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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Sure, but it doesn't automatically follow that we should legalize all other narcotics. My position is that we should legalize the stuff that is as dangerous or less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco and keep everything else illegal.
I'm reminded of an incidental mention in Schlock Mercenary that piloting a vehicle while intoxicated was a death penalty crime, then goes on to explain the reason for it in footnotes: this being the future with self-driving everything, putting themselves in that position required a lot of deliberate steps taken while sober such as disabling the autopilot and making a vehicle capable of manual operation in the first place even before making the decision to get intoxicated and get in said vehicle.
Which raises a curious question: at what point, if any, does possession of drugs with intent to use them cross into "likely to cause harm to others in a way you could have stopped"?
The difference is that the manufacture of really hard drugs like PCP can be tightly controlled and are inherently extremely dangerous to humans. Most of the reason why people want marijuana legalized is because it is within the realm of alcohol and tobacco in that it is only as harmful as them and is easy to make.
edited 18th Jul '16 10:53:02 AM by GameGuruGG
Wizard Needs Food BadlyMaybe it's the straight-edgeHey! in me, but I have trouble seeing the difference. Pretty much any means of achieving the "high" sensation is inherently hazardous to humans. That sensation is caused by the brain slowly dying. There are no safe, reasonable methods of achieving the sensation of slowly dying.
Intoxication has the word "toxic" in it for a reason.
In pursuit of this high, people have literally hung themselves with the intention of cutting the rope at the last second. There was also an epidemic of people inhaling aerosolized air cans intended for electronics maintenance - which, incidentally, can kill a person instantly; bodies have been found with the can still sticking out of their mouths, as if they had no idea they were suddenly dead. Those cans are now prohibited from sale to minors, but there's been no move to criminalize them.
edited 18th Jul '16 11:04:06 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Alcohol has contributed to far more deaths than hard drugs, but at least it has uses that are not automatically harmful to the health of its users or those around them. It's been a social lubricant for thousands of years and light to moderate consumption may have certain health benefits. It is hard to argue that PCP is in any way beneficial to its users, nor that it contributes to alleviating social anxiety or whatever. "Look, Bob's falling over drunk, ha ha." "Look, Jill is gutting people with a kitchen knife because the fluorescent pink people from Mars told her to and we can't stop her because she can't feel any pain."
At the very least, substances that fall into the category of "use it once and you're basically fucked" should be heavily regulated, just as we already regulate a wide variety of pharmaceuticals.
To be frank, the problem with narcotics, stimulants, hallucinogens, and the like is that they were originally sold as the contemporary equivalent of fad weight loss pills; there was no safety regulation or required scientific research to make sure that they weren't horrendously lethal or deleterious to one's sanity. In a modern environment, you'd need ten years of clinical trials and tens of millions of dollars to market one, and it could be recalled if someone died after taking it because they slipped on a banana peel.
We have a fundamental dichotomy: people love taking recreational drugs, of which alcohol is a member, and doing stupid shit while on them is an accepted part of the social hazing process. Meanwhile, we have a collective societal interest in keeping people from killing themselves and/or others through abject stupidity, especially as complete legalization devolves rapidly into a predator-prey situation where inexperienced, insecure young people find themselves having to navigate a maturity process that is saturated with land mines that have pretty glowing "Taste Me" signs on them.
It's not helped when their parents are high on God knows what and neglect them horribly, resulting in a life that's ruined before it even gets started through absolutely no fault of its own.
edited 18th Jul '16 11:17:10 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"![]()
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The difference is that banning something like alcohol would lead only to violence. We know this because it happened before for that very drug with Prohibition. At some point, making sure our current society can function without violence is better than banning everything that could potentially harm a human. We don't ban ropes just because people can hang themselves with it because ropes are a tool that is extremely useful and extremely common. Useful in that there are many legitimate uses of rope and common in that any long flexible rope-like object can be used by people to hang themselves. Aerosolized air cans are the only thing that can safely clean out electronics systems and given that electricity is a requirement for our current society as we know it to function, people dying from abusing aerosolized air cans to gain a high ends up being an acceptable downside to having a society that uses electricity for everything.
edited 18th Jul '16 11:24:20 AM by GameGuruGG
Wizard Needs Food BadlyIf I can be a little realpolitik for a second: drugs are legal or not depending on whether society is willing to put up with the cost of their use.
It's entirely possible to consume alcohol in moderation with next to no short- or long-term health effects, so alcohol is legal. I'm not entirely clear if that's true of tobacco products or not, but it's been grandfathered in if nothing else. However, "hard" drugs like cocaine are illegal because they're addictive enough and their effects are harmful enough that society has decided that it's not worth the trouble of trying to legalize it at all. Unlike alcohol and (arguably) tobacco, there's no such thing as "responsible" use. You can't do a little heroin with dinner like you can with alcohol, and the negative effects are much more severe and much less delayed than tobacco.
The reason there's such debate over marijuana is that it's about the same (in terms of harm caused to society) as alcohol and tobacco, but they're legal while weed is illegal. Personally, I expect to see marijuana legalized federally eventually — in the next 10 or 15 years, if I had to guess — but some states will keep it illegal for much longer (the same way that there are still some "dry counties" where it's illegal to sell alcohol).
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.Marijuana is quite a bit less toxic, both in the short and long term, than tobacco; the major reason it's a controlled substance is political, not medical. Some wankers decided that hemp was a cheap competitor to their textile products and that couldn't be allowed to happen, so they started a public health scare and got it banned, much like the automobile industry succeeded in undermining public transportation and fucked our cities over thereby.
Regardless, tobacco, aside from a mild boost in concentration that one rapidly becomes tolerant to, has absolutely zero health benefits. (I've read somewhere that nicotine in pure form may have beneficial pharmacological properties, but I can't recall where.) It's also one of the most habituative drugs in existence, beating even hard narcotics in terms of the body forming a physical dependency. THC, by contrast, does not create physical addiction.
Becoming a smoker ranks way up there in terms of fastest ways to lighten your wallet and shorten your life expectancy with no benefits whatsoever. My father died, of smoking complications, still spending something like 10 percent of his fixed income on cigarettes. If you want to waste money for giggles, take whatever you'd spend on tobacco and flush it down the toilet; you'll at least live longer, without the nauseating personal odor and the gruesome hacking up of dead lung tissue.
edited 18th Jul '16 11:37:59 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"While all that is true of tobacco, it has a history of social and/or ceremonial use that goes back many thousand years. Additionally, it doesn't make you intoxicated in a way that makes you a danger to others. It's horrible stuff and you shouldn't use it, but many who do use it defend it fiercely as a lifestyle choice. The case for banning it is not one likely to gain much traction (though I don't think you were arguing for it).
edited 18th Jul '16 11:43:11 AM by Elle
No need. We're working very hard, and mostly successfully, to make it socially unacceptable, but it's a very long process.
For the harder drugs, making consumption a felony is absolutely pointless, but making manufacturing without an FDA license a felony is absolutely necessary; plus, users can and should be directed into treatment programs — for a vastly cheaper per-capita expenditure than prison, mind you, and a far lower recidivism rate.
Marijuana is a wash; legalize the damn stuff and apply the same basic rules for using it as for alcohol. As long as you aren't stinking up my immediate environment with the godawful fumes or driving while stoned out of your gourd, I don't really care. I might even try some, as long as I don't have to smoke it. I'll never try marijuana while there's a risk of losing my job or going to jail over it, though; I have a family to take care of.
edited 18th Jul '16 11:47:40 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the current resistance to marijuana legalization is coming surreptitiously from the tobacco industry, since they're the ones with the most market share to lose...
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Yes, plus you also get black market effects proportional to the increased taxation. It doesn't help that the major tobacco companies have more or less written off growth of their product lines in the United States and have been preying on emerging markets for the past few decades, where they have much weaker regulatory environments and it's really easy to suborn public health education efforts.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"From I heard, that explanation while it is plausible, isn't correct, and it was actually a combination of cannabis being used mostly by Mexican labourers and black jazz singers, and the head of the Prohibition department
wanting to keep his job. Still political and not medical though.
Anyway, yeah, weed should be legal since it's objectively less harmful than tobacco and alcohol, although it does have potential for abuse that shouldn't be ignored.
I'd also like to see LSD and psilocybin legal in a more controlled fashion, since they seem to have multiple uses, including treating depression and addiction. I don't expect that to happen for at least another 15-20 years, though.
Maybe we should have a drugs/drug legalization thread? Probably not enough interest in the topic to keep it going continuously, since tropers are all a bunch of nerds.
Also, just to keep things sort of on topic, Wikipedia tells me Clinton favours reclassifying cannabis to Schedule II
, to allow states to legalize it for medical use. Sanders wanted to legalize it, bro, which surely helped his popularity among the reddit demographic.
edited 18th Jul '16 12:01:11 PM by majoraoftime
I'd be concerned that a drug legalization topic would turn into a place for people to discuss how to find and consume them, which is explicitly banned under our forum rules. It is a U.S. politics topic, even if there are other things that we could be discussing, like the train wreck of the Republican National Convention that I have been avoiding tuning in to.
Also, the IADA has recommended banning Russia from the Rio Olympics due to doping, but that's international politics... albeit rather interesting.
edited 18th Jul '16 12:01:56 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"In that black market vein, you'd have to negotiate something with the various Native American reservations, who are willing enough to use their sovereign status to sell duty-free cigarettes and other products with a sin tax (though it has to be said our history is complicit in giving them motive and need, to say the least).
The special rules for Native American reservations are just plain wacko, and I could spend quite a while on a diatribe about them, but "unfortunately" I have actual not-wiki work to do.
edited 18th Jul '16 12:05:12 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"![]()
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IIRC that's exactly what happened several years ago when we did have a thread on the topic, this its banning.
Several Native American tribes are heavily pushing for an exception to the law to allow them to produce and distribute Cannabis already. Some are taking the particularly shady route of trying to have it declared a "traditional/religious herb" in the same manner Canadian tribes are doing to allow dangerous herbal quackery (which has zero connection to any historical ritual use) to proliferate.
edited 18th Jul '16 12:09:46 PM by carbon-mantis
