War on Drugs Filipino style

[Osmium Steele]

Originally Posted by Oberon

It doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to reduce that price, after all, isn't that exactly what we've striven to do in warfare technology since the Second World War?

What about the people of Dresden, Hamburg, Coventry, London, Berlin, Warsaw, Rotterdam, Guernica, Frampol, and Kassel achieve for their nations war effort? Was the end of the war in Europe hastened by Bomber Commands attacks on civilian targets?

A certain Star Trek episode comes to mind, and remember, that series was written by WWII veterans who saw the horrors up close.

WWI was a relatively clean war. Static fronts, mainly warfighters dying in the millions, and just 20 years later WWII broke out.

With the above carnage you mentioned, there hasn't been another war on the continent for 70+ years and Germany has a phobia of being seen as too aggressive. Yet elsewhere, the American war machine has made war clean, precise, with minimal collateral damage and fighting flourishes in endless streams of violence.

War SHOULD be horrible. It should affect "those back home" in very real and visceral ways so as to minimize the tendency to wage it.

I think it was Robert E. Lee who said, "It is good that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it."

[Von Due]

Originally Posted by Osmium Steele

should affect "those back home" in very real and visceral ways so as to minimize the tendency to wage it.

I think it was Robert E. Lee who said, "It is good that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it."

One problem here is it's not just the "people back home" who are affected. Civilians in the war zones are very much affected and they never waged it, asked for it or wanted it. It was thrown at them and they had to and still have to pay heavy prices they should never have had to pay. I don't think anyone in my neighbourhood can explain to me the horrors the way those living dab in the middle of it can.

In a war, civilians have always been "legit" targets. Reliable WW1 numbers are hard to come by but most agree that Russia and the Ottoman Empire saw horrendous losses of civilian lives due to the war directly or war crimes stemming from and committed during the war.

What makes WW2 so "special" is the sheer number of civilians lost (as well as the direct causes) but it was in no way the first war where civilians were targeted. Nor the last. Drug wars are no exceptions with massacres of civilians in recent decades.

[Mr Quatro]

What if instead of killing the drug dealers and drug users you just lock them up in football stadiums and sell them the drugs that you confiscate.

Let them do drugs till they overdose and make money off of them at the same time. They will always find a way to buy drugs in prison or out of prison.

[Von Due]

Many users are easily reached but not all. Cocaine and amphetamine are still hugely popular and accepted in the high end of society with lawyers and businessmen/CEOs among them.
The top dogs in the organizations are a whole other deal. How are you going to reach people who are protected by officials, in some cases by the same people who are supposed to go after them?
What will happen is, inconsequential and totally replaceable dealers will go down together with users not so fortunate as to have a job title to hide behind and the people pulling all the strings, recruiting, bribing, blackmail and kill their way into society will go free.

Apart from this: Users need to kick their habit. Easy to say, huh? but it's the truth. Prison, death, that's not what they need. They need to get out of it. If they can do it themselves then great, and some do get out with support from family and people around them. If they can't quit themselves, then they should get the aid they need to put it behind them. What that should be, I don't know but it is a case-to-case issue.

For the dealers I have a lot less sympathy but I do acknowledge that behind any dealer on the corner is a trail that leads to heavy duty organized crime and the poverty that drives farmers to grow opium or coca plants.

[Mr Quatro]

Originally Posted by Von Due

Many users are easily reached but not all. Cocaine and amphetamine are still hugely popular and accepted in the high end of society with lawyers and businessmen/CEOs among them.
The top dogs in the organizations are a whole other deal. How are you going to reach people who are protected by officials, in some cases by the same people who are supposed to go after them?
What will happen is, inconsequential and totally replaceable dealers will go down together with users not so fortunate as to have a job title to hide behind and the people pulling all the strings, recruiting, bribing, blackmail and kill their way into society will go free.

Apart from this: Users need to kick their habit. Easy to say, huh? but it's the truth. Prison, death, that's not what they need. They need to get out of it. If they can do it themselves then great, and some do get out with support from family and people around them. If they can't quit themselves, then they should get the aid they need to put it behind them. What that should be, I don't know but it is a case-to-case issue.

For the dealers I have a lot less sympathy but I do acknowledge that behind any dealer on the corner is a trail that leads to heavy duty organized crime and the poverty that drives farmers to grow opium or coca plants.

Good points Von Due come join us more often

Most drug dealers are users, started off by another dealer with the hint that they can supply their own need by selling the drug too.

What I propose will never happen in this country, but it could very well start in another country. Just put them in all in the same prison with drugs that are for sale ... then test everyone and the one with clean blood gets to go free.

[Moonlight]

^ sounds good, there won't be many being set free though.
You could always give them an incentive to be drug free, get the cameras rolling and the one with the highest drug count in their body gets to face the rope.
Clean and simple me thinks but our useless governments wouldn't go for it, They could call it "stop or drop", it would make something worth watching on the TV for a change.
You might think that I'm jesting about it but I'm deadly serious, I despise drug addicts and pushers and if they needed someone to do the job my name would be going forward.

[August]

Originally Posted by Moonlight

^ sounds good, there won't be many being set free though.
You could always give them an incentive to be drug free, get the cameras rolling and the one with the highest drug count in their body gets to face the rope.
Clean and simple me thinks but our useless governments wouldn't go for it, They could call it "stop or drop", it would make something worth watching on the TV for a change.
You might think that I'm jesting about it but I'm deadly serious, I despise drug addicts and pushers and if they needed someone to do the job my name would be going forward.

Well if our government ever starts doing this then i'm joining the rebellion that it will cause.

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Moonlight

^ sounds good, there won't be many being set free though.
You could always give them an incentive to be drug free, get the cameras rolling and the one with the highest drug count in their body gets to face the rope.
Clean and simple me thinks but our useless governments wouldn't go for it, They could call it "stop or drop", it would make something worth watching on the TV for a change.
You might think that I'm jesting about it but I'm deadly serious, I despise drug addicts and pushers and if they needed someone to do the job my name would be going forward.

Was that you I saw constructing the gallows when I was driving through Sheffield last week?

[Von Due]

Originally Posted by Mr Quatro

Most drug dealers are users, started off by another dealer with the hint that they can supply their own need by selling the drug too.

In numbers, that is completely true, I believe but in volume, combined they are still small fish. They are the replaceable ones, easily disposed of if wanted. They might make what, a grand, a couple of grand a week but the big fish make millions each week. Some make tens of millions a week or more.

These guys don't sell grams but kilos or tons, and they don't stand on the corner. They are in the shadow paying others to do the jobs. The very top make good efforts in staying out of the spotlight, getting the big money and handing out jobs via a chain of people. On that level, the ones staying alive the longest are the ones not using since users are often seen as a liability and security risk and are not rarely found face down in a ditch somewhere, or if they're Mexican, their family members are found face down in a ditch somewhere if there are anyone left in the town alive to discover anything at all.
Rarely are these big fish caught and when they are caught, the prisons show little to no interest in isolating them. On the contrary. These big fish have prison guards and directors, police, lawyers and judges, soldiers, leutenants and generals, and politicians, on their payrolls. The ones taking the bribes won't bite the hand that feeds them.

For that reason alone don't I have the slightest illusion that any state or Govt will solve the drug problem. They will go public crying out for war against drugs but apart from the lone weirdo who didn't take bribes, war against drugs would more likely mean war against the gang or family that threatens their own favourite gang or family. Call me cynical but that's how I gathered it is.

[Catfish]

You should really read Don Winslow's "The power of the dog" and "The cartel", they are real eye openers. It is about Mexico and the Narcos, but don't blame it on them, it is the US that buys most of the drugs.

The cartels may have been mere trafficking gangs long ago, but are now "little states, with their bosses being politicians sending other men to war. Some of those men are putatively public servants, but graft has so comprehensively penetrated the state that at one point the drug wars take the surreal form of local police fighting their federal counterparts, each side on the payroll of a different cartel."

The higher powers like e.g. the American government and the Mexican government have a philosophy like there is always going to be a drug trade and a drug cartel, so it might as well be our drug cartel. If you want to blame and shoot all who are somewhere in the drug selling chain, you can begin with the Mafia, with the Mexican and US government, and then go on to their law enforcement, the CIA, and then go on to Europe, China, anywhere, but it will not work.
No chance in hell you will get this ever right.

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Osmium Steele

A certain Star Trek episode comes to mind, and remember, that series was written by WWII veterans who saw the horrors up close.

WWI was a relatively clean war. Static fronts, mainly warfighters dying in the millions, and just 20 years later WWII broke out.

With the above carnage you mentioned, there hasn't been another war on the continent for 70+ years and Germany has a phobia of being seen as too aggressive. Yet elsewhere, the American war machine has made war clean, precise, with minimal collateral damage and fighting flourishes in endless streams of violence.

War SHOULD be horrible. It should affect "those back home" in very real and visceral ways so as to minimize the tendency to wage it.

I think it was Robert E. Lee who said, "It is good that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it."

A Taste of Armageddon? Good episode that, and I could see a future war being fought like that.
Truth be told, I'd rather that we never had war, but could our planets population growth survive such a thing? Perhaps, one could hope that in such a utopia we would be able to up reach up those living in poverty and reduce the rate of child birth and mortality into a rate which is sustainable for our food and water supplies.
Unfortunately I don't think we'll ever see the end of war, and while I can see the point you're making in that war should be so terrible that we dare not wage it, you just know that eventually someone somewhere would cross that line. Take nuclear weapons, we've managed seventy odd years without one being used, but the longer we go on, I think the more likely it becomes that someone somewhere is going to use one.

Time will tell.