should hard drugs be legal?

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I'm so anti-drug that I don't even smoke tobacco or drink alchohol, yet rather than being praised for it everybody looks down on me like I'm an uptight fuddy duddy.

I really don't understand why people can't see how bad all drugs are regardless if they are legal or illegal. Drugs do more than just ruin your body and slowly kill you, they cause you to forget about the people and things in your life that should be important like your job and children. Growing up in a rather poor white trash neighborhood I have seen so many parents as a kid who completely neglect and abuse their kids just because they cared more about spending their time and money on getting high and drunk than they do making sure their kids are fed or safe. In fact my stepfather who we recently found out was a crackhead has stolen over $90,000 from me and my mother to support his drug addiction and has basically left my family broke and struggling. That is why I have nothing but contempt for people who do drugs and support the legalizing of drugs that are currently illegal.

Of course all the junkies in the world probably could care less about what I think about drugs, so I don't care if they smoke, snort, and shoot themselves up into dying. I just know I will never turn to drugs or have anything to do with people who support drugs even if all the drugs in the world are made legal.

Last edited by GreySun369 on 30 Sep 2011, 10:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I am so anti-drug that I'd like them all to be legal so that drug dealers just die of starvation. I don't drink alcohol. Tobacco sucks. I drink coffee though.

I drink caffine in my tea and soda and that's about it. I don't think that kind of thing should even be considered on the level of other legal drugs like tobacco and alchohol because it's about the only "drug" I know of that doesn't hurt those around you.

i will repeat the only OD i have ever seen was on caffeine, it is dosage that matters.

besides most human activities destroy us or our possibilities in one way or the other, including seemingly harmless everyday activities.

to me the real issue here is that usually people will not afford others the choice they make themselves, albeit it in a different form.

diamond trade (legal and illegal) has a history more bloody than the drug war, it began much earlier and continues to this day.

My point is that a caffine addiction rarely effects the people around the indivual who is addicted to the drug. Second hand smoke from tobacco can cause lung damage and cancer to people around a smoker, people who abuse alchohol can hurt others in a variety of ways like physically assaulting their spouses and kids when drunk or killing people in car wrecks while driving drunk. I could care less about an individual's right to choose to harm their own body for a few moments of sensual pleasure, but I think it's pretty unfair to the families of people who abuse drugs to have to suffer from something they did not choose. To me the issue of drug abuse is more about how it effects families than it is the individuals who choose to do it. That's the ultimate reasoning I can see as to why hardcore drugs should remain illegal.

Not trying to persuade you one way or another, but to explain what you're seeing or why its given so much lax:
1) Its all really an illusion, we live for our experiences largely so long as we do so within reason. Hence not too many people are purists.
2) As for things like marijuana, mushrooms, LSD, ecstacy, etc., if you get there you quickly find out that there's a lot more to it than the common story of people just being dumb and self-destructive. Not to say that I'm endorsing it, just that once a lot of people have crossed that threshold - even if they haven't done any of it for years and have no intent of doing it again (say being 30+, having a good job, being a parent, etc.) that former outlook is still utterly gone and particularly with things like hallucinogens, a lot of people do look back at some of those experiences as some of the most intimate and self-revealing of their lives.
3) Some people just really enjoy spelunking deeper into their own minds or pluming their own depths so to speak, to which there's no greater fast-track.

I used to be just like you in this sense, probably until I was about 16 or 17. Around 19 or 20 I really broke that open and tried most of the mid to upper-mid level of it and, you could say that I all of a sudden saw how much of the commercial artwork, how much of the music, and how much of so many things in general is drenched in influence that you can tell came from first-hand psychedelic experience. In a way its almost frightening to see just how much was whizzing past you previously in that sense.

I gotta love the characterization of the libertarian position on drugs as "extreme" when the current default position is to lock people up for getting high on the theory that we're protecting them from themselves. Because that worked so well with Prohibition and all, and hasn't virtually destroyed multiple countries and millions of lives. Hopefully one side effect of the national state of being out of money will be politicians and their constituents finally seeing the light on this one, though I for one am not holding my breath.

so true,
many drugs are made 10 times worse for society by being illegal.

Well if I had my way I would make all recreational drugs illegal including tobacco and alchohol. It's not like that would stop anyone from obtaining and using them though.

I relate to some of what you said and have also witnessed some pretty bad things growing up. It's hard for me to understand why people look down on others who take a hard and absolute anti-drug stance. Most people who have that outlook don't suddenly wake up with it one day out of nowhere; it's often born out of some difficult, if not extremely traumatic, experiences.

I think it's somewhat suprising that people who've been sheltered from those sort of harsh realities feel entitled to judge your outlook when maybe they should just acknowledge they can't ever fully understand where you're coming from. There are some things in life that effect us on a deeper emotional and spiritual level when we've actually lived through them. People on the outside looking in miss that whole added component, so of course they aren't as likely to feel as strongly about the issue as you. It's the old cliche about walking a mile in someone's shoes ...

and those actions would kill so many more than those affected by drugs,
you decide

the real issue here is that on one hand you allow people ro make a choice and you allow them to get hurt because of it,
on the other hand you will try to prevent people from making that choce and people not even affiliated by that choice gets hurt because of it.

to me its a no brainer just because of that, then there are multitudes of other arguments on top of that.
no one here is forcing people to do drugs.

I'm glad somebody understands where I'm coming from. People think the issue with drugs is all about the person who chooses to use them, but they either don't realize or don't care that it effects other people too. Especially children growing up around drugs like me. I'm probably the only person I know who's grown up around people who abuse drugs and chose not to do them, if I had been a "normal" kid like everyone else I probably would have grown up smoking, drinking, and maybe doing hard drugs like everyone else in my family does.

I think we have enough problems with children of parents who do hard drugs like crack and heroine. These children are always abused and neglected, living in messy gross homes where they sometimes have no food and they almost always grow up to engage in criminal behavior and abuse drugs just like their parents. We don't need to make it any worse but making these drugs legal to obtain and use so that the legal system can't do anything about these parents who do this stuff to their kids.

I was recently rear-ended by a drunk driver while sitting at a red light in the middle of the afternoon. That driver's decision to drive drunk completely turned my life upside down. Most people here would be sympathetic to my situation and think my rights should be protected under the law, as opposed to the other driver's individual freedom to use alcohol, etc. After all, I was being safe and obeying traffic laws, while he was being reckless and endangering the lives of innocent citizens, right?

For some reason, though, people don't seem to grasp that there are usually far-reaching adverse effects to innocent people whenever someone uses drugs or alcohol, like you pointed out in your post above. The injuries I sustained in this car accident hurt me physically, emotionally and financially. But, in many ways, I think I was hurt more by the regular drug and alcohol abuse of adults in my life growing up.

well he was doing an activity not suited to do while intoxicated, does that reflect upon all alcohol users.

in my mind people like the parents mentioned would have a much easier time getting help both practically and mentally if they knew they get treatment without the massive stigma attached today.
either way it doesnt change the issue regarding many other recreational drugs, as i mentioned before there are some drugs that are plain nasty.

you would have an easier time finding deaths because of oxygen poisening than lsd or psilocybin, ot to mention cannabis with not a single death ever recorded, to portray them all as equally bad would be the same fallacy as not to regard meth or heroin as extremely addictive.



the issue here is would people get more easily addicted if these drugs were offered legally in a responsible fashion?
what would be required for it to be responsible?
what criteria should legality be based on? (lets face it any special justification is extremely hard to do, even the fact that alcohol is legal while cannabis is not is a proof of this)

the issue is not as black and white as legal / illegal.

I'm really sorry to hear about that, and you are absolutely right in that being a good example of how drug users can hurt innocent people. People don't seem to consider that until it's too late. Of course the sad fact is that even making all the drugs in the world illegal won't do any good, people will stil find ways to obtain drugs illegally and won't care who they hurt to get it. So if they're illegal, people will get hurt. If they're made legal, people will still get hurt.

The point I was making is that regular d&a abuse in and of itself harms those in the lives of the individuals abusing them, period. Those who've experienced first-hand the harm an addict can cause in someone's life understand there is not really any such thing as a "suitable activity" for an addict to do while intoxicated. It all has a ripple effect.

Addiction is a biological disease. People with a genetic predisposition will become addicted regardless of how society views the substance. Making something legal just provides more opportunities for people to become addicted; it doesn't necessarily breakdown barriers to seeking treatment. I'd point to the widespread abuse of prescription painkillers as an example.