Huzzah!

I don't know...I'm just not sold on the idea. It's not that I hate pot, or people who smoke pot. I have had many friends who used it often as a relaxant ( basketball players ), before games.

But, I have this nagging feeling that things don't just become super duper gee whiz hunkey dorey by legalizing pot. I mean, if legalizing pot DID cause a huge economic hit to the major drug cartel's in South America, and wherever they are...what will they do to get their money back? They aren't stupid, if they stop making money on pot, maybe they'll turn their full attention on making more of the other more dangerous drugs.

And what happens when the supply of crack and cocaine goes up, and it becomes easier to get? I think, as the law of supply and demand dictates, supply goes up, cost goes down.

If it's easier to buy, more people will do it, and thats not what we need.

Granted this is hypothetical, because I'm making the assumption that the cartels would change to producing more of these dangerous drugs, but that doesn't seem like a very long stretch to me at all. I mean, it's not like the drug cartels will just give up, right?

This whole post wasn't exactly an argument against legalizing pot, but at least it gives a little larger picture...try to think about what might happen outside of your own neighborhood if pot was legalized

Quote:

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Originally posted by Phaera
*takes all Vini's papers and runs off* :p

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Actually I don't smoke marijuana anymore. :p My vices at this point in my life consist of sex, the occasional glass of red wine, too much caffiene, foreign films and banned books. :D

And Eomer, I would say our governments are unmatched in giving rights to the few, not the many ;) In terms of rights for the 'majority of the people' there are western European countries that have the US and Canada beat.

I think acid flashbacks are not nearly as common as people seem to think. I know a fair amount of people who did it, including myself, and I have never heard of someone having one. And I agree that maybe acid shouldn't be considered a soft drug, it's hard to say really. There haven't been very many studies about it's long/short term effects on people.

As far as ecstasy goes, I have never done it, nor have I read much about it. It could very well be really bad for you, I don't know.

Hah, the health aspect isn't really what I was getting at about ecstasy or acid, just that they are certainly harder (personal experience with ecstasy, none with acid but I've seen the effects) than pot or shrooms. And ecstasy is kinda wierd, I haven't read any studies that said it's addictive by any chemical means, but the feeling is certainly addictive to an extreme. One of my close friends had a problem with poppin tabs in school because he's a dumbass, he had like 15 possession counts, because it's not too hard to figure out when someone is trippin on the shit heh.

And that is a very good point Maegwin, because I do doubt that they would simply curl up and die because they lose buisness with pot (though I think most pot isn't really trafficed by the south american drug cartels, it's mostly mexican imports. But there are farms of it and what not in south america and it does get shipped to the US, just not nearly in as great a quantities as mexican) I just fully think that if pot were legalized, people wouldn't have to sneak around to get their fix, and it would reduce sales overall to your average coke/crack/heroin user. As Kenju said, a lot of the reason that people call pot a "gateway" drug is because since it's illegal, you frequently have to go to dealers to get it. And dealers are always trying to sell their more expensive shit, so they throw the "it's the same as pot, but better" thing at you regarding stuff such as ice, coke and what have you. If people can go to the store or grow pot at home, there would be less instances of people not already addicted to the harder stuff to become addicted to it. But I agree and after rethinking my point about the south american drug cartels taking a hit, they probably wouldn't feel the effects nearly as much as mexican drug runners.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Tarissa
"In my opinion i feel that ALL drugs should be legalised, it is up to the individual, and in all honesty people would see it as being 'less' trendy and reduce crime."

Oh boy. You really think people are smart enough to know what's best for them when it comes to drugs that can be so habit forming and addictive that it eventually kills them?

Legalized heroine? Crack? uh omg?

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Read Gore Vidal's essay on Drugs...

"Often Vidal has been pointedly controversial, as when he supported legalization of illegal drugs - it would remove the Mafia from the drug market. "It is possible to stop most drug addiction in the United States within a very short time. Simply make all drugs available and sell them at cost. Label each drug with a precise description of what effect—good or bad—the drug will have on the taker." (The New York Times, 1970; from The Last Empire, 2001)"

If drugs were legallized, there would be little point in processing opium poppies into heroin or cocoa leaf into crack cocaine. The profit motive would be gone and the labor intensive growing and processing of these plants would probably decrease to the point of being inconsequential. The fact that drugs are illegal is what makes them so profitable, take away the profit motive and you'll see a decline in drug traffic.

Also as to the argument that the government should "protect people who aren't smart enough to refrain from killing themselves with drugs." The fact that drugs are illegal doesn't prevent people from killing themselves with them now. Decriminalizing drugs would free-up billions of dollars that could be directed toward drug treatment and rehabilitization, things that would actually treat the root problem (addiction).

I used to think "yeah more rights for the individual, then them die if they want to" but I don't think that way for drugs anymore. (cept maybe mary jane, only because there has yet to be a documented case of someone dying from an overdose, and its physical addiction is still debated)

Cocaine and Heroine will physicaly get you addicted. Its not just in your head. If drugs were legal, access to them will be extremely easy to stupid kids, and they will get addicted and kill themselves. Its just going to happen. Look at smoking today. Tons of kids smoke. People are going to think "well the government lets it be sold, so it must not be that bad." I'd rather have today's mafia then half our children dying. The white trash on cops, I could give a rats ass about though. (ok, maybe a little)

I've seen a few studies done on drug abuse and what it does to the brain. That changed my mind without much of a fight.

Btw, alcohol will destory your ability to learn after a couple decades. Once those brain cells die, you never get them back. And people call me strange for not drinking.

That's if you are a hardcore drinker though Torrid. In moderation it isn't that bad for you.

And I strongly believe that by making drugs illegal, it actually makes them easier to attain for kids than if they were controlled substances.

Ask any 17 year old kid in high school how hard it is to get weed, mushrooms, acid, or ecstasy. It's nearly as easy as getting alcohol or tobacco, and in some cases easier. And it's not like getting alcohol or tobacco is all that hard in the first place. Hell here if you can drive, you can buy liquour, more or less.

Having things illegal does little to reduce their availability. The past 100 years of prohibition on drugs has clearly demonstrated that.

http://www.cnn.com/2002/HEALTH/paren...vey/index.html

"One of the most disturbing findings of the survey is that marijuana use has gone up, and the perception is that it is not harmful," said Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson.

"My friends, the idea that marijuana is benign is completely inaccurate. It's dangerous in it's own right, it's addictive, and it leads to the use of even more destructive illicit drugs.

"The hard scientific data about those facts -- that marijuana is damaging to the brain, to motor skills, to the heart and the nervous system, and that it is the first step toward drugs like heroin and cocaine -- are indisputable."

I have yet to see a recent study, done in logical manner, that prove any of what this person said. Most of what they said is absolute bullshit, in fact.

Excerpt from an article on Newscientist.com about one of the so-called studies that "prove" pot makes you stupid:

In tests such as memorising a list of 15 words, the long-term users recalled 8.5 words on average, 2.5 fewer than both the short-term users and 31 non-users. The long-term users were also slower at mental arithmetic. But in in other tasks, such as sorting cards, they were just as quick.

Both groups of users also tended to over-estimate the time it took them to complete a task, thinking it had taken them a third longer than it really had.

The authors conclude that cannabis has a cognitive effect that lasts beyond the period of intoxication and that the longer you smoke, the worse the effect on memory and attention. "We do not know exactly how that translates into real-world problems," admits team member Robert Stephens, a psychologist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Nevertheless, he thinks long-term users might not function as well in day-to-day life.

But there are other explanations for the results. For example, it was only 17 hours on average since the users had last smoked a joint, and some had smoked just 12 hours earlier. Harrison Pope, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, says other studies, including one he published last year comparing 108 users with 72 non-users, reveal no long-term effects. One difference, he says, is that his subjects were tested 28 days after they had last smoked.




Wow, whoever did that first study sure wasn't trying to skew results now was he?

Though I don't smoke pot, I think that pot should be legalized from an economics stand point. In the US since the 1980's there has been apporximately 500,000 arrests made for possesion, intent to distribute, etc etc etc due to pot. In order to keep an inmate in prison it costs approximately $25,000-28,000 per year. Though not all of those arrests led to a conviction with prison time, that still adds up to a few billion dollars, add to that the fact that drug possesion laws are becoming increasingly harsher, ie longer prison terms and such, and that will equate to even more money that WE have to pay for. Also keep in mind this does not include the cost of the man power necessary to fight the "War on Drugs."

Currently the US has a budget deficit of apporximately two-hundred billion ($200,000,000) dollars. HELLO, legalize pot and we end up with a budget surplus.

Well what about all the money that is taken in due to drug raids you ask. Well, first off, that only equates to a small portion of what it costs to enforce the current drug laws: secondly if pot is legalized institute a "sin tax" similar to the taxes already placed on alcohol and tobacco products.

For those who think pot is a gateway drug......WRONG. One of the major reasons people start to smoke pot is because it is taboo. Take that away and pot use will decline.

I wouldn't classify Ecstasy or acid as a soft drug. Both can kill you in a short amount of time. I'll give two examples why.

When I was 16 years old this friend of mine used to smoke pot with her mom all the time. They would also do acid alot. One morning her mom thought it would be funny to pop a few hits into the milk in her cerial when she was't looking. Long story short the acid was tainted and she ended up in the hospital. She is now in a wheelchair and can't talk or walk. She is basically a vegitable.

Two years ago this heavy acid user boarded a plane from florida to LA ( i think). He wanted to sneak a sheet of acid with him. So like any uber smart drug addict. He taped it to his chest. (If you don't know acid can be absorbed through the pours in your skin). So he basically ODed on the plane and went into cardiac arrest. He did survive the incident. But what I don't like about acid is. Anyone can slip you some if your not looking. A small tab on the back of the neck when your not paying attention etc etc. Also, not sure how factual this is but I heard that if you have never used acid before 10 hits would kill you?

Ecstasy is lethal as well. Too much of it, and it will kill you. Ecstasy is basically GHB which very lethal, a table spoonfull could kill you, some sellers dilute it in water before selling to lessen the effect. There is a TV add going around in Arizona about a girl who died not too long ago and the only drug in her system was E.

Granted legalization of it might prevent bad acid from being made. But like someone else said in this thread. Any drug that might be bad if made wrong shouldn't be legal. Anything you can OD from shouldn't be made legal. Vs pot cant be exploited. You can't slip someone a pot hit or get them high by contact. Plus I would rather not have some driver high on acid swerve to miss the big purple elephant in the road to hit some child on the side walk =).


Mitsy

"Btw, alcohol will destory your ability to learn after a couple decades. Once those brain cells die, you never get them back. And people call me strange for not drinking."

That's true Torrid, but you're talking about someone who drinks habitually for that long. Social drinkers such as moi, who only drink on some weekends with friends won't ever kill anywhere near enuogh brain cells to suffer that kind of damage. The first effect though is a reduction in short term memory. And that doesn't really take too much to happen.

While I am not necessarily arguing in favor of the wholesale legalization of all drugs there are some arguments here that should be thought through logically:

1. Legalizing drugs hasn't been shown to increase use. To say that if you legalize 'x substance' it will be more prevalent is a specious argument. You have to prove that this will indeed happen, it is not reasonable to make this assumption based on the facts presented.

The facts that have been stated seem to suggest that legalization would in fact reduce use.

2. People currently OD, become addicted, and dose unwitting strangers (to use Mitsy's example), based on the fact that these things occur in the status quo the logical realization is that the war on drugs is not one that we are winning. The prohibition of drugs is NOT preventing these things from happening. And the reason we continue to pump billions of dollars into a failed program is because people are motivated by fear to believe the specious argument that drug use will increase if drugs are legalized. This argument has yet to be proven.

In fact the evidence is quite to the contrary. In Amsterdam, where pot is legal and other harder drugs are essentially decriminalized, drug use has actually gone down. The same can be said for many other countries where so-called "controlled substances" in this country are legal drugs that can be purchased over-the-counter.

Do some research and see for yourself. This is a very serious issue and one that we all need to think about critically.

We could take the money we currently spend on the failed war on drugs and put it into drug education and treatment. We could put addicts into rehabilitation programs instead of jail. We could solve the problem of drug addiction instead of turning addicts into criminals.

Being on a drug should not be a crime. Being on a drug while committing a crime should not be a defense for committing the crime.

Until we seriously look into addiction and the reasons for drug use, drug use will continue. We need to treat the cause not the symptom.

EDIT I actually believe that if people were better informed and told the truth about drugs and drug use they would actually make better decisions about drug use and choose not to use them. Currently we have no such education.

Drug use is a very complicated issue and isn't one that is solved by throwing drug users in jail. If anything it makes them feel more isolated and more disenfranchised and contributes to the addiction rather than cure it.

One of my teachers at my school is in the field of memory, learning, and the human brain. He took a day or two to show us how drugs fuck you up. He showed us brain scans that show areas of the brain that now have little blood flow because all the neurons in those areas are dead. Pot kills your brain, alcohol kills your brain, smoking, coke, heroine, etc. Lots of money and attention have been put into studies. I could explain how drugs block neurotransmiters and whatnot, but I won't. My teacher practices what he preaches too, he refused any pain killers for his medical procedures.

A lot of this shit is common sense too. If youre a researcher in the field, and all your old-time users come in acting like zombies, then any fool and see that drugs fuck you up.

They are only a few years away from a drug vacine that completely nullifies any affects. Only real problem is morphine and other such drugs used for hospital treatments would also be affected. Research into other methods of killing pain is of course a somewhat high priority now.

Ahaha!

I will just sit back and laugh at the people that want these drugs to be legal. Ya... Duh! I think they should be legal because they are GOOD for you!! Alcohol is good for you too!! Duh, didn't you know that's why everyone drinks Alcohol and does drugs? It's because it's good for you, jfc!

Drugs are your friend! Alcohol is your friend!

Oh... and don't give me these medical reasons bullshit either - go to the damn doctor and if he ok's taking the drugs, then I'm fine with it too. Until the doctor says so, you're full of fuckin' shit though.

Doctors have "opinions" and alot of doctors have alot of different opinions. Whos to say which doctor is right? /shrug

If you're going to argue that legalizing drugs makes drug use go down, that is just a spacious argument as saying that they will go up. There's no hard facts either way, one case here or there isn't enough to say which way it would go with pot.

Alcohol was legalized, and I don't think you can say that alcohol use has declined...I don't know the numbers but the alcohol industry has GOT to be one of the richest industries in the world. You can't walk two blocks in most villages,towns,cities without finding an establishment SOLELY devoted to the sale of alcohol, whether it be a bar or a liquor store.

Pot could go the same way, and then instead of a "rebellious, me against the world" type of drug using experience, where you can feel like you're persecuted and nobody understands you, You would have committees and huge corporations making billions of dollars off of the controlled sale of pot, that sit in their little conference rooms, discussing their favorite golf courses in the carribbean, while you shell out your last 7.25 for another pack of joints, and your kid doesn't get cereal for breakfast the next morning.

If I were you, I would be happy that weed is "if anything, easier to get than alcohol or cigarettes". I mean, if it's so easy to get, everything should be fine...and as long as you aren't a moron and get caught smoking it in public then you wouldn't have a problem...

I can just see all the poor schmucks blaming the government for their addiction to pot because the government legalized it.

Okay some of you guys make no sense when you say something, I've read about 4 times drug addiction is a problem, but when you smoke weed you don't do it once a month or once a week you do it about every day maybe miss one day a week, that would be an addiction. So either you do it and your addicted or you don't do it at all.

and yeah I'm against the legalization of weed because, what's next to be legalized? acid?

I'm not really sure what a "spacious" argument is. :p As for the idea that I haven't proven my claim that drug use has been shown to go down in places where it is decriminalized please read my post again and you will see that I gave you a specific, Holland. You can look up the evidence for youself if you do not believe me.

The same is true for prohibition of alcohol. Please read your history books. Prohibition did NOTHING to decrease alcohol consumption. All it did was increase crime and make a lot of scumbags rich off of bootlegging.

I think the root of the problem here is that most of you are thinking of "the people" as a mass of idiots who need to be babysat and "the government" as this benevolent parental entity that protects "the people" from themselves. I guess if you buy into this schema (which I don't) then legalizing drugs ("oh my!") would indeed be a bad thing.

However, I ask you to consider this, is the fact that drugs are illegal the thing that prevents you from using them? Is the fact that they are illegal keeping those who will try them from using them? The educated answer has to be no to both questions. So obviously something is wrong with the system.

Education and drug treatment are what combat drug use NOT the legal status of the substance. Whether drugs are illegal or not is not what makes some people use them and some people not use them. (Torrid has proven that Drug Education works with his statements on why he thinks drugs are bad).

With that in mind it only stands to reason that the criminal status of these substances is causing more harm than good. I hope I don't need to list the harms of drug trafficking here... They should be self evident. I think that taking the criminal element out of the equation entirely is what will truly combat the problem. Drug education and treatment could be funded with the massive amounts of money currently being used to enforce our (failed) drug laws.

The fact that drug use is so prevalent even though drugs are illegal should tell you that the current laws are not working. I have yet to see any of you prove otherwise. :cool:

Peace