Should all drugs be 100% legal?

[SangerRainsford]

SHOULD ALL DRUGS BE 100% LEGAL/FREE-ACCESS, similar to alcohol/cigs?

I used to say YES, wholeheartedly. As a given right, people should be free to pursue what they want, so long as it doesn't stop others from doing the same. This includes,quite obviously, includes drugs - if you choose to hang out huffing paint, smokin rock, eating haagen das, gambling, whatever, well, it's your call, so long as you don't truly impede on others' abilities to do what they want (no, pissing off your family/friends is NOT impeding their abilities).

However, I've been thinking a lot lately, so much so that it's changed where I'd cast my vote on this poll. It's almost certainly a combo of life experience (i'm not too old, so I'm still learnin lots ;P ), and the devil's advocate within me. I think of hypotheticals - for instance, what if tomorrow a new coca (or poppy, or synth, doesn't even really matter) product reached the market, and the product offered (devil's advocate here, remember ;P):
- 1,000X the high of the best currently available drug
- 1,000,000,000,000 the addictiveness of any available drug (ie, using it virtually guarantees you'll be an addict)
- 20T X the toxicity/lethality of any rec.chem that's currently available

This product would, for lack of a better term, be a *weapon*. This drug would have the potential to destroy any society in which it was cheaply and freely available. Would you endorse this chemical for 'free and legal to all upstanding citizens'?

I have a few (probably lame ;P ) ideas for making drugs available to the average citizen WHILE keeping the (obvious) societal problems of drug addiction/side effects to the minimum allowed, if this actually stimulates discussion then we can go there

 

[SangerRainsford]

Oh, and mods, if DC seems better for this then feel free to throw it there ;P

 

[edgarshade]

This thread probably does belong in another forum but I'll offer my thoughts.

A drug that is more harmful is more likely under prohibition because prohibition tends to bring that kind of stuff. No one these days tries to extract alcohol out of "denatured" alcohol on a large scale and sell it to people who will risk blindness, irreversible harm and death drinking it. That's what happened during alcohol prohibition, though. Not only that, the government of the day ordered more and more noxious poisons were added to the alcohol in an attempt to discourage the practice. This resulted in more death.

If cocaine were legal would we have crack cocaine? If amphetamines were legal would we have methamphetamine?

I reckon that if we had legal drugs, education and responsible attitudes towards the whole subject, people would more likely favour, recommend, promote and develop safe drugs that have good effects over dangerous drugs that have a horrendous body load. MDMA, 'cid and shrooms are examples of a reasonably safe drugs that have a lot of desirable effect. There may be many more safe but good drugs but while our governments have this blind faith in prohibition I guess we'll have to make do with crack.

 

[phr]

Oh, and mods, if DC seems better for this then feel free to throw it there ;P

I asked them if they did. We'll see.

 

[DrapedUpDopedOut]

Lol, is there really a point to ask this on a drug-using forum?
Of course everybody thinks drugs should be legal, but we all know it is absolutely implausible. Unfortunately.

 

[SkagKush]

^ lots of pro drug people are anti legalization......

but me.....

legal please.....

 

[GRINCH3369]

i voted no because i cant stand tweekers..burn burn die die. and put the blinds down no ones watching you!

 

[muvolution]

This thread might be more informative if it was a "what drugs should be legal?" thread.

Ima go with yes, but I don't know how you practice harm reduction with tweakers. I mean, its not like meth is expensive or really too impure. Just educate them I guess.

I think that in the foreseeable future, decriminalization is the push to make, since that might actually be possible, and while it wouldn't eliminate the black market, it would pave the way for that, as well as eliminating a lot of the harm associated with drug use - which is the punishment (Cue Jimmy Carter quote).

 

[The Chemist]

Honestly I put the Government simply because the cashflow from the Black-market would be immense, and proper (read: low, non-threatening) taxation upon such products would be effectively funneled back into positive development such as flood money into green energy technologies, and aggressively attack out dependence upon oil.
Truly we could up our standard of living and become a "tolerably constricted Utopia"

and yes, i am pretty stoned right now but that just sounded really good when i re-read it.

 

[SangerRainsford]

Of course everybody thinks drugs should be legal, but we all know it is absolutely implausible. Unfortunately.

'unfortunately'? so you would be okay w/ drugs being legalized, and then watching someone subsidize, say, 50,000 kilos of meth into your local area?
/'someone' would, in a normal marketplace, most likely be a representative from, i dunno, "Tweakers Conglomerated" ;P

 

[Thorns Have Roses]

In a word, yes.

so you would be okay w/ drugs being legalized, and then watching someone subsidize, say, 50,000 kilos of meth into your local area?
/'someone' would, in a normal marketplace, most likely be a representative from, i dunno, "Tweakers Conglomerated" ;P

Um, yeah. It's not like everyone who didn't do meth already would suddenly start doing it if it were legal. And if the people who already did it got it cheaper (including myself), that'd be pretty cool too.

 

[SangerRainsford]

o i'm not saying that i think it'd equal more ppl becoming addicts. i'm saying that, provided w/ virtually unlimited <insert DOC here>, society's problems w/ addiction could/would become rampant. i can think of more than 1 place that, if pallets of crack were to land tomorrow, would become a nightmare.

 

[muvolution]

What about a bunch of pallets of cocaine dropped into the middle of Detroit, New Orleans, DC, Chicago, Houston, and Atlanta, with promise of more as soon as they ran out?

I think then everyone would just become disinterested and quit drugs all together.

 

[SangerRainsford]

I think then everyone would just become disinterested and quit drugs all together.

im praying my sarcasm meter has broken
/edit: i see nothing wrong w/ pallets of mdma, cannabinoids, (any)entheogen, etc, being dropped *anywhere* in the world. i know some personally, and many more via the news, where pallets of *certain* drugs would be, quite literally, a public-health nightmare.
//is the US, for example, capable of pulling 'a portugal'?

 

[SangerRainsford]

<<missed this post, nsfw=old post-quote>>

NSFW:

This thread might be more informative if it was a "what drugs should be legal?" thread.

it'd be a mess of a poll, and it'd still kinda miss the mark im going for here. perhaps better poll options would've been "illegal", "fully legal", and "legal, but regulated tighter than booze currently is".

I think that in the foreseeable future, decriminalization is the push to make, since that might actually be possible, and while it wouldn't eliminate the black market, it would pave the way for that, as well as eliminating a lot of the harm associated with drug use - which is the punishment (Cue Jimmy Carter quote).

im probably in the minority, but "decriminalization" pisses me off (presuming you mean in "decrim personal use"). if i can buy a gram of something, but my dealer sold it to me illegally, aren't we still playing the same game?

 

[Oxycondone]

We really need one country to do this to see the effect it has. No one (in their right mind) wants to be that country however

I think laws such as what Portugal has are pretty sensible. Drug use and possession is legal (all drugs), but trafficking, cultivating and dealing aren't. This way the end user isn't punished but the king pins who are making millions of other peoples addictions are. It's not totally perfect but it's a pretty reasonable system.

I think it would be smart for the government to regulate and sell (to over 18, 21 in america if you want) cannabis, LSD, extasy, ect and not the addictive drugs like opiates, meth, ect.

I'd base what is regulated and sold and what isn't based on graphs like this:

 

[SangerRainsford]

portugal has done it, they hit their 1-decade anniversary pretty recently (decrim'd most/all drugs. nowhere i know of has an actual full-legalization policy)
/i LOVE that chart, haven't seen it in forever ;P. thing should be the cover page of every D.A.R.E. syllabus

 

[muvolution]

Hm. I wonder how the heroin scene is in Portugal. maybe a move is in order.

Anyways, what portugal has is decriminalization, and you seem pretty for it in that case.



And yes, I was being sarcastic earlier. Without a huge public education initiative, this would be disastrous.

It would be a good system if in order to receive drugs, you had to take classes regarding the harms associated with it, ways to stay safe and mediate harm, ways to handle overdose (including narcan and benzos), and training on how to use the drug. You would take a different set of classes for every substance you wanted to be authorized to purchase. Then refresher classes once a year at least.

You could then have your "card" authorizing you to buy a certain substance, ideally from a tightly regulated business with a regulated supply chain producing pharmaceutical / food grade products depending on the substance.

 

[SangerRainsford]

their diesel scene isn't bad at all, and the decriminalization a decade ago barely caused more than a spike in the usage of most hard drugs. and yeah, im definitely for it (now, anyways). i wish i were more familiar w/ specifics on how this went there - im curious if they rolled this out in an informed manner, or if they just announced restrictions were lifted (or if the # of users, and amounts used, was basically the same b4 adn after this policy was enacted - for instance, legalization is largely irrelevant in many areas near coca production - because you cannot realistically change # of users, or price/availability of the drug. In, say, the US, you can't really change the # of users, but price/availability? yeah, drugs've been ahead of any prohibition efforts, but they're clearly nowhere near a true, natural market price.)

 

[slimvictor]

I'd base what is regulated and sold and what isn't based on graphs like this:

I don't like that particular chart, though I like the concept behind it.
In this case, however, it looks as though heroin were far, far more horrible than solvents, which I don't believe.
If people were using solvents everywhere, the harm to their bodies/brains and to society would be immeasurable. If they were doing heroin everywhere, things would probably just get a little more relaxed.
I don't believe that doing pure heroin (assuming quality is controlled) harms people's bodies in a significant way, unlike solvents.
Could be that I just don't know, but I have seen a study of the brains of dead, long-term heroin addicts. There was nothing at all in their brains that indicated that they had been addicted.
I am also not sure about steroids - extremely frequent roid rage could push the freeways in LA over the edge, for example.
But basically, if cannabis and psychedelics (and other things like GHB, ketamine, and Khat) were legal, I would have no problem with it.
I would want some controlling body to set and enforce rules if addictive stimulants/depressants were legal, in order to control the quality and to help people who take things too far. But I do support the legalization of all drugs, provided that there is careful oversight.