Ghost, I was in a live game when I commented. I didn't do a very good job making my point. First, I don't care if people do drugs or not. I do, however, care about the consequences of the choice to do drugs. I am being forced to pay in one way or another for their choice. Since I have no control, and certainly don't want my government having control over who get's to use drugs and which ones, I prefer that they remain illegal. They always weren't. When the US was agrarian hemp and coca and other drugs that are now illegal were legal. With industrialization accountablity became more important. In agrarian times if a drunk or addict didn't produce they became charity cases of the church or were punished for their crimes. If murder was committed, even while drunk, the person was dealt with quite harshly. The end result was that drunks/addicts weren't a burden on society and society could shun them. Allong comes industrialization and urbanization. Now a small concentration of addicts/drunks have a huge impact on society. Take into account society's views on rehabilitation and all of a sudden society becomes the victim and will not deal with people making poor choices. Instead, society helps them continue to make the same poor choices over and over again. Legalization isn't the answer. The drug use going down doesn't hold water. It's based on a % of the population. Real numbers go up as the population increases. Those higher numbers, even if it's a smaller percentage of the increased population, are still larger numbers.

"don't want my government having control over who get's to use drugs ..." legalisation does not necessarily mean that. The Swedish alcohol monopoly will sell to anyone. Or, you could leave supply to private business.

"... and which ones" Governments make that choice today so no difference under legalisation.

"Real numbers go up as the population increases." Also true with illegal drug use, so again, no difference.

@The Czech:

Criminals can't get jobs because they have a criminal record - this means that even if a drug user manages to get out of rehab and break their addiction they will be limited in what they can legally do (it may be easy for them to sell drugs on the street or be involved in other crimes)

That is not saying people who drug drive/drunkenly crash a plane shouldn't be held accountable, just that those drug users who DON'T harm anyone shouldn't be criminalised.

The fact is giving drugs users clean needles reduces the spread of disease means you reduce the cost (to society) associated with drug use. The provision of medical centres which will treat drug addicts (without the fear of the consequences of criminalisation ie loss of job and the ability to find gainful employment) MORE addicts will avail of these services.

Yes there is a cost to society, but the more people availing of addiction services the less TOTAL number of drug addicts around (asusming the same number of people start using drugs then they each are - on average - going to spend less of their lives addicted to drugs and probably live a lot longer, and be more productive)

Good education will have the same result it currently does, people will ignore it and use drugs anyway, but telling them it is bad for their health will still stop the vast majority - and this is JUST talking about decriminalising drugs.

Next you go on to Legalising/regulating the sale of drugs: you can tax drug sales, and license drug sellers. Regulate who they sell to, and apply standard consumer protection laws to prevent drug sellers from poisoning their clients (which has been known to happen, when marijuana growers mix fiber-glass particles into their plant to make it look like they have high concentration THC crystals)

The money saved by drug enforcement agencies tracking down illegal trafficing can be spent elsewhere, the money made by taxation can be spent anywhere - perhaps medical bills and education.

High levels of taxation would have the effect of depressing demand. Thus the free market approach of allow the market demand decide the supply does not mean you can't still require drug users pay for potential medical costs which their drug use may lead to.

Government warnings can even be placed on packaging to provide useful information about possible health risks - that way the government is NOT encouraging drug use. Government encouragement would entail funding advertising campaigns, and free samples. This is not what anyone is advocating.

Freedom to choose as we have with alcohol. Society can cover it's own costs and reduce the negative influence of drugs by changing the law.

@orathaic excellent point about ability of drug addicts to get jobs

“So Ghost, the problem isn't drug or drink, but poverty because people who do drugs can't keep jobs so they resort to crime. Seems if we just give addicts money crime will go down. If that's true, I'll become an addict and you can start sending me money.”

Do you realise how much drugs cost to produce? Literally pennies. You wouldn’t need to send anyone money, because it simply doesn’t cost them more than a copy of The Sun to keep it up.

Legalisation is the answer precisely because it will reduce crime five-fold without incurring a cost on the taxman.

“It's based on a % of the population. Real numbers go up as the population increases. Those higher numbers, even if it's a smaller percentage of the increased population, are still larger numbers.”

I call bullshit. As the raw numbers go up, so do the raw numbers of incidents, as the percentages go down, so do the incidents per head of population. Also, population increase is hardly significant in the Western world.

Not getting into this debate properly at half midnight, but clearly there are a lot of people who do drugs and have decent jobs.

using (illegal) drugs and being addicted to them (where you need medical treatment) are two different things.

If i've used the terms interchangably then i apologise.

Can we at least all agree the The War on Drugs hasn't and isn't working? If so, can't we also agree that another solution to this problem needs to be at least tried? If not legalisation, then perhaps decriminalisation? At least test the theory on a small scale?

Or can the U.S. (and other western nations) not admit defeat?

Yes but legalizing drugs can have just as bad effects. Drugs have different effects on different people. A drug that has no bad side effects for one person can potentially harm somebody else very bad. Many people learn this the hard way. And making them legal would just make drugs easier to get(not that they are hard to get already). Drugs dont do good in society. They change peoples personalities and make society as a whole worse. But if we focused more on helping the people who fall more into drugs, aka the poor, maybe then we could win the war on drugs.

"And making them legal would just make drugs easier to get(not that they are hard to get already)."

Not necessarily. That depends mostly on the way in which legalization were enacted. If the government had a heavy role, it could make drugs quite difficult to get a hold of. For example, it's much, much easier for me to buy cocaine than it is for me to buy Percocet. I'd need a prescription or someone who has a prescription. Doctors would prescribe it to me because I'm clearly not in need of it's therapeutic effects, and the person with the prescription usually does and isn't very willing to sell it. At the very least, if drugs were dealt with in a similar way as alcohol and tobacco we might see a decrease in exposure to children.

"Drugs dont do good in society."

Define drug. People make all sorts of arbitrary distinctions between different substances... I would say that caffeine (which *is* a drug) has probably done good in society, in a sense. With all the people who rely on it to boost themselves in the mornings... if we banned caffeine the North American economy would completely shut down. Caffeine is a great example because it's actually very addictive (the only drug with which I've ever experienced withdrawal), and is similar in chemical function to amphetamines as well as exhibiting similar overdose symptoms in both cases.

The most striking difference is perhaps that caffeine is found much more commonly in plants as a natural pesticide while many chemically similar substances were synthetically produced in the past century. If meth naturally occurred in tulips at concentrations far below the yield of artificial synthesis, I bet we'd have tulip tea, and there'd be Speedbucks on every corner selling Methmochas. It's the difference in dosage; you'd easily die of overdose if you snorted a line of relatively pure caffeine.

"and von moricke that's ridiculous to say alcohol is the most dangerous thing. Obviously it's harmful when you get plastered but no one can sustain that at a constant rate. Cigarettes kill you in the long term but they don't impede performance. Hard drugs really screw you up and often don't take long to have an effect unlike alcohol."

Actually, alcohol is quite a harmful drug, relatively speaking (not that I don't drink). It's physically quite toxic, to the point that alcohol poisoning is a pretty common occurrence. Comparably, to die of caffeine you'd have to drink like 80 cups of coffee, or with magic mushrooms you'd have to eat 17 kg of fresh mushrooms, and I've heard an estimate of having to smoke 680 kg of marijuana in 14 minutes to conceivably overdose from THC. More importantly, the dose required for recreational effects of these substances is astronomically lower than the dose required for lethal effects, whereas with alcohol, the ratio is much smaller.

In the short term, alcohol impairs judgement and dramatically affects your co-ordination, balance, reaction times, etc not to mention damage to your central nervous system, most notably in centres critical for learning and memory. In the long term, it increases risk for cardiovascular disease, liver disease, mental illness, and a host of other fun things.These are just the direct effects of alcohol. Driving under the influence causes many deaths, injuries, and property damage. Nobody beats their wife when they're high. Nobody gets into fights when they're on MDMA. Alcohol may be single greatest instigator of riots.

"we have at least reduced the usage"

TGM already brought up Portugal, but it's also worth bringing up the case of marijuana legalization in the Netherlands. Amongst the youth, marijuana consumption has actually gone down. I've heard it said that they've succeeded in making pot "boring".

"alcohol impairs judgement" - making it easier to inflict alcohol poisoning on yourself.

Alcohol usage is also much higher so it does more damage to society than most illegal drugs. So any arguement for keeping 'illegal' drugs that way should also put forward a move to ban alcohol - IF that is a solution.

Any drug, in excess, is damaging to the individual and also to society; no one here is saying otherwise. We cannot legislate them out of existence and we have been unable cannot to stop production. Production costs are cheap and profits are high so suppliers are able to bribe more and are prepared to be more violent in order to get their drugs to market. If you do succeed in restricting the flow, suppliers recover lost margin through higher prices and the addicts do more crime and take bigger risks to get their fix. Attacking the supply side is not working and never will.

@Chrispminis: "I've heard it said that they've succeeded in making pot "boring""

I have heard the same from the young Dutch people that I know. That said, The Netherlands is supposedly the best place in the world to be young which means that the desire to do drugs "to escape" is likely to be lower.

You do see the brown cafes around, especially in A'dam where I expect tourists are a large part of the custom. The only other drug related activity I have seen is a few pushers trying to sell to tourists in the Red Light District. Drugs don't seem to be a big problem here.

Pot is fundamentally dull. I'd say it's not so much that the Dutch have succeeded in making it boring but more that they have failed to make it exciting in the way British and American governments have.

The problem with drugs is that they are harmful to society. There are some people, indeed the vast majority with some drugs, who can take a drug, enjoy its effect, and then carry on none the worse for the experience. There are others who will take the drug and become a violent and damaging member of society (depending, of course, on the drug involved). And there are others who will take a drug, react badly to it, and cost the taxpayer a small fortune putting him back together again.

What we must do as a society is hammer together a betting understanding of what is an acceptable risk and what is beyond the pale. The current system of what drugs are illegal, and the war against drugs based on that system, fails because it doesn't make sense. Ecstasy is a class A drug (UK system), and yet ecstasy usage kills far fewer people than peanut usage or indeed hotdog sausages (perfectly designed to block someone's airpipe. Kills hundres each year in the US alone). Alcohol kills thousands and yet is perfectly legal. Unless we develop a system that makes sense the war on drugs will never succeed.

And yes, I firmly believe that there are some drugs out there that should be illegal, in much the same way and for the same reasons that it is illegal to get an adrenaline rush by driving a car 100mph down the motorway. (Actually, make that 120 mph. I've done 100 myself a couple of times... perfectly safely of course....)

legalization arguments are potent...

but something inside of me tells me that legalizing, say, PCP is a bad fucking idea.

@Octavious: even with a coherent, risk based approach to drug scheduling, you must still attack demand not supply.

@Thucy: fair enough, don't legalise the real nasties.

note that i did not read this thread lol... sorry.

I would argue that legalizing PCP could indeed work if you placed strong limits on the licensing of sellers of PCP, or perhaps even a government monopoly. That way, at least you'd have data as to who was purchasing PCP, and could keep a closer eye on them.

Legalization works, there are tons of examples (primarily in Europe though) and studies on the matter.

Drugs are the only area I have some serious conspiracy theories about. My head cannot figure out what would stop a government (any normal government) from making at least cannabis legal and make more than half of all drug money taxable.

Same goes for prostitution actually. Wherever it is still illegal that is.

@Ivo - a politician on their own can't just change the law, they would need to campaign for it, and this would leave them open to the accusation that they are trying to harm children (among other things)

This is likely political suicide for most politicians.

Perhaps the current drug-users should be running for political office, and perhaps they have failed to get elected on the platform of changing drugs laws. (in fact i think few people get themselves elected to change one policy, and those who see they can do other good things would have to weight the risk of not having any effect at all OR dropping the drug legalisation policy.)

All I have to say is... what about those drugs which either:

A) can addict with only one use, or
B) can kill you with only one use?

should those really be legal? So what if you can "keep an eye on them?" What if they die?

It's like legalizing suicide lol. Then again I suppose some of you would be in favor of that... although I think rational people recognize that that's bullshit.

Anyway I don't know. I agree that legalization basically works. But I think it's best just to legalize relatively "safe" stuff. Like weed... and maybe.. uh... that's probably it. Shrooms maybe I don't know anything about risks related to that.

@Diplomat
The fundamental source of demand is the human desire to alter their perseption of reality. There is little difference in motivation between a hippy taking LSD or a child rolling down a hill and spinning in circles to make themselves dizzy. As long as humans remain curious creatures that wish to seek out new experiences there will be a demand for drugs. That is why you get drug use across all aspects of society, in all classes, all races, and both sexes. Reducing demand via education etc can only ever have limited success.

@Thucy

Noone is talking about legalizing heroin, I think. Why do you keep asking this?

You do know cigarettes and alcohol are legal and they do kill also? It's not as fast, but it's more expensive :)

@Octavious

Dude, you've never taken anything have you? What you wrote is so inaccurate, I'm not sure where to start...

People don't take drugs to alter their perception of reality, at least none of the people I know do it for this reason.

Plus, you should know better educated people generally take more drugs, so not sure how you plan to educate them out of it :)

Education won't stop everyone but it will stop some.

@orathaic

You have a point, but it would be mostly valid in the US. How about if you're in GER, or BEL - the Dutch are next door, this can be explained.

Btw, teh canton of Zurich in Switzerland is considering legalizing cannabis. Clever people the swiss :)

@diplomat61

ok, this time more simply put: MORE EDUCATION = MORE DRUGS :)