancouver we may be able to start collecting some meaningful data, albeit on a limited geographic area and population.

 

What's the Insight experiment?

 

I wonder if anyone's actually run the numbers on the free meth/heroin/crack + treatment vs enforcement-bureaucracy/crime/incarceration models.

 

That's only on the monetary side. On the freedom and liberty side - It'd be worth contemplating the risks and costs associated with an enforcement bureaucracy that's been empowered to seize property from citizens under "zero tolerance" laws, establishing a social order where the state can criminalize the voluntary ingestion of a particular set of substances by sane, consenting adults, etc...

 

There's a great cautionary note from either Von Hayek or Ludwig Von Mises from the 1920's about the dubious moral and political justifications underlying the arguments for prohibition, and of the larger risks to personal freedoms inherent in these policies. I posted it a while ago, but don't feel like doing the work to dig it out at the moment...

[murraysovereign]

Insight is the name of the safe-injection site the city of Vancouver set up in the downtown eastside. Supervised "shooting gallery", clean needles, and drug counselling in an attempt to reduce the incidence of accidental overdoses, slow the rate of HIV infection from used needles, and divert users into treatment programs. It's been running for a couple of years now, under an exemption to the federal legislation that would otherwise make it illegal. The former Liberal government established it, and the exemption is now up for renewal, but the current Conservative government is reluctant to do it.

 

Depending on who you listen to, it's either a step in the right direction, or a moral abomination. Most of the available evidence apparently seems to indicate that it's helping, in that the overdose rate and HIV rates are being positively impacted, and users are availing themselves of treatment programs at an increased rate due to their frequent interactions with the facility's staff. Drug-related activity on the streets in the immediate vicinity seems to be down, but there's no clear causal link. I don't have the stats behind those assertions, but that's the gist of the "pro"-side of the debate. There was a recent report from the Vancouver health-care community appealing to Ottawa to allow the facility to continue operating because of its positive effects. That report may be available on-line, but I haven't time to try looking for it right now.

 

The "con" side seems to be made up mostly of the tough-on-crime faction of the Conservative party, and I think the national association of Chiefs of Police are also opposed to renewing the exemption, but the local beat cops are more likely to be supportive as I recall.

[STP]

That’s well and good but sometimes I get the nagging suspicion that public health departments have a vested interest in promoting these types of programs, i.e., to support the establishment and perpetuation of bureaucracy designed to oversee these programs. The State is a hungry beast (and we feed it often for the sake of the public good).

 

I wonder if actually these programs would lead to making it “safer” for some folks who wouldn’t think of using and essentially produce a new generation of addicts.

 

I suppose, however, in the name of “trying something completely different”…

 

LayaGk0TMDc

[murraysovereign]

Actually, their argument was more that the Insight facility is resulting in a net reduction in demand for the health care system. Prevention and early intervention are more effective uses of limited resources than simply reacting to emergencies. No surprise there - the same holds true for cancer, obesity, smoking, work-place safety, clean drinking water... show me an area of health care that doesn't benefit from prevention and/or early intervention. It's not necessarily always about self-interested bureaucracies promoting their own self-interested agendas.

Edited May 18, 2008 by murraysovereign

[STP]

I agree with you regarding prevention but how many of us when faced with the information actually have the will to conform to a safer lifestyle? It seems that taking on risk is hardwired into our genetic code.

[murraysovereign]

"Insite" site

 

Results include:

 

* Insite is leading to increased uptake into detoxification programs and addiction treatment. (New England Journal of Medicine)

* Insite has not led to an increase in drug-related crime, rates of arrest for drug trafficking, assaults and robbery were similar after the facility’s opening, and rates of vehicle break-ins/theft declined significantly. (Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy)

* Insite has reduced the number of people injecting in public and the amount of injection-related litter in the downtown eastside. (Canadian Medical Association Journal)

* Insite is attracting the highest-risk users – those more likely to be vulnerable to HIV infection and overdose, and who were contributing to problems of public drug use and unsafe syringe disposal. (American Journal of Preventive Medicine)

* Insite has reduced overall rates of needle sharing in the community, and among those who used the supervised injection site for some, most or all of their injections, 70% were less likely to report syringe sharing. (The Lancet)

* Nearly one-third of Insite users received information relating to safer injecting practices. Those who received help injecting from fellow injection drug users on the streets were more than twice as likely to have received safer injecting education at Insite. (The International Journal of Drug Policy)

* Insite is not increasing rates of relapse among former drug users, nor is it a negative influence on those seeking to stop drug use. (British Medical Journal)

 

Health Outcomes

 

The research also points to positive health outcomes from the facility. Insite is part of Vancouver Coastal Health’s continuum of care for people with addiction, mental illness and HIV/AIDS and, as a result, it has connected users of the facility with other health services.

 

Over a one-year period, Insite made more than 2,000 referrals, with close to 40 per cent of those to addiction counselling. People using Insite are more likely to enter a detox program, with one in five regular visitors beginning a detox program. The facility also cut down on deaths from overdoses.

 

Of the 500 overdoses that occurred at the site over a two-year period, none resulted in a fatality. If these overdoses happened on the street, many of these people may have died.

 

Other research results show*:

 

7,278 unique individuals registered at Insite

Women made up 26 per cent of clients

Aboriginal people made up 18 per cent of clients

Heroin was used in 41 per cent of injections

Cocaine was used in 27 per cent of injections

Morphine was used in 12 per cent of injections

453 overdoses resulted in no fatalities

4,084 referrals were made with 40 per cent of them made to addiction counselling

Referral to withdrawal management: 368

Referral to methadone maintenance: 2 per week

Daily average visits: 607

Average number of visits per month, per person: 11

Busiest day: May 25, 2005 (933 visits in 18 hours)

Number of nursing care interventions: 6,227

Number of nursing interventions for abscess care: 2,055

*All totals or averages are for the two-year period from April 1, 2004 to March 31, 2006.

 

[STP]

TXpGaOqb2Z8

Through a Scanner Darkly

[dougd]

Shit, I own a toyota tacoma!

 

So, the tweakers are now traveling to remote trailheads stealing catalytic converters!

 

WTF is the world coming to...

[JayB]

A world featuring quick release catalytic converter mods for Toyota pickups, evidently...

[AlpineK]

We're talking about methamphetamine and comparable drugs that utterly destroy lives, families, and the societal fabric. Do you really want to argue for legalization or make the lame argument that criminal acts should be excused because the perpetrator has what you view as an "illness"? Gimme a break.

 

I don't think you reading very well.

 

What I said is if Joe Meth commits a crime then he should pay the price for the crime he committed (jail time). I'm sure in an event like this it would probably come out as an extenuating circumstance that Joe was doing a lot of Meth. If that happened then the court should mandate drug testing and counseling but not more prison time based solely on the drug use.

 

Stuff like this would obviously lead to reevaluation down the road and possibly further action.

 

Jail time costs a lot more than testing and counseling. Of course in the end more jail time might be the thing to do, but starting off by treating the drug use part of the offence as a medical problem is a better approach.

[mattp]

Not only did he misunderstand your post, but Fairweather is misconstruing the most basic argument raised by those who say the drug war is failing. And ignoring the history of our efforts.

 

Yes, those generally on the right tend to scoff at notions of any "disease model" for drug or alcohol or drug treatment and prevention measures and urge more jail and tighter law enforcement rather than some "kid gloves" approach. However, whether you think the graph I linked on the prior page is flawed or not, you must believe the war on drugs is not working if you are convinced that the meth epidemic rages on in the face of how many task forces and special blah blah blah units, and "zero tolerance" grandstanding from everyone from the dog catcher and local pastor to the governor and the president's "drug czar" over the last 15 years? If you think we need MORE enforcement and LESS tolerlance after 25 years of mandatory sentencing and "DARE" programs, just what should be next? Dope dogs in every high school and vigilante law enforcement on rural roads? Forced antabuse dosages?

 

Meanwhile, we have the highest rate of incarceration of just about any country - if not the highest rate period. We have the toughest drug sentencing laws of any nation that we consider "civilized." We have the biggest international drug enforcement program in the world by a factor of what - 100? Drug addicts and alcoholics are shunned from society and generally considered pariahs who will never "contribute" to society and who should be given minimal services if any along with minimal civil rights. Somehow, Fairweather still claims "our" side (the misguided liberal segment of society) has rammed some kind of liberal approach down the throat of this poor nation and it has been a failure? Say what?

 

It looks like the failure here has been the drug war's "we're going to impose a cure on our society through unprecedented government intervention and massive cash expenditures" approach.

 

Nobody is arguing that meth is a good thing. Few except maybe our friend from Portland who participated in a recent thread would argue that Heroine is OK and that is not really what he said, either. I haven't heard anybody come out in support of encouraging alcoholism.

[builder206]

I was an EMT many years ago. Until then I never knew how much damage alcohol causes through society. Without alcohol we'd need half as many cops, lawyers, and surgeons. The toll of that drug is unbelievable unless you get down in the trenches and see it day in and day out. The press has plenty of coverage from the individual standpoint---the endless parade of celbs in rehab, articles about new findings in the field of alcoholism cures, that sort of thing---but little is said about the toll across the nation and through families. In two years of emergency response, I never went to any emergency caused by meth, heroin, marijuana, LSD, or any other illegal drug...but each and every shift had anywhere from a few to continuous hours of alcohol-related calls. And every one of the most gruesome was alcohol-related.

[mattp]

Builder:

I have heard some suggestions that tougher DUI enforcement is having some beneficial impact on rates of drunk driving. Clearly there are a lot of drivers who have had their licenses suspended and been ordered into treatment - both actions that we would assume would help address the danger posed by drunk drivers - but we also read about how those damn drunks drive anyway and treatment is rarely effective in the long term. Do you know if there has been a comprehensive and scientific assessment of how effective our approach has been? If we determined the present programs have not been effective, would you support more active intervention - say roadblocks throughout the City or putting all drunk drivers in jail for extended sentences?