Or, the drugs that are illegal because they are addictive and/or destructive in other ways are REALLY easy to grow (marijuana, coca, opium poppies) and need little or no processing, or they are easy to make in a lab (meth). I think ease and profit attract the criminal, who has no regard for the destruction he causes in other lives.

Cynthia

Obviously, there were bad things happening when laudanum was legal, and when speed was legal. Some politicians got it in their heads that the bad things happening when alcohol was legal was so bad that the country needed Prohibition. Alcohol and tobacco are both recreational and addictive substances. They cause bad things, but those bad things were not as bad as Prohibition. So, the feds repealed Prohibition.

Milton Friedman once said that illegal drugs are expensive drugs. And the high profit margins from them go to bad people who spend their money in bad ways. He favored legalization just to get the profits out of the business. If we did legalize the stuff, some of the bad things like no-knock police raids and drug gangs would go away. Without high margins, drug dealers won’t bribe judges, politicians and policemen.

Legal drugs might be sold in state stores, like Ohio’s state liquor stores. And they can be taxed like tobacco and alcohol are taxed.

But drugs are addictive (fine, more tax revenues!). And all those bad things happen to people who use those drugs.

Legalization or prohibition each cause bad consequences. Which are worse? Let’s tally up the costs either way.

I happen to believe an individual should take responsibility for himself without a paternalistic authority passing laws to protect him. I want helmet laws repealed, and I wear a motorcycle helmet. I want drugs legalized and I don’t do drugs and I tell people who choose differently they’re choosing stupidly. But we not use the power of the state to force that choice, because I think the bad things to society due to prohibition are greater than the bad things to that individual who’d use the drug.

And yet some people, I am told, actually do take some of these things for recreational purposes.

There are times when I’m tempted to ask, “If it doesn’t have side effects, it’s not really a drug, is it?”

I think you are seriously misinformed about a number of things here. This is understandable as we have been bombarded by anti-drug propaganda for over a hundred years.

Fully defending the above statement would take far more time and effort than I am willing to expend. I will, however, offer brief assertions. I will expand on them if anyone is interested.

1. Anything you think you know about the effects of illegal drugs or addiction rates is wrong.

Why? Because it is illegal under Federal law to study them.

Getting a handle on actual addiction requires a lot of guesswork. The methodology is to estimate the total number of regular and casual users and the number of addicts.

This is extremely difficult. First, the numbers from official sources as to the amount of drugs consumed are self contradictory, often to an extreme degree. Second, there is no standard definition of addiction and no consistent method of reporting it.

In other words, when people talk about drugs it usually issues from the wrong orifice.

2. There is no known incident, ever, where a single dose of any drug caused addiction. This myth is just like the myth of the needles stuck in halloween candy – it never happened. Very little is actually know about the course of addiction. It is illegal to study it. The only evidence we have is anecdotal – from addicts, those paragons of trustworthiness.

3. The use of street illegal drugs is regular and widespread in our armed forces. The pilots of the billion dollar B-2 bomber take them. They are provided by the military.

I hope I have raised some questions in your mind. Any debate about drugs is driven by parochial interest and is all hot air.

Regards,
Roy

It’s called personal responsibility. Harsh! I know!

Sorry for the after-thought post.

I was going to call her piece “Sophistry,” but it isn’t quite clever enough. Her points are more like a mirage: They seem to mean something until you approach too closely, and then they disappear into thin air.

No doubt legal drugs can be abused, but that is not an argument to make a drugs legal. Entire sections of cities are not blighted by crime, prostitution, and official corruption because of the local hospitals curing disease.

Ugh!