Really? What about domestic violence? People who can’t do their jobs because they’re zonked out? etc.
How about thalidomide? THAT was OTC in some parts of Europe, used as a sedative or sleeping aid, and look what that led to.
Seriously effective arms control?
On the other hand, we’re all assuming that there will be no major negative effect of legalized drugs.
Accounts of China before the Opium Wars are that vast numbers of the Chinese were becoming addicts, listless and wasted all of the time, and hurting the economy as well as themselves. Now that could just be a false viewpoint by a conservative government, unrelated to actual data.
But it could well be that the legality of marijuana, opiates, etc. could start to prove to be untenable. We should all be clear that we are running an experiment of which we don’t really have a strong idea of how it might play out over the next few generations. And some things do take a few generations to show their full impact - as cultural norms are slowly adjusted by underlying reality of the change.
While true enough, from the angle of landing in jail/prison for possession, the difference becomes vanishing. Incarceration can fuck up your life drastically, often moreso than merely the act of getting fucked up on a substance. Locking people up for this is grossly unproductive all around when just a treatment program would make more sense.
As long as the hard stuff is off limits, the supply chain will behave like Altria/RJR/Lorillard/etc, doing their best to facilitate demand for their product. By which I mean if it were taken off the black market, there might be stringent regulation that could lead to efforts to mitigate the addictiveness of the substances – I believe that this is a likely possibility, to produce substances that provide a sufficient fix with reduced addiction potential. There is no way to try to move in that direction when the hard stuff is strictly illegal.
Even cocaine isn’t comparable to heroin. A lot of people have dabbled in cocaine, it can indeed be used “recreationally” on an on-and-off basis; yeah people can develop addiction to it, but that’s true of alcohol too. Heroin isn’t “recreational.” The margins for error are a hell of a lot smaller.
Here’s my question about the whole issue: we acknowledge that some drugs are way worse than others, like meth, heroin, and opiates. Yet whenever someone suggests legalizing their recreational use, they tend (in my memory) to hand wave that fewer people will use those drugs once the panoply of currently illicit substances is available to them.
My question is, why do people make this assumption? If these substances are that “good” when they’re illegal, why would people not use them regardless? And if that’s the case, why should I not be concerned about meth, heroin, and opiates being generally available to the public?
So after shooting up, tooting up, toking up or keeping down your complementary government funded fix, line, rock or good olde fashioned bourbon & buttermilk enema with a little Danish angel dust stirred in (in enthusiast slang, a so-called “Goober ‘n’ Gomer”) will there be any entertainment options at the clinic for those wo choose to indulge?
Perhaps free snacks, drinks or use of “privacy cabins” for those couples feeling amorous after their stone sets in?
Maybe special holiday themed promotions, i.e., a Crackhead Christmas Carol Choir sing-a-long?
Taco & Tramadol Tuesdays?
Fajita & freebase Fridays?
I am sure that your heartland working class types who are surviving paycheck to paycheck will be thrilled to see all the 20-something Seattle slackers on the nightly news rioting for “Extra Rations” during long holiday weekends.
It’s out-of-the-box thinking like this that will win the hearts & minds of all right thinking Americans.
The only argument that I see against it is that you don’t want to pay for it. Sure, but I ask you whether or not you think it would work. Legalizing them is putting a profit motive in the hand of private companies to encourage drug addiction. That to me is foolish. Sure, you may hurt the cartels, but I think we know exactly what large corporations do with addictive substances and it’s not ‘look out for the public good.’
Selling them for profit in government dispensaries is perhaps a way around this, but it still allows for a large amount of non-control. How are people getting addicted to drugs in the first place? It’s usually them being offered by a friend at a party and they are curious. My plan gets rid of the parties and makes the friend have to ask you to go to a clinic with them to try your drugs. At the clinic, people can be there to make sure you know the consequences of your decision.
The bottom line is that junkies are gonna get their fix. They always do because it’s the only thing in life that they crave. Heroin addiction is horrible. If they have to lie, cheat, steal or kill to get their next hit, that’s how it’s going to go down. I’m saying eliminate those elements. Put them in a safe space where they don’t have to lie, cheat, steal or whatever to get their hit. Make sure that people that are new to drug use fully and completely understand what that means. Verify their ages so that they are going in fully aware of the consequences of ‘just one hit.’ Undercut the cartels on price by so much that they can’t afford to stay in business and they have no impetus to find new users and new markets.
And I get that you don’t want YOUR money going to junkies. Well, I don’t want MY money going to locking up 2.5 MILLION people a year. I don’t want MY money going to pay for police officers that are in constant fear of their life from strung out junkies looking for their next hit. I don’t want MY money going for indigent healthcare for yet another generation of addicts. I do want MY money going for solutions that might be outside the box, but definitely what we’re doing now ain’t working and hasn’t worked for 50 years, so maybe it’s time we try something new.
You will still have indigent healthcare going to addicts. You will still have cops combating with strung out drug users. The only thing that changes is that these people are getting free drugs to start or continue their addiction.
As long as you dont drive-- or fall asleep with a lit ciggie, etc.
But second hand MJ smoke cant kill anyone, absent some odd allergy.
This is idiotic.
Are you worried about cost, or is that a distraction?
If you are worried about cost, lets talk about how expensive the war on drugs has been, from police resources, trials, through incarceration. If it costs less to let the degenerates waste their lives, would that sway you?
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When I was in pharmacy school in the early 1990s, there was a program called “Katy’s Kids”, aimed at grade-schoolers, which taught them about the difference between “drugs” and medicine. This was started after reports that children were refusing to take medications for things like epilepsy and asthma after finding they were drugs, and thinking they were harmful in some way. I never participated, but one of my friends did; a group of them took turns going to schools, and the shortest one among them would put on a kangaroo suit with “KATY” across the belly.
Several years later, I was telling a colleague about this, and she said that she’d done something similar at her kids’ school, only her talk described the difference between drugs, medicine, and poison. That’s also an important distinction.
I don’t think I’ve heard that.
What I have heard is that legalizing marijuana may cause a decrease in abuse of other, harder drugs. The theory being that marijuana isn’t a gateway drug that leads to others, but rather it’s grouped in with all the others due to being illegal. If I could go to the store and buy some weed, that’s what I’d do. On the other hand, if I have to go to my dealers house to buy it, he might happen to have some coke or ecstasy or percocets…and as long as I’m there, maybe I’ll try/buy some. Similar to an impulse buy.
Make marijuana legal and a lot of people will never get into the harder drugs because they aren’t casually introduced to them.
You may be looking at this backwards. If you have to work, say, 60 hours a week to get by, and are a couple paychecks away from living in your car or a cardboard box, I would suggest that there are other aspects of our system that could use some revision. You can resent the junkies for getting free fixes, or you can redirect your peeves at the people who are sodomizing your life to get themselves even more profit.
There are a lot of aspects of our society that need revised.
I’m perfectly OK with marijuana being made legal, and probably most hallucinogens as well - LSD, mushrooms, maybe ecstasy.
Cocaine, meth, heroin, PCP, and the like? That’s a public health hazard. Alcohol is as well, granted, but as stated above prohibiting alcohol is simply unworkable given that literally anyone with access to yeast and a sugary liquid can make their own.
I am still new around here, but this has to be an attempt at parody, right?
Frankly, the ludicrous, almost farcical idea that drug users, (both hard-core, homeless street addicts or novice recreational users from privileged, pampered, 1%-Percenter backgrounds alike) would be content to limit their psychoactive drug usage to clinical settings, under the watchful eye of government employees, as opposed to say the freedom, comfort and privacy of a seedy, run-down Quiznos bathroom stall or the excitement and allure of a glamourous destination 3 day music festival, makes it seem to me like you are not familiar with even the very basics of human nature, at least when it comes to this particular aspect of it.
That is without mentioning the fact that not even the most ultra-liberal, progressive Scandanavian countries wouldn’t go for something this extreme, as if for no other reason supporters would be comitting political suicide.
“Candidate Senoy says he supports providing our country’s 18 year-old children with free, government funded yet highly addictive, intoxicating narcotic drugs, including cocaine, heroin and hallucinogenic cacti, and earmarking the American taxpayer’s hard earned money for clinics where users would even be allowed to smoke, play penny backgammon or listen to anti-social “Gangster Rappers” music while under the pernicious influence of these vile poisons.”
“I am Candidate XYZ, and I say NO to wasting taxpayers money, NO to Gangster Rappers and NO to government supplied hallucinogenic cacti!”