Hmmm... Well, I was kinda staying out of this, but despite the Godwin risking last post, I'm gonna comment:
natsuko wrote:
The problem with legalizing drugs, like "pot", is that you then have to make all kinds of laws about when you CAN'T do it.
Its not such a big deal if you are doing it at home or something, but the problem would be people driving around and doing it. The problem would be train engineers smoking pot and wrecking their train, which has actually happened even though pot is illegal.
Why is this a problem with pot? DUI laws already restrict and punish for "driving under the influence" of a wide variety of substances, including pot. We don't actually pass a separate law for each substance. What we do is catagorize substances based on what they do (AMA and FDA type stuff). Then pass laws based on those catagories. So if marijuana was changed from a prohibited depressant to a restricted depressant, it would automaticaly come under the same laws as alchohol (more or less). It would be just as illegal to drive while stoned as it is to drive while drunk.
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The problem is we'd have all the problems which we currently have with booze, such as increased traffic fatalities, while now also having them for something new. When anything is "legal", a lot more people do it. So you'd have a huge increase in accidents and fatalities, all due to something which was previously illegal. A lot of people wanting to legalize drugs like this never really think it through. The problems that legalizing it would cause are FAR greater than any benefit to legalizing it, so why do it?
I couldn't disagree more. I hate to break it to you, but people already drive stoned. It's already illegal, but they do it anyway, just like people drive drunk. There is absoutely no evience to suggest that illegalizing or legalizing a substance will significantly change the rate at which people will missuse it (ie: Drive while under its influence).
However, you can make an arguable case that by keeping it illegal, we increase the odds that any individual already under the influence of pot will drive in that state. If it's already illegal just to posses and use pot, then the person using it has already taken the risk of illegality. He's already in a state where if a cop sees him, he's going to jail. He's working on the assumption that he wont get caught, and that assumption will carry over to driving. If you make it legal to use and posses, you will have many many people who will use it responsibly, but will balk at passing from the legal use to the illegal use (they'll smoke pot, but wont drive while stoned). Despite all the horrible statistics for alchohol related accidents, the vast vast vast majority of people who drink do not drive while drunk. Why expect that all the pot smokers will?
I also completely disagree with you that the problems with legalization far outweigh the problems with illegalization. In fact, I believe the exact opposite. I think that the costs of illegalization are so ridiculously much higher then those of legalization that it borders on the criminal that we as a society continue to keep pot illegal. More on this later.
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A lot of people, like myself, will never do things like that because they are illegal. That makes for a better society. I also don't think that a large tax would work, since if you had a large tax people would still sell it illegally instead.
Um... Wrong. You're not applying all the differences here. Why do you think that it costs 20 bucks for a relatively small bag of weed? Do you think it cost that much to grow a plant? It costs that much because it's illegal. Funnny thing is that people who get into an illegal business expect a high amount of return for their risk. The actual cost of pot if it were grown commercially would be no higher then that for tobacco. Odd that a pack of smokes costs 4 bucks, but a bag of weed that maybe has about one cigarettes worth of smokable material in it costs 20...
You make it legal. You license it's production. Sure, folks can grow their own, but they can't sell it without a license. Free market kicks in. The tobacco companies step in. Pretty soon, we have Marlborro brand MJ cigarettes on sale. Sure, they're pricy, but still less then what it would cost today to buy those. And that's with a super high tax (A tobacco company actually sells a pack of cigs for something like 50 cents. The rest of the cost is taxes). Who would buy illegally produced MJ smokes in that environment? Why? I can go to the store and buy my MJ smokes and I know exactly what I'm getting, or I could buy from some guy who grew it in his backyard. It's probably not as good, and I run the risk of breaking the law. Again. Why would I do that? No reason at all.
How many people buy non-licenced cigarettes? None? Why is that? After all, we have tons of taxes on those things, right? Why doesn't everyone just buy them illegaly? How about liquor? How many people buy liquor smuggled into the country to avoid paying the license taxes? Yup. Somewhere really close to zero.
Trust me. You legalize and regulate it just like alchohol and tobacco, and the illegal sales and production of pot will disappear immediately. There's just no market left for them anymore. Incidentally, all the crime related to that illegal sales goes away as well. The gang activity. The guns. The controlling of "turf" for selling. All gone in an instant.
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I don't believe in the stupid "gateway" drug thing at all, that is like saying that because I like a couple beers occasionally at home (when I'm NOT going to be driving AT ALL, AT ALL EVER UNTIL THE NEXT DAY) that I'm also going to do weed. Its kind of a stupid arguement. Drinking booze has nothing in common with doing weed, nor does doing weed have anything in common with shooting up or popping pills. This is why for the most part people are drunks or potheads or druggies, they are all kind of mutually exclusive to some extent.
This I agree with you on, with one caveat. There is a "gateway" aspect to drugs like pot. But it's not anything inherent to the drugs themselves. It's the fact that they are illegal, and the people you deal with to get them are dealers in illegal goods. It's a gateway in that if you deal in that world long enough, you might move from breaking one kind of crime to breaking another. It's a gateway in that if you get busted for it, you now have a felony on your record, which automatically makes it that much harder to get legitimate employment, and puts you into an environment (jail) full of folks who may introduce you to yet other criminal ventures. The only think that makes pot a gateway drug is the fact that it's illegal. Again, I've never heard of anyone who got into smuggling because he bought some beer at the local store. However, lots of people get into the production side of illegal drugs just by using them, if for no other reason then to get access to them at a lower cost. Legalize pot, and it ceases to be a gateway to other, more serious crimes.
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So the biggest valid arguement for not making it legal is simply that you'd do nothing to benefit society, while very likely you'd make it a lot worse. We have enough problems with booze.
But here's where I have a huge problem with your logic. Are you suggesting that any activity that does not "benefit societey" should be made illegal? That's what you're implying. If that's the case, then amusement parks should be illegal. Sky diving, skateboarding, bungie jumping, all illegal. After all, not only do those produce no benefit to society, but people can easily get hurt doing them (just as pot smokers can hurt themselves over time using the drug).
I'm sorry. I think that's a **** poor reason to make something illegal. If that's all you can come up with, then you're effectively saying we should legalize pot tomorrow.
The facts are that we spend Billions of dollars each year in the "war on drugs". The fruits of that expense is that we arrest and incarcerate 10s of thousands of "criminals" each year, who's only crime was a poor choice of recreations. We then spend 10s of millions more keeping those criminals incarcerated where they may otherwise have been productive citizens. By keeping drugs illegal, we encourage smuggling pipelines due to the high profitability of the drugs on the street. Illegalization drives up prices. Thus, we're creating the very profitability that makes folks want to deal in drugs. Along the way, we allow for the method of delivery of other things along those same smuggling pipelines. The city of LA confiscates and destroys some 5 thousand illegal firearms each year on their gang detail alone. Where do you think those guns came from? Who do you think got them to the gangs? Yup. The same folks who ship the drugs around.
While this isn't as applicable to pot, it's still a factor. The vast majority of overdose deaths from drug use are not the result of the substance itself, but the result of inconsistent concentrations of the substance, and poor manufacturing processes (fillers, cleaner, etc which can be toxic). Legalization would eliminate those deaths literally overnight as standardization would be the norm. Instead of guessing at the quality of a batch of your drug of choice, you'll know by the brand you buy that it's the exact same as what you bought the last time. That's huge.
So each year Illegalization does the following:
- Costs us billions in policing.
- Costs us tens of millions more in incarceration costs.
- Puts illegal guns (and other weapons) on our streets.
- Promotes gang violence due to competition for selling rights.
- Takes 10s of billions of dollars of taxible revenue out of the economy and puts it into the hands of illegal enterprises, including potential terrorist organizations.
- Causes thousands of unecessary deaths due to overdoses.
And what do we get? The satisfaction as a society that we are preventing a fairly large group of people from recreating in a way that we disapprove of. Wow! That's freaking brilliant!
