I don’t like mind altering drugs, never have, never will. However I am more and more finding myself agreeing with the idea that such substances should not be banned. I base this on first of all on the fact that I dislike the police state we’ve created to fight drug use.
Our rights are constantly whittled away in order to make it easier for the government to enter into our private lives. Not to mention the costs in terms of lives and treasure that we sacrifice at the alter of law and order.
Mind you I think we shouldn’t create some sort of protected class for drug users. As an employer I should be free to not hire or fire drug abusers and driving high should get a similar treatment as drunk driving. But the drug war has taken far too great a toll on our society.
I voted “other” because I think that government in general needs to treat drug use less as a crime and more as a public health hazard. Addiction is the only disease where we punish the victim for being sick, and while the state should continue to crack down on the trafficking and sale of hard drugs, the people who get caught using them need treatment and education far more than they need prison.
As a matter of practical policy, criminalizing drugs hasn’t worked. People are still using drugs and the costs of this being a crime are astronomical. We aren’t helping the drug users by making them criminals and we aren’t helping society as a whole.
Illegalizing drugs puts too much power in the hands of criminal gangs. If we are fighting a war on drugs, keeping them illegal is arming the enemy. Legalize, make it easy to get treatment for addiction, and rake in the tax revenue on the newly legal products. They would probably still sell for cheaper than now, because there would be much less risk involved.
Opiates for example, are not especially dangerous drugs by themselves, as long as you can get clean drug of known quantity. What is dangerous, is when some dealer claims fentanyl is really heroin, or a junkie in withdrawl shows up at CVS with a gun, or people share needles.
I am not exactly sure how the solution works, but it should be obvious that criminalizing the behavior in our current manner doesn’t work. I’m tempted to suggest monitored and regulated use of substances - something like a modern opium den, maybe - but I don’t think we know whether that would work.
I think we need better and less biased information about how people can really function with drugs. If you ask addicts, plenty of them will say that their drug of choice makes them feel good without interfering with their life… but they’re biased that way. The war on drugs is biased in the opposite view, and insists that everyone is spiraling out of control into some inevitable future crash. Looking at alcohol as an example, some people can use it in a healthy manner, but some people apparently can’t. I don’t know whether healthy uses of cocaine or ecstasy or meth are possible for anyone, and it’s not like we’ll see properly conducted scientific studies on the subject in the current environment. We need a much better understanding of addiction all the way around.
*People use drugs no matter what the regulations
*Criminalizing drug addicts is essentially criminalizing mental illness
*These people need rehabilitation and not punishment
*Governmental control over the market would at least ensure clean products for the users
One aspect that is starting to annoy me is that I was in a car accident recently but getting a doctor to prescribe pain medicine is like pulling teeth due to the crack down on doctors.
I said yes for some drugs such a pot, urbanredneck, my take on it is, give it time. eventually, I’m sure, pot at least will be full legalized at all levels and then that will be pretty darn near the end of all independent sellers and suppliers of all varieties legal and illegal as the Tobacco Industry, Big Pharma, Corporate Agriculture and the Government swoop in and take over the market and supply.
The poll is insufficiently nuanced. Legalizing all drugs would mean loosening controls on a lot of prescription meds that aren’t used to get high but which nevertheless shouldonly be used under a doctor’s supervision.
I’m all for decriminalizing simple possession and use of marijuana and probably cocaine, possibly heroin and other narcotics. There should still be controls on the sale of coke, heroiin, and so forth, but the emphasis should be on treatment rather than punishment.
I’d like to see possession of drugs completely decriminalized, and the purchase and redistribution of drugs entirely in the hands of the state. Joe Blow can snort all the blow he wants, but he has no business peddling it - and quite frankly it should be impossible for an illegal activity to compete with a government-run one in terms of costs and safety.
I loathe mind-altering drugs as much as the next guy (I’m not even that fond of alcohol beyond the point of tipsiness), but criminalizing possession hurts society more than it helps, and I think continued employ of a failed practice is not just dumber than a sack of bricks, but fundamentally immoral. The war on drugs is much like illegalizing abortion from an efficacy standpoint - it’s not actually preventing anything, it’s just getting people killed needlessly.
This pretty much sums up my stance on the subject. Making substance abusers into criminals just gives them another yoke to carry. These people do not deserve to be shunned and loathed because they have an involuntary addiction.
Edit: Also, people obviously want to spend great deals of money on the stuff despite it being illegal. Might as well get governmental control over the market and rake in the tax money.
You have got to be kidding, or woefully uninformed.
The legal pot is professionally grown and comes in a wide variety of THC and CBD levels to suit any customer. This is very big business. A lot of genetic expertise goes into this stuff.
Bob on the corner with his one strain of Basement Grown can’t even begin to compete with these people.
You can’t get much more potent than 33.4% THC Headcheese or the famous 29.55% THC Dutch Treat. There still has to be some plant matter involved for pot. But if you want to buy extracts then you end up in the 70% to 90% range.
It seems to me that it has essentially ended, but the residue from it sticks around to enable dick cops and redneck sheriffs to arrest (or otherwise harass or abuse) pretty much whomever they please, and have plausible charges. Which may be the reason the war on drugs started in the first place.
It is not a coincidence that the legislation associated with the War on Drugs formally went into effect in 1971, just a couple of years after it stopped being legal to arrest people for just being black.
We have a lovely example-prohibition. It didn’t work. Now that booze is legal, society works just fine. A small percentage of people get addicted. Driving while drunk is illegal. There’s no reason to believe that legalizing all drugs won’t work out in a similar way.
The points made in the OP and many of the subsequent posts here are compelling. It was not until the 20th century that drugs were criminalized. And what does decriminalize mean? If possession is legal but sale is not, then we still have the whole drug enforcement apparatus in place. If sale is also legal, then drugs are legal. Prescription are another matter. But all the prescriptions I take (6) are relatively benign and don’t lead to highs, so what is the point?
Interesting you should mention this – I actually did see a long-term (five years) study done in Britain about adults who mostly did speed in the evenings when they went out or on the weekends. They had jobs, kids, stable relationships, homes, and most of them held it all together surprisingly well.
Wish I could find that study again. I saw it online back in the days when “harm reduction” was a hot concept.
Seems to me that back in the 1980s in San Francisco I myself knew a lot of adults that were handing casual use of drugs. Of course, the economic situation in that place at that time was very sharply different than it is now.
I think one of the biggest deciding factors in the matter is poverty. If you’re poor, your financial margin of error is so tiny that it’s almost inevitable you will screw up. You will be living in a poorer area where there are more cops around, more suspicion and investigation and scrutiny, so you’re far more likely to get busted too. Once you’re in the legal system, all kinds of other disaster ensues.
Believe me, there are enormous numbers of affluent people going around on all kinds of drugs, both prescription and street. You never hear about them because they get caught less often, and when they do they are more likely to have attorneys and receive lighter sentences, or go to a frou-frou rehab center. Poor folks just go to the drunk tank or whatever.
What I’m trying to say here is that a large part of what we consider “handling” one’s drug use has to do with a person’s support network (and whether or not they have one).
I can see cannabinoids, but I’m far less sanguine about other drugs. It’s incredibly difficult to OD on pot. Other drugs, not so much…or to do something monumentally stupid that risks one’s life and/or others’.
I get that the War on Drugs is almost as stupid, but I doubt that making drugs cheaper in general and more freely available is going to do anything but make more users. Perhaps just not enforcing laws with the same money-sinking fanaticism?
It used to be 1 in 4 were smokers. How much less do you think Big Tobacco or Big Pharma would market legalized drugs? You’d need serious regulation just to make a drug vending system workable. No advertisement for the hard stuff, big penalties for doing so.