A thread about prohibition has got me speculating.
Illegal recreational drugs are a global phenoneman.
The profits are incredible, the response by Western Governments is incredible, but the demand is insatiable and it doesn’t at the moment really look like that we’re going to win.
We can’t get the toothpaste back in the tube, we can’t seem to halt the demand in our own populations and we can’t seem to stop production abroad.
Is it perhaps a time to seek different solutions as an alternative to just trying to ,outright ,ban them ?
Its not just a problem with those we consider the lowlives of society, cocaine is regulary used by the movers and shakers.(Including the legislators).
I’m not asking for a moral debate about the rights and wrongs of drug use but should we legalise some and enact Draconian punishments for others?
Or something else?
I genuinlly am ambivalent about the solutions and the problem.
I’ll make my declarations, I believe Crack, Heroin and Morphine are seriously a problem, but Marijuana or Exctasy aren’t.
Neither of which I use but did so quite some years ago.
There I’ve come clean.
I agree with you on everything except your last point.
If we could only legalize one drug, it should be heroin. The more dangerous the drug, the MORE reason to legalize it. However, by legalizing I do not mean opening it up to the free market. It should be either socialized or extremely regulated. But there really needs to be a legal and not too expensive way to get it.
The best action would be to legalize it all, and regulate against its use in proportion to the danger of the drug. Heroin should be regulated the hardest, preferably socialized, drugs like MDMA and marijuana should be treated like alcohol is now and alcohol should be more heavily regulated.
All funds currently spent by the justice system on users should instead be spent on rehabilitation programs. But I could also see it being used on a tax cut to sell the idea to fiscally conservative but socially liberal people.
Totally agree with you about alcohol, I suspect that more people have died as a result of it, directly and indirectly, then most of the illegal drugs put together.
Thats only a gut feeling on my part and I have no stats to support it.
The last time I checked the stats, alcohol and cigarettes made up about 90% of drug related deaths. Alcohol killing about 1 million people per year, smoking being responsible for over 5 million.
The obvious conclusion is that our drug laws are very irrational. Very harmful drugs like alcohol and tobacco are legal and socially acceptable, and relatively harmless drugs like ecstasy and LSD are “Class A” narcotics. The current system of classification is arbitrary as well as racist and discriminating.
The country in the world who has made most progress against misuse and addiction to drugs is Portugal. They had huge drug problems a decade ago and in desperation basically decided to take researchers advice and decriminalize all drug use. The results have been astonishingly positive and what was at the start a very controversial decision now has massive political support, it is now only opposed by the most religious and socially conservative politicians.
You’ve “been told” a lot of things. Not all of them true.
All drugs are harmful, it is a question of how harmful they are compared to other drugs. People are going to use drugs for recreation. We do it in every culture that exists and we’ve done it for at the very least thousands of years. The question is which drugs should we use and which shouldn’t we.
Ah yes, reefer madness. This was proved in the church-sponsored propaganda film from 1936, called “Tell Your Children”.
What’s the ld50 of MDMA? Snowboarding kills people. Vending machines, swimming pools and toasters kill people. Aspirin kills people. Which is more dangerous, using ecstasy or snowboarding?
I don’t have a cite. I don’t know much about ecstasy.
I would point out however that people die from crashing into trees and falling off cliffs and that sort of thing, and not snowboarding per se, whereas taking ecstasy is taking ecstasy.
The people who die after having used MDMA generally do so because of dehydration and/or hyperthermia caused by increased physical exertion (e.g. dancing) and decreased sensitivity to thirst, not direct overdose. Cite
Well, it isn’t clear that snowboarding causes such physiological instability in and of itself. It is your business I suppose, but I’d rather not have any ecstasy myself, thanks.
Ecstasy is seen as some sort of death drug due to a number of deaths of users that have been highly publicized. In truth though the actual risk of death is absolutely tiny and can often be made even tinier by sensible use.
The real reason not to take ecstasy is that it WILL mess with your brain chemistry, leading to negative side effects, the full extent of which are not properly known yet.
I have used ectasy when I was in my early twenties, only semi-reguarly for a period of a few months and I would not touch it with a barge pool now. The chemically-induced sense of euphoria does not even make the short term negatice side effects worth it or the stupid things you do whilst on it. The mdeium and long term side effects are not fully known yet.
As a drug though I do not think it is particualry more dangerous than marijuana, especially with the strong varieties around today. That said the dangers of marijuana are often ignored. I certainly wouldn’t touch marijuana with a barge pool.
But we have had legalized drugs. Heroin wasn’t always illegal. Neither was cocaine. How well did that work out? If you don’t know find a newspaper with an archive back from the late 1800s and early 1900s. You can see it wasn’t a rosy picture.
The obvious conclusion is that more people use alcohol and tobacco, and therefore they have a higher number of deaths attributable to them - I am certain that if you factored in the number of people taking each drug then alcohol and tobacco would not be at the top of the list.
Citing the total number of deaths is misleading if you don’t take the differing numbers of users into account.
