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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: average joe who wrote (14231)	5/24/2001 6:17:34 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

How on earth did the ten commandments, or morality, come into the picture? Utterly irrelevant. I don't respect a drug pusher with a seven year medical degree anymore than some hood on the street. It's a question of your honesty and the system honestly doesn't work. I'd guess half the people on this board wouldn't be alive right now if it weren't for modern medicine. I certainly wouldn't be. I'd have died of pneumonia at the age of 8. The medical system is not perfect, but it's better than anything that's ever existed. How many lives are saved yearly by the hood on the street? I am certainly not in favor of current policies on recreational drug use. But the idea that these policies are sustained because the conventional drug industry worries about recreational drugs chewing into its market is not supported by either fact or logic. The therapeutic drug market is broken into two categories: prescription and non-prescription. The prescription market is not going to be significantly impacted by legalization of recreational drugs. Doctors are not going to start prescribing crack, smack, and speed. The non-prescription drug market is largely responsive: headache pills, antacids, painkillers, decongestants, etc. Do you honestly think that people will stop buying these because recreational drugs become legal? They won't. They may go out and puff a legal joint when they want to party, but when their heads hurt they will still buy aspirin, and when their guts are riled they'll still suck down alka-seltzer. Again, I don't know where you get this idea that there is some sort of organized acceptance of synthetic drugs vs. organized resistance to natural drugs. Plenty of synthetic drugs are banned or highly regulated, plenty of natural ones are legal. The operative factor in acceptance or rejection is not whether a drug is synthetic or natural, it is therapeutic potential vs. recreational potential. This whole notion that legalization of recreational drugs is only being blocked because legal pushers are afraid that illegal ones will cut into their profits sounds to me like one of these one-line explanations that demagogues love to spout. It sound easy and simple: "yeah, yeah, just follow da money". It's only problem is that it makes no sense at anything beyond a quick glance. As usual, reality is a good deal more complicated.