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Drug War
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Legalization, doesn't mean you can go anywhere and just light up. You can't just goto the local park and get wasted. Decriminalization would still make it illegal to posses, produce and manufacture. If you got cought with a small amount of the substance you'd get something to the equivlanent of a speeding ticket. If you got cought with a lot you'd still goto jail and be fined.
HombrePequeno
Diamond Member
Again, I don't think experimentation would go up for meth, heroin, etc. if proper education was put into place. The amount we educate people currently about drugs is pretty pathetic.
Honestly, how many people do you know would experiment with an extremely addictive drug like heroin just because it is legal? I sure don't know anyone that would.
Even if you have higher rates of addiction, that can be combated with greater funding for rehab clinics which are a hell of a lot cheaper than prison and have a higher success rate.
I hate to tell you this but the war on drugs is causing a lot more deaths (abroad especially) than it is preventing. I see legalization as a sound economic policy that also saves lives.
smack Down
Diamond Member
But we do. You can say we should all day but we will still do so. Lets just added the tax and be done with it.
PrinceofWands
Lifer
Total legalization to do them (on private property), regulation of manufacture and distribution. Concurrent is the requirement that committing any crime while under the influence of a drug results in automatic maximum sentencing if found guilty. Also necessary to suspend ALL government and insurance subsidization of treatment. If you choose drugs (including alcohol & nicotine) you're 100% on our own, live or die. No one should be financially responsible for your weakness.
JD50
Lifer
Hey, good idea. Lets have a fat tax, a cholestoral tax, a tax on people that don't go to college, a tax on people on welfare, a tax on people that use food stamps, a tax on people that use medicare/medicaide, a tax on illegal aliens, etc... they all make choices that cost us tax payers money. Lets just send all of our money to the government, they know how to spend our money much better than we do, lets just call it a "workers paradise". You are a socialist moron and I hope to god that no one like you ever gets any power in this country.
Edit - In reference to the poll, let people do whatever they hell they want to do to their own bodies, if they want to kill themselves with heroin, crack, etc... its fine by me.
I think the cutoff for legal/illegal is pretty clear: addictiveness. If it's addictive (coke, meth, heroin, speed, etc) then it's a matter of public health and safety; if it's not addictive (LSD, mescaline, cannabis, mushrooms, etc) then it should be legal and regulated. Obviously DUI laws, etc would still be in place to protect public safety, but use of non-addictive substances by adults in their own home should be a matter of personal freedom of choice.
EDIT: I should make a clarification: only drugs that actually impair your motor control should be covered under DUI laws. If there is a statistical link between use of a substance and impairment of driving, it's a matter of public safety. But is smoking a cigarette while driving illegal? No, because nicotine doesn't impair motor functions. What we need is ONE standard for all drugs; anything less is pure hypocrisy.
EDIT: I should make a clarification: only drugs that actually impair your motor control should be covered under DUI laws. If there is a statistical link between use of a substance and impairment of driving, it's a matter of public safety. But is smoking a cigarette while driving illegal? No, because nicotine doesn't impair motor functions. What we need is ONE standard for all drugs; anything less is pure hypocrisy.
Steeplerot
Lifer
By simply removing smoking and drinking, health utilization could be reduced by 25 percent.
Other studies have shown that 10 percent of the population accounts for 75 percent of the nation's health care costs and the high cost people tend to be smokers and alcohol abusers.
On the basis of these studies, it is conservatively estimated that smoking, alcohol and drug use account for 33 percent of the medical care expenditures or $300 billion per year.
Link
Smoking and drinking costs us all big.
PrinceofWands
Lifer
I find your post hypocritical. You call for one standard, but make subjective distinctions. Cell phones don't impair motor functions, but the process of talking on one changes your abilities/reactions. Just because nicotine doesn't impair motor function doesn't mean it doesn't change driving conditions in some other way (not to mention the number of fires caused by tossed cigarettes and second-hand smoke damage). Other drugs might have similar circumstances.
The same can be said for addictiveness. Just because there's no proven physical addictive properties to pot or other drugs doesn't address rather or not people will do them obsessively. Hence, potheads who destroy their lives. Alcohol is certainly addictive, yet it's legal. Physical addictive qualities are not psychological addictive tendancies but the outcome is the same, hence your distinction is false.
Either people are allowed to do drugs, or they are not. It should be an absolute.
dmcowen674
No Lifer
Oh really?
Apparently you haven't been around nicotine addicts that have run out of cigarettes and need their fix.
It's not pretty and they are just as incapacitated as any other junkie.
So what were you saying?
What is not addressed in this debate is the fact that drug use is not a choice. If you are poor, live in poor high crime areas or areas of high crime rates, poorly educated, suffer emotionally from poor self esteem and numerous other things accidents of the environment we have all allowed to be as it is, you will be more likely to seek an escape from the psychological and physical pain such disadvantages create by means of drug addiction as the result of a need to ex cape. You and your indifference to the condition of the world is the reason others are sick and that fact, in denial, is what creates your phenomenal ego. Look at me. I am a responsible adult who makes good choices and I hate the sick for the fact that they are the proof otherwise. Let them kill themselves on drugs. I will never admit to my wonderful self it's my fault. I am a good person who practices self control. But self control is not pimping up your ego. Self control is working to bring up everyone's level.
PrinceofWands
Lifer
Drug use is absolutely, totally, 100%, a personal choice. It can be influenced by various factors, but in the end you choose to do it (except for crack babies, etc).
That is incorrect. You are in denial because you have built your ego on the notion that who you are has something to do with you self worth. You don't see that your need for self worth is based on the feeling you don't have any. You do not know your real worth, far greater than you can imagine and so you cling to your floating cabbage. People take drugs because you, all of us, are and have been indifferent to human needs, the right of all, the need really of all, to grow up with physical and emotional support that allows us all to develop our full potential.
You have no idea as to the degree of influence and therefore no idea of the lack of choice any more than that you chose to believe you have choice. You have to believe that. You have no choice not to. You will not allow yourself to feel that pain. You can't know what you have no experience with. To be unconscious is to have needs you are ashamed to feel but you will be driven to satisfy them anyway and will because you sleep. The need to escape pain is profound because our pain is huge even buried.
PrinceofWands
Lifer
You're a real fruitcake. You know that, right? 😎
People do drugs for a number of reasons (escape, comfort, pleasure, assimilation) but it's always a choice. Always. It's even a choice after they're addicted, just a harder one. Of course, since I see the individual as absolute and nearly all-powerful, I consider almost everything choice.
The issue is the battle between individual perception, social stigma, and close-in environment (including family and friends).
Ok Ok, whatever you do right now is choice but once the choice is made we know what choice it was you had no choice in making. You just start feeling how much of a fruitcake you are when you hear the sound of truth in your ears. He who tells the insane they are crazy is automatically nuts. So yes I know I'm a fruitcake to you and others in your state.
edit: And don't you feel a little sad that's all the case you can muster? You're a fruitcake. Oh wow, now that's going to impress the hell out of me as a logical argument.
PrinceofWands
Lifer
Washington? 😉
Seriously though, let's play a game. I'm deciding what to do tonight. People expect me to drink, but I don't like to do what people expect, which people also know. Given that, what do people expect me to do tonight? Since both (and neither) choice is correct for me (and because I really don't care at the moment), I draw a card from a deck: red card I will drink, black card I won't. It comes out red.
So we're drinking and you ask me if I want to do 5 shots in a row. I don't really care since it won't affect me much, but I'm in a non-choosing mood (which I frequently am). So I tell you to flip a coin: heads I'll drink, tails I won't.
Now then, thru all those steps and twists of luck my only choices were ones of apathy, yet they instigated actions of randomness. In that way rather or I drink 5 shots or not is still a choice. What is certainly missing, however, is any ability to 'know' my choice, or for the outcome to be decided by anything other than blind luck - once my choices were made.
The choice to do drugs is similar. It is not pre-determined. Neither God, nor the universe set the moment in the book of ages. Yet neither is it totally random, since the individual had the ability to remove choice from the hands of chance. Even if we say that the choice to do a drug the moment before you say yes wasn't really a choice (having been decided by previous environmental factors), the choices that brought you to that moment were; and they were choices that at some fulcrum moment were completely of your own choosing.
My point? Your entire life is more or less the choices you make, and you have total individual responsibility for them.
PrinceofWands
Lifer
You can see my edits in above posts. Or I can approach it differently if you'd prefer.
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