Jenos Ridan wrote:Ditocoaf wrote:Jenos Ridan wrote:suggs wrote:All drugs should be decriminalised, no question. You'd halve the crime rate at a stroke.
But of course, most drugs f*ck you up.
Which is why they are illegal to begin with.
Weed I can see legalized, but taxed to death. All the others should remain regulated.
yeah... while I've heard the "is weed better/worse than tobacco/alcohol" debated over and over again, it's hard to contest that if you arranged drugs into "tiers", weed is a lot more comparable (in health risk) to those two legal drugs than to most other illegal drugs.
Which is why I can see weed legalized with no moral hangups, but stuff like Heroin and Cocaine should remain heavily regulated and the killer crap like PCP and Meth should stay outlawed.
This all comes from someone who believes the 21 drinking law is stupid and finds it equally stupid that people can buy cannons out of the mail-order Dixie Gun Catalogue at any age with a credit card, but a handgun can't be bought any earlier than 21 (a good shooter can wax maybe 7-8 people on one clip. Whereas one can take out twenty or more with a cannon loading with nails and other loose stuff that can be picked up anywhere, hmmmm. Gee, I wonder which would do more harm: a piddling 9mm or six or more pounds of nails, broken glass, rocks and whatever else fired out of a cannon?). I like the idea of the waiting period and background checks, but some of the laws are just insensible on the face of them.
Just wait until HeavyCola sees this, it'll cause his poor pencil-necked sheeple Limey heart to seize up.
The War on Drugs has put us into a predicament. At first glance, the Drug War seemed like a good thing, it was meant to be positive. Simple enough, right? You just make drugs illegal and you enforce it as a deterrent.
But what a slippery slope you climb when government intercedes as
the moral authority on our lives. For the government (an entity whose only purpose was to protect our Constitutional rights as Americans and provide us with an army for protection) to become a moral-surrogate is only doomed to failure. Before the Drug War, sure there were
some stoners, sure there were
some coke heads. There will always be addicts, but that is not the place of the government to stick its nose, that is a personal/mental issue, one of which can be handled by a strong community. The community may have supported certain associations or religious institutions before the government got involved, now the Drug War has become a business.
The People's right to property become a mute point, as property was seized by the government and turned into cash to fund itself. The forbiddance of at first Marijuana and then Cocaine, had only lead people to seek other alternatives. To say that you are for one drug being legal and another being illegal is a total double standard. If one drug is bad then how can the others be good? The best thing to do is to let it all be legal, tax it, and enforce societal laws revolving around its use.
Sure Meth is bad, but it wouldn't have such a pull on our society if we didn't have a War on Drugs. For example, when I lived in Arizona, everybody did coke, but very few did Meth. The coke-heads despised the tweekers. But when the government came down hard on the illegal drug trade on the Mexican border and shut down around 30% of the cocaine traffic into America, the Mexican Mafia switched over to making Meth and selling it. The once proud Coke-Heads now found themselves switching their addiction from cocaine to a much more powerful methamphetamine. The buzz was so much bigger and lasted so much longer. You got a bigger ride for your buck. So now Meth is king and coke is just something you mix with Jack Daniels (if you like such things).
The Drug War made small minority gangs large and powerful. If you take the Drug War away, these gangs will disintegrate. Prohibition was found to be a negative thing on society, as Americans found out. The Amendment was repealed and the alcohol lords lost all their power over society, the same would be expected with the gangs in power today.
I think the damage and corruption that has been done by this stint of the War on Drugs is beyond repair. The best thing to do is establish a New Nation as patching up this one only leads to further fissures in our society. The old "new wine into new wine skins" adage is at play here, and I just don't see any hope for the United States on this front.
JK?
