Legalize them all. But don’t leave them in the government’s hands. Let the free market compete to bring the safest, best priced, most amusingly marketed drugs to our groceries and quicky-marts. Our booze supply is safe, cheap, and successful. No reason heroin and meth can’t be handled the same way.
This thread/poll makes it sound like the only alternative to the drug was is legalization. It bears repeating that decriminalization is not the same thing as legalization. From ITR’s link:
They haven’t buried enough of their friends yet. We are keeping alive too many of the ones who don’t learn. That teaches the wrong lesson to the ones who do pay attention. The school of hard knocks is an excellent teacher. One object lesson is worth a thousand parental lectures.
We hand people the right to vote at age 18. That carries the implicit assumption that one is capable of evaluating consequences, and making rational choices. That may be an invalid assumption, but it is one that our culture has embraced.
I went with ‘only some drugs’ because I don’t think removing all regulation is a good idea. Decriminalize personal use and possession of all drugs, no outright prohibitions, but stop the stupid useless drug war. We already lost, drugs won, and we’re paying a steep price for it.
Roving bands of pot-crazed marauders desperately chasing the green dragon, terrorizing the locals in their Cheech & Chong van tricked out with tire spikes and flamethrowers?
This comparison is so fucked up I don’t even know where to start. No one in the history of mankind has ever been born a drug addict. Using drugs requires a conscious and deliberate choice on their part.
That is simply not true. Babies are born as drug or alcohol addicts every single day because of choices their mothers made while they were in utero. It is not good to be born and immediately have to be detoxed but that is exactly what happens to many newborns with drug or alcohol dependent mothers. Some of those effects are severe and irreversible in cases like fetal alcohol syndrome and induce permanent brain changes that predispose the child to later become dependent as well.
Have you really never heard of such things or are you just blinded by an ignorant ideology?
But that does not change the fact that the person was made a drug addict as a result of human agency. It did not happen in a vacuum and it is in no way comparable to being born gay.
For the war to be over someone has to win …
Who’s winning the war on drugs? I’m straight now, but back in the 80’s I had to have my pills and my razor blade and my straw and my joint for a movie.
I think the bad guys are winning, but the law is on the good guys side so a few get caught, the greedy, the careless, the dumb, the dealers that use, the users that steal.
It’s a no win situation … we need to change society not the laws.
Perfecting our society … that would be a good platform to run for office on.
actually, there’s a lot of evidence that at least some forms of addiction are genetic, so yes, people are born drug addicts. The very definition of “addict” means it’s out of the person’s control, so saying they are making deliberate decisions is incorrect. If they could make decisions about it, they wouldn’t be addicts. Until people discard the “oh they are just immoral/weak/shitheads” attitude, we won’t make any progress on figuring out how best to help these people.
Orange hands and faces smeared with Cheetos dust. Soulless eyes staring out through the bottom of their Mountain Dew bottle. I have seen these people.
Throw a few Twinkies at them and that will buy you just enough time to get away.
And how valid is that evidence? There are no real control studies to establish that addiction is genuinely inherent in individuals.
Two things would make sense to me:
Either 1) you legalize all drugs.
Or 2) you legalize only those drugs that have been found to have both a low risk of addiction, and a low risk of serious harm (to the user and the user’s surroundings alike), and criminalize the rest.
Of course, the second option would lead to the criminalization of alcohol, which would… Well… Feel odd. Plus our American friends already tried that and the results were, shall we say, rather so-and-so.
So I don’t know. But of course in both cases - case 1 or case 2 - you would at least legalize the least dangerous stuff, such as khat, psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, etc.