Let's talk about drugs.

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People who use caffeine do so primarily motivated by its psychoactive effects. To an even greater extent than with alcohol.

True- I didn't even think of Caffeine, that is how accepted this stimulant is

Caffeine is actually the only non-prescription drug I have ever used. I haven't used it in well over a month now, and even when I did it was always in moderation- I don't think ever more than five times in a week, usually significantly less.

I used to drink a lot of coffee but I find it makes me way too jittery. I do like a cup in the morning, though I tend to drink decaf (sort of like how I drink non-alcoholic beer...)

I gave it up because it never worked as a stimulant. I could down two cups and feel no increase in alertness. However, I did somehow manage to get the crashes at the end of the (nonexistent) caffeine high, especially if I had coffee two or three days in a row.

You know what I really resent my tax dollars paying for? Locking up non-violent drug users. Nearly as bad is the billions spent spraying nasty chemicals on other countries, snooping on people's private lives, militarizing the police, stealing property under bogus "forfeiture" laws, enacting asinine rules for buying cough medicine, locking up doctors because bureaucrats don't approve of their prescriptions, funding pseudoscience propaganda to mislead the public, sending SWAT teams to the wrong house to shoot people's pets, giving money to questionable third world governments to "fight narcotrafficking", etc, etc. Talk about social costs...

@ Orwell

I am sorry you find my arguments unconvincing. As a taxpayer, I find the social cost factor important. People who drink coke, as far as I am aware, do not do so primarily for the caffeine. As to coffee, as far as I am aware they do not produce THC free weed, they do produce decaf.

@Dox47

You mentioned a militarized police. When you expect to be free to purchase semiautomatic firearms, what weapons do you expect the police to need, when they have to make a dynamic entry to serve a warrant? Perhaps you think only the police should have handgun calibre restrictions and SWAT teams ought not to possess m4's? When they enter a house, your constitution guarantees that they will never know what they will find on the other side. In point of fact it significantly increases the risk of danger, due to the number of weapons available. Watch how the US police stop cars in cities as opposed to how Australian police do it.

Ok don't even bring guns into this thread. I already destroyed your arguments in that other thread,. and you didn't even bother to make the distinction between gun deaths and homicides. You said more guns raises gun deaths overall, but the fact you didn't even separate em in the first place either means you can't interpret statistics for s**t or you are intellectually dishonest. You were talking about negligent discharges, and when I said a round is guaranteed to not go off if you follow the golden rules of safety (one of which involves not putting the finger on the trigger), you said there are no guarantees when it comes to negligent discharges and the most common ones you've seen happen are during weapon clearance the round gets fired when the springs are eased without even mentioning the finger was on the trigger. Oh, and you said you've been shot at by negligent discharges, so once again this is traced back to not following the golden rules of safety. You always try to evade the issue, so I declare you dishonest and full of s**t. I can't believe I even gave you the benefit of the doubt.

Last edited by AceOfSpades on 26 Jan 2011, 11:41 am, edited 1 time in total.

The problem is you don't see or understand the societal cost of them being illegal. Mainly because those costs are (falsely) attributed to the drugs themselves rather than their legal status.

The point there is that those are needed because it's a black market trade and black market higher up's and even low-level black marketeers are normally armed and operate fully outside the law. You're failing to see the full picture.

Forget it, he has a tendency to evade issues. He hasn't even addressed my rebuttals to his sources yet, he just comes with one after the other. I proved the schizophrenia link is BS since marijuana usage has increased greatly worldwide since the 60's yet schizophrenia is statistically stable, that one of his sources is politically motivated, and that the first source he posted is full of laughable myths that doesn't even know what the f**k skunk is.

I was hoping maybe if I pulled the curtain back on why he might not be able to see the costs that maybe he'd start to investigate that a bit and maybe try thinking through the scenarios a little further than simply "drugs always existed as a black market item, the police have always been fighting them, it's the drugs' fault."

I already gave him the benefit of the doubt and even tried to help him on interpreting facts, but he's still up to the same old evasion and presenting statistics without even ruling out classification or correlation/causation.

You wanna see how he operates? http://www.wrongplanet.net/postx148180-30-0.html
I was saying why isn't Switzerland drowning in a blood bath with it's relaxed gun laws, and he points out gun deaths without even distinguishing between gun deaths and homicides. Then when I did the distinguishing, turns out the gun deaths were at 259 in 2008 yet 239 of em are suicides. Yet he said I cited the fact that Switzerland and the US are socioeconomically different which is the REAL culprit of gun violence, but I was talking about homicide and not "gun deaths", hence me saying as quoted "Why isn't Switzerland drowning in a blood bath if it has to do with how well gun laws are enforced?". He said his point was about "gun deaths" when it is that direct quote he was rebutting.

PS: Didn't mean to derail this thread, I just wanted to point out the weakness in his arguments and the dishonesty they're founded on. If anyone wants to talk about guns, we can revive some threads...

The police didn't militarize until the 1980s, when crack hit the market and the drug trade got particularly violent; it had nothing to do with civilian gun ownership. Nice try at a red herring though, people love to try to derail threads that I'm participating in by bringing up the gun issue. Perhaps you'd like to try and blame abusive forfeiture laws on guns as well?

The problem is that either you are deliberately misreprenting the cost, or you really don't understand where that social cost comes from. Much of the social cost is a direct result of drug prohibition. Besides, alcohol has a higher social cost than pot, heroin, crack, or any other drug in existence, so your argument is still a steaming load of crap even if I uncritically accept all of your incorrect and asinine assumptions.

Bad argument, they'll just say "ban alcohol" and "see what happens when you legalize something?" rather than accepting that alcohol is a pretty damaging drug that's perfectly legal.