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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (1958)	10/22/2005 3:54:18 PM
From: Geoff Altman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

I would treat pot exactly like beer and wine. All the rest I would dispense through clinics, free or at a minimum fee, where there would also be help available for addicts. I'd kill all the drug enforcement programs that are in place and spend it on education and treatment and social services. Basically I'd copy the Netherlands policy since it works. IMO if you make a full list of the pros and cons I think you'll have trouble coming up with much on the con side. Increase in drug education Empower some government agency Increasing drug education to me isn't a con it's actually one of the steps necessary to demystify drugs. Education in schools has done more to reduce the use of tobacco in this country than anything else and the very same thing would work with drugs and alcohol. According to a report in the British Medical Journal in September of 2000, "Cannabis use among Dutch schoolchildren aged 10-18 years has fallen for the first time in 16 years, a national survey of risk behaviour among 10,000 young people has shown." The story notes that according to Trimbos, the Netherlands Institute for Mental Health and Addiction ( www.trimbos.nl ), "about one in five young people had used cannabis at some point in their lives but less than a tenth had used it in the previous four weeks ("current users")." As far as empowering some gov't agency, my word, that's already happened in the war on drugs, the power and money that the DEA has is mind boggling and verging on being unconstitutional. As far as having more people in a mind altered state..... I really don't think you'd find that either. Doctors have had access to drugs but does the AMA say we've got a problem there? I'll admit that I like to smoke pot on occasion but that doesn't mean that I'm going to work on high voltage electronics stoned...... Peter, I could ramble on about this forever, in the end though you're going to find that the pro list is gigantic and the con list is miniscule. drugwarfacts.org One more thing now that I think of it. Did you know that there's a shortage of opiate type pain killers in Africa? This is so thanks to our war on drugs. In the long run we're probably going to kill everything good that we've done in Afghanistan since we've been destroying the poppy industry there and poppies, being more or less a weed, is one of the few plants that will grow in that harsh environment. Sorry, I'm starting to feel like I'm ranting. Truth is, I've been all for the war on drugs, being that it played well with my (small) reactionary side, until just recently when I made an effort to educate myself about it. You know what triggered my curiosity? Watching a few of the Drug Czars infomercials. One in particular got my attention, the one that says, in short, you buy a joint and you're supporting terrorism. In reality, it's the war on drugs that's doing that. Peter, bottom line is if you look at the facts prohibition never has made sense and only damages our society in ways easy to see and is causing untold damage by destabilizing gov'ts world wide.