legalize all drugs - free money and freedom

Gee, how hard is it really for a kid to go and grab a beer out of the refrigerator? Of course if the parent doesn't drink then its a lot harder for a kid to get a beer.

The fact is that if a kid wants to do illegal drugs or drink they will. It has absolutely nothing to do with whether it's legal or not. Of course the fact that it's easier if the parent does it for the kid cannot go unnoticed. If, for example, LSD was legal but the parents don't do LSD then its much harder for the kid to get it because LSD wouldn't be provided by an extensive black market in "illegal" drugs like we have today. I'm sure they could if they tried hard enough but the "infrastructure" of the illegal drug trade is greatly diminished making it harder to obtain through a black market.

 

Also, besides, if we legalise ALL drugs, such as heroin and cocaine and LSD and PCP, then more kids will start using them, because they will become more socially acceptable and less taboo, and they will also become more available to them.[/QUOTE]

And, yet, when these drugs were legal, it wasn't considered a problem. Why is that? Smoking was common among teens, but the hard drugs were not.

As for your speculation about PCP, that's all it is. The evidence doesn't bear up. There are very few documented cases of violence caused by PCP, and during the 6 years it was used on humans as an anesthetic, not a single case of violence was documented as caused by it. Yours is the same sort of rhetorical garbage used as propaganda against the "demon weed."

 

So, hypothetically and in that alternative, what should Nanny-State tax rates be?

 

This is absolutely true. During the 19th and early 20th Century before we started banning substances there wasn't a "drug problem" in the United States. Yes, a small percentage smoked opium, a few did heroin (or more likely morphine that is refined heroin), while quite a few used cocaine that was included in many "patent medcines" because it made the user feel good.

While the propaganda for the prohibitions were often based upon racism or racial prejudice we can look at the fact that the reason a drug was ultimately prohibited was because it made the user "feel good" but served no other primary purpose. The criteria, which is still applied today, is that the drug makes the user feel good which is considered to be a "non-medical" purpose.

Sure, some of these drugs can be dangerous but they're no more dangerous than many of the prescription drugs we take today. Cocaine is still being legally sold by prescription today for cancer victims because it makes them "feel good" but a person without cancer is prohibited from obtaining cocaine solely to feel good. Morphine is used in medicine because it made a person in severe pain "feel good" but it can't be used by someone not in pain to feel good.

It's like our government has something agianst people "feeling good" because that's what the prohibition laws are really about. If it feels good then ban it seems to be the mantra of government.

 

No argument here, but it is true that PCP causes more violent behavior than marijuana.

 

I would agrue against a "cause and effect" relationship between PCP and violence. A non-violent person will not commit a violent act because they use PCP. A violent person person can commit a violent act because the PCP can aggravate and trigger their inherent violent nature. The key is that the person must first be a violent person to begin with. The cause is the "violent personality" and the effect is the "act of violence" regardless of what triggers it. Cause and effect.

It is true that marijuana is less likely to trigger a violent person into committing a violent act but neither PCP or marijuana is the "cause" of the violence.

 

I'd argue that any substance that amplifies violent behavior in an already violent person can be partially blamed.

It's like how there are laws against serving alcohol to alcoholics.

A schizophrenic person shouldn't smoke pot just like an aggressive person shouldn't do PCP.

How much the law should get involved is a tricky issue, but overall, I think it is reasonable to attribute blame to substances that amplify negative behaviors. I wouldn't say that means we should ban these things, but as a society, negative stigmas toward them make sense.

And I would extend this to prescription drugs as well.

 

Many people who use heavy drugs are in existential pain, which the medical establishment is not really equipped to deal with except through the rather brutal psychological professions. They want to feel good, and the best way to feel good is to either get high or to ingest something that takes away all feeling. While this is a medical problem in most cases, though not all, the government prescription is to destroy their lives, put them in cages and, in some cases, force them into treatment by bureaucrats who grow wealthy off of the injustice system.

 

I based the observation on friends of mine who were heavy pot users who told me that it caused them to lose motivation, not on statistics or "Reefer Madness." I trusted their perception of the drug.

 

Is it? i might accept that it's true that people prone to violence who are anesthetized might be especially difficult to control when they become enraged, but how would you know that PCP is the cause of the violence? It seems to the easiest way to tell is to give it to a large number of people and see if they become enraged without any other external stimulus. In the years between 1959 and 1965 when PCP was used as an anesthetic for humans, no cases of violence were recorded.

 

I could switch out "cause" with "amplify" if you would prefer.

Again, it's just a matter of recognizing what each substance is likely to affect.

Some people have their anger amplified by alcohol. Some have their libido amplified by it.

Different people react differently to each drug, but patterns do emerge when looking at overall trends associated with them.

PCP is known to contribute to schizophrenic behavior, for example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phencyclidine#Brain_effects

 

It says that it mimics some symptoms, and the side effects look bad. I'm guessing that it would be a rare drug to find if all drugs were legal. After all, if a safe drug like pure morphine can be had by a minimum wage worker, why bother with the stuff that just makes you feel worse? Moonshine making and distribution was a huge business during Prohibition and the side effects of even a little methanol use is nothing to write home about, and, yet, how many people do you see drinking moonshine these days? It's not difficult to make, yet it's not a problem to go buy a cheap bottle of whiskey that is safe to drink.

 

No argument here. Again, I support the legalization of all drugs, but I also acknowledge that some drugs are much more harmful than others.

I just believe that society should take private action against certain substances. There should be heavy social pressure as a culture to discourage the use of things like PCP. Educating people about the dangers of it and other hard drugs should be the focus, rather than bans.

 

Well, here's some scientifically-researched evidence which actually supports this whole gateway drug theory.

http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060703/full/news060703-9.html

 

I believe the abomination of hypocrisy to be even more insidious as a "gateway" non-drug, since anyone who engages in that behavior will usually bear false witness to any Cause they may profess on a not for profit basis, under Any form of Capitalism where full employment of human capital resources are not achieved through Institutional means.

 

How many "excuses" are we willing to make for the behavior of the person? No one forces a violent person to use any drug that would tend to trigger their violent behavior.

There are no laws prohibiting an alcoholic from purchasing or consuming alcoholic beverages that I'm aware of.

Legalization of currently prohibited drugs such as cocaine and heroin includes the fact that by legalization there can be regulation. Compare drugs to firearms where if a person has a record of violent behaviour or mental illness they can be prohibited from owning or possessing a firearm. Could not the same criteria be used for certain drugs that have been shown to trigger violent behavior in some cases?

 

It's not an excuse; it's simply a recognition of what certain substances can do.

As a bartender, you can be held partially responsible for the actions of an alcoholic if you serve him/her alcohol and knew he/she was seeking help for it. It's like how you can be prosecuted for serving enough alcohol to someone that they end up driving home very drunk.

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with these laws or liabilities, but it is a recognition that alcohol (and other substances) can lead to destructive behavior.

Agreed. And again, that's why I support legalization.

 

Cannabis may cause some hallucinations (it's classified as some mild hallucinogenic substance), which may cause somebody to crash their cars while driving. Driving while hallucinating from smoking cannabis is not a safe thing to do at all.

 

A few points.

Marijuana does not cause hallucinations and the belief that it does is a misrepresentation of the facts. Psychosis can cause hallucinations and in rare cases marijuana can potentially trigger a psychotic episode in individuals with psychosis. There has never been any indication that marijuana itself causes hallucinations. The cause of the hallucinations is the psychosis and not the marijuana.

These are extremely rare cases and generally speaking when a person doesn't have a "good" experience on marijuana, or any drug for that matter, they don't use it again.

The "strong" effects of marijuana are very short lived, lasting only a few minutes after consumption, and are followed with a much lower level of "high" where the person is typically just "mellow" and that can last for perhaps one-half hour to perhaps an hour. The belief that someone is going to sit on their couch, consume massive amounts of marijauna, and then run out instantly and drive their car into someone else are really far-fetched.

Studies have shown that marijuana users are aware of the slight impairments to their driving abilities (unlike alcohol drinkers) and typically engage in driving practices that provide greater safety margins (i.e. not tailgating and driving slower) that mitigate the effects of the impairment. Overall moderate marijuana users (i.e. the vast majority) don't present any additional risks while driving based upon accident studies.

People shouldn't drive when they have impaired senses from any cause and most marijuana use doesn't involve driving at all.

 

Smoking marijuana primes the human's brains into receive some hardcore drugs such as cocaine and heroin. Some lab studies has even shown that rats that were administered some THC beforehand, (before they were given their heroin during those specific lab experiments) has self administered much more heroin than the rats that were not given any THC at all beforehand.

 

This is a bogus study. THC is the refined active ingredient in marijuana and simply smoking marijuana doesn't have the same effects of using THC directly. By way of analogy the Peruvian indians commonly eat the leaves of the coca plant from which cocaine is derived and are only minimally affected by it. They can't consume enough of the coca leaves to obtain the "high" that cocaine provides. The identical situation exists with marijuana were a person cannot smoke enough marijuana to obtain the same effects of consuming THC directly.

I remember a study on an artifical sweeteners from the 1960's where they gave lab rats a highly concentrated form of the artificial sweetener and it eventually lead to death in some the rats. They said that the sweetener could kill a person but failed to note that it equated to consuming 26 pounds of sugar daily and that would also kill a person.

People really need to be aware of the fact that studies using highly concentrated forms of anything lead to false test results.

 

One thing that I think people fail to consider is that because illegal drugs are not readily available it leads to the use of many drugs that are not the prefereed drug of choice. How many people, for example, used PCP because it was available at the time in the black market but cocaine was not?

Legalization (and regulation) allows a person to be selective in the drugs they choose to use as opposed to being limited to what's available in the black market on any particular day. A person may want to "get high" and given the choice might prefer cocaine but if cocaine is not available and PCP is then they would probably be inclined to use the PCP as a replacement.

 

*That* is a very good point. It's one of the reasons that meth has become so prevalent. With the crackdown on cocaine, the skyrocketing cost of the drug, meth moved in to become the poor person's cocaine. Often, pushers would get whatever they could, and roll that out to their buyers. I won't get into what I did when younger, but I do remember those days.

It also makes those drugs extremely inexpensive and unprofitable. Methamphetamines produced by pharmaceutical companies are cleaner and do not lead to the same side effects as street meth, and cocaine and heroin are so cheap to produce that no one who self-medicates with it would have to commit crimes to pay for it.

 

Well, here's some very good analogies for this.

Whenever somebody starts listening to some musical groups that they enjoy very much, they often will get more curious about listening to other different bands that are from those same styles of music.

This is just human nature-trying out one thing usually will get somebody more curious about doing some other stuff that's very similar to something which they had tried out first.

If somebody smokes cannabis, they may become more curious or psychologically inclined to try out some hardcore drugs to get high from, which is very similar to how many people get interested about listening to some other bands, after hearing some bands that they like. Just as some Iron Maiden fans may become more curious about whether or not they may like some other heavy metal bands, (such as Slayer or Anthrax or Testament), some cannabis smokers may become more curious about trying out some other substances to get high from.

Some people that became fans of some of their favorite bands, they became interested in those specific bands, which was a result of them listening to their first heavy metal music CD, which got them rather curious about experimenting with some other different sorts of heavy metal music much more.

Isn't that very same analogy true with somebody that smokes cannabis?

The cause and effect between smoking cannabis and doing those hardcore drugs is human nature and curiosity-just like how some Slayer fans started off as Iron Maiden fans.

 

Perhaps. It still comes down to this question: why should people be put into cages for engaging in that sort of behavior?