Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Also, what, specifically, is the war on drugs? What does it mean to end it?

I tend to think of it a bit like the Green New Deal: it's a slogan that includes a lot of different aspirational goals. The slogan is, I think, used to justify criminal justice policies relating to drug trafficking. But maybe I'm wrong.

The war on drugs, primarily, is the treatment of drug use/abuse as a criminal matter rather than a public health matter. 

When it gets into the nuts and bolts it basically boils down to drug use, in itself, being a "victimless crime". And I realize that you could say that the user is himself/herself a victim, but it's self-victimization by choice and therefore the user has no incentive to report a crime.

As such, policing of the "war on drugs" basically requires law enforcement to have to surveil / identify / stop purely voluntary transactions. This is in contrast to, say, rape or assault or theft where the injured party brings the offending act to the relevant authorities for redress. 

From a "social justice" standpoint, there are significant disparities in how the war on drugs is prosecuted depending on where you live. Timmy in the suburbs might get sentenced to a drug treatment program for cocaine possession and have the mark expunged from his record based upon successful completion, because Timmy's dad has a lot of money to hire a hotshot lawyer. Tyrone in the projects, however, gets caught with a dimebag of weed and carries "drug possession" on his rap sheet for the rest of his life, making it harder for him to ever rise out of poverty. 

To end the "war on drugs" means to primarily treat drug abuse as a health problem, and not a way to push ever greater numbers of people through "the system" and basically hamstring any efforts they will make to better themselves in the future.

It also means to treat drug use different than drug abuse, much the way we today have legal alcohol but treat alcoholism as a health issue. Where the "war on drugs" becomes so pernicious is that drug use is basically a normal, if not healthy, part of life for a lot of humanity. People enjoy altered mental states. But we criminalize drug use as if it is synonymous with drug addiction, while we don't criminalize sex even though some people are sex addicts, or criminalize gambling even though some people are gambling addicts, and don't criminalize alcohol consumption even though some people are alcoholics.

The goal of ending the war on drugs is to treat drug use as a problem, but not a criminal one.

Hence why some people even refer to it as the "War on (Some) Drugs", to highlight the hypocrisy of things like nicotine and alcohol being legal while [likely less-dangerous] drugs like marijuana are illegal. Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances on the planet, and smoking is a HUGE public health issue. Alcohol has enormous negative social impacts. Yet marijuana is not physically addictive, cannot be overdosed, and unlike alcohol doesn't often lead to violent behavior or cause "blackout" behavior. 

So while there's not one easy answer to exactly "what does ending the war on drugs mean?", hopefully that kind of gives you the framework for the what and the why. 

Y'all, I think I'm going to concentrate my clicks elsewhere, going forward (meaning elsewhere on this site, not completely somewhere else).

But before I go, a couple of things.

1) Keep blaming the poor for being poor.

2) Keep telling yourselves that all government (or merely most) is bad government. Think about the United States' best moments and achievements, and consider how many of them happened in lieu of or in spite of government intervention. I'll click back here to see what you list, at least a little bit.

3) Keep telling yourself that the guy who's raison d'etre is making fun of people who disagree with him isn't fanning the flames of hatred and division in this country.

4) This is probably my only substantive point: you like to point to government safety net problems as the cause of the nations social ills, but those programs were implemented because of those ills. While you point to the Great Society as the reason for poverty and the shrinking middle class, the loss of union power in the private sector correlates even better with the decline of the middle class. Unions (for all their faults, and like any person-run organization, they have plenty of them) helped distribute wealth to the working class, rather than to the ownership class. It worked for much of the post-war period, but in the 1970s union power started to decline. Unions have always been in the cross hairs of the ownership class because they do just that, they distribute wealth down to the workers, which, in turn, protects the middle class. One unfortunate thing that Badge--or one of you, anyway--hinted at above was the clash between the civil rights movement and the private labor unions. Labor unions exist to force management to the bargaining table over wages/benefits and to protect jobs. However, when the civil rights movement gained momentum, that created a conflict between protecting jobs and giving black people (primarily) a seat at the union bargaining table. The ownership class, which has predominantly been Republican, has been more than happy to exploit that schism to keep working class laborers struggling against the civil rights movement, and vice versa. However, we're now at a point in our country's history that private labor unions have lost much of their power, but they are no longer the bastion of whiteness that they were in the 1950s. If private labor were to regain strength today, the clash over job protection and race has largely vanished, so a rising labor movement would raise all working class labor, not just white (or black, latino, etc.) labor.

In the short term, stronger private labor unions might put a dent in my 401K, but in the long term, they would make for a stronger middle class, less poverty, a rising standard of living, and a more stable, better country.

Alright--time for me to (mostly) read other threads.

1.) Who on this site is blaming the poor?

2.) I no of no social program, implemented by the gov't, that has achieved any of the stated goals, stayed within budget and wasn't corrupted from either the inside, outside or a combination of both. Gov't needs to stick to their charter, i.e. the Constitution.

3.) I see people from both sides of the aisle fanning flames. To say it is one sided is willful ignorance.

4.) I'm with Badge on this one for the most part. Public sector unions are immoral and should be eliminated as those paying the bill are not at the table. As to private sector unions, they were responsible for creating the working environment that we have today (8 hour day, 5 day work week, child labor laws, etc.). I believe that there may be pockets where they are still of use, but I cannot point to any specifically. For the most part, my opinion is that they are past their prime and exist to protect the lazy. Again, I could be wrong and there may be some that are actually doing some good, but I have not seen them.

Bwar, I'm up on all of that and generally agree with the concept. But I think the details are pretty hard to work out. What we're saying when we say end the war on drugs is ending the police intervention in the drug trade? Presumably, like with alcohol and nicotine, we would legalize, standardize, and regulate (as opposed to criminlizing) the sale of mind-altering drugs?

Is there any limit to that? Legalize and regulate all drugs? Heroin, cocaine, meth, fentanyl?

[I'm doing a terrible job of staying out of this thread...]

As Cincy suggested, take a look at Portugal's approach:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal

Essentially drugs may still remain illegal, but the way you combat drugs is insanely different than what we do here today. 

I do think marijuana should just be legalized and regulated effectively the same way we regulate alcohol.

What private sector unions do is provide bargaining power to the laborer. A single laborer has little hope of convincing the business owner to increase his or her wages, but the threat of striking, e.g., not having a labor force, provides bargaining power to increase wages/benefits. That bargaining power means that instead of putting all profits into corporate coffers (the shareholders, whomever they may be), the labor force shares in corporate profit as well.

As long as there is capital, unions will have a place in distributing it. The benevolent publicly held corporation is hard to find. In fact, based on U.S. corporate law, it's essentially illegal (as a corporate board's fiduciary duty is to its shareholders).

The company I work for has several plants across the US and around the world. There were a couple that decided to unionize a few years back. Once they did, our customers began either pulling their work or making demands that their work not go through those plants. Needless to say, those plants are no longer around. The work left and the company moved their assets to other plants where they did not have to deal with a union.

Right or wrong, companies don't need the threat of work stoppages in an industry where often the products are time sensitive. Those workers probably had a pretty good contract that gave them additional benefits or more money. However, none of that matters now is all that they have left is that contract. Their jobs are gone. As Fearless said, they can go to work for other employers and compete there for a better wage. 

Bwar, I'm up on all of that and generally agree with the concept. But I think the details are pretty hard to work out. What we're saying when we say end the war on drugs is ending the police intervention in the drug trade? Presumably, like with alcohol and nicotine, we would legalize, standardize, and regulate (as opposed to criminlizing) the sale of mind-altering drugs?

Is there any limit to that? Legalize and regulate all drugs? Heroin, cocaine, meth, fentanyl?

[I'm doing a terrible job of staying out of this thread...]

All drugs legalized, treat them like alcohol. Take the profit out of the black market and you remove the criminal element, killing over turf, etc. Keep people out of jail who have hurt nobody but themselves.

You would think we would have learned from the prohibition era. No one is being killed while bootlegging liquor or fighting over who has what territory to sell it. 

the individual seems to have as much power as the corrupt union

as stated, union shops don't usually get paid more than non-union shops

the individual seems to have as much power as the corrupt union

as stated, union shops don't usually get paid more than non-union shops

The government's Bureau of Labor Statistics disagrees with you.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/04/art2full.pdf

Even these guys, who "advance[] the principles of free market and limited governance" agree that union workers are paid more, though they think not by as much as pro-union people would have you believe. https://www.mackinac.org/22643