All drugs should be....
....completely legalised. Yes, including the hard ones like heroin, cocaine, etc - which should be supplied on prescription to registered addicts. This would:
a) Largely remove organized crime from the supply chain overnight
b) Drastically cut the amount of crime committed by addicts, who would no longer have to steal to get money for drugs to feed their habits
c) Drastically cut the number of drug-related deaths, overdoses, etc, through the simple expedient of quality control. Most drug-related deaths are caused by poisonous impurities in illegally-supplied drugs and lack of medical supervision
d) Totally prevent people from being tempted into trying harder drugs by ruthless dealers supplying them with a bit of grass
Think of the hundreds of thousands of hours of police time that would be saved for other things. Think of the number of young people who would no longer have their lives blighted by losing their jobs and/ or jail. Think of the satisfaction of finally winning ?The War on Drugs?! Discuss
PS - Before anyone leaps to any conclusions, The Blue Meanie does not take or supply drugs
[ 03-14-2002: Message edited by: The Blue Meanie ]
[ 03-14-2002: Message edited by: The Blue Meanie ]</p>
a) Largely remove organized crime from the supply chain overnight
b) Drastically cut the amount of crime committed by addicts, who would no longer have to steal to get money for drugs to feed their habits
c) Drastically cut the number of drug-related deaths, overdoses, etc, through the simple expedient of quality control. Most drug-related deaths are caused by poisonous impurities in illegally-supplied drugs and lack of medical supervision
d) Totally prevent people from being tempted into trying harder drugs by ruthless dealers supplying them with a bit of grass
Think of the hundreds of thousands of hours of police time that would be saved for other things. Think of the number of young people who would no longer have their lives blighted by losing their jobs and/ or jail. Think of the satisfaction of finally winning ?The War on Drugs?! Discuss
PS - Before anyone leaps to any conclusions, The Blue Meanie does not take or supply drugs
[ 03-14-2002: Message edited by: The Blue Meanie ]
[ 03-14-2002: Message edited by: The Blue Meanie ]</p>
Comments
I probably still wouldnt as long as I am in school, but once I got a job the story would probably be different...
And before anyone jumps to any conclusions Jamie does not supply drugs. He's takes 'em but doesn't supply 'em <img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" />
J :cool:
<strong>Jamie agrees wholeheartedly with The Blue Meanie.
And before anyone jumps to any conclusions Jamie does not supply drugs. He's takes 'em but doesn't supply 'em <img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" />
J :cool: </strong><hr></blockquote>
You scots are jacked up on heroin and talk about Sean Connery all the time anyway. What do you know?
[edit: on topic: I don't know. Addiction is evil and I'm afraid that some of these drugs are too addictive to allow people to get easily. Pot, OTOH, is different. BTW, I don't use it, but it's needlessly vilified.]
[for those who don't get the reference: <a href="http://www.addict.com/issues/2.08/html/hifi/Features/Trainspotting/"; target="_blank">Trainspotting</a>. An Ewan McGregor flick that doesn't suck. One of my faves.]
[ 03-14-2002: Message edited by: torifile ]</p>
<strong>
You scots are jacked up on heroin and talk about Sean Connery all the time anyway. What do you know?
</strong><hr></blockquote>
<img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" /> I wish I could afford to be jacked up on heroin all the time!!
Great film though.
J :cool:
The government would produce and distribute all of the drugs. Everything would be available over the counter at your local drug store, each clearly labelled with the effects, good and bad, in plain english, along with how addictive they are, and typical withdrawl symptoms and long term effects.
Basically, all the information your friendly neighborhood drug pusher leaves out when they're recruiting new clients.
The scale at which the government could produce and distribute drugs would allow them to be sold at prices that would far undercut any illegal dealer, thus reducing incentive to deal illegally as well as diminishing any sort of status symbol chic of drugs like cocaine, heroin, etc. And the proceeds from the sale of drugs could go towards education, fighting crime, the military, whatever needs funding. Not to mention, putting the $19 bil a year the gov't spends on ?The War on Drugs? to better use.
Of course, it'll never happen, but it's a nice idea.
ciao,
michael
<strong>....completely legalised. Yes, including the hard ones like heroin, cocaine, etc - who should be supplied on prescription to registered addicts. This would:
a) Largely remove organized crime from the supply chain overnight
</strong>
They'll just find a different crime to commit. How about exporting the "legal" and "clean" US drugs to countries where its still illegal?
<strong>
b) Drastically cut the amount of crime committed by addicts, who would no longer have to steal to get money for drugs to feed their habits
</strong>
Are you kidding me? If drugs were legal you'd have MORE people stealing to get money for them. You'd have bums begging for change so they could buy heroin instead of alcohol. I can't prove that more crimes would be commmitted but there's also no way you can prove that less crimes would be committed.
<strong>
c) Drastically cut the number of drug-related deaths, overdoses, etc, through the simple expedient of quality control. Most drug- related deaths are caused by poisonous impurities in illegally-supplied drugs and lack of medical supervision
</strong>
I'd like to see some proof that "most drug related deaths are caused by poisonous impurities". A heroin or cocaine overdose alone, even if its pure could kill you.
<strong>
d) Totally prevent people from being tempted into trying harder drugs by ruthless dealers supplying them with a bit of grass
</strong>
Beer is legal. People try harder alcohol to get drunk quicker. IMHO if harder drugs were legal it would give people all the more reason to try them.
<strong>
Think of the hundreds of thousands of hours of police time that would be saved for other things. Think of the number of young people who would no longer have their lives blighted by losing their jobs and/ or jail. Think of the satisfaction of finally winning ?The War on Drugs?! Discuss
</strong>
Instead of drunk driving we'd have heroin or cocaine driving. Instead of worrying about our kids binge drinking they'll be binge snorting. They'll have a much easier time getting a hold of drugs. We'd have more addicts, more doped up people. IMHO we'd have more people in jail, more people losing jobs. We wouldn't have "won" the war, we'd have given in.
Legalizing ALL drugs is the dumbest idea I've ever heard.
<strong>
They'll just find a different crime to commit. How about exporting the "legal" and "clean" US drugs to countries where its still illegal?
</strong>
This would fall under the same heading as export of prescription or over-the-counter drugs. We could choose to sign treaties stating our effort to prevent exports to keep good relations with our allies, but it's always the more restrictive country that bears the brunt of the burden of restricting imports. Witness our current massive efforts to conduct the War on Drugs vs. the lackluster effort from the Columbian government to prevent exports.
<strong>
Are you kidding me? If drugs were legal you'd have MORE people stealing to get money for them. You'd have bums begging for change so they could buy heroin instead of alcohol. I can't prove that more crimes would be commmitted but there's also no way you can prove that less crimes would be committed.
</strong>
No proof indeed. But there is ample evidence that the street price for some drugs is as high as 17000% of the equilibrium market price in the presence of competition and the absence of risk-based markups caused by its illegality. Very few people commit violent crimes to afford to pay for cigarettes, which are significantly more addictive than many of the drugs we classify as type 1.
<strong>
I'd like to see some proof that "most drug related deaths are caused by poisonous impurities". A heroin or cocaine overdose alone, even if its pure could kill you.
</strong>
How many packages of cocaine currently come imprinted with the proper dosage, and possible effects of overdose? How many dealers are subject to liability if the product violates the promises on its packaging?
<strong>
Beer is legal. People try harder alcohol to get drunk quicker. IMHO if harder drugs were legal it would give people all the more reason to try them.
</strong>
Alcohol is the only example we currently have for a drug that has been both legal and illegal in the United States. When it was prohibited, usage went up. When prohibition was repealed, usage went back down. The same may not hold for other drugs, but this is the only historical evidence we have at this point.
<strong>
Instead of drunk driving we'd have heroin or cocaine driving. Instead of worrying about our kids binge drinking they'll be binge snorting. They'll have a much easier time getting a hold of drugs.
</strong>
There are laws against both DUI and underage use of cigarettes and alcohol. Since you support the premise that laws can and do control behavior, why do these not suffice to cover other drugs?
<hr></blockquote>
-- ShadyG
I didn't say laws can and do control behavior, obviously thats not totally true. It is true for some of the people, some of the time. Obviously underage drinking and DUI's still occur even though they're illegal. Should we make them legal? Would we have more teens drinking or less? More people drinking and driving or less?
I know when I was a teenage a lot of my friends would have open bottles of alcohol in their cars. They were paranoid about getting caught, even though they weren't drinking heavily. If it was legal, they wouldn't even second guess having that open bottle in the car.
I feel that legalizing all drugs would remove the social stigma attached to drug use, and send a message of tolerance for drug use, especially to kids.
You might think it will solve some problems, but you'll just be faced with a whole slew of new ones.
People know the risks of drugs now, yet they still continue to use them. Warning labels on cigarettes and alcohol aren't preventing people from continuing to smoke, drinking while they're pregnant or even binge drinking. How many high school Phys Ed classes have you been through that told you how much alcohol was too much for your system? Yet some kids still drink till they're in a coma. <img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" />
Look at the death tolls amongst Americans with legal drugs:
Tobacco: >400,000 a year
Alcohol: >150,000 a year
Prescription drugs (side effects, bad reactions etc): 110,000 a year.
Prescription drug abuse: 15,000 a year
Illegal drugs (heroin, cocaine, crack, meth etc)
around 5000 a year.
Marijuana: unknown, zero attributed.
Legal drugs' death tolls outnumber illegal ones by a factor of some 130:1
Keeping drugs illegal is one of the mainstays of the economy. The trade in illegal drugs is greater than that of motor vehicles and textiles combined, and this huge flow of capital ($1.5 Trillion annually) is laundered through banks and financial institutions, primarily American companies; it does not sit under the mattresses of Colombian gangsters, gaining mildew and no interest.
If the profit motive was suddenly removed by mass global decriminalization, and drugs were made available to users via clinics and pharmacies, legally, regulated, taxed (and regarded as a medical issue) then suddenly 15% of the flow of dirty capital through big financial institutions would dry up. A UN study of this some years back indicated that to legalize drugs would cause anything from a huge recession to the complete collapse of the world banking system. One bank (BCCI) were caught redhanded in one of those rare instances of enforcement of the law at the top levels. Of course the system in time would recover its equilibrium after the shake-up.
Imagine all that police time and effort going to catch real criminals, like thieves, burglars, rapists and murderers!! Imagine the gangbangers suddenly having to find honest work! Imagine the streets and inner cities getting a whole lot safer as the financial raison d'etre for the streetgangs was removed. Imagine the improvement in relations between police and inner-city communities minorities and drug-users. Imagine the increased safety on the job for law-enforcement personnel.
Imagine the howling and bleating of privately run correctional institutions like Wackenhut and CCA whose business relies on the incarceration of millions of petty drug offenders, at $40,000 per bed per annum! That is $$billions upon $$billions of $$throughput. Their corporate lobbyists would be bouncing round Congress like pacmen on crystal meth.
Imagine the loud noises from multinational corporations, which use the captive labor pool of hundreds of thousands of mostly petty drug "offenders" provided by prisons at virtually zero wages cost, to do work that would normally be done by Americans, (or should that be Chinese and Mexican?) in factories and workshops etc etc. Suddenly many of those prisoners, who have no business being in jail, would become unavailable for this equivalent of slave labor.
Imagine the shift in burden from being a tax liability, with $$billions being spent on this insane war which will never be won, to being a potential source of revenue, where the proceeds would go into educational and treatment programs!
America is hooked on traditional approaches, even if proven time after time to be uneffective or counter-productive, and any sensible/balanced approach to the drug situation will be seen by much of the public, who have been "educated" in reefer madness style regarding drugs, as "going soft on crime". Muttering about legalization/decriminalization is a death sentence for any politician.
No matter what, as long as the powers-that-be in the world of big business and Wall St continues to reap huge profits from the illegal drug trade and its spin-offs, then nothing will change.
Then there is the other (exhaustively documented) issue of US agencies (CIA et al) deliberately importing and distributing cocaine, thereby creating a large user base which in turn furnishes huge returns to the banks through which the proceeds go. And another current issue.....during the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan, opium production fell to nearly zero...now the Northern Alliance and its allies have "taken over" and a record harvest of opium is forecast as farmers go back to growing poppies. Expect huge amounts of cheap heroin to be flooding into the USA in due course....to get that drug-money rolling again and prop up those Wall St. profits.
As I said before, there is as much chance of legalizing drugs as the Pope converting to Hinduism. And if you buy into the official whitewash and BS that the "war-on-drugs" is to protect our children, then you are naive in the extreme. It's a war for and on behalf of narco- profiteers, bankers and gangsters using working class, uneducated and addiction-susceptible people, white, black, and brown as guinea-pigs.
<strong>The "war on drugs" has nothing to do with public health or "protecting our kids".
Look at the death tolls amongst Americans with legal drugs:
Tobacco: 400,000 a year
Alcohol: 150,000 a year
Prescription drugs (side effects, bad reactions etc): 110,000 a year.
Prescription drug abuse: 15,000 a year
Illegal drugs (heroin, cocaine, crack, meth etc)
around 5000 a year.
Marijuana: unknown, zero attributed.</strong><hr></blockquote>I'm glad you posted this, but I believe it makes exactly the opposite point you're trying to make. What it shows is that our legal drugs are our most dangerous. What if we made the illegal drugs legal - wouldn't we see many more deaths resulting from drugs?
What the chart seems to show is that drugs are unhealthy. So why make even more of them legal? It's bad enough that half a million Americans die each year from our legal drugs, so why make that number rise even more?
Another point about those numbers - tobacco is believed to be the leading cause of death, period. Not just among drugs. Its association with cancer and cardiovascular disease, our biggest killers, makes it the number one cause of death. And Americans smoke quite a bit less than other countries.
BTW, could you tell me your source? I have numbers that are totally in line with those, except those prescription drug numbers. They seem a little high to me. I also don't think marijuana is 0 - I believe those alcohol deaths include drunk-driving deaths, and so the marijuana deaths should also include accidents, and there are some.
And yes, the postive effects already mentioned would likely surface.
<strong>I'm a big supporter of legalizing drugs. If a person should decide to destroy his or her body and mind, I have absolutely no problem with that</strong><hr></blockquote>
I have a huge problem with that. Someone being allowed to freely destroy his or her mind can severely impose on my freedoms.
Why do I have to feel less safe driving a car because on top of drunks I have to worry about tripped out or doped up drivers?
BRussell said it best. Look at those statistics. Legalizing those drugs would make them much easier to get a hold of, thereby increasing the amount of deaths because more people would be using them.
I also just love how everyone makes this about money. "The economy will improve". "Our taxes would be finally put to good use".
Please.
I need more crack heads in my neighborhood like I need a f'ing hole in the head.
In a word: prescription. I'm not saying that crack and smack and what-have-you should go on sale at the local (ahem!) drug store. I'm saying that addicts, once medically assessed as such, should be provided with medically controlled doses of their drugs of choice on prescription by doctors. They could then be given appropriate treatment - indeed that could be made a condition of the prescription. The cost to the taxpayer of providing drugs on prescription would be a fraction of the billions already spent on the "War on Drugs". The addicts would then have zero incentive to commit crime to get money for drugs. As a newspaper reporter, I can assure you that a vast amount of (petty) crime (mainly theft) is committed by addicts desperate for a fix. (And let's not forget that serious drug addiction is a disease, not a lifestyle choice).
Addicts would also be less likely to die. I can't speak in detail about other drugs but I do know that it is possible to take heroin for years - decades - with no ill effects whatsoever, provided the dose is properly controlled and the drug is pure. Most addicts OD on heroin when they return to the drug after a period of abstinence and their tolerance has dropped.
Yes, we might get a few dope drivers, but so what? That doesn't cancel out the vast amount of misery they already cause - and it would be relatively small price to pay for drastically cutting that misery.
[ 03-14-2002: Message edited by: The Blue Meanie ]
[ 03-15-2002: Message edited by: The Blue Meanie ]</p>
<strong>The "war on drugs" has nothing to do with public health or "protecting our kids".
Look at the death tolls amongst Americans with legal drugs:
Tobacco: >400,000 a year
Alcohol: >150,000 a year
Prescription drugs (side effects, bad reactions etc): 110,000 a year.
Prescription drug abuse: 15,000 a year
Illegal drugs (heroin, cocaine, crack, meth etc)
around 5000 a year.
Marijuana: unknown, zero attributed.
Legal drugs' death tolls outnumber illegal ones by a factor of some 130:1
Keeping drugs illegal is one of the mainstays of the economy. The trade in illegal drugs is greater than that of motor vehicles and textiles combined, and this huge flow of capital ($1.5 Trillion annually) is laundered through banks and financial institutions, primarily American companies; it does not sit under the mattresses of Colombian gangsters, gaining mildew and no interest.
If the profit motive was suddenly removed by mass global decriminalization, and drugs were made available to users via clinics and pharmacies, legally, regulated, taxed (and regarded as a medical issue) then suddenly 15% of the flow of dirty capital through big financial institutions would dry up. A UN study of this some years back indicated that to legalize drugs would cause anything from a huge recession to the complete collapse of the world banking system. One bank (BCCI) were caught redhanded in one of those rare instances of enforcement of the law at the top levels. Of course the system in time would recover its equilibrium after the shake-up.
Imagine all that police time and effort going to catch real criminals, like thieves, burglars, rapists and murderers!! Imagine the gangbangers suddenly having to find honest work! Imagine the streets and inner cities getting a whole lot safer as the financial raison d'etre for the streetgangs was removed. Imagine the improvement in relations between police and inner-city communities minorities and drug-users. Imagine the increased safety on the job for law-enforcement personnel.
Imagine the howling and bleating of privately run correctional institutions like Wackenhut and CCA whose business relies on the incarceration of millions of petty drug offenders, at $40,000 per bed per annum! That is $$billions upon $$billions of $$throughput. Their corporate lobbyists would be bouncing round Congress like pacmen on crystal meth.
Imagine the loud noises from multinational corporations, which use the captive labor pool of hundreds of thousands of mostly petty drug "offenders" provided by prisons at virtually zero wages cost, to do work that would normally be done by Americans, (or should that be Chinese and Mexican?) in factories and workshops etc etc. Suddenly many of those prisoners, who have no business being in jail, would become unavailable for this equivalent of slave labor.
Imagine the shift in burden from being a tax liability, with $$billions being spent on this insane war which will never be won, to being a potential source of revenue, where the proceeds would go into educational and treatment programs!
America is hooked on traditional approaches, even if proven time after time to be uneffective or counter-productive, and any sensible/balanced approach to the drug situation will be seen by much of the public, who have been "educated" in reefer madness style regarding drugs, as "going soft on crime". Muttering about legalization/decriminalization is a death sentence for any politician.
No matter what, as long as the powers-that-be in the world of big business and Wall St continues to reap huge profits from the illegal drug trade and its spin-offs, then nothing will change.
Then there is the other (exhaustively documented) issue of US agencies (CIA et al) deliberately importing and distributing cocaine, thereby creating a large user base which in turn furnishes huge returns to the banks through which the proceeds go. And another current issue.....during the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan, opium production fell to nearly zero...now the Northern Alliance and its allies have "taken over" and a record harvest of opium is forecast as farmers go back to growing poppies. Expect huge amounts of cheap heroin to be flooding into the USA in due course....to get that drug-money rolling again and prop up those Wall St. profits.
As I said before, there is as much chance of legalizing drugs as the Pope converting to Hinduism. And if you buy into the official whitewash and BS that the "war-on-drugs" is to protect our children, then you are naive in the extreme. It's a war for and on behalf of narco- profiteers, bankers and gangsters using working class, uneducated and addiction-susceptible people, white, black, and brown as guinea-pigs.</strong><hr></blockquote>
What an extremely eloquent post, Samantha. The Blue Meanie agrees with every word
So many people get into the drug scene because it was the cool thing to do, because it placed them within a culture, they responded to peer pressure to "be cool and hip", outside of the mainstream and outside of the law. There is a parallel with cigarettes; almost every kid you know probably had his/her first one "behind the gym at school etc" because it was (a)against the school rules, or (b)there was peer pressure etc, in the full knowledge that continued tobacco use will get them hooked, or kill them in any number of gnarly fashions. Same thing with alcohol. This still remains a big attraction for kids, this need to rebel; if the hipness label was stripped away from intoxicants by the universal acknowledgement, both in law and education that it is a medical problem, and kids could be convinced that drugs/alcohol are 'lame', then thats a start in the right direction. If people want to use drugs, or want to experiment with altering their consciousness, then no amount of draconian laws laws will stop it. People have been taking recreational drugs for thousands of years. The problems all started when laws were made to supposedly frighten people out of indulging, but in reality were designed to protect the interests of certain powerful corporations. DuPont (re. marijuana) is a classic case.
[quote]Why do I have to feel less safe driving a car because on top of drunks I have to worry about tripped out or doped up drivers?<hr></blockquote>
I hope you don't think that because drugs are illegal, it means that people don't use them, and people don't drive around smashed out of their skulls. The roads right now are jammed packed with people drunk senseless, or doped on a smorgasbord of over-the-counter drugs like nyquil or robitussin (anything which says on the label that "this may cause drowsiness: if affected do not drive or operate machinery). Tens of millions of people are on prescription barbiturates which can render a driver in a highly incapable state, specially when combined with a very small amount of alcohol. And yes, there are people driving around on LSD, ecstacy and methaphetamines, despite the laws.
If someone's going to get hooked, then they are going to get hooked: it's so much more to do with the character of the person than the nature of the drug itself. Some will go for whisky and a tiny percentage will go for heroin. If drugs are decriminalized, do you honestly think that suddenly, a whole lotta people will get up and suddenly say...."coooool maaaaan, lets go get smashed now because Uncle Sam says I can"??? Gimme a break.
It is universally known that cigarettes will probably kill you, and heroin will turn you into a junkie. Since we live in a society where we are constantly reminded that "You Must Take Responsibilty For Your Own Actions", then why does the Government feel the need to "nanny" people regarding the arbitrary choice of what dangerous substances we ingest, to the point of spending $billions to do everything from arming terrorists overseas to raiding peoples' homes here and locking them up by the millions in the process?
Then there is that grossest of double standards regarding the relative status of tobacco, the biggest killer of them all. R.J. Reynolds etc etc. market a product that kills nearly a half million Americans each year, (in terms of fatalities thats a World Trade Center scale disaster every 2.5 DAYS) and everybody sits back and says...thats OK, they are a big corporation, so it must be just fine. And whats more they contribute megabucks to the Republican-Democrat 'axis of whatever'. Sick, strange and baffling.
And, no I don't believe that tobacco should be illegal. The industry would be overtaken by a different set of gangsters who have even less ethical standards than the current batch of scumbags, (if that was possible), and would put tobacco addicts in contact with dealers who most likely would trade in other illegal drugs, just like many folk who are looking for some pot may well be offered harder drugs.
All drugs should be illegal, including alcohol and tobacco, except:
1. They should be available by prescription or OTC with FDA approval and all the testing that entails, and
2. if you grow it and use it yourself, but don't sell it, that's OK too.
<strong>All drugs should be illegal, including alcohol and tobacco, except:
1. They should be available by prescription or OTC with FDA approval and all the testing that entails, and
2. if you grow it and use it yourself, but don't sell it, that's OK too.
People would still be able to grow their own if it was completely legal without the limitations you suggest.