Col,
As a Libertarian, what would you say is wrong with the Libertarian view that the war on drugs imposes on individuals’ personal freedom and responsibility and that our communities would be safer when drugs are legalised?

I can’t think of a good enough reason why it would be anyone’s business what substances people choose to take. The very act of smoking, drinking, sniffing, chewing, swallowing or injecting anything into one’s own body does not harm others.
If the result of abusing drugs, e.g. too much alcohol, or taking any other substances results in anti-social behaviour or crime, then THAT behaviour or crime needs to be punished. We punish drink driving, not drinking. Why should, for example, the act of blowing a joint be punished if all the person does is blow and admire the colours of the wallpaper?

Anyway, if you are not ready to see how users of drugs as well as non-users will benefit from the legalisation of drugs then what is your opinion about harm reduction programs?
I see this as some kind of middle ground between legalisation and prohibition of drugs.
Harm reduction programs focus on finding a way to reduce the negative impact of drugs on both the user and the community. For example, needle exchange programs.

Just for the record, I think that the best harm reduction program would be to legalise and regulate drugs.

Look at the article Fractelle linked to and the one I gave about re-classification of drugs in our other debate. We need to base classification of drugs on science, not on historical beliefs about drugs or on emotion.

Pelican,
Are illegal manufacturers of alcohol and tobacco undercutting the price of these legally available substances?
Re-legalisation of alcohol in the US in the 1920s got rid of the black market for alcohol. When it was illegal, the black market thrived. Drinking alcohol was more risky because the quality was tampered with, too.
There were far more problems with alcohol during the period when it was banned, which was the reason to re-legalise it.

Today, the government receives NOTHING from the sale of illegal drugs but we have to clean up the mess with our tax dollars anyway.
When legalised and regulated, the government will receive tax from the sales of these drugs, rather than losing it to a black market.

Drugs don’t really cost much to manufacture- the reason they cost so much on the street is because drug dealers are free to set any price they want especially when supply is low. Especially when the government keeps seizing them.
The price of illegal drugs is not set by manufacturing costs but by demand-supply, and greed.

If the government regulates the price like with tobacco and alcohol, the price will be stable and tax can be spend on health care and drug prevention programs.
It will not be worthwhile for dealers and pushers to create a black market, and one would be foolish to buy from an illegal drug dealer when one can obtain a drug from a licensed dealer, especially when users are required to be educated about the substance they choose to take.

Celivia
I never said the cost of illegal drugs were largely derived from manufacturing costs. I was referring to the cost of manufacturing by governments or pharmaceutical companies should they be made legal. Do you think the pharmaceutical companies are charities? They will want to make a profit and so will their shareholders. The only way the government can regulate is to provide subsidies under programs like the PBS and that was my point, we will be paying a lot more under a legal system than not.

You are right governments don't get anything from the sale of illegal drugs just as they don't get anything from the sale of burgled items or from white collar crime. Governments won't get anything from legalisation either, only a greater cost.

Cannabis is probably one exception in the case of pain relief or for the terminally ill under a prescribed program under the care of a doctor. Particularly in cases where other forms of pain relief may not work or have other side effects.

While the jury is still out on the effects of marijuana, I have seen too many cases of paranoid schizophrenia from marijuana use even in quite young people so legalisation would pose greater problems and greater costs. Some of those patients talk quite openly about their conditions and the effects that drug use has had on their lives. I know some of you will disagree, but for me drugs are not fun, including cannabis.

http://www.abc.net.au/health/minutes/stories/s1885496.htm
http://www.drugfree.org.au/resources/library/marijuana/

The second link has lots of information about drugs that some might find interesting.

In my view, if a substance is illegal less people are apt to use it and the better off we are as a society.

If there is a problem with law enforcement on the 'war on drugs' lets look at fixing that instead of making the problems worse and creating new problems.

Pelican

You have seen the tragic results of the drug black market - yet you claim that legalising, with all the inherent controls and regulation would be a "monumental mistake".

Many here have providing well thoughtful and evidence backed reasons why legalisation works better than prohibition.

Could you please explain how a regulated market for drugs would be inferior to the current situation afflicting Australia?

In 2003 the AIC found:
http://www.incb.org/incb/annual_report_2003.html

"Law enforcement intervention has often been seen as the only viable response to violence and other crimes associated with drug abuse, but there is a need to explore other means of addressing such crimes. It is suggested that persons who abuse drugs and engage in crime and violence should be reformed through a multidisciplinary approach including:

(a) Introducing effective drug demand reduction programmes;
(b) Introducing effective and efficient policing of neighbourhoods and communities to prevent illicit drug trafficking;
(c) Offering assistance to drug-dependent persons so that they can seek treatment;
(d) Referring drug-dependent persons for treatment through the justice system as an alternative to incarceration;
(e) Involving the community in drug abuse prevention;
(f) Creating employment opportunities, thereby providing such persons with a legitimate means of earning an income."

and
http://www.cedro-uva.org/lib/reinarman.dutch.html

" The Dutch example shows that liberal drug laws can be beneficial....
In 1972, after an exhaustive study by a team of top experts, President Richard Nixon's hand-picked National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse recommended decriminalization of marijuana. Five years later, President Jimmy Carter and many of his top cabinet officials made the same recommendation to Congress.....

At about the same time, however, the Dutch government's own national commission completed its study of the risks of marijuana. The Dutch Commission also concluded that it made no sense to send people to prison for personal possession and use, so Dutch officials designed a policy that first tolerated and later regulated sales of small amounts of marijuana."

continued...

continued

"Creeping Totalitarianism

Having scapegoated drugs for so long, U.S. politicians cannot tolerate a tolerant system like the Dutch. They compete for votes on the basis of whose rhetoric is "tougher" on drugs. The Right-wing Republicans who currently control Congress call President Clinton "soft on drugs" even though more drug users have been imprisoned during his administration than under Reagan and Bush. ....

....The number of drug offenders imprisoned in the U.S. has increased 800% since 1980, mostly poor people of color. This has helped the U.S. achieve the highest imprisonment rate in the industrialized world — 550 per 100,000 population, compared to the Netherlands' 79 per 100,000. Under the banner of the war on drugs, a kind of creeping totalitarianism tramples more human rights and civil liberties each year. Tens of millions of citizens — most of whom have never used drugs and all of whom are supposed to be presumed innocent — are subjected to supervised urine tests to get jobs and then to keep jobs. Hundreds of thousands more are searched in their homes or, on the basis of racist "trafficker profiles," on freeways and at airports. Houses, cars, and businesses are seized by the state on the slimmest of suspicions alone. And U.S. school children have been bombarded with more antidrug propaganda than any generation in history....

.... After more than a decade of deepening drug war, U.S. surveys show that illicit drug use by American youth has increased almost every year since 1991. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration admits that hard drugs are just as available, less expensive, and more pure than ever. Hard drug abuse and addiction among the urban poor remain widespread. HIV/AIDS continues to spread most rapidly via injection drug users; meanwhile, the needle exchanges that help stem its spread in every other modern nation remain criminalized in the U.S."

PS

To CJ Morgan - as someone who is not averse to 'stirring' - I think your holier-than-attitude towards my teasing of US not a little hypocritical.

Excellent additional information from all since my comment. Of course I agree with Celivia's and Fractelle's positions. While I understand where Pelican's coming from, I have to say it's exactly this kind of 'half-pregnant' approach that has produced the mess we're in.

Clearly, the illegality of most recreational drugs doesn't stop a very large number of people using them - and doing so in the most hazardous and uncontrolled ways possible. It's hard to imagine how the problems caused by currently illegal drugs could possibly be made worse by legalising them and regulating them strictly, as we do with alcohol and tobacco. Further, there's no evidence to suggest that significantly more people would use them, nor that those who currently do would use them more. Indeed, my reading of the evidence suggests the reverse.

Fractelle - I wasn't having a go at you. Rather, it'd be nice to read a thread in which US or Steel participate where the issue of the evil feminists didn't come up. Even Col Rouge has managed to avoid bringing 'socialism by stealth' or 'dearest Margaret' into this one - likewise Philo didn't make his usual obligatory Christian reference.

However, US managed to confuse his own thread with his hypersensitivity to anything that might be vaguely 'feminist', to which Steel responded like a dog to a whistle. I was trying to imply that it was that obsession that I found distracting from the actual topic, rather than your lampooning of it :)