I really don't see a valid reason not to legalize all drugs. Most of the problems associated with them would disapear overnight in the event of drug legalization.

Personally, I find drugs to be vile and in of themselves. A lot of my friends smoke weed and I don't really care about that, but I think it's vile when women do that. Guess I'm a bit old-fashioned.

Definitely minors should stay forbidden to do drugs. Hardcore drugs (anything but marijuana) should stay illegal. It's kind of a waste of human life for a person to throw away their lives so that they can get a few moments of chemical pleasure.


WEB

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In a recent study published in the British medical journal The Lancet, faculty at the UK's Bristol University "proposed a new framework for the classification of harmful substances, based on the actual risks to society," according an Associated Press article published Friday. The study, led by Prof. David Nutt, ranked the various commonly used drugs, and found alcohol and tobacco to be among the top ten most dangerous -- ahead of marijuana and ecstasy, though behind cocaine and heroin.


Nutt and his colleagues feel that Britain's current drug classification, which divides them into three different categories -- ostensibly based on their potential for harm -- is "ill thought-out and arbitrary," he told the AP. "The exclusion of alcohol and tobacco from the Misuse of Drugs Act is, from a scientific perspective, arbitrary."


One might think such talk could fuel calls for alcohol or (more likely) tobacco prohibition -- I hope not! That isn't necessarily what they are looking for -- Nutt wants more education, he said, and realism. "All drugs are dangerous, even the ones people know and love and use every day."

Marijuana's relative lack of harmfulness is one good reason to want to legalize it. Certainly it makes vividly clear the bizarre senselessness of what we are doing here in the US, where police make over 700,000 arrests for marijuana every year, about 2,000 per day.

For other drugs, paradoxically, their harmfulness is one of the best reasons for wanting to legalize them. As my friends at Law Enforcement Against Prohibition are fond of saying (and as their bumper sticker that I have stuck to back of my car exclaims), "drugs are too dangerous to leave in the hands of criminals." Especially for people who are addicted to them -- what a dangerous and tumultuous and destructive situation it must be to be tied to the criminal underground for getting the fix that you're just not ready yet to do without! A lot of people have trouble with that idea; they see the harms and the miserable condition of people who've gotten hooked on these drugs, and they can't imagine that it would be a good idea to legalize them.

An understandable reaction, but an illogical one. All of the harms we see today related to cocaine and heroin and the like are the harms that exist under the current system. At a minimum the current system did not prevent them. The idea that more people would get addicted to the drugs if they were legal is mere speculation, and to me it seems doubtful -- I wouldn't use heroin if it were legal, and only rarely has anyone who doesn't use heroin now told me that he would. In the meanwhile, the addict suffers severe financial debilitation from the high street prices created by prohibition -- often is driven to extreme measures to afford drugs that would cost pennies to produce in a legal market -- and is at risk of overdose from fluctuating purity or poisoning from adulteration. We are literally driving addicts to their deaths, who might survive, eventually maybe even recover, if we would simply allow them to acquire their drugs from a safe and affordable source.

A conversation I had at a social function a few years ago illustrates the confusion. The person I was speaking with had very decent views on the issue -- he was all for legalization of marijuana, he hated mandatory minimum sentencing, he was all for helping people with programs like needle exchange and so forth -- but he couldn't imagine legalizing heroin or cocaine.

An example he provided to me, from his personal experience, was one that illustrates my point about the fallacy of the line of reasoning. He told me about a wedding he had recently attended, at which the groom had gotten wired on cocaine and was acting out from it. It was a very uncomfortable situation for everybody, and the fact that this guy couldn't stay off of the stuff on his wedding day, in front of everybody, really said something negative to him about it. It certainly sounded like a bad scene to me.

But are there any ways it could have turned out worse? One way that it could have turned out worse is that the groom could have gotten a bad batch of the stuff, and instead of making people uncomfortable with his behavior, simply dropped dead. Such a tragic outcome would clearly have been worse than the merely uncomfortable and unpleasant one that transpired, and deaths from that very cause take place thousands of times per year in the US alone.

And that is prohibition at work. If users were getting their substances from licensed manufacturers and outlets who have a strong incentive to secure their reputations and stay on the right side of the law, it would almost never happen -- some people would still overdo it and harm themselves in that way, but only rarely from getting something other than what they thought they were getting.

So again, I find my conversation partner's reaction to the situation he witnessed to be understandable. But it is not well thought out. Just because a drug is dangerous doesn't automatically mean that banning it is a good response, and making such an assumption takes a pretty big leap of logic. The danger of a drug only raises the question of how to best respond to it, but does not answer that question.

The Bristol study is a positive contribution to the debate. Implementation of its recommendations would undoubtedly improve policies, assuming the implementation did not include any new prohibitions. But the harmfulness of a drug is only the beginning of the discussion, not the ending. Ultimately it is the consequences of prohibition -- and they are terrible -- which point to where governments need to go in drug policy. And that is to prohibition's ending.

This argument I find to be absurd:

It's saying that the best way to get people to stop doing something that they want to do is to allow businesses to market them on their shelves and for people to buy them. That's just silly. Obviously, if you allow a product to be brought within reach to someone and legalize them to consume it, you've only made it more likely that they will consume it.


WEB

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No, I didn't state that people will stop using. Just that it is much easier to control them when they are legal rather than illegal. Just look at the children factor, many people say drugs are illegal to protect the children when in fact drug prohibition makes it much more likely for a child to obtain drugs. Drug dealers don't ask for ID.

OK, so if we legalize drugs (aside from the people who then legally start taking drugs) kids can get fake ID's or older friends to buy them drugs and still take them. So no solution there by legalizing drugs. Now we just got an entire society hooked on drugs and spend all their time getting high instead of working, and blowing their money on cocaine and heroin when they could have used it on something productive.

Society loses.


WEB

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Also, since we have now legalized something creating a CHEMICAL ADDICTION AMONG PEOPLE, we can look forward to a rise in crime when people can no longer pay for their drugs and have to start committing crimes in order to afford them.


WEB

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Let's say we have a situation here presently (with the current laws)

Joe Drugdealer grows his own stuff and gets other stuff from other countries. He hangs out at some clubs. He has a reputation for selling his stuff and people come to him to buy drugs.

A new law comes along and now Joe doesn't have to go to foreigners to get his drugs. Now he just goes to Walmart and buys them there. Joe is now able to spend more time selling drugs. Consumption of drugs among all age brackets of the US population sky-rockets. Society loses.

Do you disagree with this hypothetical situation?


WEB

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No, they wouldn't, and they would be replaced with other problems. Alaska experimented with drug decriminalization (similar to the way Amsterdam did) in the late 1970s. They found that abuse of marijuana (i.e. police calls involving stoned people) doubled.

Basically, you would eliminate the current problems with drugs, but you would add a new set. For that reason, drug legalization doesn't matter to me. I'm not going to support it, nor fight it. It's a zero sum game. You just have to decide what problems you want to have.

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WEB, I disagree with you hypothetical situation, because if the drugs were being sold at Wal-mart then people would not need Joe any more. So rather than having more time to sell drugs, he would spend no time selling drugs, because people get them cheaper at Wal-mart.

I am for the legalization of drugs. The two concerns that I have however are crime and insurance rates.

Crime. This may seem like a harsh stance, but I would call for increased sentencing for anyone caught committing a crime while high on some substance... I wouldn't mind seeing that even if they stay illegal.

Now, on to insurance. I think that insurance companies should not pay out any money to illnesses related to drug consumption, including liver disease brought on by alcohol abuse, lung/throat cancer brought on by tobacco use or any illness caused by other "drugs".... I may even go as far as to say that shouldn't cover heart problems of an obese person. These are all illnesses brought on by poor life choices and that cost should not be spread to those who do not make such poor life choices.

We need to start allowing natural selection to work... if people want to ruin their lives with substance abuse then let them weed themselves out of the gene pool. No sympathy what so ever coming from me.