The rules are wrong, therefore the blame lies in the law. If there was no market there would be no 'value stream'...

So now it's the addict's fault that our inner cities are laced with
drugs and thugs? It's the user's fault that normal people dare not
set foot into the ghettos that exist in every major city in America?
All we have to do to fix this mess is "change the law"?

That may be the most naive thing I've ever seen written here -- and
*that* is not an easy cliff to scale!

If you had any experience in the inner cities of America, you would
know that drugs are the scrourge of EVERYTHING and EVERYONE there.
The "market" you speak of exists because of a drug cartel that
produces and provides cheap drugs for easy distribution to people who
apparently have nothing left to lose.

These people then think nothing of taking everything that anyone else
has to lose, in order to maintain their drug addiction -- and the
cycle of crime continues. Stretch this cycle out 40 years, and you
have what we have today in America -- large areas in every major city
that are essentially fenced off (by police, and common sense) from
regular citizens, so that the shooting war in the inner city can't
infect the rest of us.

A quiet, sad irony of America -- far more shooting deaths occur in our
inner cities every day than occur on the battlefields of Iraq and
Afghanistan. It's a shameful situation that BOTH political parties
and the mainstream media choose to ignore.

(Well, except after Hurricane Katrina, of course, when they were
shocked -- SHOCKED -- that there was poverty and violence going on in
New Orleans!)

Now, of course, you can say that eliminating drugs wouldn't fix the
ghettos, and you might be right. People who can look at a hypodermic
needle full of unknown **** and somehow make the leap to thinking
"Hey, it sounds like *FUN* to inject that into my arm!" are probably
beyond ANYONE'S help.

Stupid is incurable.

However, eliminating drugs (and the cartel behind them) would remove
a major fuel source for much of the violence that claims so many lives
there.

And, of course, you have to look at the reciprocal of what you are
proposing. If making drugs ILLEGAL is the problem, what would making
them LEGAL do?

When I contemplate legalized drugs, I get a vision from "The Matrix",
with entire segments of our society laying around hooked up to
intravenous tubes, oblivious to everything around them. Would
providing free drugs to the inhabitants solve the violence? Even if
it did, would it be the right thing to do?

I don't know the circumstances of the shoot-down in the video, but if
that plane was packed with cocaine or heroin that was destined for my
hometown -- a beautiful city on the shores of Lake Michigan that is
fighting for its life against a growing drug-and-crime-plagued ghetto
-- and the pilot had ignored every attempt to get him to land, he
deserved his fate.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"