Therapeutic drugs have health claims to their efficaciousness even if they are only implied or by word-of-mouth. While I support the right to try experimental therapeutic drugs, I also support, at the very least, the government using its bully pulpit to let consumers know which drugs don’t work, if not restricting their use, and letting them get away with directly employing false therapeutic claims is right out.
Recreational drugs on the other hand are not primarily meant to treat any disease, so there is no government interest in protecting consumers against relying on them when they don’t work.
I have never tried it and never intend to but I do believe that it should be decriminalized, as well as other drugs. Not because I think it’s great stuff but because I hate the impact on our government and our civil liberties that fighting it has had. We don’t need to have so many folks in jail, we don’t need cops given liberties to preform, what should be, illegal searches and seizures. Courts keep widdling away rights in order to accommodate this war on drugs and not only does it need to stop, it needs to reverse.
Am I the only one who was confused by the thread title? I thought it was referring to the capital of the Netherlands, which has long been famous for its lax drug laws.
And I’ve never partaken of marijuana and never intend to, but I do think that it should at least be put in a lower schedule, and I’m on the fence about full recreational legalization. But I do oppose medical marijuana laws, for the same reason that I oppose the lack of regulation for other “herbal medicine”.
Indeed. I’m not entirely unfamiliar with English politics: I know that Teresa May is currently Prime Minister, I know that Boris Johnson (former mayor of London) is a secretary in her government, I know that Nigel Farrage is involved with UKIP and was a Brexit advocate, etc. However, I’d never heard of William Hague, and when I first saw the title of the thread, I, too, assumed it had something to do with The Hague.
The coffeeshop system seems like a hamfisted way to run the system. It has to be grown illegally, purchased by the coffeeshop illegally, and sold to the end user illegally (but “tolerated”). If you are going to legalize it, then legalize it; why go to such subterfuge?
My guess would be that when they implemented it they didn’t want to run afoul of all the international anti-marijuana consensus and the treaties they were a part of that affirmed that. Canada can get away with full legalization now because that consensus has crumbled.
I will not. The stuff doesn’t get me high, and I have tried. If I am already tired, it makes me sleepy, but if I am not tired, it does nothing to me. And I’m not a smoker, so I need hash brownies, or something-- something you have to go to some trouble to make well.
As far as this happening in the US, Indiana recently legalized Sunday alcohol sales (from noon to 8pm-- you still have to wait until after church), something I thought would would never, ever happen, so now I’m never gonna say “Never” again.
