you shouldnt cal people names.

tht said, the u.s has a few states that decriminalized but in reality small amounts for personal use gets a small fine. even less than speeding (in a vehicle) would get you. that is not what this thread is about, if you read the op


OP:
btw, mj is not a narcotic.

Ultimately the issue of whether drug X is more dangerous or less healthy than alcohol is irrelevant. The issue is simply that, so long as people want them, making drugs illegal causes more harm than good. Seriously, we can't even keep illegal drugs out of prisons! How the fuck can we expect to keep them out of a free society? The very idea is absurd and serves only to fund criminal enterprises, turn our inner cities into war zones, and fill our prisons.

Legal drugs means cheaper drugs, less people in prison (which will save governments a lot of money), less crime to get drug money.

Legal drugs probably means increased drug consumption. Increased drug consumption probably means more drug deaths and drug related illnesses.

Legal drugs means measured dosages which might decrease deaths.

I don't want children doing drugs and alcohol. I watch some of the local kids smoke marijuana at 8 AM before they go into their high school. If Alcohol was illegal for adults would 15 year olds drink more or less alcohol than they do now? Illegal drug dealers have less reason to not sell to children than liquor stores do. It does not seem to matter; kids don't seem to have much problem getting drugs or alcohol.

We have tried the war on drugs. It was expensive and it failed. Lets try legalization for a while and see how that works out.

Imagine how effective the war on drugs could be for a little while if we restarted the war on drugs after letting drugs be legal for ten years. All the supply networks would have broken down during the ten years of legal drugs.

Amen! Hey we agree, something must be wrong.

From my experience, it was a lot harder to get alcohol in high school than pot. I didn't even smoke pot, but I knew where to get it from a number of sources right there in the school. Alcohol, on the other hand, was a major pain in the ass to get.

The existence of a legal distribution system which doesn't sell to kids makes it much harder for them to acquire alcohol than pot because the illegal distribution system that exists for pot has no qualms about selling to kids.

Good points. My experience with Meth led me to answer differently, but upon pondering the subject matter, I can't see how leaving it illegal helps the matter.

~String

Bullshit. I wouldn't expect any different treatment for myself.

Cocaine dealers get more time in prison than child molesters and rapists.

Its not as if people don't know what they're getting into when they do drugs. And if they want to escape let them. If they want to fail let them. If they want to ruin their health let them.

good god I hope not!! Have u ever been there?! You cant even drink the water there!! LOL!

my 16 year old neighbor comes home in the afternoon to smoke. then bitches about how her next hour teacher knows she has smoked.. everytime I hear it my words are, well then DONT smoke before that class! Dont smoke till AFTER school...

I think that they all should get more time for their crimes..

and most people dont fully understand the consequences. But they will sit there and say, no I wont get addicted, I will never be like this person or that person. I can control it! And then it goes from there...



me personally, I did meth for about a year, a boy friend got me on it,. and kept feeding it to me to say... unlike most the people Iknow, I would say up for 2 days, clean, draw, write, get things done, I was able to talk about alot of the bad times in my life, and I felt better getting it off of my chest!! Then that 3d night, I would sleep, eat in the morning, then go get high with my boyfriend again. Then after we broke up, I stopped... There are times when I wish I had it just because looking at how messy a 3year old makes the house, makes me want more energy to get this place even cleaner! But that is jsut me.. haha.. I have not touched the stuff in 4years now.

i dont see how keeping them illegal causes more harm than good.

it is very relevant. even the way drugs effect the user is relevant because they are so different and the effects are worlds apart. you dont think things like long term psychosis is relevant?

did you imagine that too?

Which is what makes comparisons to alcohol relevant: if we, as a society, have already accepted that banning alcohol does more harm than good, then what possible justification is there for banning drugs that are less harmful than alcohol?

It's a question of consistency, or specifically the lack of it in the prohibitionist rhetoric.

Although I suppose the outright lies in said rhetoric should be a bigger target...

pot does less damage then drinking does... it doesnt screw up ur liver

Your lack of critical perspective on the issue is neither here nor there, in terms of public policy.

Try arguing that drug prohibition actually causes more good than harm, with actual evidentiary support, if you want to be taken seriously.

i am not asking to be taken seriously by you. honestly i think you are out of touch and are playing armchair quarterback.

just two ways keeping them illegal is good is that addicts who want to quit certainly dont want drugs easier to get and would rather it was not around at all and another is there are some people who learn when there are consequences attached.

The problem with such arguments is that, while valid, they get you tied up in the minutiae of the phamacodynamics of various drugs when the argument can really be settled on principle. Experience shows that prohibition, be it of alcohol or drugs, just does not work. This has been aptly demonstrated thru the prohibition period in the 20's and 30's and by our modern "war on drugs". It's stupid, it's counter productive, and it's morally wrong. All of that is true whether pot or alcohol is (objectively speaking) the more harmful drug.

anthony, 'war on drugs' term goes back decades. it wasnt true then and it isnt true now.

I wasn't comparing pot with alcohol.

I was comparing cocaine and heroin with alcohol.

Plenty of people already agree that marijuana criminalization is stupid. But they imagine that drugs like cocaine and heroin are in some category of nastiness too horrible to contemplate. Meanwhile, they have no problem with legal alcohol, despite the plainly-evident, vastly-greater harm that alcohol does, both to its users and to society as a whole.

This is the key lie sustaining public support for drug prohibition. Nobody has even raised any other rationales for it in this thread. We are wrestling with recognition of the very principle you state: prohibition does not work.

Well, no. I haven't bothered with the pharmacodynamics at all. It suffices to look at the public health statistics: orders of magnitude more people die from alcohol than all illegal drugs combined, every year.

have you ever been around cocaine or heroin users? i doubt it. the main difference is that a person can be a recreational drinker for decades and even a whole lifetime but with heroin or cocaine recreational use is very short period.

the truth is that things will always be illegal. it is like giving a child a stick of dynamite to play with. is that legal? should it be legal?