Which drugs would you legalize?

[Fjones]

I think all drugs should be legal. Depends what you mean by legal. People who posses a small amount of any drug should not be persecuted for personal consumption. Legal does not mean that they should be sold at every 7-11 and gas station like cigs. It does not mean that they should be promoted through aggresive advertising campaigns. My point is that if someone has a small amount of their drug of choice for personal use in a safe environment, they should not get in trouble for this. Arguably the law is like this were I live in the US.

BTW the Czech Republic just legalized all drugs in small amounts and set posession limits on the major ones. I think Holland has similiar laws

If it's legal for me to possess in a "small amount for personal use in a safe environment," then why should it be illegal for someone to sell it to me? What difference does it make whether I have a "small amount for personal use" or a "large amount so that all my friends and I can enjoy it"?

 

[k.kat]

All drugs.


(I'd still only use opiates though)

i would support this too
but would still only use MDMA, WEED/HASH, COKE, & POSSIBLY MCAT

 

[BEEF/N/BROKLY]

Phencyclidine(PCP)


WHY U MITE ASK??

Legit reason son, 99% of people who think dey smoke pcp wen dey smoke dust are smoking none other than formaldahyde(which gets u high n all)which is a carcinogen which is designed to freeze livin cells n shit on contact and is so fuckin bad for you, now pure Phencyclidine(in any form but a pill would be ideal for many reason) is not as fucked up and comes in a greater amount of forms(unlike formaldhyde which u get dipped tobaco or dipped leaves) which I believe are safer den smoking bd.. I cut back on it cause think of it, smokin form put it thru ur whole resp system i mean u potentially fuckin ur nose mouth loungs n shit, but if u pop a Phencyclidine pill u not exposin ur wet organs n systems n shit wit raw formaldahyde n shit, but even smokin real pcp u smoke less and get more fucked up n in theory by dat alone is better as less is needed thus safer aswell as it is safer den reg bd.. Would be soo much better if we cud get da real shit and not da fucked up similar high which issss not tooo great on u. u feel me

 

[debaser]

Legalize all drugs. If hard drugs such as alcohol and tobacco are legal, heroin and crack can be legal too.

 

[squidhead]

Legalize all drugs. If hard drugs such as alcohol and tobacco are legal, heroin and crack can be legal too.

Ditto....Anyone age 21+ should be able to use their own judgment on what they want to consume. Look how many people die each year from alcohol & tobacco. Hundreds of thousands!! All the recreational drugs combined don't even come close to that number.
Weed? 0!! LSD? Only the ones who think they can fly & jump off a 20-story building!! Opiates would probably be the highest number, but I'll bet it's nowhere near booze &/or cigs.
This Drug War is nonsense. It'll go on forever because the general population will always want their 'attitude-adjusters'. Plus if everything was legal & sold in pharmacies, the street gangs would dry-up from lack of revenue. Who's going to buy some garbage from a punk in the street when a person can be rest-assured that their product-of-choice will be pure & potent in the drug store?
It's a win-win situation...tax the hell outta these drugs & the government will make beaucoup bucks while busting-up the street thugs source of income. Hasn't the government learned anything from the Prohibition Act of 1919? All that did was kick-start La Cosa Nostra in the USA & the rest, as they say, is history.

 

[NomNomNom]

All drugs should be legal, prohibition doesn't work (see: America in the 1920s) and it's the same for every drug.

It enriches groups of people who eventually fight for turf or for the hell of it, drives up prices, drives down quality (and safety) of the product, stigmatizes large portions of the population, fattens up the police state, costs non-drug uses LOTS of money in taxes, and generally makes as much sense as a fish riding a bicycle.

But if we legalized drugs there would be LEGIONS of bureaucrats without jobs, the poor fellows. Oh no wait, i pay your salary with my taxes and you in turn put innocent people in jail for political posterity, scratch that - you're all assholes.

If drugs are dangerous, making them illegal only makes them more so on several levels. If drugs were legal a person could use Heroin daily for about the price of a bad coffee habit.

 

[anonymous1419]

Hate to say it... but legalization of all drugs I think would be very very bad for humanity and society. As much as I love a wide-variety of drugs, I think pot should be legal for all no prescription required and thats about it.

Yup, I agree. Although it would be nice if I could buy my OC80s OTC at a pharmacy for the mere pennies that they cost for those with a script.. 8)

 

[squidhead]

All drugs should be legal, prohibition doesn't work (see: America in the 1920s) and it's the same for every drug.

It enriches groups of people who eventually fight for turf or for the hell of it, drives up prices, drives down quality (and safety) of the product, stigmatizes large portions of the population, fattens up the police state, costs non-drug uses LOTS of money in taxes, and generally makes as much sense as a fish riding a bicycle.

But if we legalized drugs there would be LEGIONS of bureaucrats without jobs, the poor fellows. Oh no wait, i pay your salary with my taxes and you in turn put innocent people in jail for political posterity, scratch that - you're all assholes.

If drugs are dangerous, making them illegal only makes them more so on several levels. If drugs were legal a person could use Heroin daily for about the price of a bad coffee habit.

Excellent post!! I couldn't agree with you more!!

 

[NomNomNom]

I used to strongly think that all drugs should not be legalized, but really only because i was afraid i would just become a humungous crackhead if they were. Really though...if drugs weren't illicit, they would lose a LOT of their appeal.

It's the forbidden fruit factor, part of the reason you want it is because you're not supposed to have it. I really doubt that if CVS started selling Percocet OTC that people would deplete the world's supply of oxycodone in a week or something.

For me, a huge part of my fixation with opiates is the compulsion more than the addiction. The "mmmm i could really go for a perk now" followed by rifling through all of my old clothes to see if i left one in there, then reluctantly asking a few close friends, then thinking maybe my mom isn't home and i could go by and rifle through her shit for something, then giving up, then feening again, then finally getting like 4 measley Vicodin 9 hours later and being all NOMNOMNOM on them.

I know that i can do without them and not suffer, but the thought that i MIGHT be able to get some if i spend like 2 hours of my life questing sends me into a fiendy, sketchy alter ego, compulsive tailspin.

If they were at CVS and i thought "hmm i could go for a Perk" i wouldn't beast out of the house rip a bottle off the shelf and tear it open in line i'd be like whatever it's there when i want it.

 

[Visitor Q]

Legit reason son, 99% of people who think dey smoke pcp wen dey smoke dust are smoking none other than formaldahyde(which gets u high n all)which is a carcinogen which is designed to freeze livin cells n shit on contact and is so fuckin bad for you

Wrong. Check your facts.

Formaldehyde or Embalming Fluid are street slang terms for Phencyclidine (PCP)
Formaldehyde IS NOT psychoactive and it is a known carcinogen.

Ask Erowid here.

 

[nativenick]

i cant remember who floated this idea. but maybe having some kind of licence to use drugs would be a good idea. the hardest drugs are the most tightly controlled and one would have to take drug education class to prove themself responsible enough to use said substances. the only way to get around it would be if you legitamatley needed it for medical purposes ie painkillers.

softer drugs like weed, low alcohol content bevarges, would have lax controll and be sold in stores and marketed. as booze is now. i liked the idea of making a fun house type place or lounge where you could do psychedelic drugs, thats not a bad idea at all. liscences would have a merit demerit based system. over consumption, driving intoxicated and criminal activity as a direct or inderect result of drug usewould give you demerits or forfiture of your liscence to consume drugs

its just a thought

i think if you make rules when and where and how often you can use drugs it might work who knows maybe you could have cocaine or mdma bars where said substances are only allowed to be consumed in those locations no take homes. or nothing

 

[CFC]

save

 

[JoEhJoEh]

Cannabis also just for special medical indication and not for people under 18.

JJ

 

[Wilson Wilson]

I'd legalise all drugs but treat them differently.

Cannabis should be sold openly like booze and fags - it's much safer than both.

Psychedelics and MDMA should be widely available but only from pharmacists who have been trained in harm reduction. That way people can be told how to trip safely etc.

Coke being available in the same way should be fine too since most people just use it on weekends.

Amphetamine could be sold at pharmacies as a nootropic type thing.

Heroin and other strong opiates should be made available to addicts in some controlled fashion but shouldn't be openly marketed and use shouldn't be encouraged.

Weak opiates like codeine can be sold pretty openly since they're relatively low risk, but again I'd put restrictions on marketing.

To be honest I'd also put more restrictions on alcohol marketing too. Cigarette ads have been banned here for ages after all.

 

[specialrelativity]

I would legalize cocaine and lsd. All drugs is an option, too.

Specialr

 

[SunriseChampion]

Everything.

Various levels of regulation based on safety profile and therapeutic use, obviously, but fuck out of here with prohibition.

 

[SunriseChampion]

To be honest I'd also put more restrictions on alcohol marketing too.

This can't be understated! How the fuck is it that a dangerous, toxic substance such as alcohol is openly sold and advertised all over the place whilst something that grows in the woods (mushrooms) is "illegal"?

At my house, I keep the mushrooms in a nice wooden box in my living room and the booze is relegated to a corner cupboard under the counter in the kitchen, where it belongs.

I have my own drugs laws here.

 

[Wilson Wilson]

This can't be understated! How the fuck is it that a dangerous, toxic substance such as alcohol is openly sold and advertised all over the place whilst something that grows in the woods (mushrooms) is "illegal"?

At my house, I keep the mushrooms in a nice wooden box in my living room and the booze is relegated to a corner cupboard under the counter in the kitchen, where it belongs.

I have my own drugs laws here.

Right? Literally the only reason alcohol is legal is that it has a long history of use in Western cultures. Nothing to do with science, it's just following tradition. Also a bit of sly racism involved especially if you look at how America justified criminalising cannabis. Similarly, opium used to be legal until Indian and Chinese immigrants came over and started using it. Which is ironic when the British fucking loved opium when they were making a fortune growing it in India and selling it to China - they even started two fucking wars over it! In both the UK and US, opium and opiates were sold OTC at pharmacies until the early 1900's. Medicines containing cannabis tincture were also very common. You even had medicines containing both opium and cannabis.

In any case, the history of how drugs are treated is based purely on politics and very very rarely, if ever, on science.

Slightly back on topic a bit, I like how David Nutt speaks about alcohol and its danger compared to other substances from a purely scientific fact-based perspective. People went mad when he published a study concluding alcohol is the most dangerous drug when dangers to the individual and society are taken into account. That research was repeated by a different team of researchers who gathered data from the whole of the EU and they came to the same conclusion.

Some interesting links:

Alcohol 'more harmful than heroin' says Prof David Nutt

Alcohol is more harmful than heroin or crack based on the overall dangers to the individual and society as a whole, according to a report co-authored by the UK's former chief drugs adviser Professor David Nutt.

www.bbc.co.uk

European rating of drug harms - PubMed

The outcome of this study shows that the previous national rankings based on the relative harms of different drugs are endorsed throughout the EU. The results indicates that EU and national drug policy measures should focus on drugs with the highest overall harm, including alcohol and tobacco...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

House of Commons - Home Affairs Committee - Drugs: Breaking the Cycle - No - Minutes of Evidence: HC 184-II

publications.parliament.uk

If you don't mind a bit of reading that last one is really good.

Q303 Chair: You maintain that alcohol is just as dangerous or more dangerous than cannabis?

Professor Nutt: It is considerably more dangerous than cannabis, yes.

Q304 Chair: Is cannabis a special case, or are there other drugs that you would like to see decriminalised?

Professor Nutt: My own view is that if society allows people to market the drug alcohol, then if people want to make a rational decision to use a drug that is less toxic than alcohol, they should be able to do that.

Professor Nutt: I think we should have a completely rational approach to all drugs. Separating the two is a mistake; we have to look at how we can minimise the harms of all drugs. With alcohol we know better regulation, reducing sales in supermarkets, increasing price will reduce use and reduce harms. Also a significant proportion of people use alcohol because cannabis is illegal so if cannabis was at least regulated and accessible people would switch from alcohol to cannabis. That would also reduce the harms of alcohol. My suggestion to you all is that a regulated market for those drugs is the best way forward.

Professor Nutt: No. Let’s be clear, that is the scale of harms in the UK at present. The point of that paper is to say if we really want to do something to reduce the harms of drugs, to stop the fact that within 10 years alcoholic liver disease will kill more men than heart disease, if we want to stop this rising, rising tide of alcohol admissions to hospital––over 1 million admissions last year––we have got to do something about alcohol because that is the most harmful drug at present. The harms are largely the harms to society. You will see from the scale that certainly heroin and crack are more harmful to the individual, but then there is the vast use of alcohol and the violence it causes-it is responsible for most spousal violence, most child abuse, a lot of other violence on the streets, it costs £6 billion a year to police the public disorder from alcohol. You compare it with cannabis. The recent research of Steve Pudney suggests that policing cannabis costs £500 million per year and that is largely arresting people for possession. Policing alcohol costs £6 billion, and that is arresting people because they are drunk and disorderly. So the huge harms of alcohol are driven by the public use and the disorder it produces.

Professor Nutt: Most domestic violence is alcohol-fuelled. Okay, you can debate whether it is causal or not but the fact is less alcohol in the home equates to less violence. There is a beautiful study recently published from Glasgow showing that when people go and get drunk at football matches they come back and beat up their wives. Alcohol is a major factor in violence across society, in the home, on the streets, at social events. It is not causal but it is an unfortunate aggravating factor so if you reduce the amount of intoxication you will reduce violence, we know that. There is a great example in my book about Euro 2000 when two separate countries had two different ways of dealing with the drinking British football supporter. The country that gave them less strong alcohol, the Netherlands, had much less violence than the country that gave them strong alcohol, Belgium. We know therefore that less alcohol means less violence; that is a fact.

Of course you are in Canada, your laws on cannabis at least are already far more enlightened than ours. Afaik you also have supervised injection rooms over there too?

I also wanna drop this here because it's just brilliant:

Imagine if the media covered alcohol like other drugs

Meet alcohol, the drug making people run around nude and collapse in the streets.

www.vox.com

“It actually starts to rewire the brain chemistry,” one law enforcement official said. “They have no control over their thoughts. They can’t control their actions. It’s just a dangerous, dangerous drug.”

Across the US, public health officials have linked alcohol to much graver effects, including domestic abuse, sexual assault on college campuses, 40 percent of violent crimes in the US, and millions of emergency room visits each year.

According to federal data, alcohol is already the second deadliest drug in the country — topped only by another legal substance called “tobacco,” which has a smoked form that causes an astonishing 480,000 deaths each year by some estimates and 540,000 by others.

No other drug comes close to the staggering fatalities of these two. Illicit fentanyl, which has consumed widespread media attention due to the opioid epidemic in the past few years, was linked to fewer than 30,000 overdose deaths in 2017. And marijuana — another drug that federal law enforcement officials have warned is dangerous — reportedly caused zero overdose deaths in the past few thousand years.

Despite the heightened public health crisis, federal and state officials seem reluctant to do anything about the drug, which remains legal for adults 21 and older to possess and even sell in most of the US. Policymakers say that banning alcohol is out of the question, citing its importance to the economy and American culture.

 

[JessFR]

It depends on what you mean by legalization.

In terms of being legal to the extent that people are allowed to advertise it? Almost none. Caffeine, Marijuana perhaps? Not alcohol though. I don't generally agree with advertising potentially addictive drugs. There might be others that on further thought I'd agree to as well, but not many.

In terms of legal as in not being fined or jailed for carrying them or using them? All of them. I'd legalize every recreational drug in that sense.

I would also provide at least some kind of system to allow all the illegal drugs to be legally bought through some regulated system, at least for people already using them some other way.

Including the hard drugs like heroin, meth, alcohol etc. I'd still have them highly regulated, but none would be illegal to possess, and all would have at least some system to legally get them if you're an existing user. So perhaps you could apply for a heroin license if you pass a drug test that establishes you are already using it.

Id have to think about it in more depth and specificity to decide how to handle each drug, but that's the general principle I believe in.

That advertising harmful addictive drugs should be illegal, using them however should not. And selling them should be through regulated systems. The specifics of which I'd have to think about more and might vary for different drugs.

Most likely I'd have it that you could say, buy heroin at a pharmacy using your heroin license. Or likewise with amphetamines and such.

I'm not sure what I'd do with alcohol probably keep the law as is except prohibit advertising it.

Marijuana, mdma, alcohol and some others I'd make legal to buy without a license.

It's not that I don't think alcohol is a hard drug in the same level of other hard drugs, but I'd treat it a bit differently because of its existing cultural acceptance.

 

[Xorkoth]

I'd make all drugs legal to possess and manufacture. This would eliminate all problems with criminal gangs and the resulting violence and lack of quality, and adulterants. People would be able to get 100% pure drugs and this would greatly reduce the incidence of overdoses and other harm. People wouldn't be pushed to the margins of society and forced to participate in other forms of harm to get their drugs. In addition, instead of wasting billions of dollars on a failed war against personal freedom to alter one's consciousness, governments could bring in billions of dollars from tax revenue. Prohibition doesn't fucking work, I don't know when we'll learn that.

Actually we already know it, the war on drugs isn't about stopping drugs, it's about filling for-profit prisons and ensuring slave labor from them, and maintaining the ability to marginalize segments of the population.

I agree that advertising drugs shouldn't be legal.