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Prohibition of alcohol was a horrible failure. Yet, we did not learn from it. Last week I saw an hour long program about these people, former drug enforcement police who want to have drugs legalized. One of them said before the Harrison Act drug users were about 1.4 % of population. He says now it is the same. He suggests that is you dropped a block of heroine and cocaine on a street corner 98 % of the people would walk by. Drug enforcement eats billions of dollars and does very little good. We waste billions jailing people for drug use yet we can not afford serious rehab for any one who wants to get off.
Police departments,politicians and Governments are all corrupted by drugs. Neighborhoods are unsafe because addicts have to commit crimes to obtain the money for drugs. We waste billions incarcerating users and then releasing them unchanged,back on the streets. It is time to legalize and tax one of the biggest money makers in the world.
Even if we decide that some drugs are too dangerous to legalize, we’re clearly going about enforcing drug laws the wrong way. Nobody goes to jail for drug crimes and comes out rehabilitated. I don’t know what the answer is, though. Alcohol is not always a good comparison to drug use, because although it’s possible to drink responsibly it’s not really possible to shoot heroin or smoke crack responsibly.
Invest the money needed to jail non-violent drug offenders into rehab centers.
Decriminalize, regulate and tax weaker drugs as per recommendation of unbiased commission decades ago and use those revenues to educate and detox people.
Treatment, not jail. Better to sell safe drugs than to let violence and overdosing continue. It’s just common sense. People just need to have faith in their ability to make responsible decisions. We have to do it every day anyways.
Actually it is possible to shoot heroin responsibly. Heroin has few long term health effects aside from constipation. Sharing needles, not knowing the strenghth, and having it cut with dicey substances are all the result of it being illegal.
Cite? especially for the heroin claim. People used to use the stuff as cough medicine for god’s sake. Its slide into illegality was very protracted, it started off being available over the counter in pharmacists, during which time there were many people who became dependant but were able to maintain their day to day lives quite well (think functional alcoholic). Making heroin illegal and thus hard to obtain, requiring contact with criminals and much larger sums of money to maintain a habit was the catalyst for turning drugs from a problem of individual addiction and a medical issue into the criminal matter it is today.
I’m having difficulty tracking down an online cite I trust for the above paragraph, but I would recommend this book to those interested in the forces behind drug prohibition. My information is taken for it.
Whilst everything you say makes sense there is a problem that the first people to legalise are going to get a wave of addicts travelling there which is likely to make things quite unpleasant for everyone else (c.f. Amsterdam which would be a far more pleasant place without the large foreign addict population), the resulting bad news stories will be paraded by the prohibitionists to maintain the status quo everywhere else. Legalisation will only work if a certain critical mass of the larger countries all change tack at the same time, which is tragically unlikely to happen.
There are governments whose prime business is illegal drugs. One of the enforcers on the show said he was in Nicaragua he saw the police that we were paying to fight exportation and growing of drugs, playing soccer with men in a drug cartel. They just eat up billions of our money and share it with the growers. It does not work.
Every mom would think their kid wouldn’t be on drugs if they were illegal.
My personal opinion is that all drugs should be legal to possess, but illegal to sell and of course illegal to drive under the influence of.
I’m curious about this as well. I know nothing of heroin and crack, and I’m sure that there are very few, if any, responsible users of them. But is that a result of the fact that the only culture they are in is an extra-legal one that encourages excessive use?
I think all drugs should be legal as well. The money blown on “fighting” them needs to be put into rehabs, clinics and anti-smoking and anti-drinking campaigns, since drinking and smoking are far worse than a good amount of illegal drugs. And that statement can be proven, just google cigarette deaths and then google marijuana deaths. Hell, google cigarette deaths vs. heroin deaths.
It is certainly possible to use heroin responsibly; it used to be a brand-name drug, sold over the counter. Most of the problems of heroin users stem from its illegalility.
And if cocaine were legal, nobody would even bother with crack.
I’m NOT saying marijuana kills more than cigarettes, BUT . . .
I wouldn’t quite trust the numbers that we take for granted. I’ve read in a few places that anytime a person who smokes cigarettes dies - from virtually any cause - whoever is keeping score tallies it as a cigarette death. Whereas with marijuana - which contains more carcinogens than tobacco and is puff-for-puff more harmful - gets off every time. I don’t think a death has ever been directly attributed to marijuana, but to think it’s never happened is just holding your head in the sand.
I, too, think drug laws are counter-productive, especially since they criminalize medical problems which would be better suited with other forms of rehabilitation and treatment.
Although NORML is obviously a biased source, I find this article, which indicates that pot smoking in Holland is less than in the US, despite its legality there, to be compelling. Much of our drug problem in the US stems from, rather than is alievated by, our legal intolerance for drug use. By demonizing (some) altered states, we increase their appeal.
And, obviously, the US doesn’t necessarily have a problem with other forms of intoxication; the huge tobacco and alcohol industries testify to that.
Instead, I think the history, and propagation, of the drug war is much more tied to the economic juggernaut stemming from prohibition. While some may suggest that legalizing, and taxing, drugs, would be a boon to our economy, I suspect that criminalization has a huge impact on the prison, law enforcement, and legal industries which far surpass any windfall arising from more tax revenue.
See, as a commentary on this, the lyrics to System of a Down’s prison song
Sadly, I can’t agree with this. There is a more intense high with crack, and some gravitate to it. I do feel that drugs can be a huge problem in a person’s life. But criminalization is a poor way to address a medical issue.
FWIW, a view from NajaHusband’s Minnesota relatives was that he didn’t view marijuana as harmful per se, but that he knew that the instant it became legal, he’d have to worry about all the stoned drivers that were going to be waiting on the freeway to murder his children in high-speed pileups. That was it, the entirety of the reason why he, personally, will vote against legalization every single time. Stoned drivers.
Do you think it is possible to get drugs in any city in America? They are not stopped. You can get them anywhere any time.
The program made the point that legalization does not result in more users. As a matter of fact they decline. Therefore you should be strongly for legalization. It will save your children .
I know one thing, if they could attribute even a single death to marijuana use, they’d make that one person an anti-drug poster child and we’d see their picture plastered over countless anti-drug “public service announcements.”
“They say marijuana never hurts anybody. Tell that to the family of Billy Smith…” :smack:
I don’t doubt that puff for puff marijuana has more carcinogens in it than cigarette smoke. But I don’t know many “chain weed smokers”.
I’d be willing to bet that even a heavy weed smoker might smoke two joints a day. Imagine a cig smoker who smoked two cigarettes per day. I don’t think that would pose any increased risk of lung cancer at all…
No way, I’ve known people that smoked weed upwards of 10 times a day. The equivalent of at least 4 to 5 medium sized joints if not more.
That’s quite impressive. I can’t imagine myself smoking that much without being glued to the couch all day. Did these people do anything besides smoke weed? 
Here’s an interesting article: [Large Study Finds No Link Between Marijuana and Lung Cancer](Large Study Finds No Link between Marijuana and Lung Cancer)
I don’t think so. I’ll admit to having had a bout with crack cocaine when I was 18-20, and I’m 38 now, with a family and a house and a decent job.
The illegality to me only added to the paranoia of using it, which I guess could be viewed as a thrill but I never thought so. Travelling to the wrong side of town always meant getting the fuck out of there after you scored in order to not overly associate with the sketchy drug-population as well as risking notice by the police.
It was pure addiction for me, plain and simple. I cannot possibly fathom undertaking the risks I used to take to get high, given my current life, which is far different than my former one.
And I disagree with the poster that claimed that heroin could be used responsibly. IANACOFHA ( I Am Not A Current Or Former Heroin Addict), but from what I’ve seen, the drug is so terribly addictive that even if you could regulate your purity (which seems to be the leading cause of heroin OD’s/deaths) you would need increasing doses to achieve the same level of pleasure that you would at some point increase the dosage to a point where due to unmitigated use, your body or heart would just shut down.