A while back you said that it's always more expensive for taxpayers when a given law is enforced, or to have a given law...something to that effect. I disagree.
Bank robbery is the clearest counterexample. If bank robberies were not banned, investigated, and prosecuted, with extreme diligence, they would be MUCH more common -- nearly a constant, IMO. In the best case scenario, banks would have to ramp up security to a manifold degree, driving up costs, and bank robbers would amplify their level of force correspondingly, making banks extremely dangerous places. FDIC costs would skyrocket, which is a taxpayer burden; banking costs would skyrocket; banking-related violence would skyrocket (especialy if murder was not being prosecuted) -- and that bears an immeasurable cost.
That same element would carry over, to a lesser extent, to any establishment that had large amounts of money or valuables.
I think its quite clear that the cost to most taxpayers would be much greater if crimes of violence and major property theft were not treted as crimes, or were not handled seriously.
Also, you asked about some 12-year-olds who were doing lots of drugs (I assume illegal ones) and having lots of sex, and wanted to know if it was good or bad. I'd say it's probably bad in most cases - although I'd also say it's not a guaranteed deathknell or anything, and plenty of people have made their way through life just fine with equally or more rocky starts. Lots of my friends from high school started drinking, smoking, or doing some drug by 13 or 14, if not 12, and they all have good jobs -- all of them, AFAIK -- and most make more money than me, who didn't drink til I was 14 or 15, and didn't smoke pot until I was 17.
One thing I would say for sure is that the War on Drugs was a catalyst in bringing the drugs and the 12-year-olds closer together, quicker. And in bringing them harder drugs.
One thing I would say for sure is that the War on Drugs was a catalyst in bringing the drugs and the 12-year-olds closer together, quicker. And in bringing them harder drugs.
And that is pure nonsense. The war on drugs cannot have possibly increased drug use. You apprently are under the misconception that there is a cause and effect with the drug war and increased use. Because there has been increased use does not mean the war on drugs is the cause of the increased use. There would be an increased use even without any effort to stop use. Why? Because in some people's minds it is "cool" to do drugs. Others do enjoy the drugs. But the increase is not do to the effort to stop drug use.
Any expense from bank robberies, would be left to the banks and filtered on to their customers, not the taxpayers. So that's not an issue.
FDIC, while a Federally administered program, is shouldered by the banks themselves. So that's not an issue.
If a bank were constantly being robbed, the market (consumers) would take care of that problem. Banks would be forced to protect themselves, or else their customers would go elsewhere.
Lots of my friends from high school started drinking, smoking, or doing some drug by 13 or 14, if not 12, and they all have good jobs -- all of them, AFAIK -- and most make more money than me, who didn't drink til I was 14 or 15, and didn't smoke pot until I was 17.
Well, I was about the same as you on both counts, and look at what a loser I am.
My wife has a theoretical case in one of her law classes where a girl had a roommate selling Meth. Simply by living in the same apartment, she was arrested. The girl faces 40 years in prison, and a $1,000,000 fine.
Although the case is theoretical, the law/punishment is not.
Even if I disagree with your legalize drug stance except in the case of pot, I have to agree with you that our system is totally screwed.
My wife has a theoretical case in one of her law classes where a girl had a roommate selling Meth. Simply by living in the same apartment, she was arrested. The girl faces 40 years in prison, and a $1,000,000 fine.
The really screwed part is that there are real life cases of stuff like that, and lots of them. And that there are people of influence who want to make those penalties harsher and more widespread.
Yes, the law is the law, and yes, the laws should be enforced, but that doesn't rule out that the laws can be totally fucked up (and thus, the enforcement of them also be totally fucked up. (
<--more to jethro's ever-lovin copout when faced with blatantly foul drug laws than to you JT.)
Well, I was about the same as you on both counts, and look at what a loser I am.
I don't know what point that was supposed to make, if anything.
jethro:
And that is pure nonsense.
That's an unsupported assertion of opinion. Is it based on studies, like my assertion?
The war on drugs cannot have possibly increased drug use.
That's an apparently unsupported claim of fact. Can you state your basis for it?
There would be an increased use even without any effort to stop use. Why? Because in some people's minds it is "cool" to do drugs.
And that factor increased? When? Hasn't it been "cool" to do drugs "in some people's minds" for decades now? Is your premise that it's becoming "cooler" with each passing year, as a natural phenomenon? Will that continue to increase with each passing year indefinitely? What causes that increase, if you indeed claim it exists?
Your tax dollars at work: The government's billion-dollar anti-drug ad campaign is actually encouraging children to abuse drugs.
So says a survey conducted by the private research firm Westat and the University of Pennsylvania. It found an increase in drug abuse among some teenagers who saw television ads such as the one depicting kids passing around a joint in a suburban basement.
National Office of Drug Control Policy Director John P. Walters is ready to dump the ads and spend even more tax dollars on new ones.
"We can do ads that can both excite curiosity when targeted at too young an age or suggest everybody's doing it, which undermines what we want in changing behavior. So, we need to make sure we're testing, and we intend to move the campaign to older teens and target it there," Walters told Fox News.
Sometimes the most well-meaning plans backfire. The federal government's attempt to curb teenage drug use with a multimillion-dollar ad campaign dramatizing the perils of marijuana has backfired spectacularly.
It is now obvious that these ads are doing more harm than good, and Congress should pull the plug immediately.
Unless you've been living in a cave the last two years, you've probably seen the commercials sponsored by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Sensationalized and scary, these ads suggest that teens who smoke marijuana are likely to commit date rape, run over little girls on bicycles and even shoot their friends.
As a psychologist who studies drug abuse, I worried about these ads from the beginning. The "facts" in them are exaggerated and out of context. Their single-minded emphasis on marijuana, rather than far more addictive and lethal substances such as cocaine and methamphetamine, makes little sense.
Now, scientific data -- from the very surveys that Congress set up as yardsticks to measure the success of the drug control policy office -- tell us that these ads have boomeranged.
Back in 1998, Congress chose to evaluate the office's performance via two well-known surveys of adolescent drug use: the federally funded "Monitoring the Future" study and the privately run Parent's Resource Institute for Drug Education survey. Both are considered reliable indexes of teen drug use. The goal was to reduce the percentage of teens using illegal drugs within the last month to 3 percent of the adolescent population over a period of five years, starting in 1999.
It hasn't happened. The numbers from the 2002-2003 PRIDE survey, released Sept. 3, are devastating.
Not only is teenage use of illicit drugs running at more than five times the goal set by Congress, it went up last year, not down. And the biggest increases were seen among the youngest kids.
Last year, for example, 7.2 percent of eighth-graders smoked marijuana within the last 30 days. This year, it was 10.2 percent -- a third more. Among sixth-graders -- we're talking about 11-year-olds here -- past-month use of marijuana doubled, from 1.7 percent to 3.4 percent.
Kids aren't just tuning out the government's messages about marijuana. They are also ignoring warnings about drugs that are far more dangerous. Past-month use of cocaine was up in every age group this year, often by alarming percentages, while use of heroin in the last month was up 50 percent overall and 60 percent among junior high school students.
funny the article does not seem to indicate how the ads have increased drug use or by how much. it seems to be just assumed. I find this part curious:
Past-month use of cocaine was up in every age group this year, often by alarming percentages, while use of heroin in the last month was up 50 percent overall and 60 percent among junior high school students.
Say if only 2 people are doing heroin and one more joins them that would be a 50% increase. It also appears that this was done by survey. Ask me if I did cocaine, heroin and meth last month I would tell you that I did. You wouldn't know different unless you knew I was lying.
No it is a questioning of info and how it was obtained.Is it based on studies, like my assertion? The studies appear somewhat flawed. But of course you wouldn't recognize that, would you?
yeah... but theres a problem with taxing both of those things....
People can grow marajuana in their backyards, or basements and use it for themselves without even selling it, or just sell it to their homies.... how is it gonna be possible to tax that?
Yeah... if ya sell it in a store, like cigs, then its taxable, but not the way people are already doing it.
And prostitution? Yeah... it'd be another good thing to tax, but how are you gonna convince some penny cent hoe, who's missing her front teeth, to ask some dude "yeah... that'll be 15 more cents, because of the tax"?
all different kinds of people take drugs. I've never said that all people who do are good or that all people who do are bad.
Funny how fold and crabs go on and on about how all drug users are such upstanding citizens and or victims.
what is funny is that you think this isn't a strawman of your own design.
what I have tried to point out to people like you is that not all drug dealers are "bad" people anymore than they are "good" people. They are just people like anyone else. They may even be conservatives.
but as long as you insist on claiming others are saying what they aren't saying, yes, your hypocricy straw will continue.
What doesn't make sense, Rowan said, is that offenders sometime spend more on devices to beat the test than they spend on drugs.
"It seems they will stop at nothing," said Rowan, noting that sometimes offenders use their children's urine to try and pass tests. "They won't continue with their sobriety, and they'll exhaust any method possible to continue with their drug usage."
You got it all wrong JT. Druggies like that are upstanding, productive citizens. I'm sure those children were more than happy to give a sample to dear old dad/mom.
Those pesky police officers, courts, probation officers are always trying to screw up a good thing for ingestors.
no...really...how di you gt that stick so far up your ass in the first place?
and maybe it isn't a stick...maybe it's the entire tree.
crabs, you have your head so far up your ass you should know how it is done.
so, your sense of righteousness is the absolute truth for everyone?
what are you? some sort of god?
I don't care what you think, crabs. How could I since I have zero respect for you?
so why do you want the laws?
A while back you said that it's always more expensive for taxpayers when a given law is enforced, or to have a given law...something to that effect. I disagree.
Bank robbery is the clearest counterexample. If bank robberies were not banned, investigated, and prosecuted, with extreme diligence, they would be MUCH more common -- nearly a constant, IMO. In the best case scenario, banks would have to ramp up security to a manifold degree, driving up costs, and bank robbers would amplify their level of force correspondingly, making banks extremely dangerous places. FDIC costs would skyrocket, which is a taxpayer burden; banking costs would skyrocket; banking-related violence would skyrocket (especialy if murder was not being prosecuted) -- and that bears an immeasurable cost.
That same element would carry over, to a lesser extent, to any establishment that had large amounts of money or valuables.
I think its quite clear that the cost to most taxpayers would be much greater if crimes of violence and major property theft were not treted as crimes, or were not handled seriously.
Also, you asked about some 12-year-olds who were doing lots of drugs (I assume illegal ones) and having lots of sex, and wanted to know if it was good or bad. I'd say it's probably bad in most cases - although I'd also say it's not a guaranteed deathknell or anything, and plenty of people have made their way through life just fine with equally or more rocky starts. Lots of my friends from high school started drinking, smoking, or doing some drug by 13 or 14, if not 12, and they all have good jobs -- all of them, AFAIK -- and most make more money than me, who didn't drink til I was 14 or 15, and didn't smoke pot until I was 17.
One thing I would say for sure is that the War on Drugs was a catalyst in bringing the drugs and the 12-year-olds closer together, quicker. And in bringing them harder drugs.
One thing I would say for sure is that the War on Drugs was a catalyst in bringing the drugs and the 12-year-olds closer together, quicker. And in bringing them harder drugs.
What nonsense.
Do you mean to imply that more 12-year-olds were doing more, harder drugs before the War on Drugs?
Do you mean to imply that more 12-year-olds were doing more, harder drugs before the War on Drugs?
Do you really believe that the war on drugs has increased use by 12 year olds?
And that is pure nonsense. The war on drugs cannot have possibly increased drug use. You apprently are under the misconception that there is a cause and effect with the drug war and increased use. Because there has been increased use does not mean the war on drugs is the cause of the increased use. There would be an increased use even without any effort to stop use. Why? Because in some people's minds it is "cool" to do drugs. Others do enjoy the drugs. But the increase is not do to the effort to stop drug use.
Any expense from bank robberies, would be left to the banks and filtered on to their customers, not the taxpayers. So that's not an issue.
FDIC, while a Federally administered program, is shouldered by the banks themselves. So that's not an issue.
If a bank were constantly being robbed, the market (consumers) would take care of that problem. Banks would be forced to protect themselves, or else their customers would go elsewhere.
Lots of my friends from high school started drinking, smoking, or doing some drug by 13 or 14, if not 12, and they all have good jobs -- all of them, AFAIK -- and most make more money than me, who didn't drink til I was 14 or 15, and didn't smoke pot until I was 17.
Well, I was about the same as you on both counts, and look at what a loser I am.
btw Lance,
My wife has a theoretical case in one of her law classes where a girl had a roommate selling Meth. Simply by living in the same apartment, she was arrested. The girl faces 40 years in prison, and a $1,000,000 fine.
Although the case is theoretical, the law/punishment is not.
Even if I disagree with your legalize drug stance except in the case of pot, I have to agree with you that our system is totally screwed.
Yes Jethro
I was just stating the basics.
The issue is the unusually harsh punishment if convicted.
The really screwed part is that there are real life cases of stuff like that, and lots of them. And that there are people of influence who want to make those penalties harsher and more widespread.
Yes, the law is the law, and yes, the laws should be enforced, but that doesn't rule out that the laws can be totally fucked up (and thus, the enforcement of them also be totally fucked up. (
<--more to jethro's ever-lovin copout when faced with blatantly foul drug laws than to you JT.)
I don't know what point that was supposed to make, if anything.
jethro:
That's an unsupported assertion of opinion. Is it based on studies, like my assertion?
That's an apparently unsupported claim of fact. Can you state your basis for it?
And that factor increased? When? Hasn't it been "cool" to do drugs "in some people's minds" for decades now? Is your premise that it's becoming "cooler" with each passing year, as a natural phenomenon? Will that continue to increase with each passing year indefinitely? What causes that increase, if you indeed claim it exists?
Feds anti-drug ads backfire
Your tax dollars at work: The government's billion-dollar anti-drug ad campaign is actually encouraging children to abuse drugs.
So says a survey conducted by the private research firm Westat and the University of Pennsylvania. It found an increase in drug abuse among some teenagers who saw television ads such as the one depicting kids passing around a joint in a suburban basement.
National Office of Drug Control Policy Director John P. Walters is ready to dump the ads and spend even more tax dollars on new ones.
"We can do ads that can both excite curiosity when targeted at too young an age or suggest everybody's doing it, which undermines what we want in changing behavior. So, we need to make sure we're testing, and we intend to move the campaign to older teens and target it there," Walters told Fox News.
The Cannabis Crusades
Anti-pot ads have backfired
Mitch Earleywine Friday, September 26, 2003
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sometimes the most well-meaning plans backfire. The federal government's attempt to curb teenage drug use with a multimillion-dollar ad campaign dramatizing the perils of marijuana has backfired spectacularly.
It is now obvious that these ads are doing more harm than good, and Congress should pull the plug immediately.
Unless you've been living in a cave the last two years, you've probably seen the commercials sponsored by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Sensationalized and scary, these ads suggest that teens who smoke marijuana are likely to commit date rape, run over little girls on bicycles and even shoot their friends.
As a psychologist who studies drug abuse, I worried about these ads from the beginning. The "facts" in them are exaggerated and out of context. Their single-minded emphasis on marijuana, rather than far more addictive and lethal substances such as cocaine and methamphetamine, makes little sense.
Now, scientific data -- from the very surveys that Congress set up as yardsticks to measure the success of the drug control policy office -- tell us that these ads have boomeranged.
Back in 1998, Congress chose to evaluate the office's performance via two well-known surveys of adolescent drug use: the federally funded "Monitoring the Future" study and the privately run Parent's Resource Institute for Drug Education survey. Both are considered reliable indexes of teen drug use. The goal was to reduce the percentage of teens using illegal drugs within the last month to 3 percent of the adolescent population over a period of five years, starting in 1999.
It hasn't happened. The numbers from the 2002-2003 PRIDE survey, released Sept. 3, are devastating.
Not only is teenage use of illicit drugs running at more than five times the goal set by Congress, it went up last year, not down. And the biggest increases were seen among the youngest kids.
Last year, for example, 7.2 percent of eighth-graders smoked marijuana within the last 30 days. This year, it was 10.2 percent -- a third more. Among sixth-graders -- we're talking about 11-year-olds here -- past-month use of marijuana doubled, from 1.7 percent to 3.4 percent.
Kids aren't just tuning out the government's messages about marijuana. They are also ignoring warnings about drugs that are far more dangerous. Past-month use of cocaine was up in every age group this year, often by alarming percentages, while use of heroin in the last month was up 50 percent overall and 60 percent among junior high school students.
more...
(permanent archive copy)
funny the article does not seem to indicate how the ads have increased drug use or by how much. it seems to be just assumed. I find this part curious:
Say if only 2 people are doing heroin and one more joins them that would be a 50% increase. It also appears that this was done by survey. Ask me if I did cocaine, heroin and meth last month I would tell you that I did. You wouldn't know different unless you knew I was lying.
No it is a questioning of info and how it was obtained.Is it based on studies, like my assertion? The studies appear somewhat flawed. But of course you wouldn't recognize that, would you?
what drug offense would be so heinous that it should be a capital crime?
f*** you, fold.
Funny how fold and crabs go on and on about how all drug users are such upstanding citizens and or victims.
Now there is a RUMOR that a well known conservative MAY have purchased some pills but of course doesn't fall into either of their above catagories.
Will the hypocrisy of the left ever end?
it is also funny that they don't tell you it is a National Enquirer story.
LOL!
crabs hasn't been around for awhile. I wonder if his employer finally caught him "multi-tasking"?
No hypocrisy of the left here...just the principles of liberty, whether for Rush or Tommy Chong.
'Bill - Fold' 10/4/03 3:21am
Fricking "A", what a hypocrite.
Legalize all drugs....
tax it and build a new Twins stadium. Legalize prostitution...tax it , buy a new stadium for the Vikings.
yeah... but theres a problem with taxing both of those things....
People can grow marajuana in their backyards, or basements and use it for themselves without even selling it, or just sell it to their homies.... how is it gonna be possible to tax that?
Yeah... if ya sell it in a store, like cigs, then its taxable, but not the way people are already doing it.
And prostitution? Yeah... it'd be another good thing to tax, but how are you gonna convince some penny cent hoe, who's missing her front teeth, to ask some dude "yeah... that'll be 15 more cents, because of the tax"?
as long as you keep inventing it, I guess not.
all different kinds of people take drugs. I've never said that all people who do are good or that all people who do are bad.
what is funny is that you think this isn't a strawman of your own design.
what I have tried to point out to people like you is that not all drug dealers are "bad" people anymore than they are "good" people. They are just people like anyone else. They may even be conservatives.
but as long as you insist on claiming others are saying what they aren't saying, yes, your hypocricy straw will continue.
Where ya been crabs? Rehab again? If that's the case, you should be making at least some sort of sense.
why do you ask?
did you want me to say hello to your mom or something?
it wouldn't matter anyway. you wouldn't know sense if it bit you on the ass.
Yeah, I know I make no sense to you. That's because I'M sober.
you're a drunk...you can't fool me.
"A body part when it's up against a plastic cup isn't going to go 'clink,'"
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,99577,00.html
What doesn't make sense, Rowan said, is that offenders sometime spend more on devices to beat the test than they spend on drugs.
"It seems they will stop at nothing," said Rowan, noting that sometimes offenders use their children's urine to try and pass tests. "They won't continue with their sobriety, and they'll exhaust any method possible to continue with their drug usage."
You got it all wrong JT. Druggies like that are upstanding, productive citizens. I'm sure those children were more than happy to give a sample to dear old dad/mom.
Those pesky police officers, courts, probation officers are always trying to screw up a good thing for ingestors.
often they are just that.
and I'm sure they will be thrilled when their parents get put in prison for smoking a joint as well.
As well they should be in prison for using their children like that.
Those children would be far better off with a parent like that being taken far, far, away never to come back.
Or do you approve of using/abusing children like that to support a drug habit crabs?
Druggies who use their children's urine ARE upstanding, productive citizens , eh crabs?.."often they are just that".
Can you sink any lower?
how do you get "abuse" from using a child's urine?
and you want to put people in prison for trying to beat a drug test?
you are going to have to let out the violent criminals to do that.
and besides, if they have to test to even know if there is any drug use, how much of a problem can the drug use be in the first place?
I'm sorry crabs. I forgot that you may have had a conscious when comes to children and illegal drug use within their families. I was obviously wrong.
Damn right people should be locked up for trying to beat a drug test.
Build more prisons. I'm willing to pay for it.
"how much of a problem can the drug use be in the first place"...OMG!!!...spoken by a true, hard core, brain cell burned, dillusional, doper.
spoken like someone without an answer.
but really, if it's such a big problem, why do they need to test to find out it's there in the first place
yes...you are obviously wrong about a lot of things.
Well, at least you didn't deny it crabs.
What a job opportunity for foldo and craps.
Selling children's urine on the black market!
craps doesn't care if parents take from their kids AND foldo would actually have a job!
Still sucking that free money off the taxpayers fold?
you still taking money from the taxpayers to pay to test someone's urine because you can't tell if they are on drugs, torp?
If there weren't dopers crabs, nobody would have to pay for anything for those weak-minded individuals.
But sadly, there will always be people who can't control themselves, like you.
The difference fold. I respect Luv for being a veteran.
He's not the blowhard, braggart, whiner that you are.