Feel like most Americans would get behind this 

End War on Drugs 
End Qualified Immunity
End Civil Asset Forfeiture
End No Knock Raids
End Private Prison Systems

2 hours ago, DaEagles4Life said:

Feel like most Americans would get behind this 

End War on Drugs 
End Qualified Immunity
End Civil Asset Forfeiture
End No Knock Raids
End Private Prison Systems

Maybe severely limit it, but there are times when you absolutely need no knock raids.

Just now, TEW said:

Maybe severely limit it, but there are times when you absolutely need no knock raids.

Someone's life is in danger. 

1 minute ago, DaEagles4Life said:

Someone's life is in danger. 

Yeah, basically. But in general, I agree that they're unnecessarily dangerous for everyone involved.

4 hours ago, DaEagles4Life said:

Feel like most Americans would get behind this 

End War on Drugs 
End Qualified Immunity
End Civil Asset Forfeiture
End No Knock Raids
End Private Prison Systems

These 5 policy positions would combine to bring about drastic societal changes for all of us. Some for the better and some not. 

8 hours ago, PoconoDon said:

These 5 policy positions would combine to bring about drastic societal changes for all of us. Some for the better and some not. 

Change can be painful. A lot of people at the DEA would lose jobs.

Beyond that, what are the changes for the worse? 

Serious question. Not being a jackarse. I'm sure there are some downsides, I just take the net positives as overwhelming.

13 hours ago, DaEagles4Life said:

Feel like most Americans would get behind this 

End War on Drugs 
End Qualified Immunity
End Civil Asset Forfeiture
End No Knock Raids
End Private Prison Systems

RIP bro.  We'll know you didn't shoot yourself in the back of the head 2 times like the CIA says.

13 hours ago, DaEagles4Life said:

Feel like most Americans would get behind this 

End War on Drugs 
End Qualified Immunity
End Civil Asset Forfeiture
End No Knock Raids
End Private Prison Systems

You'd be surprised. The government is now trying to ban Menthol cigarettes and most people seem to be on board.

46 minutes ago, rambo said:

RIP bro.  We'll know you didn't shoot yourself in the back of the head 2 times like the CIA says.

It's gaining steam. 

 

1 hour ago, JohnSnowsHair said:

Change can be painful. A lot of people at the DEA would lose jobs.

Beyond that, what are the changes for the worse? 

Serious question. Not being a jackarse. I'm sure there are some downsides, I just take the net positives as overwhelming.

Drugs BAD! 

But we can drink ourselves to death, eat ourselves to death, and take enough over the counter meds to kill ourselves. 

29 minutes ago, JohnSnowsHair said:

Change can be painful. A lot of people at the DEA would lose jobs.

Beyond that, what are the changes for the worse? 

Serious question. Not being a jackarse. I'm sure there are some downsides, I just take the net positives as overwhelming.

Ending the War on Drugs - Define ending the war on drugs. Sounds good on the surface, right? but what does it really mean? Full legalization of all drugs to end all interdiction and other enforcement? What are the costs associated with that policy decision? Or does it mean something else? What costs are associated with whatever that policy decision may be. IMO, legalizing pot is fine. Manage it like alcohol. Other more dangerous and addictive drugs? No.

Ending Qualified Immunity - In effect you will end police response. Oh they'll answer calls, but at 5 mph to ensure they don't hurt anyone getting there, and once they get there about an hour after needed, they'll talk to people but take no physical action for fear of exposure to civil liability. The point of qualified immunity is not to create blanket immunity but immunity that must first qualify as such. Criminal acts by police don't and won't qualify. I doubt any insurance company will cover them given the risk so, if they have no qualified immunity then the job better pay enough to offset civil decisions against them stemming from malice free human error. Talk about a tax increase. The reality is that without that protection, nobody will take the job except the very people that no one wants in those positions. 

End Civil Asset Forfeiture - OK. As long as we agree that all ill-gotten gains from all criminal enterprises and activities is perfectly fine as income and untouchable, because that's what it means.

*The first three taken to their logical conclusion, combine to create a drug cartel's dream world. No federal interference with supply. State and Local police afraid to act on anything. All illicit profits are kept. What's not to love there? The end result will likely be more property and personal crimes associated with more widespread drug use. The other organized crime groups in the country would do very well also. Every bad guy gets a golden goose. Doesn't matter how you made the money, once you got it, it's yours forever baby. 

Ending No Knock Raids - I'm actually pretty good with this one. There might be a few rare exception here and there  where it's needed to save live(s). Otherwise, I'm on board. 

Ending private prison systems - I agree 100%. Prison should not be a privatized for profit industry. 

The War on Drugs has cost the American taxpayers over ONE trillion dollars and is no end in sight. At what point do we say this is an absolute failure and time to look different options because except for prison systems and police department budgets it is helping no one. 

I have to say, I largely disagree with the first two. 

Ending the War on Drugs - I think there are plenty of archetypes of broad drug decriminalization that has been proven to work. If you want to just start with marijuana, ok, but successful policies have largely revolved around a basic tenet: possession of small quantities of drugs for personal use is treated as a health issue, not a criminal one. aggressively treat drug addicts as an issue of public health, don't criminalize. You don't have to open the doors to some libertarian "utopia" where people are sidling up to bars and injecting themselves with heroin over a beer. 

We didn't always have qualified immunity, and IMHO it's clearly an overreach as currently instituted. There are simply far too many officers who engage in bad behavior and hide behind the badge. Take the multiple incidents in this thread from one small police department in Colorado: how an officer can still have a job after breaking the shoulder of a man invoking the 5th amendment over helping remove a downed motorcyclist from a roadway is beyond me. Yeah he got a $290k settlement from the good people of Colorado, but the officer should simply have been cast off the force for such behavior. Most Americans who engaged in such behavior outside the bounds of their SOP and in doing so cost the company six-figure fines would have been given a pink slip long ago. I can't go on like it is.

Civil Asset Forfeiture is missing due process in many cases. It's not income until someone is prosecuted. Someone carrying large quantities of cash is not committing a criminal offense, and unless there is some basis beyond simply the possession of cash then officers of the state should have ZERO basis to seize it. 

31 minutes ago, PoconoDon said:

*The first three taken to their logical conclusion, combine to create a drug cartel's dream world. No federal interference with supply. State and Local police afraid to act on anything. All illicit profits are kept. What's not to love there? The end result will likely be more property and personal crimes associated with more widespread drug use. The other organized crime groups in the country would do very well also. Every bad guy gets a golden goose. Doesn't matter how you made the money, once you got it, it's yours forever baby. 

You're committing a slippery slope fallacy.

14 minutes ago, DaEagles4Life said:

The War on Drugs has cost the American taxpayers over ONE trillion dollars and is no end in sight. At what point do we say this is an absolute failure and time to look different options because except for prison systems and police department budgets it is helping no one. 

But it makes the government agents a lot of money and certain agencies a lot of dark money to run their ops.

37 minutes ago, JohnSnowsHair said:

I have to say, I largely disagree with the first two. 

Ending the War on Drugs - I think there are plenty of archetypes of broad drug decriminalization that has been proven to work. If you want to just start with marijuana, ok, but successful policies have largely revolved around a basic tenet: possession of small quantities of drugs for personal use is treated as a health issue, not a criminal one. aggressively treat drug addicts as an issue of public health, don't criminalize. You don't have to open the doors to some libertarian "utopia" where people are sidling up to bars and injecting themselves with heroin over a beer. 

We didn't always have qualified immunity, and IMHO it's clearly an overreach as currently instituted. There are simply far too many officers who engage in bad behavior and hide behind the badge. Take the multiple incidents in this thread from one small police department in Colorado: how an officer can still have a job after breaking the shoulder of a man invoking the 5th amendment over helping remove a downed motorcyclist from a roadway is beyond me. Yeah he got a $290k settlement from the good people of Colorado, but the officer should simply have been cast off the force for such behavior. Most Americans who engaged in such behavior outside the bounds of their SOP and in doing so cost the company six-figure fines would have been given a pink slip long ago. I can't go on like it is.

Civil Asset Forfeiture is missing due process in many cases. It's not income until someone is prosecuted. Someone carrying large quantities of cash is not committing a criminal offense, and unless there is some basis beyond simply the possession of cash then officers of the state should have ZERO basis to seize it. 

You're committing a slippery slope fallacy.

The war on drugs centers around curtailing the supply, to whatever extent it can be. Ending that creates an unfettered supply line. That much is clear. What impact that would have on society is unclear. I'm curious as to what example you can offer where broad decriminalization has worked without a significant increase in human and monetary costs? I'm just not aware of any.

If drugs are far easier to acquire and use in small amounts without consequence, won't their use be normalized? Won't there be a natural increase in their use through social acceptance? Won't that lead to more addiction and drug related crimes?  I can't imagine our culture instantly developing the self discipline necessary to avoid those problems. I've seen addicts commit a plethora of crimes, some of them heinous,  to feed their addiction. As for bars, you're probably right, but who really knows what public behavior will prevail when you normalize personal drug use across the board? I strongly suspect that If personal use is unregulated and otherwise ignored, the 21st century version of the old "opium dens" will most certainly arise. Birds of a feather and what not.

As to qualified immunity. It's been around for 150 years. It's not a free pass to do whatever someone wants. It's "qualified" immunity. That means the behavior of the Officer has to be reasonable under the totality of the circumstances, without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, and within the parameters of his/her training/education and Dept. policies. When an officer intentionally steps outside of those qualifying conditions, their immunity is supposed to evaporate and the Police Department (Gov't) separates from the officer for civil judgment. At that point he/she is on his/her own. 

Now, are departments failing to try to disqualify when they should? Maybe so. That seems to be the problem. Punishing the good ones for the sake of a handful of bad ones isn't the answer. Root out the bad ones and dump them. That's the correct answer.  Eliminating all immunity for police officers will strongly incentivize them to do nothing at all, forever. That's just human nature, and contrary to what I think we should want from our police. 

I've never seen any forfeiture that wasn't accomplished through due process, which resulted in a court ordered forfeiture. A seizure of assets isn't a forfeiture of those assets. The timeline for forfeiture hearings is relatively quick too. If the State can't make a case sufficient to shift the burden of proof to the Defendant, then the assets are returned. Typically, just having the cash isn't nearly enough.

I don't think it's the slippery slope fallacy, which most often arrives at an unrelated negative conclusion. I think what I've offered is directly related to the issue as a possible negative outcome. I think it's just understanding human nature in American society. Certainly not everyone will behave as I've pointed out, but there are some who, if you give them an inch, they'll take a mile. Cause and effect exist outside of the fallacy.

 

Portugal shows it works. Older data, but numbers don't lie

Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006. 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/portugal-drug-decriminalization/

For a dollar spent on treatment, up to three are saved in crime reduction. An earlier study found that interventions to address substance use disorders save more in reduced crime than they save in reduced health care spending.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14651494/

The researchers found that the opening of an additional treatment facility in a county is associated with lower drug-related mortality in that county, as well as lower crime. The effect of crime reduction alone would save an estimated $4.2 million per facility per year, or almost four times its cost.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/upshot/spend-a-dollar-on-drug-treatment-and-save-more-on-crime-reduction.html

1 minute ago, DaEagles4Life said:

Of course decriminalization should result in fewer arrests by its very nature.

Are the other changes the result of policies like the French have of providing proper doses and clean needles? 

Projections for how these changes will impact Oregonians are dramatic. According to an analysis of the bill by the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, racial disparities in drug arrests would decrease by 95 percent under the law. There would be 1800 fewer felony convictions a year and 1900 fewer misdemeanor convictions across the state, according to the analysis.

https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/how-oregons-radical-decriminalization-of-drugs-was-inspired-by-portugal

1 minute ago, DaEagles4Life said:

Projections for how these changes will impact Oregonians are dramatic. According to an analysis of the bill by the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, racial disparities in drug arrests would decrease by 95 percent under the law. There would be 1800 fewer felony convictions a year and 1900 fewer misdemeanor convictions across the state, according to the analysis.

https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/how-oregons-radical-decriminalization-of-drugs-was-inspired-by-portugal

I'm really interested to see how this plays out.

5 minutes ago, PoconoDon said:

Of course decriminalization should result in fewer arrests by its very nature.

Are the other changes the result of policies like the French have of providing proper doses and clean needles? 

Yes, you can get free needles and get your drugs tested as well. Which is extremely important because Fentanyl and sleeping pills are cheaper to mix with heroin and have higher death rates. 

1 minute ago, DaEagles4Life said:

For a dollar spent on treatment, up to three are saved in crime reduction. An earlier study found that interventions to address substance use disorders save more in reduced crime than they save in reduced health care spending.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14651494/

The researchers found that the opening of an additional treatment facility in a county is associated with lower drug-related mortality in that county, as well as lower crime. The effect of crime reduction alone would save an estimated $4.2 million per facility per year, or almost four times its cost.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/upshot/spend-a-dollar-on-drug-treatment-and-save-more-on-crime-reduction.html

It's promising for those who desire treatment. The majority of addicts do not however, and will refuse it outright. What do you do with those folks? Estimates of possible outcomes is great if we can extrapolate for the entire population of addicts, but some estimate that 90% of addicts avoid treatment. I'm not suggesting that the centers can't help, but keeping proper perspective is important. 

1 minute ago, VanHammersly said:

I'm really interested to see how this plays out.

Only article I could find on it so far but using 100 million in weed tax revenue is smart to fund the program. 

4 minutes ago, PoconoDon said:

It's promising for those who desire treatment. The majority of addicts do not however, and will refuse it outright. What do you do with those folks? Estimates of possible outcomes is great if we can extrapolate for the entire population of addicts, but some estimate that 90% of addicts avoid treatment. I'm not suggesting that the centers can't help, but keeping proper perspective is important. 

If we extrapolate the problem it's usually not a drug problem only. Look at coal country and the opioid epidemic. It's not they all wanted to turn to drugs all at once. Coal was given the middle finger and a majority of these people lost their livelihood. 

The country said F em and didn't help get these people new training or job skills so they turned to drugs and alcohol. 

I think it is naive to say most people who are addicts, don't want help. They have issues beyond drugs, that we think is just a drug problem. 

If we legalized heroin and asked 100 people who wants to try it, you may get one person. It's not like we will see lines out the door to go hard drugs.