Sorry, I don’t have time to get into the addictiveness of alcohol vs. other drugs but I want to address this. A $20-a-day habit is $600 a month! There are tons of people for whom this would be a huge burden, thus a black market would remain and meth labs would most likely flourish due to many more people having become addicted to it. Meth is widely said to be about the most addictive drug there is and once people get addicted to it they will do just about anything to get more. In my opinion the main thing that legalizing it would do would be to create a huge new impetus for the private manufacture of it, and even greater rates of theft and prostitution in order to finance the purchase of it, whether legally or on the black market.
I couldn’t agree more with everything you said. There was a time when this was a free country (for white people anyway).
Why would there be a black market if the stuff in the store costs less and is higher quality? The black market just couldn’t touch the prices of legal purchases. If you mean people manufacturing it for themselves, there may be a few people that continue doing that. But why would anyone currently paying $100/day for drugs on the black market decide to start manufacturing it for themselves when it becomes possible to get them for $20/day? And if people do continue stealing for it, at least they’ll be stealing $600 a month instead of $3000 a month.
I agree with you and Sam Stone that in a free society, people should be allowed to make poor choices.
However, I don’t think that there can be any brushing under the rug of the fact that more people, which IS the op, would use drugs. Even you concede that more would, you just feel that it wouldn’t be terribly many more.
I disagree. I think it would be substantially more…
Just look at the past, there was a time when drugs like Heroin were legal. That was before anyone understood them well or thought to make them illegal?
Legalizing drugs will solve some but create others.
Let’s face it we have alcohol already and we already see how many problems that creates.
Most people can handle alcohol perfectly fine, but suppose it didn’t exist, would those who could handle it be out anything? No, and those who can’t handle it wouldn’t be able to fall back on it.
Now that’s a way oversimplification, 'cause many of the people who couldn’t handle it would be on another drug.
But you get my point
Give a chimp a gun you can’t really blame the chimp if it shoots somebody
I honestly don’t.
Speaking only of pot , it would have to be cheaper than whats sold on the street for people to switch over on a regular basis. Currently Cigs are available in corner stores and are taxed at high levels to fund health stuff, so as everything finds its natural price point, I buy my smokes from the reservation, at a price difference of 60 dollars less than whats sold in smoke shops.
That you could buy weed in the open , and in convience stores would be its only bennifits for legalizing it as far as the consumer is concerned. Having the state have any say in the price, will only re-create a black market for weed.
Declan
Here in Washington State, liquor can only be sold at liquor stores, which are government-owned and -operated and the price is set by legislature (we have a budget deficit so they just increased the mark-up rate to help with that).
There’s still no black market for alcohol here. I don’t see why weed would be so different.
Washington State probably does have an existing pipeline for weed that wont disapear right away when prohibition ends, as for alcohol, even if its sold in the ABC stores, raise the price high enough and there will be a pipeline created within several years, as quite a few provinces in Canada found out.
Declan
The war on drugs has had such an outrageously detrimental overall effect on American society and economy that I honestly believe that those who are in control of it ought to be convicted of treason and executed.
Oh, it probably wouldn’t disappear immediately, but I think it would disappear or all but disappear quite quickly. And I’m not suggesting that there’d be no black market no matter HOW high the government jacked up the price. But with alcohol, the price is higher than you find in states where the government doesn’t have a monopoly on liquor sales, from what I’ve heard. But I doubt the government would really set the price so high that the risks associated with drug trafficking would still be worth it to many people.
Anyway, I’m not advocating that the government should control all liquor or drug sales anyway. But even if they did, that would by no means guarantee a black market.
Free people are not ‘chimps’, and I’d suggest that treating the public as if they are children rather than just free people like everyone else is exactly what’s wrong with politics and government today.
It’s simply no one’s damned business whether or not I choose to wreck my life with cocaine, alcohol, or a fierce video game addiction.
I would also dispute that the full legalization of drugs would destroy society. I think you would see patterns of usage change, but I’m not sure you’d see a huge overall increase in drug intake. America takes huge amounts of drugs now, most of it legally. Painkillers, sleep aids, diet aids, muscle relaxers, seratonin re-uptake inhibitors, anti-depressants, stimulants, and many other drugs. And of course, they drink lots of alcohol and smoke cigarettes.
But notice that America has fairly low cost, freely available cigarettes by international standards, and yet America’s cigarette use has been declining for years and is now lower than many countries with more restrictive laws and higher cigarette taxes.
I also dispute that increased use of some recreational drugs is a bad thing. Canada leads the world in recreational pot use, and use four times the world average per capita. It doesn’t seem to be such a bad place, and I’m not seeing the huge society problems caused by an excess of stoned yuppies.
Sam…does that include the right to develop PROFOUND mental illness?
You’re missing that stuff like meth, PCP etc can cause very profound mental illness.
Why should we have batshit nuts people disrupting quality of life just b/c someone wants to inject chemicals to make themselves feel better? I mean meth psycosis can be quite violent.
The rule should be that if you can’t take the drug without recklessly endangering the public, then the drug should be illegal. So if you can prove that taking a drug will alter your brain chemistry in a way that will make you violent in the future and a threat to other people, then that drug should be illegal to take.
Is there anyone here who would happily do cocaine, heroin, pot, meth, et cetera except for the fact that it’s illegal? Like as soon as it’s legalized you’re going out and buying a bong and loading it up for the smokefest of your life after which you’ll snort some blow to stay awake and then take a hit of heroin to calm yourself down?
I love the idea that people are lined up around the block to get high as soon as the lawmakers get around to legalizing everything.
People who are going to do drugs… are doing them.
People who don’t want to do drugs… aren’t.
People who want to experiment are going to regardless of legality.
I think another important factor on the increase/not of drug use would be the social implications of its use. How would your employer view drug use, for example? Would the attitude be that, since it is now legal, we aren’t testing anymore? Or would it be, “I don’t care what the law is, anyone caught with drugs in their system will be fired!”
How about neighborhood picnics and parties? Will there be giant bowls full of cocaine around, or will it be like it is now?
I think that the problem with most drug legalization scenarios is that is assumes that a magic wand is waved and that drugs are now legal. I don’t see it happenening without a sea change of attitudes.
So alcohol should be illegal?
Isn’t that the case now, for the most part? Drugs don’t get put on the controlled substance list all willy nilly. (Pot probably being the exception).
How do you feel about prescription drugs? Anti-depressants? Antibiotics? These are all controlled as well. Should people have free access to them?
Cite?
I note that most studies in the immediate aftermath of alcohol prohibition concluded that consumption actually went down after repeal (for one thing, the natural level of demand for low-proof beer and wine returned after prohibition had arfiticially shifted the market toward higher-proof, and thus more easily concealed, beverages). Only in the 1980s did anyone seriously claim that repeal caused a surge in demand. I can think of two explanations for this phenomenon:
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1920s-30s America, like Nineveh and Tyre, had most of its relevant historical records lost, and so new discoveries were required to ferret out the truth, or,
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Drug War pressure to sweep an embarassing rebuttal to their arguments under the rug distorted the research (this sort of thing is a perennial problem resulting from dependence on government funding).
I find the answer behind Door #2 to be more plausible.
Or at least the drek coming out of Hollywood would seem funny, which I suppose is something… 
Pot would be like beer is now. So, no being stoned at work, but yeah, you could often bum a toke from people at a casual gathering. Not at parties run by mormons, obviously, but there are lots of groups where this ‘sea change’ has already taken place.
(The ‘harder’ drugs would be like soda pop made of draino is now. Legal, yes, but…)