Quote:
dude, legalizing all drugs is the worst idea i heard. wake up man: most drugs are highly damageable for health, and especially mental health. do u want a society with druggies ans psychiatric problems, with ppl doin badtrips in the streets. yo man cmon
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHahahahahahAhahAHAhalmao
It reeeeallllyy pisses me off when people who smoke weed think that "most drugs are highly damaging to your health", this is one of the most hypocritical statements a stoner can make. Basically, you're willing to admit what the government and media tell you about marijuana is bullshit and yet you swallow all the other bullshit the government shoves down your throat about other drugs.
Now don't get me wrong, if you only smoke cannabis and do no other drugs good for you but i've done plenty of drugs and realize the line seperating 'hard' drugs from 'soft' drugs is non-existant. Drugs are what they are, they all have risks and many of them have benefits when used responsibly.
You speak of cocaine and heroin, well newsflash they and other drugs can be used occassionally. No drugs are inherently evil and many that you probably think cause physical harm do not.
Heroin for example does no physical harm to the body, a person could use the drug everyday and live just as long as they would have. The problem with drugs, especially the addictive ones is that they are illegal. Many social ills blamed directly on drugs and drug users are in fact the result of drug laws.
Drug laws obviously don't prevent drug use, they only worsen the situation. Street drugs such as cocaine and heroin are black market substances, there is no way to be sure how pure your bag of dope is or what other substances are present. When you here people talk of collapsed veins and gangrene from injecting heroin, it is actually from the talc powder and other shit the heroin was cut with.
Legalizing all drugs would keep all drugs out of the hands of children and teens who are most likely to try them in the first place. Drug dealers don't check ID and it has always been easier for me to get weed, crack and ecstasy than alcohol.
It is also important to note that nicotine is just as addictive as cocaine and heroin.
Quote:
In fact, a sizeable percentage of heroin users consume only occasionally, without becomming heavy users (Zinber 1979), and measurable withdrawal symptoms from opioids rarely occur until after serveral weeks of regular administration (Jaffee 1991: 67).
Further evidence that addiction is far less important than typical portrayals come from the experience of returning vietnam veterans. Robins, Davis, and Nurco (1974) report interviews of veterans eight to twelve months after their return from vietnam. They find that most addicted veterans gave up their narcotic use voluntarily before departure or after a short, forced treatment period at departure. In subsequent work, Robins et al. (1980) find that although most veterans had access to cheap heroin in vietnam, only about 35 percent tried it and only about 19% became addicted. They also conclude that heroin use does not consistently lead to daily use and addiction, that addiction frequently ceases without treatment, that maintaining recovery from heroin addiction does not require abstention, and that the reason for high levels of social disability among heroin users is likely attributed to characteristics of the users rather than to heroin users per say.
Quote:
"One possible measure of addictiveness is the degree to which use continues after initial experimentation. High continued use rates do not necessarily suggest addiction; if people who consume a good find they like it and therefore consume it frequently, the continued use rate is high even if there is no addiction. But addiction does not imply high continued use rate, and this has been used frequently as a measure of addiction.
The fact that continued use rates for marijuana, which is not regarded as physically addictive, are similar to those for crack, which is regarded as highly addictive, also challenges the more extreme claims about addictiveness of drugs. Likewise, the continued use rates for other legal goods (e.g., chocolate, caffeine) are perhaps even higher.
Both quotes taken from Jeffrey Mirons Drug War Crimes: The consequences of prohibition.
In this book the modern War on Drugs is compared to the Prohibition of alcohol in the early 1900s.
When drug law enforcement expenditure increases, so does the homicide rate.