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Originally Posted by raveneye
My chiropracter is my source. 
During the summer my wife and I like to try to travel to Amsterdam. We've done it twice so far. As far as I know they haven't legalized crack or heroin, but certainly weed and shrooms of all kinds and varieties are available.
You walk into a little shop, and you get a menu that describes about 10 varieties of pot you can buy, and how they taste and what their effects are. Or you can buy packages of various species of hallucinogenic mushrooms.
And if it weren't for the aromatic smells wafting around, you'd be hard pressed to notice much of any difference from any other touristy north-European city. Society hasn't collapsed, everything functions and everybody's about as well off and happy as anywhere else.
Not only that, but Holland has lower rates of pot and heroin use than the U.S., much lower spending on crime and lower prison incarceration rates per capita than the U.S. And they aren't racially profiling people, wiretapping, and sending "blacks" to prison for drug crimes at twice the rates of "whites."
I suppose there are lots of good things about our Puritan roots. But this obsession with order and control and self-discipline that I think has contributed to what I believe is paranoic fear of drugs is not one of those positives.
And my chiropracter agrees with me. |
I agree that a healthy society can handle legal drug usage of this nature. However, Holland and the Netherlands are not America. The countries of Western Europe have a generally superior level of education and health care. They are also governed secularly--to a degree of which most Americans aren't aware. I wasn't aware of how secular they were until recently.
For example, Margeret Thatcher, in her entire career has prime minister of England, invoke the name of God
once and was
reprimanded. Our leaders, however, invoke God and often reference the Bible in their public discourse. Thus do ethics become obscured with morality, and "God bless America" is codified. We were founded on humanist ideals by a council of men who were deists at best, but we have become a Christian nation. And this Christian nation does not approve of marijuana, peyote, mushroom, or their relatives. Particularly if it's being used in the practice of a heathen religion.
And you can bet the pharmaceutical industry isn't pleased with a drug people can grow in their backyards. The tobacco lobby isn't pleased with something that makes people feel good but isn't chemically addictive. In short, America is its own largest roadblock to legalizing these drugs.