6th March 2007, 5:33 PM
Quote:Please alert your friends to this alarming threat. We must ban doctors before this gets completely out of hand!!!!!
(that was taken from a chain-email from people who are anti-gun-control)
Once again, given the proper context, anything can be considered bad.
On that subject, banning all non-hunting guns from America would be an extremely good thing... I know it won't happen, but it would help. I know, 'more guns don't mean more violence', as Michael Moore's gun movie showed (comparing the US to Canada, which also has a lot of guns, and how much less violence there is in Canada), but when you've got a problem on the scale we do, something like that couldn't help but make adifference. Police and such would still be armed, of course, but those people who say 'you need weapons to protect yourself from the criminals who would keep guns if they were banned'... well, many other nations have banned handguns and the like, and they seem to be doing a decent job of minimizing the amount of gun violence. :) (violence with other weapons would go up, like knives and the like, but those are less easily lethal...)
Quote:What makes those choices bad in the eyes of prohibitionists is misinformation about the substance in question. Of course, I ought to ask - are you another person in the boat that believes that cigarettes and alcohol should be illegal, too? Why is it a crime to alter one's perception, if he isn't harming anyone?
The question of harm vs. benefit is a central one. Tobacco is very easy to categorize: in any quantity, it does harm. Smoke one cigarette or breate in some tobacco smoke and you've done permanant damage to your body. Meanwhile, tobacco has no beneficial side-effects that come even remotely close to negating the negative ones. As a result, it should be banned -- or at least cigarettes should be banned; smokeless tobacco is less bad because people using it only be harm themselves, not themselves and everyone around them.
Alchohol... despite being by far the most abused and dangerous drug fatalities-caused-by-it wise, thanks to drunken driving and alchohol-fueled agression, in small quantities it doesn't do lasting harm and perhaps in some forms helps, so it probably should be legal -- though the societal problems caused by alchohol abuse are huge, and reducing them is very important. I can think of good arguments on both sides of this question... I'm not sure which I more believe.
Quote:IMO, people who casually use marijuana (let's say, once a week) simply aren't harming themselves. The harm from grass only comes from A) smoking it and irritating the throat, B) becoming addicted to it (don't forget that physical dependency is hardly present - it's less physically addictive than caffeine) and smoking it to the point where it interferes with one's social life, job, relationships, etc. How likely is this to happen? Well, an estimated 83 million people (37 percent) over the age of 12 have tried marijuana. If cannabis addiction were an epidemic, I think we'd know.
Many sources try to make the claim that most people go to rehab for marijuana abuse, but the truth is, many people are SENT there by a judge as part of a plea bargain. The statistic of how many people is then abused, with prohibitionists claiming that people are mostly dependent upon cannabis. See how their propaganda works?
I don't like any drugs when I can avoid them. If I wanted I could be on medication for social anxiety or something, or (lesser) could look more seriously into if some medicine could deal with whatever it is I'm allergic to (that has caused my nose to not be completely clear in seven or eight years now), but I don't, though for the latter the fact that I tried a few for a while and found that they didn't make it completely go away was part of the reason, for the former, it just feels wrong...
Anyway, arguments like "it is not much more addictive than caffeine" or "it doesn't really do much more impairment than alchohol at best" are not exactly what I would call things that I would look at as examples of why I should support the thing. Legalize something and more people will use it. As a result, legalization of marijuana would harm the public health with only minimal gain (among that tiny percentage who might find medical gains, and medical use could be approved without general legalization, perhaps, under certain conditions).
For instance, Prohibition. While everyone thinks of the speakeasies and illegally made liquor, what isn't as well known is the fact that during prohibition, the number of people using alchohol, and the number abusing it, fell dramatically. The federal government eventually gave up because of public pressures and the impossible task of policing it all in a state of increased criminal activity to serve the people who would not give up alchohol, but overall, drunkenness and alchohol abuse rates dropped appreciably. Once it was legalized again, they began to go back up.
Anyway... legalization might well decrease the criminal activities surrounding the marijuana trade, but it would increase the numbers of people using the drug dramatically, and that would NOT be a good thing. Perhaps look into whether it could actually work in certain medical situations (I am far from convinced that there is proof that it's actually needed (that is, that nothing else could help), and set up a legal procedure for those people to get marijuana in a way that would not support crime (buying it on the street and supporting whatever gangs or criminal groups were involved in its production, transportation, and sale), but don't generally legalize.
I remember when a few years ago I had a roommate (idiot...)... every weekend he went out with his friends and did marijuana or alchohol (not 21 yet) or both, whatever. He got in trouble with the law once that year (him and his genius friends were on something and decided to enter someone's open room and take something in it. They got caught.) and again later on (after that school year, for smoking marijuana on Main Street, I believe... smart, that!). If I hadn't already been strongly opposed to drug use, that would have done it, I expect... that wasn't my point, though. My point was this -- the whole mindset of "wow, I don't remember what we were doing last night at all, isn't that awesome" makes absolutely no sense to me. You forget what you were doing... so that's a GOOD thing? Uh, isn't that pretty obviously BAD, not good? Yup.