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Time To Discuss Drug Prohibition?
gplus writes "December 5th was the 75th anniversary of the end of alcohol prohibition in the US. The Wall Street Journal has an op-ed which argues that now may be the time to discuss our war on drugs and the drug prohibition currently in place. The article argues that the harm caused by the banned substance must be balanced against the harms caused by the prohibition. As to why Americans in 1933 finally voted to end prohibition, while we barely even discuss it: 'Most Americans in 1933 could recall a time before prohibition, which tempered their fears. But few Americans now can recall the decades when the illicit drugs of today were sold and consumed legally. If they could, a post-prohibition future might prove less alarming.'"
slashdot moderators and editors often use illegal drugs.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Copyright is specified in the Constitution. Drugs? Not so much. Why should drug prohibition require nothing more than a law when alcohol prohibition required a constitutional amendment? Oh, and the original excuses for banning drugs: black folks on cocaine or mexicans smoking marijuana might rape your white daughter.
Meh--easy solution to the 'problem'. Allow people to take personal responsibility and drug themselves to death if they want.
Allow every citizen (with no restrictions) to carry any amount of guns they want.
Then, in your scenario, if some coked-up druggie tried to rape your daughter, you can blow them away.
After a year or so spike in drug/gun related deaths, everything should settle down. The retards who use drugs and lose control and try to kill someone will be dead. The nutjobs who get ahold of guns will be dead (by the non-nutjobs with guns) and we can just continue on...
Or as a dope-smoker once put it to me: "keep on keepin' on"
There's no place like
It's a good point, but I don't think that's how things would actually work. Meth would be technically legal, but you wouldn't be able to pick it up at Walgreens. If it has any positive use (which I doubt) it would be available only by prescription and only through special order. It wouldn't be mass-produced by pharmaceutical companies like marijuana and other drugs would be.
I admit that I know very little about the illicit drug world, but I think that extremely dangerous drugs like meth would eventually all but disappear were they all to be legalized. If the choice is to buy meth from Joe the biker at the bar or buy something else, something less dangerous, at safe and friendly Walgreens, over time fewer and fewer people would choose Joe the biker. Joe's shady business would still be illegal, too, as meth would still be a controlled substance only available by prescription.
There will always be a black market for drugs, of course, and maybe Joe has the business sense to be able to survive. There will always be people who want or need what the pharmaceutical companies don't distribute, or who can't get a prescription. This will of course include the most highly at risk people, and those at high risk of addiction.
But, overall it would decrease the amount of dangerous drug use, and would eliminate a good percentage of drug-based criminal organizations. There's nothing stopping them from going into other criminal sectors, of course, if they can manage to. The idea that legalizing drugs will eliminate a lot of crime is surely exaggerated - there's so much drug-related crime because that is what all the criminals are into these days. If it's legal, they'll all go do whatever the next most profitable illegal thing is. Not everyone will be able to make it - and that's great! They can find a real job, or they can rot under a bridge, I don't care.
Personally, I've never done any drugs, never smoked, and tried alcohol only once (the smell makes me queasy; I can't stomach it and I'm not interested in its effects anyway.) I strongly support the constitutional rights of others to do whatever they want to themselves, though. If in that process they do harm to others, I strongly support harsher penalties for doing it under the influence - just like there are harsh penalties for drunk drivers.
Just today I saw an obviously drunk driver driving on a very busy street. Everyone else just cautiously went around him, but I called 911 and reported him (and yes, I pulled over first - it is illegal after all to use a cell phone while driving here in California :) ) I doubt they caught him, but what an idiot.
There will always be idiots like that guy. Yeah, it'll be worse when people are legally high and decide to drive on a busy street (they do this already, of course.) The penalties would, thusly, be much worse as well, and that's how it should be.
Hm. I think the physical harm assessment might need to be revised slightly.
Things like GHB and anabolic steroids are rather more damaging because of they way they're used than you might expect by considering them in isolation.
Check out social darwinism sometime. Not a good idea. be placated go
More importantly, I think the government has no right to tell us what we are and are not allowed to take into our own bodies.
And here's where you (and a lot of drug users) are wrong. Unless there is something in the constitution that says that the government specifically gives up that right, it has it. The government grants you rights, not the other way around.
Let's face it though there is just no telling what these druggists are capable of, most of the time they don't even know what they're doing or how crazy they're acting. Now you daughter might not spend much time in the druggists ghetto but you can bet they're all busy murdering, raping and robbing each other the whole time down there and your daughter would suffer the same fate were she to cross paths with a druggist desparate to score his next fix.
Druggism is clearly a massive problem for the US but whilst it's still confined to a few hellish druggist ghettos in most cities and doesn't really have much of an impact on regular god fearing folk well then I think prohibition is the wise course. Hell, the last thing I'd want was my daughter being able to try whack herself, getting addicted and ending up selling herself in the ghetto. The church already ventures into those areas and helps those who do want to be saved and that is about as much as any man can do.
If the U.S. lifts drug prohibition, you wouldn't be able to control people's use of it in critical situations such as an E.R. nurse, air-traffic controller, pilot, railroad engineer, etc. etc. etc. Clearly you wouldn't want someone completely doped up performing surgery on you. Okay, so as an employer would you be able to legally say "I won't hire you because your drug use would impair job performance." or "You're fired because you slammed your train into the back of another one because you were stoned." Who then is liable for the harm a drug-user imposes on another person perhaps hundreds of other people? Clearly the concept of Personal Responsibility is unheard of among a great many people these days. And how long would it be before drug-use discrimination lawsuits arise saying you can't not hire or fire someone simply because they use drugs?
"an addict can managing their use intelligently"
thanks for the laugh
kind of like saying "so an elephant can fly gracefully"
the idea is harm reduction right?
the best harm reduction approach, for something as truly vile (highly addictive+highly inebriating, so job/ relationship maintenance is horribly difficult) as meth/coke/heroin is TO PREVENT THE CREATION OF ADDICTS IN THE FIRST PLACE
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it