I, for one, (30, white male, military) am firmly against drugs. Pot included. I’ve never touched the crap in my life, and think illegal drugs are tremendous evil being inflicted on the world. I know that my position is based primarily on morality. I just don’t understand why anyone would want to drug themselves into a stupor. It disgusts me. When you consider the massive criminal infrastructure that has grown up to exploit people’s lack of self-control and apparently irrepressible “need” to get high, I can’t see it as anything but a blight on humanity.
I don’t smoke, and I go for months at a time in between the occasional sips of alcohol. I’m around a lot of people who talk about drinking like it’s something they “have to do,” as though they have no choice in the matter. It’s disgusting.
As far as I’m concerned, if you need to drug yourself into happiness go buy some beer and drink moderately. There may not be a scientific basis behind banning the drug, but neither is there any rational argument for why it should be used recreationally. Nobody “needs” to get high. If you require pot for a medical condition, have it used under a doctor’s control with limited refills just like every other drug. Most of these states that have “medical marijuana” have the program abused by quacks who write blank checks so people they know aren’t sick can just get high as much as they want. We don’t need dispensiaries… we need pharmacies.
I know I’m in the minority in this “more enlightened age,” but it is something I believe in and something I’m not going to back down from. Drugs are contemptible.
It doesn’t surprise me then that US prisons are more violent than their UK counterparts, if, nevermind wacky baccy, they can’t even enjoy a bit of snout after a hard day sewing mailbags.
You can’t take the comparison between marijuana and tobacco too far, though. For most tobacco smokers he process of smoking an ordinary cigarette, which takes a few minutes, is part and parcel of the attraction of smoking. The lighting up, the first drag, the taste of the smoke and the gentle stimulation (why yes, I did use to smoke, how did you guess?) all contribute to the pleasure of smoking. Obviously, too, there’s the nicotine, providing a relaxing sensation and, incidentally, quite addictive. But the amount of nicotine in a single cigarette is tiny. One smoker ordinarily smokes an entire cigarette on the spot, and will likely smoke several more in the course of an evening. All the smokers in the room are doing the same thing.
By contrast, marijuana is typically not smoked that way. I’m sure there are people who can chain smoke joints the way Jack Webb smoked Chesterfields, but they are absolutely the exception. Most tokers would be hard put to smoke more than a fraction as much pot as the typical tobacco smoker does tobacco. That said, I agree with you on the public aspect of it and think it would be a step backwards to allow widespread smoking of MJ in public places.
Actually, no. It takes a good deal of time, effort and attention to produce a mature, high grade marijuana plant. In a regulate-and-tax scenario there would still be a sizable market of producers, sellers and consumers.
I’m sorry if I didn’t make this distinction in the OP but just for example my father is actually not sympathetic at all to drug users or addicts in some senses, he would say make it legal and let them OD and everyone else can get on with their life. His position is more that drug prohibition is a farce that can’t exist in a free society, he believes that it has ruined the fourth amendment among other things.
You can be anti drug prohibition without being pro drug use.
My feelings about taxing it is … there’s already a massive infrastructure for surreptitiously producing, transporting, distributing, and retailing marijuana. I suspect it will be as eagerly used to avoid taxation as it is currently to get around prohibition.
The obvious comparison is alcohol, but that was only illegal for a few years, and it had been legal for a long time before that. The marijuana distribution network is much more reflective of the illegal nature of the industry.
This is just silly. What about all the people who drink alcohol but who don’t become alcoholics and never drive drunk? What about all the folks who enjoy, and occasionally partake of, Big Macs or chocolate cake or what have you, and manage to maintain a healthy weight?
solosam, does the fact that these foodstuffs can, in the hands of intemperate people, lead to early death and debilitating diseases garner them the same moral contempt in your view? Should there be food police as well as narcotic squads?
I agree it’s a problem, but you seem to assume that the consumption of alcohol would remain the same in any legalized-drugs scenario. I question that premise, as the producers and sellers of alcoholic beverages apparently also do.
I’d be interested in reading your views on how you think the world survived until about 1900 AD without drug prohibition. I do realize that highly concentrated refined narcotics had become available only in the century or so leading up to that point, but in crude form these drugs had been available for thousands of years. And while there had been prohibitions, here and there, against everything from opium to tobacco to coffee, there was nothing like the contemporary worldwide establishment consensus that drugs must be prohibited.
I think the main driving force behind drug prohibition is frightened parents. They don’t want their children using drugs. They want harsh criminal charges against anyone who sells or uses drugs so that there’s nobody around who will cause their child to use drugs.
Of course, if their child ends up using drugs anyway, there’s a complete 180. Drug use stops being a criminal matter and becomes a problem that needs rehabilitation and understanding.
This dichotomy explains the schizophrenic nature of drug policies in this country. For every person caught with drugs, there’s somebody that wants to sentence them to life in prison and somebody that wants to send them to the Betty Ford Clinic.
I don’t follow you. How would it increase Bayer’s profits to have aspirin sold only by prescription?
My understanding is that what drug companies want is to have as many patent assets as they can muster, and they do this either by inventing or discovering entirely new compounds that have some therapeutic value, or by developing better means of delivery, e.g. extended release formulas. This is why Adderal XR costs much more than generic mixed amphetamine salts, although they are both Schedule II controlled substances. In the same way brand-name Mucinex costs much more than generic guafenesin, and those are both OTC preparations.
I’m merely a layman here, but I don’t think whether a drug is a controlled substance or prescription only or OTC makes much difference with respect to drug company profits.
My doctor recently had me start taking a pill to prevent strokes. I got the first supply from the drugstore with a prescription. It turns out to be just childrens aspirin (81mg). Since then, I’ve just bought them from the store counter. And I paid way, way less than that ‘prescription’ bottle!
Duh, yourself. Did the pharmacy staff have to count out 30 tablets and place them a plastic tube? Did they have to create the prescription label and glue it on, and did they have to do the paperwork associated with prescriptions, including entering it in your patient file? There’s a cost for all that as compared to simply stocking bottles of Bayer on the shelf and letting purchasers pay for them at the front of the store.
If I were you I’d be asking my doctor why he or she wanted you to obtain aspirin this way instead of just buying it off the shelf.
I have little but contempt mixed with pity for most drug addicts and alcoholics, but I also believe it should be legal for utilitarian reasons. Do you have contempt for tobacco smokers who are literally killing themselves and (in the case of second-hand smoke) possibly their family and friends? Or people who gorge themselves on junk food? Or people who engage in promiscuous sex? Or countless hours of video-gaming? Should all those be banned too then?
From Caulkins, Hawken, Kilmer and Kleiman (2012): Portugal is often held up as the poster child for successful legalization. It is better thought of as the poster child for misunderstandings about legalization…
Portugal decriminalized; it did not legalize…Portugal is an interesting case study – but of a middle path, not of legalization.
It’s one thing to support decriminalization as a message board poster, quite another as a politician. The attack ads write themselves. No elected official wants to be soft on drugs. Whether a stance of “Harm reduction” has legs remains to be seen.
You are right, I actually read my link AFTER I posted it.
Personally, I think Portugal should go ahead and completely legalize pot as well.
You are very right about politicians not wanting to “write their opponents attack ads”. However, they don’t have to, if they make it a ballot initiative.
I could agree with you there, let’s rehabilitate instead of imprison.
But I also think drugs are something you shouldn’t start on in the first place. Keeping them illegal will at least discourage the law-abiding potential abusers.