I don't know that this has much to do with vancouver's casual approach to drugs. Aside from marijuana the laws against hard narcotics dealers are probably as harsh as anywhere in canada. Its sad that this is happening though, vancouver is definitely the jewel of canada imo. I think the main issue is that you have a ton of mainland and HK immigrants in vancouver who take their baggage with them. I wouldn't be surprised if a large percentage of the people who make up these gangs are young chinese men who don't fit in anywhere else and get into the gangland scene. I think the only solution to this is tougher immigration screening, and a larger budget for police narcotics divisions. Crackdown hard on the crime and make it known that if you are a gangster in vancouver you're up against some serious hard line cops.
^ i think the gang wars have lil to do with the chinese gangs...if its asian then its most likely the vietnamese gangs cause chinese r prob soft compared to viets anyways vancouver's drug war is getting more scary every month as anything can happen. you can be in the wrong place and not knowing it or giving a look at someone and get killed. It is hard to stop all gang activities and if you take out the high ranked members there's always people replacing them therefore a better plan needs to be considered instead of stricter sentencing
^ i hate that so much, its like that in the Uk too, some people will kill you for looking them in the eye. from my experience Chinese gangs tend to be very quite, behind the scenes like, you dont hear about them much like other gangs.
lol. Yeah when I first saw it, I was in stitches too. Oh well, it would seems alot of the regs here are from VC ? Do take care... I really hope the situation don't degen further. I have relatives there too...
I think this is because chinese gangs treat organized crime as if it were a business and they merely want to make money, whereas the other gangs are all about the "thug life" crap and etc. I could be totally off though.
Legalizing all drugs will eliminate drug gangs, remove funding for narco terror organizations, and create a new class of business called recreational pharmaceuticals. Tax revenues and jobs will be created and after a few years, rival PhillipMorris and Seagrams. By co-opting drugs (like the government has done already with Nicotine and Alcohol), we can finally acknowledge and treat drug addiction as a medical entity instead of a criminal one, while simultaneously taking the money and power from crime gangs and putting it into the tax base instead. We currently have alcoholics but don't have rum runners killing each other any more (St. Valentine's day massacre). It's time society woke up and realized that if we can't beat drugs, we need to co-opt it and control it.
I think co-opting Marijuana would be a major step forward for the US, particularly since MJ has almost no negative side effects, aside from the munchies and stupidity. Doing so with hard drugs is significantly more difficult imo. How do you legalize cocaine, LSD or ecstasy. And even with legalization the controlled nature of the drugs would still allow for an underground market and gang activity. You still see the underground sale of pharmaceutical narcotics like oxycontin, oxycodone, fentanyl, demerol... all the good stuff. For some, getting a prescription for narcs is either not worth the time or not an option because of a history of abuse. There will always be gangs and underground activity to supply to that niche. It would cut back significantly on international narcotic trafficking because it wouldn't be as lucrative a business, but to say legalization would eliminate narc crimes completely is naive and shortsighted.
Nah, just change the schedule classifications and make them all available over the counter. The ONLY reason why those things are illegal in the first place is by the stroke of a legislative pen. So, rather than making drugs legal, you just make them NOT illegal by repealing the controlled substance act. As an example, remember that morphine used to available over the counter (if you ever read O'Neil's Long Day's Journey Into Night), and lithium was the original ingredient in a commercial beverage (Seven Up). Decriminalizing drugs will eliminate the need to underground market. So, far from being naive or shortsighted, it's being broadminded and realistic. At any rate, dealing with drug addiction would be a far cry easier than dealing with drug armies taking over Mexican cities.
