legalize all drugs - free money and freedom

Here's a hypothetical question for you.

If pot was legalized, do you think that it's possible that those people may not have done ecstasy and LSD, since they would not have gotten their marijuana from the black market, or do you think they still would have down those substances anyways?

 

It's hard to say.

Some people experiment out of curiosity. Others do it just because their friends introduce them to it.

I was just an experimenter in college. For me, it was a phase.

For those who do it out of social pressure or convenience, legalizing pot would greatly decrease the odds of them using other substances.

 

What's "social pressure or convenience"? Now how exactly would legalizing pot stop them from using other substances? If they hang out with people that use other substances, won't they hang out with those people regardless of whether or not pot is legalized or not?

 

For the first generation or so after legalization, there wouldn't be much of a change. However, a lot of people interested in pot don't have much interest in other drugs. The long term effect is that marijuana users as a social group would grow apart from other drug users, because it would become normalized in the same way that alcohol was after the end of Prohibition.

 

Do you believe that alcohol is a gateway drug, or not? If alcohol is also a gateway drug, then this must mean that even legal substances can also be gateway drugs, and legalizing pot wouldn't really remove it's so-called "gateway effect". Here's some facts for you. Tell me how you interpert these statistics. Just check out some of these articles and tell me what you think about what they say.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/08/...s-gateway-effect-much-larger-than-marijuanas/

http://science.slashdot.org/story/1...rijuana-is-the-biggest-gateway-drug-for-teens

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/05/study-the-gateway-drug-is-alcohol-not-marijuana/

http://mysticpolitics.com/study-alcohol-bigger-gateway-drug-than-marijuana/

 

False on all counts.

Legalization of a commodity that is already extensively available does not increase usage. Anyone that wants to smoke pot today can get it and, in fact, that's one of the major problems because access for teenagers is far too easy today. As I've noted for a lot of American parents their source of marijuana is often their high school teenager that has better access than the parents do.

Next is that the short term effects of marijuana that do affect reaction times are so limited that it's almost impossible to smoke marijuana and actually go out, get into the car, and drive away under the influence where the reaction times are slower. The person would literally have to be driving while smoking. It can happen, just like a redneck driving while drinking a beer, but it is an exception as opposed to the rule in both cases.

Short term memory skills don't relate to driving where immediate attention is relevant. What someone might have done yesterday or even 20 minutes earlier has nothing to do with driving at the moment. Marijuana does not adversely affect a person's ability to pay attention to what they're doing at the moment. If anything it might focus them on what they're doing which is actually good when it comes to driving.

In any case driving under the influence of any substance that impairs driving is illegal and because everyone that wants to smoke marijuana is already smoking marijuana because it's readily available for everyone so there wouldn't be any change in driving safety because of legalization.

 

I guess my question is this... Are you suggesting that we should make alcohol illegal?

 

I don't believe that anyone is insane enough to suggest that today.

 

I know that this sounds very crazy, but I actually support alcohol prohibition. It reduced alcohol consumption. Just imagine if we had kept alcohol prohibition-hundreds of thousands of people would have had their lives ruined by alcohol (either as a result of dying in car accidents or being the victim of violent crimes or suicides), would still be alive today. The amount of deaths which resulted from the gang wars during alcohol prohibition was very minuscule in comparison to the harm in which alcohol abuse has done to this society.

http://www.healthydrugfreecolorado....galization What Do You Want to Know FINAL.pdf

 

Actually, yes I am. Why is everybody so against alcohol prohibition? Violent crimes did not skyrocket during the prohibition era. Most of the violent crimes had only taken place in Chicago, the vast majority of America was not surrounded by Al Capone's violent crimes. Is my statements true or false?

 

Organized crime surrounding alcohol distribution spread far beyond Chicago.

My own state of NC was notorious for bootlegging. Ironically, it gave birth to what eventually became known as NASCAR.

If you can see how many problems occur as a result of pot being illegal, you should be able to see what would happen with cartel influence if alcohol was made illegal again.

Bringing back Prohibition would be the greatest boon possible to cartels.

 

What's worse-crimes of smuggling (which happened a lot during NC), or the violent crimes in which alcohol causes? The lesser of two evils is bootlegging. Even if alcohol prohibition leads to more bootlegging, it's worth the innocent lives that it saves. You can't surrender and subject our society to more pain and suffering just to stop bootleggings.

Also, what makes you think that the Mexican drug cartels would take over the illegal alcohol black market if we just suddenly banned alcohol again?

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Well, how else can we greatly reduce alcohol consumption, without bringing back alcohol prohibition?

 

I really think you're too worried about the actions of others. You can only punish people during the act of doing something wrong or after it.

You can't treat everyone like children and then expect your society to remain free in the long run.

We see similar agendas in Europe when it comes to offensive speech. People worry about the repercussions of people getting offended concerning race or religion, and then they go so far as to ban this speech just to avoid conflict.

By the same token, you're trying to minimize things like domestic abuse and drunk driving deaths by removing the freedom to drink.

We've gone back and forth on this throughout this thread, but all I can really say in summary is that, if you base your ideas and stances on trying to protect others by removing their freedoms, there really isn't much of a limit as to where that can take you. I think you're leaning far too much toward authoritarianism in trying to solve society's problems.

A much more cautious approach would be to better educate people about the long term health dangers of alcohol and other drugs. Knowledge is a much better tool than bans, and you don't have the related organized crime to go with it.

 

When it comes to education level, it is true that college graduates tend to drink more than the less educated.

However, I admit that I don't have a study to support that something like an alcohol education class would have the effect of lowering alcohol consumption.

The reason I don't have a study to back this up is because it's never really been tried outside of cases where the students already have an alcohol problem.

 

Okay.

How much violence had actually happened during alcohol prohibition? How many people had died as a result of the massive increase in organized crimes?

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Some studies have shown that way less people are smoking cigarettes nowadays than years ago. What exactly did the government do during their anti-tobacco campaigns which had resulted in less tobacco consumption? Maybe we could do the same thing with alcohol.

 

See page 6 of this file.

http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa157.pdf

 

An interesting quotation from an anti-drug organization so I had to look up the source and check it's validity.

The actual citation is from: Robert E. Peterson, Director, Michigan Office of Drug Control Policy, “Legalization: The Myth Exposed.” 1991.

So next I looked up the murder rates from 1900 through 1990.



http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/graphs/10.htm

So yes, it does appear that the murder rate, based upon the chart, did increase from about 1:100,000 to 3:100,000 or 300% prior to the first state drug prohibition laws and later alcohol prohibition under the 18th Amendment and even his data that where he states that the murder rate only climbed 30% under alcohol prohibition could be accurate because we're talking about a peak in murder rates and that equals a change of less than 3:100,000 or less than the increase before the first state drugs prohibition laws were being passed.

At the height of prohibition the murder rate was about 9:100,000 and then with the repeal of Prohibition it dropped to less than 5:100,000 (with a slight bump at the end of WW II) by 1955. Starting in the mid-1960's the government actually began the War on Drugs, albeit not officially named at that early date, because of the hippie movement that used drugs. As we can see from the chart the murder rate increased dramatically from 1965 and on until it surpassed the murder rate at the height of Prohibition and with only a couple of blips was well over 10:100,000, or double the 1955 murder rate, by 1990 when the War on Drugs was in full swing by the Federal Government.

There's an old saying that "figures never lie but liars figure" which appears to be the case because the overall picture related to murder rates is completely different than what Robert E. Peterson (Director, Michigan Office of Drug Control Policy) attempted to portray by his statements. The lowest murder rates were prior to drug and alcohol prohibition and during the 1950's when alcohol was legal and the federal government wasn't focused on the drug prohibition laws in effect at the time. The highest murder rates by far are associated when government is enforcing prohibition laws (either drug or alcohol).

And the statement " We will never know what would have happened if the prohibition against alcohol had been retained" is really BS. While there was a reduction of alcohol consumption of 30% when Prohibition was first implemented once a black market supply source became available that begin to rise and was back up to 70% by the time Prohibition ended but was still climbing. It would unquestionably have reached 100% of pre-Prohibition levels and perhaps gone higher per capita. We just don't know how high it would have gone but we know that as black market availability increase consumption also increased.

We also know what would happen today if we imposed alcohol prohibition. During Prohibition distribution was predominately controlled throughout the United States by the Italian Mafia and to a lesser extent by the "Jewish Mafia" and "Italian Mafia" all of where the leaders of these three organizations actually had a moral code. While they were willing to murder it often required approval at the higher levels and was strictly related to business. With the war on organized crime the large crime families have been all but destroyed being replaced by numerous cartels and local street gangs that have no moral restraints. The local street gangs will murder someone for simply wearing the wrong color tennis shoes.

Yes, we know what would happen today and it would be far worse than what the US experienced with just a couple of major crime syndicates controlled alcohol during prohibition and ultimately it wouldn't reduce alcohol consumption one drop once the black market picked up the slack and was able to meet the demand.

 

Smoking is down mostly because we're open with the long term health effects.

In the past, tobacco companies outright lied to consumers and were never held accountable for it.

 

Here's something very interesting which I have discovered from this article. Alcohol prohibition actually made alcohol a gateway drug. However, I'm not so sure exactly why. The Mafia sold alcohol during the prohibition era, but they did not sell other illegal substances during the 1920s.

So how exactly did alcohol prohibition cause an increase in harder drug and marijuana consumption, if the Mafia did not distribute those black market substances to the people that bought alcohol?

 

Again, as far as I can tell, it's really just a matter of social groups.

There are many cases where someone engaging in an illegal act might also engage in other illegal acts.

A person not engaging in an illegal act isn't likely to encounter people that do.

 

Ok. Certainly better than the multibillion failed war on drugs you seem to be supporting.

 

that pot is harmless is wrong, pot causes psychosis.

 

That's only if somebody has a genetic predisposition to psychosis or schizophrenia.

 

it could be claimed that is could be a simple "discipline" issue. i believe that we should practice handling our drugs better than our drugs handle us. would anyone become "worse" by practicing their hobbies, during a "psychosis" episode, such as playing an instrument or chess on a computer.

 

Also, marijuana is not illegal solely because of racism. It's illegal mainly because of yellow journalism which was designed to protect William randolph hearst's business interests, but Hearst had just used racism as a pretense in his yellow journalism articles to make pot illegal. Hearst was afraid that hemp would replace wood as an inexpensive raw material for the manufacturing of paper. Since racism was very common so many years ago, Hearst took advantage of the racist atmosphere during those days, but he did not run his yellow journalism campaigns to make pot illegal because he was racist. He did so because he was greedy. Hemp could be grown much faster than wood, which makes hemp a way better material to make paper with than wood.

Racism was just an excuse to make marijuana illegal, but it was not the sole cause of it.

I had recently just watched a documentary about this. Harry J. Anslinger was not really concerned with making marijuana illegal, until Hearst's yellow journalism campaigns had made marijuana a major issue in some states. Anslinger then took advantage of Hearst's smear campaigns as an opportunity to make money for himself.