should hard drugs be legal?

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Part of the problem is that opiates are not legal except when administered by a licensed medical person.

Illegality is part of the problem.

ruveyn

I was talking to a friend of mine and the subject of marijuana legalization came up. We both agreed if it were legalized it would have to be controlled just like alcohol, taxed, and licensed to sell. What he suggested however and I had to agree with him on this is the fact there's no good reliable on the spot test available for it. He suggested the police would need something like a breathalyzer to test for usage quickly and effectively and there's nothing available at the moment.

The idea he had and it made sense to me was yeah, you get inebriated and you shouldn't be out driving on the drug, which any right minded person would agree. If there was a way to get a reliable read for it on the spot, I might even support the legalization for it and maybe any other drug, but until the technology exists I would have to say no, don't legalize them, but by all means stop this idiotic war on drugs that puts people in jail for minor offenses.

People drive on drugs now, how do you think cops handle that? A simple sobriety test and common sense(bloodshot eyes, reeks of reefer, open bag of Funyuns, Phish CDs) would be enough to determine whether or not someone is impaired on marijuana or anything else for that matter. Furthermore, marijuana isn't anywhere near the intoxicant that alcohol is so the need for an immediate test is unnecessary.

As for alcohol not being as destructive as certain other drugs, that is simply not true. Alcohol has probably destroyed more lives than any other "drug".

Yeah, I do find it weird that if i were to sit on my porch with a pitcher of margaritas all I'd get is disdainful looks from my more religious neighbors, but if i were out there popping benzos I'd go to jail for it.

Two I can can think of that I'd definitively say no on - meth and smack. No upside to meth, H pounds people into the dirt.

Would I legalize marijuana? In a heartbeat. LSD/mushrooms/mescaline? Hallucinogens have major upside if you know how to use them but they'd need to be limited in terms of purchase or potency. Ecstacy? Has a lot of therapeutic potential but - it can chew up your brain if you aren't watching your vitals and neurochemicals closely. DMT - not sure I know enough, sounds like the most likely thing you can do is catch yourself on fire with the bowl when paralysis sets in. PCP - dont' know enough but that's never been a run to for a lot of people.

Coke's really on the border. Its really kind of worthless IMO but then again with the crack epidemic and the fact that stimulants are just crap drugs - no, too little upside. Try giving rock stars modafinil instead.

People are already demonstrating a marked propensity to self-medicate. When the Pfizer ad convinces someone that Zoloft (tm) will make them feel better, and they go marching down to their doctor's office (or more likely a walk-in clinic) with a trumped up set of symptoms and a demand for a prescription. More often than not, the doctor has no time to do anything but reach for the pad.

So, how about a scenario where if a pharmaceutical company can get a drug approved by the FDA, they are free to retail it to anyone who wants it? Drug interactions be damned. Got a sore knee? Take fistfuls of oxycontin. Trouble sleeping? Take fistfuls of Alprazolam. Trouble waking up? Take a few fistfuls of Adderall.

The regulation of therapeutic drugs exists for a very good reason: if you don't know what you're doing you stand a very good chance of doing yourself some real and permanent damage.

I take a pretty liberal line with marijuana--unless it's going to have a significant drug interaction with something else I am going to prescribe, or I am dealing with a patient with significantly reduced pulmonary capacity, I am not going to come down hard on it. But I will not take the same easy approach on cocaine, MDMA, off-label use of prescription drugs, opiates or hallucinogens.

one could require it to be bhought at a drug store with a certified chemist, if they have full access to your medical record they can then apply any drugs you are using to it so emergency professionals would know and track any potential drug interactions.

though i would agree many drugs would require some form of oversight as their side effects can be extremely damaging, most presciption drugs are lethal in relatively small doses.

Privacy laws will not allow that kind of sharing of information.

An intelligent person always goes to the same doctor, who will know the patient's full medical history, and to the same pharmacy, so that the pharmacist can see the entire dispensing history, and identify interactions.

But the person who wants to beat the system will head to multiple walk-in clinics for the same prescription and then fill those prescriptions at different pharmacies. Provided that the patient doesn't try to seek reimbursement multiple times from their drug plan, there is no way for one doctor or pharmacy to know what the others have done.

true but even with illegal drugs these types will tend to get what they want.

if you as a person have already thrown all caution and care for yourself out the window then no amount of regulation will help you, therapy will.

should hard drugs be legal?

Probably not but I'm not going to lift a finger to keep anyone who wants to fry thier brain from doing so.

The War on Drugs hasn't done anything but waste money and resources.

Can't agree with you there. I've been so high on marijuana I couldn't find my way from my friends kitchen to her living room in a small apartment. it's just as intoxicating if not more.

They should at least be safe, and not controlled by organized crime

Hard drugs, as the title implies, aren't very safe by their very nature.
As for organized crime; wherever there's big profit to be made it's very possible that organized crime will have a hand in it.

Opiates are usually considered to have the opposite effect on most people. That is strange.

You should watch Cops sometime, the cheap liquor stores aren't in the expensive neighborhoods, and DWI collisions kill many more than tweakers looking for a fix.
Alcohol IS the gateway drug, many people's first experience with it is from their parent's liquor cabinet/stash. Drink a little, then replace what you drank with water, surely Dad and Mom won't notice, and they usually don't...

Meth is very bad, completely artificial, and it has no place in the world, heroin and cocaine do I suppose, but not in mine.

Marihuana is my medicine, and has kept the effects of Dystonia pretty much at bay. Although sometimes my hands will do this...



And I get to look forward to this, oh joy...(I am already 10 years overdue)



All of this, and I have Asperger's which makes finding help even more difficult. Makes heroin not look so bad. I am to afraid to try it though.

What I'm saying is that they should be pure and of known potency.

We carve out the market for hard drugs to be the exclusive domain of criminals by making the drugs illegal. If the same people who make OTC drugs for Rite-Aid were manufacturing them, maybe they would be a lot better quality and a lot cheaper, and we wouldn't be inadvertently funding the alqaeda or FARC or someone.

Create an environment where anyone over the age of 21 can schlep down to the county clinic and buy a hit from a civil servant in a bad tie at a reasonable market price and the criminals will mostly disappear from the market.

Make sure they can get treatment at the same clinic for nothing. Staff the clinic entirely with professionals who won't be a**holes about it. Have a rule that they have to be straight to buy, and that they can only buy one hit at a time. Some will still stockpile their hits, some will sell their hits to others, but use will probably go down after an initial hike.

This will eliminate cyclical behavior where addicts score a wad of cash (by stealing or selling, or both), buy enough to stay high for days, and further remove themselves from functional society.

Kids will no longer think of it as being something rebellious and awesome but roughly as cool as going down to planned parenthood for condoms.

The stigma will be gone but the disapproval will still be there.

Doing away with the stigma is important. We want addicts to know that they can always come back.