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Originally Posted by frogza
Personally I think taking any nonpresecription drug is simply an act of foolishness. You can't tell me that a person can operate at 100% when under the influence of drugs like alchohol, pot, nicotine or any other drug out there. Making the choice to limit your faculties, even briefly, all for a temporary thrill or escape just doesn't make sense to me at all. Life is hard enough when operating at 100%, I won't cut my "making it" margin by using substances that cut my ability.
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Such is your choice. There is nothing wrong with that and I respect your strong opinion. But YOU have no right to tell me what I can or cannot put into my body, especially if it is in no way hurting you.
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There are several arguments for legalization that have been and will be presented, from what I've seen and heard they boil down to:
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Let's begin......
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1. Since marijuana isn't as harmful as Cigarettes or alchohol, it should be ok to do.
This argument is fundamentaly flawed. It simply can't be backed up by logic, but only by emotional thought. If you apply the "logic" of this statement to most anything else the silliness of it becomes apparent. For example, Since jumping off a 20 foot wall isn't as bad as jumping off a 50 foot wall, I should go ahead and jump off.
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First, it isn't as harmful as alcohol. Alcohol is biochemically and physiologically the worst of the non-pharm drugs, and other than benzos I can't think of a drug that does nearly half the damage alcohol does to a body.
The rest of your argument you grasp for straws here. No one says just because marijuana is legal you should smoke it. People are saying they just don't want to be dubbed criminals for smoking it. And again, I believe that the number in usage would decrease within 10 years of it becoming legalized.
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2. Legalizing would eliminate the black market for it and the associated crime.
People who have established a habit of working "behind the man's back" will continue to do so, until forced to quit. I realize that is a generality, I state it because it is the general pattern. There will be exceptions, but they will be just that, the exceptions. The price to purchase black market pot will likely be lower than purchasing the governmennt endorsed pot, simply because there will be lower overhead.
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Where did I say that?
In fact I argued there will always be a black market, because there will always be something illegal that people want to get.
Hell, there's a black market for cigarettes because people don't want to pay the high taxes. There's a black market for some alcohol, porn, prostitution, script drugs, whatever.
As for purchasing pot off the black market instead of from a legal distributor, personally I wouldn't, 1) I would have no idea what it was mixed with and 2) by buying it and paying taxes for it I help society, and I know I support crime if I buy from the black market...... (I do the same with my cigarettes, in my line of work I can buy "black market" cigarettes for 75% less than what I pay at a store for them.... but I won't. I'm sure there will be a day when the legal price exceeds the point I am willing to pay and then I will hopefully quit.)
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3. Our prisons are filled with drug users, and we're turning violent criminals loose since there isn't room for them in the prison system.
This is the only argument that resonates at all with me. I feel it is counter productive and counter intuitive to sentence a drug user to a longer term than say a rapist. It also seems counter productive to start eliminating laws to fix the prison cell shortage. Ideally we would eliminate the need for so many cells by getting people to stop doing illegal things. Unfortunately we don't live in the ideal world and I for one don't know how to get us there. The idea of eliminating laws seems like a slippery slope to me and therefore scares me.
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Well, we decriminalize drug use, we lose about 25-50% of the prison population. Unfortunately, private prisons are becoming a very fast, very profitable growing industry (one of the few industries, that actually creates jobs, left in the US), so the more we keep people in these places the more demand we have for this industry the more it grows.
Am I saying that is why drugs are illegal.... NO. But theoretically, it could be one of the reasons.
And why do we have to send these people straight to jail, with multityear sentences anyway, when rehabs can treat them and may change a few of them without the need for a criminal record hanging over their head. (Doesn't hurt that I'm in that industry and it would increase the job demand and thus my wages.....
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4. The government has no right to tell me what I can and can't do in my own home.
The government is called such because it's duty is to govern, or in other words, tell us what we can and can't do. We establish governments to tell our community what they can and can't do, even in their own homes. If the majority voice calls for limitations on what we can and can't do, then it is the duty of every government branch to enforce those limitations.
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The government's primary duty is to protect, serve and make certain that even the hardest to hear voice can be heard and will recieve equality in justice, liberty and in society.
Now according to you (in the section of your quote I highlighted) if the community says weed is ok, then it should be ok.... am I reading that correctly? So then why did the Federal government go after communities that stated, BY MAJORITY VOTE, they wanted pot legal there?
The part right after that you state:
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There are some types of actions that, as a people, we have allowed full rein. In those situations the government does not have the right to influence us
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So what exactly do we have free rein in? We cannot marry people of the same sex, we cannot put into our bodies what we want, we have laws against prostitution so that someone who wants a one night stand and approaches the wrong person can get arrested, we have people now watching how we treat and punish our kids... heaven forbid little Johnny have a bruise, we regulate where people can and cannot smoke and drink yet those are legal substances that the governments cannot live without the tax money they generate...... shall I go on?
You do know why the vast majority of the above is illegal do you not?
$$...... more money for the government to regulate, criminalize and make laws on than to let people have freedom to choose.
And in the end the "War on Drugs" is all about the $$$ also. The government makes money from it coming in, from it being sold from the people who use it and we foolish taxpayers keep letting them throw billions upon billions away. People are still going to use, people are still going to live, die and kill for it.
But, I guess to some as long as it is "illegal" the feel morally vindicated when they read how some cop killed a drug dealer or how some dope dealer firebombs a house killing not just the kid who was doing business with them but the whole family.
But then again, it's ok when Rush Limbaugh does it..... "he has a disease" "it's a witchhunt", "it's politically motivated"...... forget the part he ILLEGALLY went doctor shopping for drugs.
Or it's ok when athlete's and celebrities do them..... we'll just slap them on the wrist make them do a commercial and everything is ok.
But if little Johnny gets caught with a pound of weed....... fuck him send him to jail for 25 years without any chance of parole. In the meantime, that guy that killed 3 in the liquor store holdup last year, he'll be out in 4 with good behaviour. It's all good, Johnny knew it was illegal, so fuck him. I'd rather pay for his imprisonment for the next 25 years, then to try to send him to a drug rehab and maybe change and better his life.