The War on Drugs has been lost, lost long ago. Destined to be a losing proposition from its inception. It is past time for us to recognize this simply fact, and alleviate the massive harm that the WOD is inflicting upon the American people by ending it.
The plain, pure, simple fact of the matter is that a vast majority of humanity feels the need to alter their state of consciousness at some point or another, with various drugs. Prohibiting those drugs is not going to change human nature, but rather force people to endure all sorts of dangers in order to fulfill that need.
Worse, we are losing our country, our civil liberties to this prohibition. All the time while enriching the national security and prison industries needlessly.
If you look at other experiments in legalization, you will see that they are successful. Britain has legalized heroin and look what's happened. A heroin addict gets up in the morning, goes downtown on the tube, stops in at a NHS office, gets his clean, legal shot of heroin. He then goes to work, is a productive, tax paying citizen, gets off work, goes back by NHS to get his evening shot, goes home and is a law abiding citizen at home. No need to rob or assault to get money to feed his habit, no need to place him on the public jailhouse support system, and if he wants help for his addiction, since there is no longer any legal stigma, he can get his addiction treated for what it truly is, a health issue.
The same applies to meth. Do you think meth addicts want to ingest a product that has been made in a back room, that consists of battery acid, sulphur and other toxic ingredients? No, they are ingesting meth because they can't get pharmaceutical grade amphetamines. Why do they want that? Well, meth, speed, those are working class drugs, drugs for the poor. They allow that poor fellow to continue to schlup his ass to two or three jobs he needs just to get by in this world. Perhaps if we started addressing the root problems of drug use, poverty and such, we would actually lower the rate of drug use.
But until we do, it only makes sense to legalize all drugs. There are several advantages. First, we would stop the massive crime wave that is associated with the current drug world. No need to shoot innocents, no need to rob or murder if you can get your drugs legally and cheaply.
Second, we can remove the stigma of illegality from drugs, and treat them as what they really are, a public health problem. We can tax drugs, and use those revenues to provide much needed attention to the problem of drug addiction. The funny thing is, in countries that have legalize drugs, even hard ones, the rate of drug use goes down because that aura of glamor and danger that surrounds drugs, that aura that appeals to many a rebellious youth, is gone, no more rebellious than your old man drinking a beer. Furthermore, with legal drugs comes clean drugs. During alcohol prohibition, far too many people died from bathtub gin, under today's drug prohibition, far too many people are dying from drugs they cooked up for themselves, the modern equivalent of bathtub gin. Safe, legalized pharmaceutical grade drugs would go a long way to alleviate the suffering, and health problems, of drug users.
Third, we would get our civil liberties back, and stop our progress along this road we're traveling down towards a police state.
Prohibition hasn't worked in the past, in fact it has only made things worse. Why not learn from that, and end this prohibition against all drugs. We would be better off as a country, as a society.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021950651#post5
