If drugs became easily accessible and grew into widespread popularity, wouldn't that pose a risk to everyone's safety and law & order? I think everyone knows what lengths a heroin addict can go to if they are desperate to get a hold of some and are facing withdrawel.
Drug dealers kill each other each year by the thousands. Innocent people are very often caught up in these gunfights. By eliminating the need to kill another man for drug turf, you drastically lower the murder rate. This makes Americans
safer, not at more risk.
I'm usually not one to promote "economic justice", but unless hard drugs are cracked down on I don't see inner cities like Detroit ever coming out of economic depression and everyone will just be drug addicts (as a good majority of them are).
I'm not a big proponent of the "legalize and tax" argument, but it makes sense in response to your statement. Detroit is filled with people who are already buying this crap every day. Legalize and tax and all of a sudden the city has some income.
Mostly though, what about the issue of my safety? People on heroin, meth, cocaine will do irrational things (steal, murder, whatever) if they need to get high. Legalizing everything would only put behavior like that on the rise. That's the main difference between that and alcohol. While people who are alcoholics can pose a risk to others public safety, I don't feel it's too the degree that hard drugs can (I meant if hard drugs were legalized, obviously an illegal product that sees less use will show less damage that alcohol).
You wouldn't be at any more risk than you are now. You are supposing that by legalizing hard drugs, thousands of people are going to say "What, heroin is
legal now? Well, then I need to try it!" If someone is going to do heroin, the illegality of the drug isn't going to stop them.
Also: legalizing these drugs removes the stigma attached to doing them. Addicts cannot get help right now because they know admitting to use of these drugs will only land them in jail/rehab facilities. When we are able to treat the addict instead of the addiction, we can remove the necessity to engage in harmful behavior to feed that addiciton.
Edit: Softer drugs are on a different scale than things like heroin in my opinion, softer drugs I'd be more open to but the hard stuff I think would damage american's safety, economy, etc.
The way I look at it, it's all or nothing. They might try to say one drug is "worse" than another, but in the end they all do the same thing, and to try to legalize some and not all is just a slippery slope.
On the other hand, how many people have died because someone drove while they were high? I'm a bit skeptical about that side of the argument though, because from my experience with pot heads, driving is the last thing they want to do. :P
Quite right. (Ugh, it makes me reply in green.) Driving while high is no different from driving while intoxicated (although, from personal experience it's much easier and safer). They should carry the exact same penalties.
But I think in the end I don't think that recreational drugs should be illegal.
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So harder drugs should stay illegal.
You can't really differentiate like that. All drugs are recreational. No one starts doing meth because they want their teeth to fall out, they do it because it feels good.
And for the record I think that alcohol is far more harmful than marijuana. There are certainly a lot more deaths caused by drunk driving than by stoned driving, methinks.
Drunk driving aside (you can't really compare the two in that regard, there isn't sufficient data for high driving), alcohol is much more harmful to the human body than marijuana.
Yeah. You could do that to your own body... but that doesn't really seem to be the point. We spend God knows how long educating people against harming themselves and they still do it. If you allow people to supply it, that's like giving the go-ahead to every bloody person to commit suicide. This has happened before; notably, when cannabis was reclassified as a class C drug. Alcohol is a massive problem in Britain because it simply isn't regulated. And you think we can solve a problem by allowing it to spread? That's almost like trying to curb terrorism by giving out free guns.
You're making the same argument that Caelum made, that everyone and their mother will do crack because it's all of a sudden legal. Number one, that's just silly, but number two... why do you care? If those people want to slowly kill themselves, that's their prerogative, and it isn't for you or me to tell them not to.
If you want to kill yourself, I'm tempted to say go ahead; but it's in human nature to want to protect people, even from themselves. Sure, mushrooms grow naturally, are you saying that makes it OK to eat them? It's pretty much psychological; if you allow people to do it now, that's like saying 'No, we were wrong, you can eat them and like them!' which honestly does not work.
Why not? Prohibition has been demonstrated to not only have no effect on the use of the illegal substance, but also to create MORE crime. (Think back to the 1920s.)
Oh, about the whole "it grows naturally" thing, I don't mean to be argumentative because as I've said I don't see much harm in recreational drugs, but those on the other end of the debate could counter by naming quite a few harmful things that grow naturally so... >_>
But don't you think it's silly that they've criminalized something that grows on cow poop? And if all those other things in nature are harmful to humans, why aren't they illegal too?
Secondly, at least the law gives people (especially impressionable youths) something to argue with, against peer pressure. Otherwise, it can be very difficult to say no; even if one understands the risk involved and would prefer not to try drugs. Such coercion takes decision making out of an individual's hands.
Reality is not as simple as "it is my decision" because it can be misinformed or externally influenced.
The law also attaches a taboo to the drugs which draws kids into them anyway. If you don't think kids take up smoking just because they're not supposed to, you're kidding yourself. Kids are drawn to what they shouldn't do, it's just their nature.
By not fighting the futile war on drugs, we'd have billions of dollars at our disposal. Dollars that could be used to educate not only children, but also adults on the effects of drugs. DARE just isn't cutting it.
