Should we legalize all drugs?
Title says it all. Should we legalize all illicit substances? Should we limit it to only certain drugs like marijuana? Would it stop the rampant crime in our inner cities or would it turn us into a nation of addicts?
History gives us mixed answers on this issue imo. Look at the Prohibition era of the 1920s. Italian, Irish, and Jewish gangs turned from tiny neighborhoods rackets into illegal national corporations. There was violence on the streets, open corruption, and a general disregard for the law. And worse still, Americans still drank.
The opium epidemic in China gives us a different story. Opium poured into their borders and tens of millions of their people became unproductive addicts. They epidemic officially ended when Mao repressed drug use, forced millions of addicts into rehabilitation, and slaughtered dealers.
What should the United States do? I guess the pros are that it may reduce gang violence in our cities and that the government can regulate it. The counter is that drugs like heroin and crack are substantially more addictive than alcohol, and that majority of the crime associated with drug production has been outsourced to Mexico, whereas during Prohibition, it was all in the United States. Thoughts?
Bump
https://theconversation.com/oregon-just-decriminalized-all-drugs-heres-…
Oregon just voted for it.
in the EU Portugal, NL, Switzerland and others have also done this a while ago.
This. +1 SB.
Personally, I think that it should be legal to the extent that you are not harming others while using. The drugs should not be used as a scapegoat for committing a crime. I also think that in general, regulation could help to some degree in the lethality of the cocktail of chemicals that people take. Sure, the junkies will buy from their street dealer if it's a cheaper alternative, but I think there would be a heightened safety for the recreational user who would be purchasing legally.
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Weed should be legal but there should regulations around how much you can use and then get into a car and drive. I think powerful drugs should be illegal
Obviously no one should be allowed to operate a vehicle under the influence, that's a given.
Weed depending on it's concentration, method of ingestion, and the biochemistry of the one ingesting it can be insanely "powerful" in terms of the resulting trip. Many mainstream opiate painkillers are more "powerful" in terms of the body's physiological response to them than heroin. Define powerful.
Half of the country can’t even handle food without getting fat, imagine letting them have free access to heroin and meth.
Yes, legalize everything. I think the people who wouldn’t use them in the first place will continue to not use them.
Yes. Purely from a libertarian perspective I think the government shouldn't have the authority to police what you choose to put in your own body. The war on drugs has been used as an excuse to imprison thousands upon thousands of non-violent citizens in countries around the world, and specifically in the US has been used for decades to target minorities. Just look at what the CIA did with crack in the inner cities and how they used drugs to fund what eventually became the Iran-Contra affair. We as a country know damn well that banning a drug is pointless when we look at what happened with prohibition, so the fact this is still an issue is clearly due to institutional willpower from players like big pharma, corrupt politicians, and other people who feel the need to police everyone else's lives.
Legalization would result in higher quality controls, a freer market reducing the ever present violence on the black market, and wider social acceptance paired with mainstream treatment programs would reduce the negative externalities of people who aren't able to manage their usage of substances responsibly.
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