Quote:
Originally Posted by timalkin
I believe that increasing the availability of legal marijuana will lead to more cocaine/meth/heroine/pick your drug use. If marijuana is legalized, more people will use marijuana. Many people who use marijuana move to harder drugs. Why not, you're already consuming a mind-altering substance. What's the harm in a little harder? Not everyone will take that next step, but many will. Hell, many people who smoke marijuana started smoking cigarettes first.
Drug traffickers who can't turn a profit selling marijuana will focus their efforts on pushing harder drugs that are still illegal. The supply of harder drugs will increase because that's all the dealers have to worry about.
Then the next pub discussion will turn to legalizing harder drugs. Think about how much money the government could save my just letting people do whatever hard drugs they want. Victimless crime, non-violent offender prison crowding, blah blah blah.
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I started cigarettes after pot, and that is anecdotal, but no more than your "many people who smoke marijuana started smoking cigarettes first."
From the other MJ users I know: I'm French, so, smoking cigarettes is pretty much something that a lot of French people do, whether they smoke or not.
But in terms of the Americans I've befriended that did MJ, they often hated tobacco, couldn't even stand it in a spliff(Europeans often use tobacco to consume cannabis, for one of two reasons: to save money by rolling something not made entirely of cannabis, or because in Europe hash is the only form of cannabis available, and is not really smokable by itself).
The fact is, cigarettes and MJ have nothing to do with each other. You could argue that cigarettes are impairing, or have psychoactive effects, but you'd really be pushing it, ask any smoker.
Do you drink at all? I ask because you seem to distinguish alcohol from other drugs, while it is as much of a drug as the next thing. Why would alcohol be any less of a "gateway drug" than marijuana?