A concerted effort to make drugs more available might cancel out the argument that people would do them less if legalized.
Upon what do you base the assessment that household drugs are “much stronger” than the real ones? Getting high off of glue may cause different problems from doing PCP, but I wouldn’t say it’s stronger. No matter what you do, I think model airplane glue is going to be cheaper than some of these drugs.
The History Channel occassionally shows Hooked: Illegal Drugs and How They Got That Way. Worth watching
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Most people who grow pot at home do so in order to supply themselves personally, not for selling. They may have only a few plants which supply all of what they need. Would these people be punished for not buying from “approved” suppliers?
I’m 100% for complete legalization of marijuana, with only restrictions on age. As I said before, pot never killed anyone, and it’s not a drug which is commonly adulterated in dangerous ways. I don’t even think pot fits under the lable of “drug” due to its very nature. I’m not concerned at all about any potential effects on society or users’ health.
I will only support your legalization if it becomes law that those who want it must supply the addicts with the drugs and house and guard them. I have a few addicts in my life that I would rather not have. If you want em, you can have em.
I think pot’s a drug as much as alcohol is, and there are many similarities.
Not really true, since smoking pretty much anything can lead to cancers to the lungs, brain and upper body in general.
You seem to be placing the vast, vast majority of your confidence of all these supposed benefits to socitey on the notion that for some reason everyone is going to become a stable, well-informed/educated, logical, responsible, and mature citizen overnight when and because drugs are legalized. This assumption that people (particularly people who can’t deal with the real “non-doped-up” world to some degree) will do the right thing when big brother says “go nuts kids” is very ignorant in my opinion.
The line I see you repeating time and time again is “people will have free-choice, and if they become addicted or do something stupid it will be their fault” (with a hint of “and they will actually beleive that it’s their fault and accept resposibility for it like good eggs”)
Think about it this way… we already have free choice, and will do what we want regardless of rules as you yourself point out with the example of kids getting into bad stuff*simply because someone said “no”. And you see addicts, theives, health problems, and so forth already in enough people that’s it’s a problem. So:
a) why on Earth would people who already abuse drugs or experiment unsafely stop doing so? (considering this irresponsibility is their preferred method, and the law has nothing to do with how they actually take the drugs once they get them in their hands). How would legalization change the character of people who have problems with drugs (alocoholics, chain smokers, plus all the other types of addicts). Daddy didn’t come home and beat his kids and drink away the rent money during prohibition because the price of moonshine was high and he felt like rebelling against the lawmakers, he did it because he was an irresponsible Shithead, and thousands of people still come home today and ruin their family’s lives for the same reason; the fact that their poison of choice is legal or not has nothing to do with it. So the idea that legalizing drugs will do anything at all for the morality of the nation is absurd.
b) how could opening the doors to a lot of people largely ignorant of the drug world possibly not result in even more problems than we already have?
The results as I see them would be that:
you’d still have the same number and severity of drug-related troubled people (more or less) since they’re already hooked and for whatever reason haven’t fixed the problem,
you won’t end up with any fewer people doing drugs just because it’s no longer rebellious (how many people quit drinking after prohibition?), and
you’ll almost certainly see an increase in new people trying drugs - the brazen minority* may look for new laws to break resulting in fewer recruits, but the timid majority will now feel safe and indulge in things they were always to worried about doing before… getting messed up as a result (since a few penstrokes on paper by some grey-haired old politician will have zero effect on how people take resonsibility for their personal actions and choices).
- (this statement BTW is very overblown, and the majority of kids have the common sense and maturity to follow a rule rather than break it - those who break rules anyway are the exceptions and give the others a bad image, especially when it’s the bad ones who are used as indicators of normal behaviour like in this thread).
I have never seen a documented case in which cancer was directly attributed to pot smoking alone. Often, pot smokers smoke cigarettes as well. Pot is carcinogenic, but some users cut down on these properties by using water pipes, or by consuming the plant in other ways.
In my opinion, alcohol is far more dangerous than pot. Drunks react differently than stoners. Whereas stoned people tend to relax, drunks can become violent. I’ve heard apocryphal stories of violent pot-heads, but I’d gander to say they’re not the norm. Pot generally makes the user want to chill out and stare peacefully at the television.
Many people have died in alcohol-related accidents. Alcohol contributes to domestic violence, bar fights, and a host of medical ailments, including damaged livers.
Propaganda aside, alcohol kills more people in one year than pot ever could.
I have never seen a documented case in which cancer was directly attributed to pot smoking alone. Often, pot smokers smoke cigarettes as well. Pot is carcinogenic, but some users cut down on these properties by using water pipes, or by consuming the plant in other ways.
In my opinion, alcohol is far more dangerous than pot. Drunks react differently than stoners. Whereas stoned people tend to relax, drunks can become violent. I’ve heard apocryphal stories of violent pot-heads, but I’d gander to say they’re not the norm. Pot generally makes the user want to chill out and stare peacefully at the television.
Many people have died in alcohol-related accidents. Alcohol contributes to domestic violence, bar fights, and a host of medical ailments, including damaged livers.
Propaganda aside, alcohol kills more people in one year than pot ever could.
And the fact that pot is illegal and alchohol is not in no way effects the outcome? The ad I heard on the tv said that 30% of all drug related car accidents had mary-jane involved.
I didn’t say weed was more dangerous; I don’t think it is. But that doesn’t mean pot’s not a drug.
Yookeroo, I read the first paragraph of Race and the drug War. A scary view of the future if it is true. When opiates were legal, addiction was off the chart.
I ask again, what about the liability? Merchants of alcohol are sued on a regular basis for the deeds of their patrons.
The real question is how do you balance the right to take risks against the freedom to pursue your own pleasures. I would answer it with the old legal adage: “your right to hit me ends at the tip of my nose”.
The reason we limit the consumption of most drugs is the tremendous cost to the non-user. The costs vary from crime to healthcare to violence. Crime is the end result of a user who loses the ability to earn a living. Healthcare, same reason. Violence is relative to the act of the crime and/or psychotic behavior.
If you legalize all drugs, you will empty the prisons (looks good on paper) but fill up the hospitals. Forget about having a city park, they would become junkie landfill overnight (look at Sweden). It is cheaper and more humane to confine a user to prison. It would be even better to confine a user to a mandatory rehab center (prison with a smile).
Well, you need to take this study with a grain of salt. Legally, having pot in your system makes you “impaired” even if you’re currently as sober as a judge. THC stays in the body for a long time, especially if the person is a habitual user. Thus, the last time you may have smoked may have been three days ago, yet the traces in your system make you legally high.
In this case, the young woman convicted was under new legislation, though it was later overturned on appeal.
The study you cite doesn’t apparently control for this. The methodology is flawed if an accident victim with pot traces in their blood equalls a “high driver.”
In this case, the defendant ran a stop sign and caused an accident. He claimed that the last time he had smoked had been two or three days prior to the accident. However, as a habitual smoker, his BAC of THC was enough to make him “legally” high, even though he was sober at the time of the crash. Or, as the site puts it:
Nevertheless, the defendent was sentenced to six years imprisonment.
1990 is not 1999.
Even if the statistics are skewed, this compares a legal drug to an illegal one. Are you asserting that all of those who has accidents where not impared, just intoxicated?
I have smoke pot before. I know it impaires me and those I have smoked with to a significant degree.
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What has changed?
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I’m asserting that they were not necessarily either. Days and even weeks after smoking marijuana, traces of THC still remain in your body. Legally, it may make you impared, but reasonably and logically, you are not still “high.”
Then you should know that the effects go away after a few hours. You weren’t “stoned” two days later, were you?
So, if the original study is going off of drivers who merely tested positive for THC, it’s worthless. Only if the study was limited to those who were actually driving high, would it have any significance other than that of a scare tactic.
“The statute automatically labels a driver legally impaired if she has a minimum amount of various drugs in her bloodstream. Williams was the first person convicted under the 1999 legislation.”
That was a 1990 statistic I quoted. I doubt that if it was already standard practice to label users as automatically impaired, that they would not have to pass legislation for such.
If it is so, then that would be true. My quote did not say the accidents where caused by those who tested posotive for THC. Rather that they were caused by drivers using marijuana.
What they don’t tell you is how many of those also involved alcohol.
And for every study saying pot makes you a bad driver, there’s another saying the opposite:
And how did they find out the drivers had used marijuana? By testing their urine for THC.
A person has to right to do what he wants to do, as long as it doesn’t infringe upon the rights of others; if that person wants to do drugs, and is fully aware of the potential consequences of doing so, then that person has to right to do drugs, and when those potential consequences occur, it is no fault of the manufacturer, it is the fault of that person.
And no, it wouldn’t solve drug-related crime, the idea is for it to be reduced significantly.
How do you know tolerance isn’t a mathematical function? I don’t think we’ve done too much research on tolerance; the only thing I know regarding it is that once it develops, a user requires more of a drug to achieve the same effect. As for leading to crime, LESS CRIME WOULD OCCUR BECAUSE DRUGS WOULD BE CHEAPER AND LEGAL TO GET. As for OD, you make a point; too many stupid people would try drugs and ignore any warnings, then kill themselves.
No, I don’t have any factual support for it. It’s a psychology idea.
The high can be a positive effect for some people because as I said before, marijuana can make some people more creative, hallucinogens cause religions experiences, and stimulants and overwhelming sense of self-confidence.
I am proposing a room on the premises where kids can go and do drugs, but it would be regulated, because doing it in the bathroom could lead to disrupting nonusers (like smoking in a non-smoking area). Maybe it was a bad idea to propose drugs without age restrictions, I’m having second thoughts. Plus, since most kids don’t have jobs, that would make it more difficult to get drugs, so…
In school or workplace, information on students/workers and drug usage would be known, recorded at the “special room”. Drug tests can also make information available; can’t stick a needle in a guy to see if they’ve been watching porn. 
Inhalants are not made for the purpose of getting high; drugs are. In any case, household products are used to get high because drugs are otherwise unavailable at the moment. If we made them available, people wouldn’t have to be sniffing glue. Even if they do, its kinda difficult to regulate something like that.