I am well aware of how destructive drugs can be, and I agree that the tragic loss of life and health now caused by addictive drugs is completely unacceptable in a civil society. Anyone with a reasonably diverse social circle has experienced this first-hand.
I feel the best way to keep youth (or anyone else) off drugs is to remove the forces that get them addicted. The ONLY way to do that is to eliminate the incentive drug pushers have to push drugs. Drug prohibition, like alcohol prohibition, does the opposite. Sure, penalize pushers that pedal to youth, but treat the victims without any threat of sanction.
Our youth have been so coddled that they have difficulty making sound decisions on their own; otherwise I would advocate allowing the sale of these drugs at corner stores, under rules currently in place for cigarettes. If people were trained from an early age to choose their own behaviours based on fundamental principles, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in.
I've grown to believe that one of the greatest tragedies facing society is that people have learned to look to the law to decide what is right or wrong. If it is legal, they reason, it must be OK. If it is illegal, it is bad. The problem with this attitude is that if the citizens' ethical standards are based on the law, what is the law based on? Is that a recursive algorithm or what? It is easy to see the potential for meaningless drift of legal standards.
>12 year old girls hooking to feed an addiction
The poor girls would never have gotten hooked if no one ever had a reason to get them hooked. Unlike smoking, most youth don't view cocaine as a way to lose weight or to improve their social image. Without pressure from pushers, most kids' experimentation would never progress to the 'hard' drugs.
Your twelve-year-old hookers were introduced to the drug by people that were in a position to make money off it. Now that any enterprising a*hole can make tons of money at it, drug supplies and the number of victims have grown.
The profitable black market for drugs was created because the open market was shut down. Cocaine used to be perfectly legal and available at any reasonably well stocked drug store at low prices. Very few people bought it because they had no reason to buy it. The number of addicts was far smaller than what we have under the current regime.
As with all things that can be destructive forces in society, I tend to lean towards education as a means to successfully minimize the impact rather than prohibition which exacerbates the impact.
Outlawing things doesn't make them go away.
>Families torn apart by kids doing the unimagineable because of addictions.
I know. Our family came close, but survived.
Of course, the fiscal conservative will ask how much we should spend treating addicts - and that's a valid question. I doubt the costs could climb above a small fraction of what the current enforcement efforts cost. The added benefit would be the elimination of the rasion d'être of much criminal activity. If the feds can spend $350 million a year for paperwork for rifles that will have no impact on crime...
>Re: Medical use....cannot the active ingredient THC be manufactured and perscribed in an oral medication?
I don't know. No one is allowed to try.
> opiate poisoning (160 deaths)
Interesting number. In 1999, 165 people were murdered by firearms (mostly handguns which have been subject to registration since the 30's, in case you're wondering). 536 people were murdered in total. I wonder how many of those murders could be attributed to the illicit drug trade.
-g |
