Quote:
Originally Posted by Frosstbyte
I'm for the legalization of all drugs. Decrease crime. Clear out prisons. Increase tax venue. I'm an extremist on it, and I'm ok with that. Punish people (and severely) who make bad choices when they use drugs. People can make their own choices about what they do to themselves. Legalizing it puts money back into the system, gives some level of quality control and allows people who have their drugs stolen to have legal recourse instead of going and shooting everyone.
People, writ large, don't agree with that, but whatever.
Pot, in particular, is less physically harmful than tobacco and alcohol and has a less severe psychological impact that being drunk. It's illegal because of simple racism. People seriously were worried that migrant workers would smoke it and wouldn't do work if they could and/or that native americans and blacks would smoke it and come assault nice white families. There are records on the books of numerous states to back that fact up. The ad campaigns against weed are just hilarious in their gross levels of misinformation.
Your arguments against legalizing marijuana, timalkin, are, frankly, dated and inconsistent. If you want to have an irrational fear of the drug, that's fine. Don't impose it on the rest of us.
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They had a huge ally in William Randolph Hearst who was more than happy to run fabricated stories of black men raping white women while crazed-out on this drug called Marijuana (back then, most people referred to it as cannabis. The Spanish name Marijuana hadn't caught on and wasn't widely known to be synonymous with cannabis).
But, why let a little truth get in the way of hyperbole and fear-mongering when it's so obvious that the idea that some people might actually enjoy getting high is reason enough to keep it illegal.