Comments on: Can Someone Explain To Me The Rational Behind Legalizing Drugs And Alcohol, Etc?

By: jik

jik — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:09:33 +0000

first of all alcohol is already legal, if youre talking about lowering the drinking age i have no idea,
as far as legalizing drugs, the only one i can think of is marijuana, real drugs like cocaine, heroin, exstacy, are have no argument but to stay illegal.
marijuana should be legalized because it has no harmful effects like those real drugs have. no one hs ever died from marijuana and it has no dangerous additives or chemicals like cigarettes.
furthermore, the prohibition has failed, i do not know 1 person who cannot acquire marijuana before the day is over if they really wanted. it is so easy to find and so widespread. the government is simply wasting 20 billion dollars a year.
the fda says marijuana is dangerous, but never explained why, studies in britain and at the medical institution have shown results of beneficial medical effects. also ucla research shows NO link to any cancers (mainly lung).
chemically, it has no addiction, those who claim to be addicted just enjoy it, their is no imperative uncontrollable physical demand for it, like with cocaine or heroin.
theres more but if anyone would like to disprove me feel free to shwo it with more than words.

By: roderick

roderick — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:06:11 +0000

I guess one rationale would be that if it’s illegal, but people will do it anyway, then that only reinforces the profits for crime. It could be argued that during prohibition, there was a lot of gang activity. When alcohol was made legal, at least it could be regulated.
I think the Libertarian arguments (I’m not a Libertarian) are simply for minimum government.
For me, the bottom line seems to be that to reduce something bad, you have to change people’s attitudes. I think tougher laws against smoking are following people’s attitudes, not leading them, for instance.

By: OPM

OPM — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:53:53 +0000

Not all nations make drugs illegal. Alcohol and tobacco are both more dangerous and more addicting than clinical heroin. You can be addicted to heroin and function perfectly with no obvious health consequences. Alcohol is terribly wasting, damages thinking and is more addictive, yet it is legal. Likewise, although tobacco does not influence ideation, it kills through disease.
Legalizing drugs would have a number of positive effects:
–the consequence of taking drugs would be no greater than the natural consequence of taking drugs……you would be killing yourself, but that is also your own choice as it is with alcohol
– it would destroy much of the organized crime problems around the globe. Entire economies are driven around a need to support the Western world’s drug addictions.
–it would transfer control of who provides drugs from dangerous individuals who desire control over peoples lives to responsible people, such as physicians, who would write scripts for certain drugs. Some drugs are so inherently dangerous that no script could be written for them.
–Since drug dealing would now be licensed the price of drugs would collapse to commodity pricing. No one would have an incentive, or at least a strong incentive, to get people to start using drugs. Unlike alcohol which is “pushed” by bars and state owned liquour establishments, heroin and cocaine could be controlled by physicians who get paid by the visit rather than the quantity provided.
–although the official number of alcoholics may have increased once prohibition was over, it is to be pointed out that the end of prohibition was also at the height of the depression with 24% unemployment and we do not know how many were alcoholics but untreated
–it permits social mechanisms, such as those in many European countries where drinking alcohol is not only the norm but presumed, to control excess use. Social mechanisms are far more powerful than criminal sanctions in controlling behavior. The reason is that criminals are criminals because they do not believe they will be caught. Social monitoring is very powerful because it is always occuring, not merely when the police are present.
I am for legalizing some drugs, but not others. Clinically, many “illegal” drugs are safer than the “legal” ones, but not all issues are just clinical.
The real argument against legalization is a threshhold concept. If you do not want any people or the minimum number doing X, you do not restrict X you restrict A which is a tighter restriction than X. A high number may violate A, but very few will violate X. So if you want to minimize cocaine usage, you make marijuana illegal. People who are loss averse but willing to take a risk will weigh the price of the low restriction violation versus the high restriction violation. So you get marijuana violations, but fewer cocaine violations, or so the idea goes.

By: Aspen

Aspen — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:46:59 +0000

I doubt that the number of alcoholics shot up when prohibition ended, do you have a source for that?
The Drug War is FAILED policy, it was intended to slow or stop drug use and drug use has only escalated since. It has become a war against the people, imprisoning millions of nonviolent offenders and making it to where murderers, rapists and child molesters are being released early due to overcrowding by drug offenders.
It is a FACT that those who want to use drugs WILL use them no matter what the law is. If they were legal then the government could regulate them, thus making them MUCH safer, and they could also TAX them heavily, meaning a great revenue for the country would be created.
Do you realize that 90% of the crime in this country is centered around drugs and the illegal trafficking and sale of them? If drugs were legal then almost ALL organized crime would vanish overnight. Violence in this country would be surprisingly diminished. People wouldn’t be stealing for their next fix anymore either, because drugs would me much cheaper and ore readily available, not to mention more socially accepted so they would be much more able to get and hold jobs like the rest of us to support their habits.
In addition to all this, MOST crooked cops are only crooked when it comes to the movement of illegal drugs and taking bribes from high-end dealers. I realize that 98% of policemen are honest, but that other 2% would have their method of crime taken away if drugs were legal…
But speaking of cops, it’s the Police departments across the country who are made RICH by the war on drugs, so that is why drugs will never become legal. Far too many people are making far too much money off of them being illegal, that’s the bottom line here. It’s not about public safety or morals, that’s just the front they use to make it okay. It’s all about the almighty dollar, of course. The War on Drugs is a war against the American Public by the very people sworn to protect them; we have become their enemy.
It goes so much deeper even than all this though. The lumber industries and pharmaceutical companies, all very rich and powerful, have a hand in it too. They know that if the American public knew of all the medicinal and industrial benefits of hemp, they would lose out BIGTIME. Industrial Hemp is a very quickly renewable resource that could instantly replace lumber for all our paper and rope needs, among others. We don’t need to be cutting down all our forests, we could be using hemp for paper and do you know how FAST it grows back?? We could use the same patch of land to keep growing our paper over and over instead of cutting down all the trees, but the lumber companies would go out of business. So it is in their interest for the public to continue to think that marijuana is BAAAAD. Same with prescription medicines, many of them could be replaced with the proven benefits of medical marijuana. But the Pharm companies are FAR TOO RICH and powerful to let that happen.