Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Mwanner (talk | contribs) at 23:39, 2 June 2006 (External links). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Redirected

This page was just a redirect to Talk:Prohibition (drugs). That was confusing. -GTBacchus 01:13, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Unsourced paragraph

This paragraph pretty much reads like original research; it uses material from sources like , but then draws independent conclusions. It's also fairly POV:

One important way of analyzing a policy of drug prohibition is to test whether the decrease in the social costs of drug abuse outweighs the cost of prohibition itself. US Government Agencies do not always make helpful contributions to this analysis. For example, the ONDCP estimated that the cost of drug abuse in 2000 was over $160 billion (1.6% of GDP); but they included losses in productivity due to incarceration, crime, drug-related illness, and other reasons accounting for over two-thirds of that amount. Were the drugs in question to be legalized and taxed, many of those costs would disappear, and a legal trade in these substances would develop, as happened at the end of the Prohibition era. Costs to society would depend largely on any change in the popularity of these drugs, the proportion of abusers, and whether there would be a change in the criminal behavior of drug users. The ONDCP analysis also failed to take into account the effect of the reduced revenue that would accrue to organized crime in a regulated, de-criminalized drug economy.

-GTBacchus 01:13, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

GTBacchus, I was one of the people who worked on that paragraph (though I didn't introduce it and User:Slashme changed it substantially). Having visited the page in the hope of finding a footnote reference for the cost of drug prohibition, I was struck by the fact that the ONDCP report merrily conflated the social costs of drug abuse and the social cost of the war on drug abuse. Drug policy isn't my area of expertise, so I don't know if this kind of disinformation is common, but if it is, the wikipedia article could do well to illustrate it. I realise that objective description of this subject is often going to look POV. Any suggestions? -- pde 09:28, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

This kind of disinformation is all too common from ONDCP, NIDA, etc. Much of the paragraph is sound, but Were the drugs in question to be legalized and taxed, many of those costs would disappear, and a legal trade in these substances would develop is conjectural OR, if also common sense. It would be easy to fix by making it an observation, The report did not consider whether, were the drugs in question to be legalized and taxed, many of those costs would disappear, and a legal trade in these substances would develop. -SM 08:17, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Misleading First Sentence?

The first sentence of this article reads: "The War on Drugs is an initiative undertaken in the United States to carry out an "all-out offensive" (as President Nixon described it) against the non-medical use of certain prohibited drugs." (emphasis added)

Question: Since the Federal government has pursued cases regarding *medical* uses of prohibited drugs, even when used by residents of a state that has expressly legalized said medical use (see Gonzalez v. Raich), should we not therefore strike out the "non-medical" qualifier in this opening paragraph? I hesitate to do so personally until someone is given the chance to explain why that distinction is made here. Perhaps it could be further clarified in some way. I am concerned that it may cause some readers to mistakenly believe that the Federal government does not pursue cases concerning the non-economic, non-recreational, consumption of drugs for purely medical purposes. This is the impression that I got from reading it, and it certainly is not true.

A more accurate and neutral description of this Federal policy, it seems to me, would be to eliminate this phrase. Again, I await a reply before editing it myself.

--SamAdams 3:35, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Hmmm, good point. Maybe it would be better phrased as ...an "all out offensive" (as President Nixon described it) against the prohibited use of certain drugs.

That would cover medical marijuana, which is a prohibited drug (federally speaking), and also the non-medical use of perscription drugs like valium or ritalin. Otherwise, just removing the term "non-medical" would make it sound like they don't distinguish different types of use for any drug, which isn't true either. I guess it's the fed's contention that there is no legitimate medical use of marijuana, but that's certainly POV, and not for Misplaced Pages to imply.

By the way, you're certainly welcome to make edits like this without soliciting comment first; check out WP:BOLD. The worst thing that happens is someone reverts your change and then we end up having this very same conversation. In fact, I'm gonna be bold right now, and change that sentence. Thanks for noticing that error. -GTBacchus 04:07, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Reports

Some interesting repots, on the U.S.'s war on drugs. All cannabis specific however.

• http://www.prohibitioncosts.org/MironReport.pdf
• http://www.cagw.org/site/DocServer/Up_in_Smoke.pdf?docID=1081
• http://sentencingproject.org/pdfs/waronmarijuana.pdf

Zath42 04:19, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

Excellent. Now let's get some discussion of those numbers into the article :). -- pde 10:17, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Request

Page for Charles Bowden? I don't know how solid his work is, which is why I came here. There doesn't seem to be anything on it. I could not see how to place a sensible request via the front-end wikipedia mechanism, but feel free to move this request to another place. Abu Amaal 05:34, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Rewrite

This article is in need of some serious work. There is little coherent orginization, it just seems there are random factoids dispersed throughout. It needs to be shortened, put into chronilogical order and generally made to be more cohesive. Harley peters 23:02, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

I clarified a couple of sentences and added sources for the U.S. govt's complicity in the drug trade. I removed the first sentece of that paragraph because it mentioned "corruption" of American officials. Corruption implies an official's attmept to personally gain, which as far as I know was not the primary motive for the drug smuggling operation. Also, it was a wishy-washy sentence that had very little content aside from the misleading "corruption" charge. --NYCJosh 22:46, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

NPOV notice

This whole thing is little more than an argument against the War on Drugs. I came here to see how the pro-WOD position is justified, and there's not even a hint that anyone really tries to. --♥ «Charles A. L.» 18:06, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

I think its difficult to find people who would be interested in editing a free encyclopaedia and pro-WOD. - FrancisTyers 18:30, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Still, we should be able to find the arguments somewhere and report on them. -GTBacchus 18:32, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

It's possible that these arguments don't feature in the article because they really don't stand up when looked at from a NPOV. That being said, the article should still mention them. The article should also be split into sub headings and have more sources provided. --Apyule 14:38, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

External links

There are way to many external links. I took a shot at trimming them, but it needs more. Misplaced Pages is not a link farm. Links should only be added if they have valuable information that does not belong in the article itself and if they are not trying to sell something. If the information in the link does belong it the article, it should be re-written (to avoid copyright issues) and added to the article. In general, articles should have very few links, because very few links fit these criteria. The idea is that we want our articles to be the best possible source of information on a topic, not a short article followed by a long list of links to other articles-- one might as well just google the subject and read the first dozen sites if we are going to assemble long external link lists.

I'll try to get back to this at some point but it would be nice... -- Mwanner | Talk 23:39, 2 June 2006 (UTC)