“Legalize for our safety.”

Seriously…legalizing drugs would be safe for us?! People driving around high on heroine, crack, coke sounds safe to you? We legalized alcohol and look how many deaths we have a year from people driving on the affects of alcohol…not to even mention liver disease or alcohol related violence.

I understand some of the logic of legalizing drugs, it sounds good on paper. I know it’s worked for some other countries. But America is a unique place…full of gluttony and over abuse of everything from anti-depressants to food. You legalize drugs and lower the cost and I doubt I’ll ever go downtown again…the hobos, street urchins and current drug abusers that lurk, will all be cracked out on cheap drugs asking for change…or high on PCP threatening to kill people if they don’t drive them somewhere.

We aren’t talking about hippies high on pot, or ravers getting back rubs on ecstasy…we are talking about bad people that now have access and freedom to purchase mind altering drugs that can send even the most sane person in a frenzy or rage. It’s true, they can get it now, and do illegally. But it’s much more difficult and costs much more for them to do, which makes the frequency and demand quite less.

You give people complete freedom of an array of drugs, and that’s a explosion waiting to happen. It’s similar to weapons of mass destruction…they are bad, but they also cost millions to make, so not everyone has them. Lets say they go on wholesale and become cheaper and allow every country to buy them…now a neighbor country is talking trash…nuke time. You can’t just do that…it could be the first step to anarchy in America. We as a country aren’t mentally ready to legalize drugs. Let’s maybe start with pot and see how that goes.

Thanks for you input, Victory. I completely realize that there is no perfect fix to an imperfect world. Let me see if I can re-count your very good points:

Operating Motor Vehicles, Aircraft, Performing Surgery, etc. while intoxicated would be no more allowed than it currently is. In fact, I would recommend an increase in punishment for offenders. I also think that first time offenses for drinking and driving should be increased. For that matter, I think cell phones should be outlawed while driving.

I don’t envision CVS selling crack so don’t worry about downtown being overrun. For the hard core stuff, I envision very specific “centers” where people have to register (like medical weed in Cali) to be allowed the ability to purchase. This will allow their usage and history to be tracked and, with trained professionals on staff, an opportunity to intervene with each transaction. For the worst of the lot, the people that currently live in places like the Salvation Army downtown (where I once had a gun stuck in my face by a jonesing heroin addict), a dormitory would be available. Through my system, there will be no more need for robberies, if one can’t afford them, you can stay at the dorm and have it provided. The situations we have now are meth heads robbing people due to the high costs created by the black market and no government assistance. This is the lawlessness we deal with in reality, not a hypothetical. And if you have lived in a neighborhood with street gangs, I don’t need to tell you what that kind of current lawlessness is like.

Your assumption that keeping drugs illegal is decreasing the junkies ability to get drugs, therefore use drugs. Junkies are junkies. They don’t want things less because the items are more scarce. It just means they work harder to get their fix and the scarcity insures they will pay more. I assume you’ve known some junkies in your life, right? Meth, crack, oxys, H? If so, then you know what I mean. It’s a drive to a local dealer or a drive to Chicago, one way or another, it’s going down. Our laws do not prevent, the simply drive up price on a constant demand.

The main issue I take to your logic is the basic assumption that legalizing will create a mass epidemic of junkies. In countries where drugs have basically been decriminalized, they simply do not show the results you use in your argument.

The only thing we know for sure is everything we have done, thus far, has failed and failed miserably. Legalizing weed will not deal with the bigger issues at play here. And for the record, I hope no one uses drugs, drinks, smokes cigs, or even uses a cell phone while they drive.

UPDATE from the NYTimes:

U.S. Moves Against Top Mexican Drug Cartel

“Calling Mexican drug trafficking organizations “a national security threat,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Wednesday that federal authorities had mounted their biggest assault against one of Mexico’s most powerful drug cartels.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/2...

Our demand for drugs has created a National Security Threat. The same goes for the Taliban whom get the majority of their funding through the opium trade. Legalize drugs and end this part of the insanity.

AND

U.S. Is Arms Bazaar for Mexican Cartels

Illegal drug sales have ignited “gang warfare in which more than 6,000 Mexicans died last year.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/2...

And that’s just in Mexico (and probably doesn’t count the bodies they have not or will never find). People along the border are living in fear, on both sides… for those of you who have no family down there or have never spent time there, I assure you it is true. When our drug habits get more Mexicans get killed on their side in one year than the number of good folks we have lost in Iraq since that shit started, you can start to piece together the fear level. We have some dirty little habits America, let’s face it like we did with alcohol, and stop pushing our misery on to other countries and compounding it for ourselves.

The friggin’ Mayor of Juárez, Mexico (which is across the Rio from El Paso) is now living in El Paso because he fears for his life from Mexican gangs. Looks like they are going to try to whack him in El Paso. Legalize drugs or this is only going to get worse.

After threats, Juárez mayor in El Paso
By Diana Washington Valdez / El Paso Times
Posted: 02/24/2009 12:00:00 AM MST

EL PASO — Police are investigating threats against Juárez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz, who moved his family to El Paso for safety, El Paso police Detective Carlos Carrillo said Monday.

“We received information that the Juárez mayor lives in El Paso, and that possibly they were going to come to El Paso to get him,” Carrillo said. “He has not asked us for our help, but it’s our duty to protect any resident of our city who may be under threat.”

Juárez police said written threats against Reyes Ferriz and his family were left in different parts of Juárez after the police chief, Roberto Orduña Cruz, resigned Friday. The threats were written on the kind of banners and posters that the Juárez drug cartel has used to send messages to police and others.

Meanwhile, Mexican authorities were unraveling a shooting Sunday in Chihuahua City that killed one of Chihuahua Gov. Jose Reyes Baeza Terraza’s bodyguards.

Alejandro Chaparro Coronel died while defending another state agent in a convoy. He was a commander who served on the Chihuahua state police force for 11 years. The assailants wounded two other bodyguards, both also members of the state police.

http://www.elpasotimes.com/newup...

This is sad. Cracking down on certain cartels is the equivalent of trying to plug holes in a dam with your fingers. As long as demand exists, someone will find a way to supply. The temporary, expensive, crack down will potentially only drive up street prices, creating even greater incentive for people to find a way to deliver.

This is circular thinking, at best. Realistically, continued failure is the only possible outcome.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/02/25/mexico.juarez.drugs/index.html

With around half of all offenders in the criminal system there based on drug offenses of one type or another, the reality of how much it is costing to keep drugs illegal is piling up…

Prison Spending Outpaces All but Medicaid

Article Tools Sponsored By
By SOLOMON MOORE
Published: March 2, 2009

One in every 31 adults, or 7.3 million Americans, is in prison, on parole or probation, at a cost to the states of $47 billion in 2008, according to a new study.

Criminal correction spending is outpacing budget growth in education, transportation and public assistance, based on state and federal data. Only Medicaid spending grew faster than state corrections spending, which quadrupled in the past two decades, according to the report Monday by the Pew Center on the States, the first breakdown of spending in confinement and supervision in the past seven years.

The increases in the number of people in some form of correctional control occurred as crime rates declined by about 25 percent in the past two decades.

As states face huge budget shortfalls, prisons, which hold 1.5 million adults, are driving the spending increases… (more on NY Times)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/0...

No matter what your opinion is on drug legalization, it is ridiculous that hemp farming is banned in the US. You’d have to smoke a joint the size of a phone poll of hemp to get high. There are a huge number of uses for hemp: fuel, diet, medicine, paper, clothes / fiber, soap, weed control (kind of funny), etc. You can read about some of the benefits on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp ⇓

Hemp (from Old English hænep, see cannabis (etymology)) is the common name for plants of the entire genus Cannabis, although the term is often used to refer only to Cannabis strains cultivated for industrial (non-drug) use.

Industrial hemp has many uses, including paper, textiles, biodegradable plastics, construction, health food, and fuel.^[1] It is one of the fastest growing biomasses known,^[2] and one of the earliest domesticated plants known.^[3] It also runs parallel with the “Green Future” objectives that are becoming increasingly popular. Hemp requires little to no pesticides,^[4] no herbicides,^[5] controls erosion of the topsoil, and produces oxygen. Furthermore, hemp can be used to replace many potentially harmful products, such as tree paper (the processing of which uses chlorine bleach, which results in the waste product polychlorinated dibensodioxins, popularly known as dioxins, which are carcinogenic, and contribute to deforestation), cosmetics, and plastics, most of which are petroleum-based and do not decompose easily. The strongest chemical needed to whiten the already light hemp paper is non-toxic hydrogen peroxide. ^[6]

Cannabis sativa L. subsp. sativa var. sativa is the variety grown for industrial use in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere, while C. sativa subsp. indica generally has poor fiber quality and is primarily used for production of recreational and medicinal drugs. The major difference between the two types of plants is the appearance and the amount of Δ⁹-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) secreted in a resinous mixture by epidermal hairs called glandular trichomes. Strains of Cannabis approved for industrial hemp production produce only minute amounts of this psychoactive drug, not enough for any physical or psychological effects. Typically, Hemp contains below 0.3% THC, while Cannabis grown for marijuana can contain anywhere from 6 or 7 % to 20% or even more.

Every industrialized country in the world except for the United States produces industrial hemp.

If marijuana was successfully hidden and grown in a hemp field, it would end up filled with seeds and stems, malnourished and very low in THC content.

A federal bill was introduced yesterday by Barney Frank and Ron Paul that if passed would “remove restrictions on the cultivation of non-psychoactive industrial hemp.”

You can read about it here:

http://alaskareport.com/news39/x...

Thoughts?