Should drugs be legalized?

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If you ask me, I would say yes without a doubt as long as there is a minimum age (eighteen) to buy/sell/consume drugs. You should go to jail if you do any of the aforementioned things while you are under 18 years of age and if you force (or attempt to force) someone to take them against their will. And if you're looking to sell hallucinogens or other drugs of a similar nature you should be required by law to provide a warning/disclaimer stating the possible side-effects (e.g brain damage) of the drug. In all honesty, the WOD (War On Drugs) is a load of bull crap that has not only been a major failure but also caused the implementation of several laws whose constitutionality are very, very questionable. For instance, I remember hearing this one story of an elderly man (he was in his early 70s I think) who was essentially robbed by the government under some drug law because the police f-ed up majorly on the warrant (I believe the exact error was they did not provide a description) and they were like one place off from where they should have been and stumbled upon his house (I heard that this may have also been in part due to a faulty GPS), searched it, and even though they did not find whatever the hell it was they were looking for (he did not have it), they seized everything he had (including his home). The worst part of it was he could not sue to get any of it back, or even get them on negligence. He also was not compensated for his losses, which goes directly against the 5th Amendment's requirement that if a person has their property taken from them for public use (and I believe that would count since, if I'm correct, the money is used to fund agencies and whatnot to fight crime, I'll have to check up on that part again) they are to receive just compensation (a tidbit of the 5th Amendment that is all too often overlooked) for their lost assets. Even without those laws, though, I still say drugs should be legalized. The government's job is to maintain civil order while protecting your rights, not act as a 24/7 babysitter.

Last edited by LiberalJustice on 18 Jun 2012, 4:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

It depends if she took them at the start of this thread or the end of it!

(pretty much any emoticon would fit for that, but it was funny)

I voted no because the best thing about drugs is that they are illegal.

Yes, drugs should be legalized, because it is proven that the legal or anti-crime system is absolutely unable to do anything about them. But that is just a part of the solution.

We have a bad society that is coming apart. Rich are getting richer, poor are getting poorer (and more numerous. Corporations produce useless crap and destroy the environment. People made an entertainment of high consumption of average quality stuff. Economy is like stomach, bowels and s**thole, it's supposed to keep us alive, not to be a center of our living! People don't know who they are, what is their potential and aren't encouraged to develop it. Our society is rotten.

As such, our rotten society is very vulnerable to drugs and many other problems. People lack happiness, that is economic security, strong positive relationships, life purpose, meaningful activities and moral examples. (the Maslow pyramid, you know)

Our authorities pursue two contradictory goals, neither of which do us any good!
They want us to be like a sick patient on antibiotics or a corpse full of formaldehyde. We are meant to be weak and rotten throughout, rotting is the very process what makes us good producers/consumers/competitors/loaners/lenders. Yet we also must be kept alive and somewhat conserved by a the police and army system that suppresses external signs of rotting.

So yes, if we legalize ALL drugs in a society as we have it now, consequences would be very bad. However, we can and should legalize drugs which have impact negligible compared to tobacco and alcohol. Tobacco is more addictive than heroin and kills millions of people per year. Alcohol destroys families, causes accidents and supports violence.
Compared to that, risks of marijuana are negligible. Marijuana calms people down, if anything. I believe many artificial drugs were invented just because people can't get marijuana easily enough. We know that legal pot in places like Vancouver, Amsterdam or Switzerland didn't cause anarchy.

legalizing all drugs could also help with reducing the population. If someone wants to be stupid and do cocaine & heroin until they die... good! One less mouth to feed on a crowded planet.
Society needs to stop protecting people so much from their own stupid behavior, it's getting in the way of natural selection.

Hmm keeping driving legal also helps with reducing the population, if someone want's to be stupid and drive a car and die in a car accident. Great! one less mouth to feed in this crowded planet.

I like driving because it reduces the population.


In all seriousness though, what makes you think legalizing drugs increases drug abuse...If I am not mistaking that is just a lie the feds like to tell....but most actual studies seem to indicate less drug abuse when more rational drug policies involving decriminalization and legalization are created actually goes down.

Besides there are safer choices for regular use than heroin and cocaine. I don't see how society protects people from stupid behavior considering using a drug in itself is not necessarily stupid and well typically it's arrest, jail time or fines one gets for drugs......not people looking out for their best interest to protect them so get real.

So what about drugs that are only available with a prescription? Should it be open season there, too?

Should we be putting "Children's chewable valium" on the pharmacy shelves? Should we just stack Oxycontin next to the T3's?

It's all well and good to talk about marijuana, cocaine, heroin and their ilk as if they were the only drugs subject to discussion. We already face an epidemic of people who are attempting to self-medicate by hopping from walk-in clinic to walk-in clinic seeking prescription after prescription for the drugs that television ads have told them will solve all their problems. And the doctors, of course, are part of the problem--family doctors don't have the luxury of time to properly diagnose things like depression and anxiety disorders, and so often the easiest thing to do in 7 and a half minutes is reach for the prescription pad.

So is the remedy to cut out the doctors altogether? Should we permit direct marketing of pharmaceuticals and direct access without prescription? Should we dispense (no pun intended) with pharmacists, too?

I don't mean to be dismissive--I believe that there is an important discussion to be had about decriminalizing marijuana and finding a way to extricate its cultivation and distribution from the clutches of organized crime. But I think blanket statements that "all drugs should be legal" are irresponsible.

well do we require prescription for caffeine?

only drug i was ever hospitalized for, and that was unintentional.

of course there are better ways than blanket statements but perhaps we should focus on why some people go from clinic to clinic and for a lot of them addiction is simply a symptom of something else.
some drugs are physically very dangerous, meth and heroin are the usual suspects, others have little to no known physical danger associated with it, one would have to find a metric one can rank these drugs by, inclduing alcohol caffeine and the thousands(yes there are thousands) of psychotropic chemicals we ingest in our daily lives as well.

on a worldwide scale its suspected 25% or more have a parasite that can produce small amounts of LSA like substances in the brain, one of the more potent psychotropics few micrograms is enough for notable effects.(toxoplasma)

no one said there shouldnt be age limits or amount restrictions either, in denmark even over the counter medicine is regulated to some extent(amount and age limit, these can be ignored at a pharmacists discretion, most over the counter medicine is sold in supermarkets and gas stations however)

I think we are very much on the same page, Oodain.

I see non-therapeutic drug use as simply one part of a larger complex of drug use--prescription therapeutic use; non-prescription therapeutic use; herbal remedies; non-medicinal therapeutics; non-therapeutic uses; etc. If we see all of these things as interrelated, I think we can be much more rational about our approach to possession, use, cultivation, manufacture and sale.

I think people are just pissed off and that is why they are all on these drugs.

i cant make any sense of alcohol and tobacco being legal but not marijuana and other drugs. marijuana should definately be legal im gonna use the old pothead reasoning and say that its less dangerous than alcohol. you couldnt smoke enough to go on a murder spree and not remember it like alcohol can and you cant smoke too much and die from it. i cant talk about the other harder drugs cause i know little of them. i think making them legal will greatly decrease the crime related to them though there will still be addicts with drug problems who will do anything to get them. my vote goes to legalization and regulation.

Well, mentallyskilled, couldn't that argument also suggest that what we ought to be doing is more heavily regulating alcohol?

If alcohol is more dangerous than pot (and I won't gainsay you on that front), then let's treat it the same. Except, of course, we tried that. And it was a dismal failure.

I think all organic drugs should be legalised it will also stop all the drug gangs and cartels.