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You know what I’m retroactively pissed about? DARE.
Well, okay. Probably about half the reason I’m pissed about them is because I had a phobia of mind-altering substances (as I still do) when I went through the program and thus spent the entire time having a panic attack. That kind of soured me on the whole idea.
But the entirety of DARE, as I recall it in between panic attacks, was about how people are going to peer-pressure you into taking drugs. I spent quite a lot of time terrified of this, because basically the only thing I find scarier than drugs is the idea of people pressuring me into things.
As it happens, I attend a college that is one of the top schools for drug use in the entirety of the United States. I lived with a dealer for a while; I’ve slept with multiple enthusiastic drug users. I have experience here.
What DARE Led Me To Believe Would Happen In This Circumstance:
Them: Hey, we’re going to trip. Wanna join in?
Me: No, thank you.
Them: Come on, are you chicken? Don’t be uncool.
Me: Panic attack.
What Actually Happened:
Them: Hey, we’re going to trip. Wanna join in?
Me: No, thank you.
Them: Okay, cool. I have a lot of respect for the straightedge lifestyle, you know. The important thing is that you know what’s right for you and your body. This sort of thing isn’t right for everyone! It’s really great that you know that about yourself.
I suppose that it’s possible all the horrible pressurey people are hiding somewhere and I just happened to run into all the aggressively tolerant drug users. (The previous sentence was not sarcastic. I have a habit of running into nice people. It’s weird. I am the only trans person in the world who never had a friend respond badly to their request to use gender-neutral pronouns.) But most of the people I know didn’t start using because someone peer-pressured them into it; it was more like “hey, want some?” and they were like “sure.”
I feel like this is the problem you run into when you try to construct an entire anti-drug program without acknowledging that drugs are fun. They make you feel good and see interesting colors and feel a deep sense of connection to the universe and stuff. Even the ones that are a bad idea to take are really fun! That’s why people fucking take them. And while peer group does play a role in access to drugs and making drugs seem like a Thing That Normal People Do and there are people who get coerced or worse into taking drugs, most people who take them take them because they’re fun.
If you can’t say that drugs are fun, because that might encourage people to (gasp) try drugs, then you don’t really have an explanation for why people would risk ODing and being arrested and attempting to hug Hell’s Angels and similar utility-reducing consequences of drug use. So you’re stuck with “…peer pressure?”
Thing of Things 
To be fair, peer pressure gets a lot of people to do stupid things, so it at least seems like a plausible explanation for why people would want to do drugs.
I’ve never been peer-pressured into taking drugs, but I expect that if I weren’t so selective about people I associate with, I could’ve been in a situation in which someone would’ve tried to pressure me.
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The only studies I’ve ever seen showing evidence of peer conformity didn’t involve ‘come on, why not?’ kind of stuff though.
Nobody put pressure on people, people simply did what the group did without being overtly pressured to.
But honestly, I’m not really sure peer pressure when it comes to actual things-that-matter decisions is really a thing. I think peer *reinforcement* – wherein you have an idea, and your peers agree with you, and this makes you believe it more – is a thing, and I think pressure from people who are not your peers is a very very big thing (such as parents, teachers, bosses).
But whenever ‘pressure’ or coercion appears, it always seemed to be tied to power heirarchies, which makes ‘peer pressure’ a poor choice of words. Even teenage boys pressuring girls into sex – another thing people use ‘peer pressure’ about – is enabled and reinforced by a Patriarchy that implies, both to the boy and the girl, that men’s needs are more important, and messages from things that very much do not act like peers, like the media, telling people that this is what you ‘should’ do.
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I agree that there’s an element of hierarchy involved, but if a higher-status member of a peer group pressures a lower-status member, that’s still peer pressure. Peers need not be socially equal.
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Also, DARE has been shown to be ineffective:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448384/
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I hate DARE. I was an addict (mostly meth, some heroin) in my teens and came out the other end… When I did I went into Child and Youth Care counselling and started working at a detox…
I learned lot, mainly that my story wasn’t uncommon. In fact, it had a strong thread throughout others stories….
Most people who do drugs- think they are bad. They feel the world has been unjust and unfair. Their experiences with pain are higher than most.
What I learned was that DARE is useless…. It told kids “Drugs are bad, don’t do drugs.”… But the truth is that kids who had a decent upbringing, boundaries, healthy and attentive parents- didn’t need the message. It was the kids who already felt bad….
So the link was “If drugs are bad and I am bad- then it doesn’t matter if I do drugs.”
DARE, I’m sure, did WAY more harm than good. There is a saying I love that goes “I we want to win the war on drugs- we need to create a world people want to live in, not escape from.”
If there were programs put in place to identify high-risk youth- and then catered to their individual needs- that would have probably cost WAY less money and way more positive results.
I hate DARE. I feel sad for your experience with it, too.
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I always figured that the assumption was that you’d get peer pressured to use drugs in middle or high school, rather than in college. College is less likely to be a totally dysfunctional community. (Do people often start using drugs in prison? That would seem to be where you end up if you extrapolate this to the limit.)
Of course, DARE is still terrible, but that’s for a lot of reasons. Chief among these being that it’s one of the few social interventions that can be said to have been totally debunked, and yet schools seem to not care about this at all.
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I’m a teenager right now, and I’ve definitely gotten the “are you chicken” thing with alcohol.
This despite the fact that I’ve had group conversations where we eventually realized we were ALL straightedge, and felt kind of silly for talking as if everyone else was drinking for a while while the others nodded. So IDK. I’ve never felt pressured into drugs, but I’m clearly selecting my friends pretty heavily, and there’s still a feeling that being anti-drug would be very unpopular.
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I also can’t recall a time I was pressured into using drugs. Alcohol, maybe, but not other drugs. I’ve been offered other drugs and sometimes accepted, because like you said, drugs are fun! (Well, just marijuana; I wouldn’t do anything harder except maybe shrooms or LSD, but I digress.) But it was always just an offer, and when I’ve said no, people have always been totally respectful of that. That includes random strangers who offered me drugs in places such as a concert, and on a chairlift while snowboarding.
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I had no offline social life as a teenager so can’t speak for those years, but as an adult the only drug anyone’s ever attempted to pressure me into taking was alcohol, and only by people who (as far as I know) would /never/ take anything illegal. As far as I can tell that’s considered a socially acceptable thing to do even among adults. Maybe that’s why drug “education” programs (I’m not from the US, so not familiar with DARE) assume everything else works the same way?
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So this doesn’t really address the reasons why you hated DARE, but I think it’s a very important thing that rarely gets mentioned when people bitch about DARE.
DARE isn’t about drugs. It barely even tries; I doubt you’d find anyone actually involved in teaching DARE to kids that really believes it does.
What DARE is actually for is community interaction with police. Kids in DARE are interacting with a police officer in a friendly way with no threat of legal consequences. They see them as people, and are treated as people. And there aren’t many things where the police can be interacting with kids in a nonconfrontational way that is still clearly ‘being police’, so I don’t think something else could take this role easily.
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“No threat of legal consequences” is unfortunately false. Children may tell a “friendly” DARE officer that their parents or other relatives use illegal drugs, leading to those family members being busted, which can radically worsen the child’s life.
http://www.laweekly.com/news/parents-arrested-after-fifth-grader-turns-them-in-for-having-marijuana-joints-kid-inspired-by-la-founded-dare-program-2393781
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Surely they could bring police in to have a friendly talk about something other than drugs, though. Maybe fireworks, abuse/bullying, or safe cycling/driving.
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Some of those might work? Safe driving doesn’t become relevant until older than you’d want to run this (I really doubt you’re going to change any teenager’s mind) and isn’t a very ‘policey’ thing, and fireworks is a pretty contained problem so it would be hard to have it be a regular thing instead of one-and-done. Abuse and bullying could actually work pretty well if they were presented in the right format, I think, but they’re not that natural a topic; maybe I’m giving kids too much credit, but I think they’d tend to see that as a deliberate attempt to butter them up (which would be basically true, but it’s less obvious for something like DARE).
If someone specifically set out to design a program to fulfill this role, I’m sure they could come up with something better for both sides. But the one we have is pretty good at it for being ostensibly focused on something else entirely.
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Our school did have police officers give the “safe cycling” presentation, and it didn’t feel forced at the time.
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Thank you for this comment. I’d never thought of that way before, but I do know that when I hear anti-police criticism and “all cops are pigs” and stuff like that, I specifically thought of objecting “No, the police officer who taught my DARE class was really nice, cops are humans too.”
If that’s the *intended* result – well, I’m not sure if it changes my opinion, but I definitely need to think about it harder.
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Not in the US, so not-DARE was a one afternoon thing in middle school with presentations by a policeman, a doctor and a social worker, with slides and pictures. They were all very nice and answered questions.
The cop was lying, horribly enough that several of us noticed before the afternoon was over. The doctor was lying, but it took some research on my end to be sure.
Result of the afternoon: more confirmation that authority figures are not trustworthy, even when the subject is our health.
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@Scott: Is making the men with guns who will perfectly happily kidnap you—killing you if sufficiently vigorously resist—and stick you in a cage for anywhere from days to decades, simply because you exercised your inherent liberty to put such substances as you chose into your own body or facilitated another comptent and consenting adult’s doing the same . . . seem nicer and more human a good thing?
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(If we accept your framing) If people who do bad things are nice and relatable, I desire to believe people who do bad things are nice and relatable. If people who do bad things are not nice and relatable, I desire to believe that they are not nice and relatable.
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But are they really nice and relatable? Which counts more for determining niceness, friendliness to kids (who are not known to be delinquent), or willingness to kidnap or kill innocent people for violating the whims of the state? Which counts more for determining relatability, an open demeanor and ability to carry on a pleasant conversation, or readiness to turn a careless (or trusting) statement into probable cause?
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I’ll just note that even within the image they’re presenting – “we’re nice people who want to help you by stopping criminals from giving out these harmful substances to the uninformed” – they would still be doing that.
In fact, even if there was no drug war, we would still be paying professionals to hunt down criminals and, yes, beat and/or imprison them.
So for this criticism to be valid, you would have to reject the concept of “laws” and “police” entirely.
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That’s not very far from my actual position: I reject (if not universally, then at least very broadly) the concept of malum prohibitum, and don’t believe that the police have any more inherent right to prevent and punish the commission of mala in se than anyone else.
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Couldn’t they just talk about How Police Can Help You? Hi, I’m a policeman, I’m here to keep the community safe! Let me tell you what to do if you are a victim of a crime and how to stay safe and avoid being a victim of crime in the first place. That sort of thing.
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There are some other methods to encourage interaction with police in low-stress situations — more recently, “community-oriented policing”, and historically the “Officer Friendly” program — but they’ve had a variety of issues. Officer Friendly has become a stock character for police brutality jokes, and modern community-oriented policing programs are notoriously aimless. Moreover, neither had a giant pot of federal money attached.
At a deeper level, I’m somewhat doubtful that any reasonably producable numbers of normal police interactions could make a difference. In the already over-policed United States, there are about one active police officer per every two thousand people at any one time. Restricting to just school-age groups is more doable, but by which point you’re pretty much doing the same thing that having an officer stationed at the school does.
On the other hand, I’ve worked in a lot of communities that are very suspicious of police. They do have interactions with police officers. Often many of them! There are quite a few who had a talk from Officer Friendly when they were younger, and folk living in places with a lotta crime often have encounters with helpful police. But seriously bad encounters overwhelm good ones by orders of magnitude, and the social numbers break down even worse. Even in a perfect world, reports of good police officers acting well are limited to your Dunbar sphere times the number of average interactions with a police officer, while reports of bad interactions with a police officer are the entirety of media ever. And there’s no shortage of the latter, both well-cited and made up.
On the gripping hand I’ve worked with police, and even seeing the many, many of them that are jackasses, there are a good many more who are useful and helpful. Even many of the ones that are jackasses are still useful and helpful.
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I’ll just add a big “me too” in two big respects – in HS and college, I never once had anyone pressure me to use drugs, even if they were using right then and there (offer, yes, but pressure, no). But I’ve had plenty of people at all stages try to pressure me to drink alcohol.
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Heh. I actually wrote a blog post on this: “Scenes From a Childhood in the War On Drugs.”
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I live outside of the US so we didn’t have DARE specifically. But one of my least favourite things about the anti-drug programs was stuff like “It only takes one cigarette to get addicted!” Which really isn’t how it works, and so of course plenty of kids did start smoking, and got away with it for a while, until exams/work/university caught up with them.
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Can’t figure out how the edit comments, but the point was that it pissed me off that a) they were dishonest, and b) the dishonesty didn’t help anyone.
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I lived outside the US, and we had DARE.
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Actually, that pretty much is exactly how it works. New smokers don’t seem to be addicted because they don’t feel any withdrawal symptoms or cravings until they’ve gone several days without smoking a cigarette, but one in four people in a New Zealand study started getting withdrawal symptoms after smoking four or fewer cigarettes.
Source.
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There’s something I want to explain about my own experience. God knows if it’s representative but I suppose that’s not the point.
Throughout my time in college I was never pressured into doing drugs by being called a “chicken”. No one ever insulted me for choosing not to partake. No one was ever rude to me about it. Everyone was always very polite about it.
But I was also completely excluded from any future interaction with those people.
The best example of this was a music club that I was part of. I was one of the founding members. Early on many of the members started holding regular parties or otherwise hanging out, which inevitably consisted of getting drunk or high. I was asked to participate early on. I declined. Never again was I invited to participate in something with these people for the entire rest of my three-year membership with this group.
This isn’t peer pressure. I’m not sure what it is. But I figure it should be said.
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Why doesn’t that count as peer pressure? Just because they never said the words “and if you don’t, we won’t socialize with you”? I don’t think that’s a good reason, because their actions, according to you, were exactly that; they just didn’t verbalize it.
Also, it sounds like “if you don’t, we won’t socialize with you” was implied by social cues and you just didn’t pick up on them.
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Active harassment is different from passive exclusion. Not least because the effects of passive exclusion can often be completely negated simply by finding another (better?) set of friends.
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Yeah I’m not sure about this. Those people may have specifically wanted a drug-centric music club and I’m kinda okay with them creating that space for themselves (the same as I would be okay with someone creating a non-drug centric or anti-drug centric group).
Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t suck for you – being excluded is tough – but as osberend said, active harassment is different.
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Yeah, this is probably worth noting. Both my brother and myself were Music Kids through a sizable part of high school. More counter-cultural parts of the social group used not only tolerance of alcohol and marijuana use but personal alcohol and marijuana use as a touchstone or social rite, and even though it wasn’t an explicit requirement, it very much appeared to be a true one.
This is particularly interesting because both of us are non-straight, and this counterculture covered a lot of other topics than just alcohol or marijuana, including alternate sexuality. My brother met his now-husband through it, and I’m pretty sure it helped him better understand his sexual orientation long before that.
I’m not a social animal, so I don’t know that I’d have had the same types of benefits, but it’s meaningful to note that this was pretty much the only available group of its type at our small high school and one of very few in college (and from what I can tell, most others including the LGBTA Alliance seemed to have similar in-group play, although not always related to drugs or alcohol).
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The closest I’ve come to being pressured to take illegal drugs is that back in high school, one of the stoners I hung out with a lot told me that I should smoke pot, it would really improve my personality. And that wasn’t aggressive, just a friendly suggestion which, having used marijuana since then, I think probably would have been correct. (Mind you, it might well also have triggered schizophrenia—I’m not saying that it was necessarily a good suggestion overall, just a factually accurate one.)
Also, in considering DARE’s intent, it’s important to remember that the guy responsible for it also testified to Congress that he believed that occasional drug users should be shot for treason, because “we’re in a war.”
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“Drug Education” programs are worse than useless. They don’t even mention what is imo the most important piece of information to impart. You should not mix any two of opiates/alcohol/amphetamine(including ADHD meds). If you mix these pairings the risk of overdose becomes dramatically higher. The worst pairing is opiates/ampethamines but “even” opiate/alchol is multiple times as risky as using an opiate alone.
People should probably also be taught that opiates are very risky in terms of overdose. Especially herione and the like. Since the ration of effective dose to Ld50 is really high. For long term users it can be .5.
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Of course, this is further aggravated by illegality, and consequent unknown purity. If your personal ED/LD = 0.5 (note that LD50 is largely irrelevant when talking about long-term users), and you know from experience that your ED = n milligrams, and you have pure heroin and a scale to measure it with, then you’re okay. But if you have heroin that you think is about the same purity as your last batch, and you know that last time it took “roughly this much” to get you straight (precise scales being drug paraphernalia that you don’t want to leave lying around the house), and hopefully this dose isn’t laced with fentanyl . . . yeah, that’s a very different story.
ODs were a lot rarer, back when heroin was sold over the counter in pharamacies.
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I have never used heroine* but I actually have a very accurate scale. I got it because in my “noo-tropics” phase I tried noopept. Which requires extremely small doeses.
*I am actively pro-drug in the sense that I think drugs would be life improving for a large number of people. Though heroine is really dangerous, partially for reasons osberend said. I really like LSD/mushrooms/DMT/pot/modafinil/nictoine(no tobacco)/ampethamines however. Though idk how one should manage addiction risks.
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Minor note, just FYI: Although they’re pronounced the same, “heroine” means a female hero, and “heroin” is a genericized Bayer trademark for diacetylmorphine.
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Being a grad student who hangs out with undergrads a lot, sometimes it’s rather striking how they pressure each other into taking drugs. The people my age won’t pressure you, but the undergrads constantly badger or make fun of people who don’t drink, or who don’t drink enough. It especially annoys me when they do it to other asian people because, um, some of us have lower alcohol tolerance, that’s a thing.
Not to defend DARE. DARE conspicuously failed to prevent any of that stuff from happening.
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Either DARE or MADD (can’t remember which — I regard them as more or less interchangeable) orchestrated a thing at my high school where they did a fake announcement that several of our classmates had been killed in a substance-related car crash. My visceral response of fuck you, assholes was almost certainly a contributing factor to my decision to use drugs later in life. Peer pressure, no. Never experienced that at all.
But yeah, they’re useless. Bunch of self-righteous, moralizing twits. I also recall that a lot of the “drug facts” DARE told us were hilariously inaccurate.
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Our school does something like that, but they tell you in advance that it’s fake, and the students get taken from class by people in costume, which is not a standard casualty trait. They also stage a fake accident scene in front of the school. The one strange thing that happened was last year when they did this, someone fainted in class for unrelated reasons, so the actual EMTs who were there decided to address that case instead of being at the presentation.
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So I’ve done quite a lot of alcohol and drugs in the past. I was, like some other commenters have said, pressured about alcohol but not really drugs. To my regret, I repeated those patterns of pressurisation myself. I’m going to weigh in with a possible, cynical explanation:
Drugs are harder to get and there is often a social norm about sharing them. People don’t pressure you to take drugs because they don’t want to have to share them
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I was gonna say this!
If I’m smoking weed around you, I will offer you some both because it’s a social activity and it’s polite, like if I had a box of chocolates. But if you say no, then cool. I have more delicious chocolates to enjoy later. 🙂
Thankfully I haven’t encountered any real badgering to drink (which I don’t), but it is kind of tiring that everyone assumes you do, and when people organise social occasions around drinking or drinking establishments all the time. Kind of like if everyone was inexplicably into bowling, which wasn’t your thing, but everyone still assumed you were into bowling and the default social location was the bowling alley.
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On the bright side, DARE teaches children at an early age that schools and police lie and are always against them.
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On the dark side, it fails to teach them about the evidence for a greatly increased risk of schizophrenia if you start using marijuana in your early teens . . . that tapers down gradually to a negligible increase, if any at all, by the time you’re into your twenties. Because “pot is pretty safe once your brain has largely finished developing, but is not a great idea before then” is encouraging kids to smoke dontchaknow!
Which is to say, I agree completely, with the added malus that accurate risk information doesn’t get communicated, as their too busy telling exaggerated lies.
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I actually did have people respond to my “No thanks,” with attempts at persuasion and peer pressure. It only happened once, and I recall thinking, “Have I stumbled into an after-school special?” It was especially hilarious because we were all in our early 20s, not high school age. Anyway, I didn’t say much after the “No thanks,” just smiled and nodded politely until they gave up.
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I’ve been at events where underage alcohol consumption occurred, and the alcohol consumer was definitely in the minority, and did not encourage anyone to mimic his behavior.
Also, there are plenty of good arguments against drinking alcohol while underage and then driving a vehicle. (It increases your risk of killing someone, alcohol has negative impacts on development, you’ll probably get arrested.) “Alcohol is flammable” is not one of them, unless you also want to discourage consumption of oil-based salad dressings and almonds.
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Ozy, re: your experiences – those are definitely not the kinds of drug dealers/drug users we have in our town, at least going by a recent problem that’s cropped up in my place of work (have to be as vague as possible due to confidentiality issues, legal issues and hearsay evidence)!
We have a problem where someone needs to be moved from where they are currently living because of a dispute with drug dealers and associates, basically because they gave information as to who said drug dealers were.
This person has had their windows smashed in and was pulled out of their car when stopped at traffic lights and threatened with physical violence – i.e. person making threats would show up at their house with a knife and cut their face to ribbons (that the person making the threats is willing and able to carry out such threats we know, because the person making the threats was involved in a fracas in the city where they put out a man’s eye in a fight). The person needing the housing transfer has two young children and is pretty much terrified for their life and the safety of their family. The police are in agreement that they need to get out of Dodge, as it were.
What led up to this was this person giving testimony, to someone investigating his son’s death, about drug dealing in the town, as they were involved with that scene and wanted to get out of it. The case that provoked the demand for testimony was where alleged suspect beat up a guy (this investigating person’s son) over a drug deal, to where they thought he was dead, then disposed of the body by throwing it into the harbour. Again, allegedly, two companions with suspect told suspect “don’t throw him in, this guy is still alive” and were answered “I don’t care”. Alleged suspect turned up dead a few months later, ostensibly from an overdose, but the gossip is that suspect was deliberately given tainted gear by other gang members so as suspect would not end up in police custody and possibly talk.
Not all our clients on drugs are this interesting; mainly they turn up smashed off their faces, trying to pretend they’re functional, and not fooling anyone (because they are not capable of functioning). Sometimes they get very aggressively and verbally abusive and/or physically violent (one guy, unhappy with the answer we made him, broke the door going out).
Yeah, drugs are all fun and games until you end up being dumped over the bridge into the sea while still alive! 🙂
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Drug laws making drug deals criminal, and this has two effects: (1) street dealers in particular are compelled to engage in violence or threats of violence in order to avoid being robbed or reported, and (2) those who are willing to use violence for other ends (to maintain territory, rob someone, take revenge for insults, etc.) are less likely to be busted for it, because their victims are mostly other criminals, who are less likely to want to deal with the cops.
Want less drug violence? Legalize drugs.
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“We have a problem where someone needs to be moved from where they are currently living because of a dispute with drug dealers and associates, basically because they gave information as to who said drug dealers were.”
Possibly the drug dealers were also dangerous to truly innocent by standers in which case telling the authorities who the dealers are is justified. But if the dealers were mostly just dealing drugs then telling the authorities is a monstrous evil. Drug dealers frequently face extremely long sentences in the USA. The risks of violence or rape in the US system are high. As is the risk of straight up torture (solitary confinement).
I try to have sympathy for everyone. But it is incredibly horrible and evil to report someone for drug dealing. Threatening someone’s children is over the line. But I think drug dealers are very, very justified in threatening and destroying the property of those who report them to the police. If this behavior prevents them from being kidnapped and possibly raped its justifiable self defense.
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Uh, I kind of think people who settle disputes by means of murder (as in the comment you replied to) should be locked up, no matter what they do for a living.
Similarly, even if I was against taxes on principle, I would still give the police evidence of Al Capone’s tax evasion. Wouldn’t you?
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@Nita: I think that’s covered (at least partially) under her remark “Possibly the drug dealers were also dangerous to truly innocent by standers in which case telling the authorities who the dealers are is justified.”
I’m not sure that I’m willing to issue a blanket condemnation of settling “disputes” by murder, since I think it really depends on both the dispute and the alternative means of resolution. If someone straight-up robs you, secure in the knowledge that you don’t dare go to the police (and this is a thing that actually happens to both dealers and buyers), I think you’re quite justified in killing them.
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Nita saying you are against “murder” is almost tautological. At least if by murder you mean “unjustified killing” not merely “killing that is against the current law” *. You are however almost certainly not categorically against “people who are willing to settle disputes with deadly force.” As you presumably consider the police fairly legitimate if not exactly ideal agents. The US military also settles its disputes by killing people but the probability you consider them totally ill-legitimate is not negligible. If you are not from the US just replace US with [country].
I sadly do not think there is any way for a society to get by without some amount of inhuman violence. Steven Pinker’s book “The Better angels of our nature” gives pretty convincing evidence that governments centralizing force lead to a decline in overall violence.** But society seems to me to be far more brutal than it needs to be. Even if force has to be used one should not forget what force means, destroyed human lives. Usually the US government just locks them in cages for absurd periods of time. Criminals seem to rely more or beating or killings.
In the case of the Drug situation the “criminal” side is clearly in the moral right and deserves support. Many drug dealers and most suppliers are peaceful people. Even the one’s who are not more violent than the police. The police cage people for decades. The criminals usually beat and sometimes murder people. Probably the criminals are overall the more peaceful of the two groups. How many police are killed by drug dealers for each drug dealer given a life sentence by the police?
In lots of cases I side with the government. But its surely not because they are the “non-violent” side of the conflict. The government is brutal and vindictive. Few if any criminal gangs target their opponents with such mercilessness. Arguably this mercilessness is needed to enforce certain laws. But its pretty shocking.
*note a consistent use of the later definition means that many genocides victim were not murdered.
* There are many other sources
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I should note I personally am a peaceful person. I would never kill someone who was robing me. I would not even consider killing someone to prevent them from beating me if I thought I would survive the beating without becoming seriously disabled. Whatever their crimes I could not bring myself to deliver a punishment like death. Though I would be fine fighting back from someone trying to beat me.
But I also wouldn’t sentence someone to jail to prevent my beating or robbery. This is just too cruel. And I certainly wouldn’t press charges or testify vs someone unless I was convinced the sentence they were going to receive was going to be pretty lenient. The standard penalties for many crimes are just too harsh for me to do that to another person.
I am not sure my emotional reactions to this are logical. Perhaps I should think of preventing people from hurting other innocent. I do not think I could hurt someone so badly. And sending someone to jail for many years is hurting them very badly. It very easily might mean them repeatedly being raped or enduring years of torture.
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@stargirlprincess: I think that this: “Probably the criminals are overall the more peaceful of the two groups” depends entirely on which criminals you’re talking about. The Cali Cartel’s grupos de limpieza social made official repression of “undesirables” look positively benevolent in contrast.
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To be honest, stargirlprincess, I’m finding your stance a little hard to process. (That is to say: I am both speechless and on the brink of incoherent ranting.)
You said:
Who on earth is “truly” innocent, except very young children? And why do you think you have the right to decide who is to be protected by the law, and who can be written off as “not innocent enough”?
After reading Martha’s story about these people:
– one of them beat someone to the point of unconsciousness and threw them into water
– another one (or perhaps the same one?) irreparably injured someone in a fight, and said to someone else that they would “cut their face to ribbons”
…after all that, do they sound not dangerous to you? Do they sound like highly ethical people who try not to harm “innocent” bystanders?
To me, they sound like thugs who don’t give a shit about ethics. If drugs were legal, they’d be in some other shady business, because that’s where their talents lie — unlike most people (and very unlike you), they have no problem harming or destroying anyone who gets in their way.
Yes, most prisons in the West are still shitty, on both ethical and pragmatic terms. We should all learn something from Norway. But some people are so dangerous right now that putting them in these shitty prisons is the best option available.
Also, the police don’t give life sentences (or any other sentences) to anyone.
And finally, bad laws and legitimacy.
1. Presumably we are talking about Western countries like Ireland or the USA, not Somalia or the “state of nature” from Hobbes’ imagination. Everyone has the option to survive by doing something both peaceful and legal, while advocating for change in any laws they consider unjust. If you consciously choose an illegal occupation, you can’t blame the laws for all the violence you “have to” use.
2. You present “drug dealers” and “the police” as two violent factions on equal moral ground. But the police use violence on your behalf — they are subordinate to the state, which you and your fellow citizens control. Although the legitimacy of the state is questionable, it does have some legitimacy. Criminal gangs (who happily profit from any illegal business, not just drugs) have zero legitimacy, as they are not at all accountable to the people they oppress.
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Nita I will try to explain my position without getting emotional. Perhaps my last posts were too polemical.
1 – You have argued that you don’t want to support the side that uses murder* to get its way. Since “murder” is a clear concept I am going to replace “murder” with “killing, violence and threats of violence.” I am claiming that if the choice is between “US government” and “drug gangs” your position doesn’t make sense. Both the Government and the gangs use violence to get their way. You have to decide on some other grounds other than violence to pick who to support.
2 – I concede I said “police” when I meant or should have meant “US govenrment.” You are correct the police don’t directly sentence people.
3 – By “truly innocent” I mean people who didn’t attack the drug gangs unprovoked. Reporting the drug gangs to the police is an attack. If you try to get someone thrown in a cell for 5-10 years and they fight back you cannot claim innocence morally. Its like watching a bar fight. If you are trying to kill someone and they break your ribs I feel sorry for you. But you certainly weren’t innocent.
4 – I should also note that most people who interact peacefully with drug dealers have little to fear from them. If you don’t help the cops lock drug dealers up and you pay for your drugs on time then you are not going to get beaten or killed (in fact almost gets killed for drug debts as killing people is risky). There are some rare exceptions. Such as witnesses to crimes getting killed but this is pretty rare. The only common exception is that if I try to sell drugs in certain areas I am likely to face pretty serious violence. This is not ok. Drug dealers have no right to attack other drug dealers
5 – The police do alot more good for me than the drug dealers. But I use drugs. So I actually have alot to fear from the police. I am not confident at all they won’t randomly ruin my life. Of course as I said before I am not an ancap. But the people who have a good reason to fear police dramatically outnumber those with a good reason to fear drug gangs. Though of course the drug gangs do negligible good compared to the police.
6 – “But the police use violence on your behalf — they are subordinate to the state, which you and your fellow citizens control. “ I find it pretty hard to remain calm when I read things like this. I personally have no control over what the police do or what the laws are. Except I guess that my twin sister is a NYPD police officer. And I have some ability to ask her for favors. But unless I go through my sister I have actual zero control.
7 – “To me, they sound like thugs who don’t give a shit about ethics. If drugs were legal, they’d be in some other shady business, because that’s where their talents lie — unlike most people (and very unlike you), they have no problem harming or destroying anyone who gets in their way. “
This quote implies to me you have very bad intuitions about drug dealers and other people engaged in criminal activities. Criminal activities tend to attract those who are impulsive and lack emotional control. Criminal activities do not (on average) attract those who are intelligently selfish and amoral. Crime pays very poorly. People who are skillful at being selfish and amoral would not go into the drug trade.
The drug trade also contains alot of genuinely kind people. Many people view drugs as valuable and good. And therefore that supplying drugs is helping people. This attitude is admittedly mostly common among people who sell psychedelics and pot (not psychedelics are still very illegal). The average drug dealer does not deal out of altruism. But they aren’t evil either. Most people don’t want to hurt people who didn’t screw them over or disrespect them.
Your attitude toward dealers reminds me of the attitude people have toward police. Police engage regularly in behavior many people find inhumane. I know police and being in the police normalizes this violence alot. You hear people casually talking about stomping on a “perps” face. You should hear how police talk minority communities in NYC during the NYPDs current “fight” with the Mayor. The standard phrase is “let the animals kill each other.” Most shocking is the NYPDs complete disregard for the law. Even in cases where they settled in court that they would accept a certain guideline (they agreed to no arrest quotas ears ago and to “no choking” well before the Garner case) they just blatantly ignore the laws.
The things police say are obviously terrible. But police (even the NYPD) aren’t terrible monsters. Neither are drug dealers, even most of the drug dealers who have killed people. I am maybe in an odd spot in that my sister is a Police officer and my mom comes from a very low income background and remains friends with people who are basically “Career criminals.” Some of these people have done genuinely terrible things (drug dealing peacefully is not terrible imo). But modelling them as totally selfish and amoral is not accurate at all.
8 – I personally don’t deal drugs. I won’t get into physical altercations (though I have little opportunity here). And I would not accept a position on the NYPD. I do not think its particularly ethically healthy to get into situations where you are going to be forced to be violent. But I am not about to judge those who are engaged in conflicts by the same standards as people who never have to fight (like me!).
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“Yeah, drugs are all fun and games until you end up being dumped over the bridge into the sea while still alive! :-)”
Most people seem very happy to throw even peaceful drug dealers in cages like dogs. I don’t wish harm on anyone. But the anti-drug side has produced mountains of destroyed lives. A rather high percentage of those destroyed lives are African American for those who care.
Trying to claim the anti-drug side is the peaceful side is absurd.
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On just a gut level I do not understand how anyone could turn someone in for drug dealing. Unless one was being harassed for a different reason and using the drug laws in self defense.
Sending someone to jail is really horrible. Why would you want to do that to another human being who has done you no wrong. The desire to jail someone over this sort of thing just feels like a complete failure to have any empathy. Sorry to jut keep writing but it really creeps me out. Sending someone to a US jail on drug charges is very, very serious. It should only be done for a very strong reason. Doing this to someone who hasn’t hurt you very badly feels inhuman.
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