This, along with stronger varieties. Even Holland are looking at, or have banned, skunk.Originally Posted by perfectmark
I think all drugs should be legal
I think Marijuana should be legal & have smoked it myself
I think Marijuana should be legal but have not smoked it myself
I am undecided.
I think Marijuana should be illegal & have never smoked it myself
I think Marijuana should be illegal & have smoked it myself
I think all drugs should be illegal including Alcohol & Tobacco
This, along with stronger varieties. Even Holland are looking at, or have banned, skunk.
I expect the theory is that when one can pick up a pack of smokes for the same price as a pack of tobacco, there'll be less interest in paying as much for a single joint (depending on prices where you live).
It may, indeed, bring in a similar business model of the older days of tobacco cigarettes when different strength and flavours were available.
As for legalising ALL drugs - there is an arguement for that, but unless the rest of society is prepared to humour your stupidity, which I doubt, you may have to survive without benefits - ie, still hold down a job. Then what'll you do when you've fried your brain and can't, or won't, work?
It's hard enough for those who're disabled through no fault of their own - why also support those who did it knowingly?
Last edited by Gordo; 02-04-2012 at 12:39 PM.
A typical, ignorant, one sided, EAG post,.. *yawn*
You´re acting as if legalizing drugs would solve all/most problems, but that´s bs.
I personally believe the costs and the problems that would follow would dwarf anything that´s going on now.
Street violence/crimes would rise, the drug death rate, especially in the young generation would skyrocket, criminality in general would rise (where would all the junkies be getting their money?), HIV would hit unknown rates and just think about all the other drug related problems, health issues, accidents, etc.
And where would the drugs like Cocain and Heroin be coming from? They´d probably be still coming from the places they are now, just more of it, which in itself just makes some criminal cartels stronger and richer.
Sure people will always be using drugs, but if you open the gates, there will only be over problems.
I wish your utopic thinking would actually work
But no matter how you try to touch the drug problem, it´s a lose lose situation.
Maybe they could legalise some drugs such as cannabis, weak opiates, mdma type drugs.... None of these drugs cause anywhere near as many social problems as alchohol... And this would probably take a lot of the market away from illegal drug use..... Admittedly legalising hardcore drugs such as heroin, cocaine and crystal meth probably wouldn't be such a good idea... Most people who smoke cannabis or take the other things I mentioned are not criminals and do not deserve to be put in jail with violent inmates etc. for it imo.
Last edited by CorrupT88; 02-04-2012 at 03:51 PM.
Look who's talking, you clearly didn't think through the subject at all just spat out knee-jerk responses. You seem to be think that all the problems associated with drugs will just increase exponentially if they were legal, but so many of the problems are caused by the fact they are illegal!
Not necessarily. One solution that has been discussed is that if you are an addict harder drugs like heroin and crack should be available via prescription and given out for free. This would eliminate a huge amount of crime, not cause more as they would get their fix without resorting to crime.
Many overdoses are caused by things added to the drugs rather than the drug itself, or the lack of purity making dosage very hard to determine (and easier to OD), or the lack of education (like the girl Leah Betts who drank 14 pints of water in 90 minutes after taking exctasy and died for over-hydration) These aspects would be largely eliminated if drugs were legal. It's not like everyone is going to go mad on drugs if they were legal either, Amsterdam has proved that it doesn't work like that. It's the double standards of why drugs should be illegal when alcohol isn't that really is most frustrating about this debate.
No it wouldn't. Think about it, if drugs were legal then the whole attitude towards drugs would change. Needles would be available for free to everyone who wanted them and/or people would be able to use special NHS centres to take drugs like heroin in a 100% safe manner (already happening in some countries), and in the same place drug education, advice and counselling would take place as well. The majority of the tax money made from drugs could be invested in drug education and rehabilitation and would bring a whole new era of informed drug use. The safety of the drugs, the equipment and to those people who are doing it would increase not decrease.
Health issues? No can't use that one, tobacco and alcohol are the 2 biggest killers and they are legal. That argument is pointless unless you make alcohol and tobacco illegal to, you can't pick and choose what things that are bad for your health are illegal.
Accidents? Few drugs affect the motor control centre of your brain as badly as alcohol. No double standards.
Same with alcohol though, America tried to ban it in the 1920's and the effects of having it illegal (crime etc) just weren't worth the effort, so they made it legal again. I don't see how politicians can't see the similarity with prohibition not working. It's about choosing the least worst path, as they did in the 1920's, which is legalising it.
It will sold by governments rather than the private gangs/armies that sell them now, and the money used to help the people of the country rather than spent of fighting wars with rival cartels. I'd rather billions of dollars were going back into economies than funding the cartels wouldn't you?
Last edited by BlindKensai; 02-04-2012 at 04:08 PM.
Legalising alcohol doesn't stop people acting like twats, beating up their wives, smashing up streets. Being off your face does. Yeah, OK, providing heroin/crack on tap would "solve" the stealing-to-feed, but you're stealing-to-feed from the taxpayer instead to pay for their habit. That's worse.
Do you give money to the typical druggie/alky on the street begging for 50p to "make a phone call"? Why does taxing everyone to pay for it work instead?
Don't say, but "they will be collecting taxes off of selling". No they won't. Very little will go back to tax coffers. Illegals will be sold, undercutting the government. Fail.
Resorting to taxation of people who should NOT be taxed to pay for someone's habit. We are already paying for addicts' methadone scrips. How can you treat cocaine addiction? You basically have to put them in a form of prison (rehab centres work practically like prison usually for the first few weeks) and is HUGELY expensive. The amount of aftercare required and constant counselling, mentoring and risk of relapse, causing even more costs is just too costly to society as a whole.
One of the best rehab centres in the UK - Broadway Lodge - which is local to me is £800 a WEEK in fees for private treatment; you could be lucky to get in via the charity side. And people can be in there for many weeks, and then in secondary care, which is usually in a house full of other patients at the same stage to provide peer support and guidance on how to get life back on track. That's generally paid by the local authority of where the client originally came.
This is true, but making something legal doesn't change the fact people will always OD. Whether it's ignorance of the drug in question: could be aspirin, alcohol, cocktails of legal, or illegal, drugs and substances. Or education. Or deliberate.
The drug death rate rose 63% between 1999 and 2004, and then another 27% between 2007 and 2009. Most overdoses involved prescription painkillers like Oxycontin and Vicodin, which users typically combined with alcohol or anti-anxiety drugs like Xanax. Deaths involving painkillers more than tripled between 1999 and 2006.
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/09/1...#ixzz1lQaOLUJf
Furthermore, Painkiller prescriptions began rising in the late 1990s and 2000s, when doctors, drug companies and patient advocates pressed for increased access to pain-relieving drugs for patients with cancer and chronic pain, who were being severely undertreated. Studies show that this campaign did increase patients’ access; for example, opioid prescriptions for Medicaid patients rose three-fold from 1996 to 2002.
Increasing access before increasing, or without, education is a proven disaster.
Why is everyone still with the notion that tax will pay for drugs and drug treatment? Go and study what is involved in treating someone just coming off any addictive substance. And how long it takes most people to rehabilitate back into society and then look at and watch documentaries on relapse. No, you know sweet FA about the real world on drugs and other addictive substances.
Injected and orally taken substances are often safer than substances that are smoked, particularly over the long term, I give you that. That's if the drugs are free from pesticides/washed and needles are only used by one person/binned safely in something provided by a place that provides the needles. Smoking cannabis is often used in tandem with tobacco so there are obvious added health effects there.
You're high because you're not thinking straight. Whether it be poppers, ecstacy, cocaine, etc you are in a mind-altering state (duh that's why you took it, huh). You are not always in complete control in the way you can do a task. Depressant effects are proven to reduce reaction time: Depressants will slow your reflexes and impair your balance and coordination. They affect your vision and perception of time, as well as your ability to think logically. There are also dangerous ‘hangover effects’ such as drowsiness and poor coordination that can last for several hours. So opiates, tranquillisers, alcohol and similar are dangerous.
On the other hand, stimulants can have both sides. Effects on Driving: Observed signs of impairment in driving performance have included subjects speeding, losing control of their vehicle, causing collisions, turning in front of other vehicles, high-risk behavior, inattentive driving, and poor impulse control. As the effects of cocaine wear off subjects may suffer from fatigue, depression, sleepiness, and inattention. In epidemiology studies of driving under the influence cases, accidents, and fatally injured drivers, between 8-23% of subjects have had cocaine and/or metabolites detected in their blood. An examination of 253 fatally injured drivers in Wayne County, Michigan between 1996-1998, found that 10% of cases were positive for blood cocaine and/or metabolites. On review of accident and witness reports, aggressive driving (high speed and loss of vehicle control) was revealed as the most common finding. Ethanol was detected in 56% of these cases, and all of these drivers lost control of their vehicles. In Memphis, Tennessee in 1993, 13% of 150 drivers stopped for reckless driving were determined to be driving under the influence of cocaine based on observations of behavior and appearance, performance on field sobriety tests, and positive urine cocaine tests. http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/r...ugs/cocain.htm
The simulator provided a comprehensive and coherent set of stimulus inputs which produced a degree of realism not usually found in laboratory studies. Both the initial and the supplemental doses of caffeine significantly enhanced performance beyond that found with placebo, on each of 4 measures of alertness. http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/apl/59/4/483/
There are not enough studies on how your body reacts when stimulants wear out whilst performing motor-intensive tasks to make a valid claim that stimulants' benefits are overall beneficial. Some will make you drowsy or temporarily provide over-sensitivity with a sudden drop.
This is something worthy more of an entire university student's dissertation due to its complicated nature. However, in this case, alcohol prohibition is really comparing apples to oranges in this debate. Mainly because you are doing the opposite - going from legal to illegal to making substances from illegal to legal. Alcohol is used legally worldwide; you cannot change people's views on something in a place where immigration and freedom was something that was seen as a legal statute.
When referring to drugs that probably shouldn't have been made illegal, at least not without proper understanding, was LSD. LSD boomed without full understanding of its effects. Unfortunately, this stigma on LSD, ecstacy and some other mildly unsafe substances has stuck on politicians from a time who did not understand or were ignorant, or, in LSD's case, likely lobbied by religious fanatics that see mind-altering effects akin to being taken by the devil. These ignorances on relatively safe illegal drugs will likely stay until the fanatics or ignorants pass.
But on drugs that have a significant effect on reward pathways, such as heroin and cocaine, should NEVER be legal. Arguments can be made on Cannabis, MDMA, LSD and GHB etc. But you have to properly educate, educate, and educate or misuse can be fatal in many cases. GHB should never be swallowed or used with alcohol etc but otherwise can be safe. MDMA should have the same type of warnings as sexual performance drugs that increase heartrate, and about its fluid requirements. Cannabis can have psychosis. Noone has a definitive answer why some people are more likely to be affected, why they develop dependence or fatigue effects. Most people believe cannabis makes you happy, gives you a good time, but it's similar to alcohol in the effect that it exacerbates feelings currently afflicting the user. Is cannabis worse than alcohol? IMO, yes it is. Both can be used safely in the short term. Cannabis is typically used pari passu tobacco and due to that link, and the fact it creates smoke, makes it inherently more dangerous than alcohol. Abuse of both substances is both costly in terms of healthcare, and cause dependency. Cannabis is also likely to cause mental problems which is not seen with alcohol that relieving the body of tends to rectify.
Sigh face.
Last edited by russ18uk; 02-04-2012 at 05:56 PM.
Man, thnx Russ you saved me some time [thumbup]
"Legalising alcohol doesn't stop people acting like twats, beating up their wives, smashing up streets. Being off your face does. Yeah, OK, providing heroin/crack on tap would "solve" the stealing-to-feed, but you're stealing-to-feed from the taxpayer instead to pay for their habit. That's worse."
Im sorry but alchohol causes a LOT of problems and literally MAKES non violent people violent... It is a horrible drug tbh and causes a lot of problems... Much worse then cannabis.. If you go out in the UK on a weekend the streets are literally packed out with pissed up wankers after a fight....
Last edited by CorrupT88; 02-04-2012 at 06:32 PM.
Exactly. It's like expecting people to not act like twats when high on heroin, amphets, cocaine etc because it's suddenly made legal. That was my point.
People think legalising substances would solve all the crime issues that affect society and the money made would pay for any treatment. They have absolutely no idea at the real cost - just what the press shows them or their own made up world. I'm really surprised at DKM's views as, I believe, he works in the treatment of drug addicts. That may be Waters' case as well. 11% of the UK's treatment centres are where I live (if you believe Wikipedia) by 2006. I know ****ing loads of people who have been in treatment and still not fully integrated into society 5, 6, 7, 8 years after successfully completing it. So many have relapsed it's unbelievable.
How is paying from taxes worse than people getting mugged on the street?
Tobacco made £10.9 billion for the government in 2009/2010 (http://www.the-tma.org.uk/tma-public...-from-tobacco/), and cost about 7 billion through health and employment losses (http://www.personneltoday.com/articl...-than-2bn.html). So tobacco tax revenue more than paid for itself and with billions left to spare to put into other things - why would it be any different with drugs?
Linked to above, I think it could pay for itself so it's not people 'paying for others someones habit' if that is the case. Tax from people buying recreational drugs would pay for those who develop problems and prices would fall for rehabilitation and other drug services as they will be more widely provided. As for treating cocaine addition, it's the same whether it's illegal or not so I don't see the point of the question? Yes more people would probably become addicted, but there will be more money to pay for it. I believe having a small increase in people with drug problems is worth the massive benefits of legalisation.
I said education was necessary and would of course be hugely important. I'm not advocating legalising drugs and that's it, the entire approach to drugs and to drug education would have to change hand in hand.
It does with tobacco and alcohol, and there would also be a huge increase in the number of state run clinics which would cost a fraction of the costs you have stated. I think you (and Golem) keep applying everything that is happening now (prices, care, education etc) as being the same if they were legalised. Everything would change along with it!!
As for me knowing a sweet FA, you don't know anything. Drugs have been a big part of my own life and I've had close friends and family members struggle with alcohol and heroin addiction (one of which is still ongoing, final phase). Another of my friends went into psychosis and developed agoraphobia when he was 14 from smoking hash and I didn't see him for 3 years and we only communicated by letter. I started writing out my person experiences and problems but decided it wasn't a good idea to post it here. If you feel I need your badge of drug knowledge approval we can speak about it via PM.
I'm not saying it won't cause accidents, but the same rules would apply as for drinking, so no driving, heavy machinery etc. Of course being high impairs your brain, but so does alcohol and steps are taken to minimise it. My point is that the impairment is no worse than alcohol, which is legal, therefore it cannot be used as argument against legalising it.
It may be apples to oranges, but it isn't apples to shoes. They have similarities which cannot be ignored.
All these problems still apply when they are illegal though. If they were legal however the level of education and awareness would increase dramatically. I don't see how this is an argument against it?
--- Post Update ---
Who suggested that because it certainly wasn't me? Of course some people will act like idiots, but it won't be any different from alcohol which is legal. So many of your arguments apply to alcohol as well which makes them mute as it is legal. You can't use arguments for keeping something illegal that apply to things that are already legal.
A lot of people have first hand experience with these things, because it is a big problem. The sooner we get it out in the open and stop pushing it underground the better it will be for everyone.
Last edited by BlindKensai; 02-04-2012 at 07:06 PM.
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