[anom9999]

The moment you push any kind of culture underground you automatically make it harder and more expensive to control. So the smarter move would be to legalise the less harmful drugs but create a safe, controlled environment for sale and usage.

While some of the more conservative people out there might disagree with people taking drugs, the fact remains that people do want to get high and thus those people will always find way to do so. To me, it makes more sense not to turn those people into outlaws and instead concentrate your efforts on tackling those who turn to drugs for non-recreational reasons (eg resolving addiction and/or peoples dependency on stimulants for escapism. Those individuals usually have other real life issues and -wrongly- turn to drugs as their "fix").

This will never happen though because drugs are given such a bad connotation in the press as the roots of all evil. Not all drugs are equal; whose which are proven to be relatively harmless compared to tobacco or alcohol are given the ridiculous label of "gateway drugs" - as if anyone who smokes two puff of a joint will automatically end up on the streets shooting heroin. If we want people off the harder drugs then we have to teach kids that not all drugs are equally bad - and to do this we need governments to send a saner political message about their stance on drugs.

From a personal perspective, I've done a few "magic mushrooms" at festivals in my younger years. They made me a little giddy but at no point did I rape, steal nor murder. In fact I was more pleasant company than when I've been drinking (and I'm not a rude drunk by any means). Yet since then, the UK government has made magic mushrooms illegal. It's just absurd to think that my previous actions, which were entirely harmless at the time, are now illegal. And when kids experiment (as many kids often do) they too will learn that government legislation is broken towards "softer" drugs. Which will make then re-evaluate their opinion about their governments stance on all drugs. So the government are really just wasting their own time and our public money by continuing on this charade that all recreational chemicals are evil.

The most hypocritical thing of all though, is I bet a great many of those in power have smoked weed at some point when they were teenagers / young adults (as we saw in the UK with the amusing yet frustrating confessions a few years back where several politicians came forward and admitted to "smoking but not inhaling". sigh

[dobbsbob]

Actually Clinton is allergic to smoke, and was well known on campus for making hash cookies which is why he said 'never inhaled' because he ate weed instead. Too bad he went on to throw countless people in prison for doing exactly what he used to do.

[anom9999]

> "Actually Clinton is allergic to smoke, and was well known on campus for making hash cookies which is why he said 'never inhaled' because he ate weed instead."

UK != US. So it stands to reason that I wasn't talking about Clinton specifically. But it's amusing to see the same stories happening on both sides of the pond.

[betterunix]

"If we want people off the harder drugs"

If we want that. That is not really the goal. The goals of drug prohibition today are:

1. Creating favorable markets for the pharmaceutical industry

2. Expanding the size and power of the police

3. Artificially inflating the market for paramilitary police gear

4. Protecting the market for alcohol and tobacco

5. Attacking certain minority groups

6. Expanding the prison industry's profits

No amount of logic or reasoned argument can override the amounts of money and political pressure at work here.

[dragonwriter]

> No amount of logic or reasoned argument can override the amounts of money and political pressure at work here.

The gradual erosion of prohibition through popular referenda in the states argues against the truth of this claim.

[betterunix]

We have only seen the erosion of prohibition of a single drug. For everything else we are still seeing more of the same -- in the same period of time where states have relaxed marijuana prohibition, numerous other drugs have been made illegal.

[dragonwriter]

> We have only seen the erosion of prohibition of a single drug.

Everything starts somewhere. If the factors that were posited as insurmountable in the defense of drug prohibition really were, we wouldn't see legal progress against prohibition at all. The fact is that is that those factors, even if they are accurately described as the motivations behind legal prohibition, are demonstrably not insurmountable.