Drug prohibition.

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No. If you want me to look through those, provide a link.

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All the vice laws need to just be dumped. Gambling, prostitution, and drugs. Just legalize all of it and regulate it properly. If you take it out of the hands of the gangs then there's more legitimate business to get legitimate jobs and there's less crime.

I agree. I'm pretty sure drug prohibition is probably the most destructive though - of course, that might just be because I know a bit more about it than the other laws. They are all extraordinarily stupid.

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I think gambling is probably the only one that it makes little difference whether it's legal or not but the harm done to society by making these various vices illegal harms society way more than if they were legal (looking at the big picture rather than the individual).

Not that you need to look at the big picture - I don't know about gambling, but prostitution is far more dangerous for both the workers and the clients when it's done illegally.

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It strikes me that the discussion is somewhat one sided.

"Prohibition," is painted--not unreasonably--as a failed strategy.
But there is not any equivalent excoriation of unregulated access to recreational drugs.

Consider the following hierarchy:

-Cocaine -- no medical uses, prohibited
-Morphine -- significant medical use, controlled
-Marijuana -- marginal medical use, controlled
-Tobacco -- no medical uses, regulated
-Potable alcohol -- no medical uses, regulated

Now, do we wind up in a perverse situation in which a drug with no medical utility, like cocaine, winds up completely unregulated, while a drug with significant medical utility winds up subject to stringent control? Alternatively, perhaps we treat cocaine and heroin the way we do alcohol and tobacco.

So, suppose I have a patient with a persistent cough. He wants a Rx for codeine to supress it (let's leave aside the question of whether or not codeine is an effective antitussive). Now, in my medical opinion supression is the incorrect therapeutic approach because of the risk of, and I refuse to prescribe codeine. Is he then free to go and purchase heroin?

What is the point of writing any prescriptions at this point? We may as well throw open the pharmacy and put all the pharmacists out of work. Even physicians are pretty much redundant at this point, since people will just decide what medication they require from television commercials, anyway.[/rant]

In all seriousness, I don't think that the regulation of recreational drugs is a binary state, and the search for social policy solutions should be taken in a broader context of finding the appropriate level of control, rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I support all drugs becoming legalized. That's not to say I support all drugs becoming 'completely unregulated'.

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From a medical perspective, I think that this is highly dangerous.

Many drugs are lethal or extremely harmful if not administered correctly. Allowing people to expose themselves to lethal harm is questionable from an ethical perspective. People may genuinely believe that they have correctly diagnosed their own disorders, and are knowledgable about an appropriate drug therapy, but very often they are wrong, and I see the results of that (even in a regieme with controlled prescription medication).

Harm is not limited to the individual who abuses medication. Suppose that an individual, yearning for some quality time with his partner, misuses his "little blue pill" in a circumstance where it is medically contraindicated. And this leaves his partner and children without financial support. Is an insurance company compelled to pay out a life insurance benefit to a beneficiary of a victim of "death by misadventure?" Who bears the responsibility of seeing to the needs of the survivors?

Harm isn't even limited to the dependents of those who abuse medication. Consider the issue of antibiotics. We are facing the potential that antibiotics will become useless within our lifetimes due to misuse. Drug resistent pathogens are increasingly prevalent, and our arsenal of drugs to combat them is steadily dwindling. With each new strain of XDR pulomonary tuberculosis that emerges, we must resign ourselves to the deaths of many more people. If people rush down to the pharmacy for a weekly course of penicillin every time they have a sore throat, you are very quickly going to find drug resistant strep infections spreading through the community.

Community health is not well served by giving people license to abuse themselves in this way. We are all put in greater danger as a result.

I can kill a man with a housebrick. I can kill myself by not properly handling fireworks. Should these items be illegal?
Are people to be protected against their own stupidity? What is the limit? Plastic kitchen knives?
Alcohol is as foolish to legally provide as any other recreational drug in this instance. It kills.
However if that, then I suppose the others also.

Absolute statements ultimately end up false within some respects of their generalized meaning. While I have an absolute distaste for people who use cocaine and its derivatives, I can still see how a 1% or so may use it to gain the social confidence needed to be successful. Billy Mays died with it but it certainly amped up his success while he was alive...he just didn't know when to pull out and accept his winnings.

It made Billy very loud.

ruveyn

Billy was a crack head?

I'm sad now...

during prohibition of alcohol, there where two main "species" of bootleggers.

the first was the mobsters, which was more urban, and more violent. They where in it primarily for the money.

the second was the moonshiners, which was more of a pre-existent culture of illegal distillers that had existed since the revolution. They where in it more for the love of booze.

When prohibition ended, the moonshiners went back to their secret Appalachian distilleries and their runners founded nascar, but the Mob continued to pursue criminal activities, because it was about the money to them.

The new species is the gangster, which has more in common with the mobster. I believe for most of them it's more about the money or the lifestyle than the drugs. To assume that they wouldn't pursue other criminal activities if drugs went legal is a dangerous assumption to make. As for what exactly they would do, I'm ignorant. As a Neotenous white male living in the suburbs, all I know about gangs comes from gangland, and the history channel's tagline might as well be "We like to make **** up". Maybe they would mellow out. maybe they'd get more aggressive. that's the kind of information we would need to make a decision, but given their criminal nature it's hard to get such information, at least in a reliable way.

I personally fear Cannabis because cigarette smokers stand right outside doors and blow smoke in the faces of everyone entering in and leaving the building. If pot where legalized, pothead might well do the same thing. We could adopt the dutch coffee shop model, but I would be so terrified I'd probably avoid going anywhere near said shop... I'm a little paranoid when it comes to mind-affecting drugs, in case you couldn't tell. Is my Raw terror of second hand cannabis smoke at all justified? probably not. But if there was even a one in a million chance of a single person taking said drug against their will, that would be too much for me. But as I'm sure you can tell, drugs are not exactly my area of expertise.

The third concern I'd have with legalizing ALL drugs is that I always hear that some drugs people are more violent on (I believe meth fell into this category) and of course legalization leading to more people driving while high.

I'm not trying to call anyone out, just listing some concerns I have with drug legalization and asking how valid they are. regardless of what we do, our current system isn't working, and it's clear SOMETHING needs to change.

It also boosted his confidence and energy level and fed into his personality which made him the epic salesman that he was. Most people who do coke I hate, but from what I've seen of Billy Mays; I probably would have liked the guy.

And no, Tensu, he did coke. Different personality type from a crackhead. Crackheads are normally much more depressed and are escapists rather than most cokeheads who are more affluent and are normally fairly social people.


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtYdDK1uTDI[/youtube]

Alright, but it's still pretty jilting for me. I tend to assume the best of people even given the horrible way people have treated me over the years. I didn't believe most of the teen sex stories I heard when I was younger until recently. Maybe I'm naive, but I prefer to think I'm optimistic