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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mishedlo who wrote (30584)	5/4/2005 2:31:17 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

*OT** OK Grace I defy you to tell me what was accomplished by prohibition. Alcohol use, at the time of prohibition, was woven into the customs and traditions of peoples all over the world. This is one of the reasons that prohibition had such a destructive and counter productive outcome. Somehow, I don't think shooting heroin, smoking crack, cooking up meth shares that time honored tradition and I dare say, a small minority of people would vote in this country to give those drugs the status of legally accepted vice as they have with alcohol and tobacco. I think if you look at the stats you'll see that the socially acceptable and legal addictive drugs produce far greater numbers of addicted people, drugs like nicotine and alcohol. I used to think it wouldn't be possible to produce more addicts than we already have, but you just have to look at the exponential growth of gambling addiction since the adoption of legal numbers games and slot machines across the nation to see that when some vice is legally sanctioned more people will either start or continue an activity than would otherwise. In Baltimore they call the state run numbers game unlegislated tax on the poor. If they want to die in peace without robbing anyone then let them. You assume that someone with an addiction can somehow not have any victims unless they go out and rob. Drug use is almost never a victimless crime primarily because people who use drugs tend to get sloppy about sex and they have children. My remark about people quitting drugs and getting mortgages around the same time has to do with the idea that people tend to act more responsibly when they have something to lose by not acting responsibly. I think to have a rational discussion about de-criminalizing illegal drugs you have to go through the various scenarios and discuss what happens after you do it. Clearly, since we regulate the use of other drugs, the use of addictive drugs would also have to be regulated. Who would produce them and get the profits? Would it be done as alcohol is now, where alcohol is universally available everywhere except in a few oddball dry counties? Would you also include the prescription drugs that people abuse? What does that do to the power of the FDA to protect the drug supply? Who pays for the treatment of the inevitable explosion of addicted people? Would you have people go to schools to demonstrate safe needle use? How early would you start this education? I think you have to really get down to the nitty gritty if you really want to de-criminalize drugs. Maybe you do what they do in Australia, keep heroin illegal but look the other way when it comes to prosecuting users (don't ask, don't tell) and hand out clean needles....sounds familiar.