Moral judgment / War on Drugs
Francois Tremblay Permalink
4 comments
I read an article on memetics recently that brought to my mind the following question. How well does the claim that Christianity is necessary for moral judgment fit with "Jesus"' admonition of "judge not lest ye be judged" and his calls for "universal love" ?
I'm gonna go ahead and say, once again, that presuppositionalists are full of it.
Norm Stamper, ex-police chief of Seattle, has a lot of interesting things to say about the War on Drugs (to which both the anti-individualism of statism and Christianity's anti-worldly attitude have made big contributions) :
Lasting far longer than any other of our national conflicts, the drug war has been prosecuted with equal vigor by Republican and Democratic administrations, with one president after another — Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush — delivering sanctimonious sermons, squandering vast sums of taxpayer money and cheerleading law enforcers from the safety of the sidelines.
It's not a stretch to conclude that our draconian approach to drug use is the most injurious domestic policy since slavery. (...) In 1980, 580,900 Americans were arrested on drug charges. By 2003, that figure had ballooned to 1,678,200. We're making more arrests for drug offenses than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault combined. Feel safer?
I've witnessed the devastating effects of open-air drug markets in residential neighborhoods: children recruited as runners, mules and lookouts; drug dealers and innocent citizens shot dead in firefights between rival traffickers bent on protecting or expanding their markets; dedicated narcotics officers tortured and killed in the line of duty; prisons filled with nonviolent drug offenders; and drug-related foreign policies that foster political instability, wreak health and environmental disasters, and make life even tougher for indigenous subsistence farmers in places such as Latin America and Afghanistan. All because we like our drugs — and can't have them without breaking the law.
Don't miss the second part of my "Roman chat" series, below. Thank you !
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4 Comments:
Not to bring up Penn and Teller again unnecessarily, but they've got a great episode on the War on Drugs, too.
Thats intense. Its so sad too, to see that all the American presidents just blindly go along with the rhetoric of the drug war.
I honestly cant figure out if all these presidents 1) REALLY think the drug war is a GOOD idea, or 2) Pretend its a good idea to get more votes.
Too many Americans actually believe the drug war is good policy. Most Californians dont (whew!) but California is a very unique state compared to the rest of America.
*sigh* why are so many people still so damn stupid? Are we still so primitive????
Wow. I didn't know the extent of the situation. Great comments. Little left to say apart from: death to coercion, hail libertarianism.
I concur with the comments of richiegb. I have been saying for many years that if this is a war, where are the body bags? The whole bloated infrastructure is geared toward picking up small fry and end-users. To actually stop the flow of drugs would be to jeopardize all of the jobs that the project has created. Jobs above the "grunt" level look pretty cushy to me. There is also an added incentive to keep the drugs flowing: under the Regan administration, the government gets to send in the Jack-boots to confiscate everything you have if you are busted for dealing. This makes the government partially dependant on the revenue received from these raids, and as complacent in drug trafficking as they are in the sale of tobacco and alcohol.
Disband the DEA! Put law enforcement back in the hands of the local police, and stop funding government agencies with blood money.
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