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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (5359)	12/8/2006 2:51:39 PM
From: Dan B.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10087

Cocaine and other drugs should be legalized. But there is no doubt that the need to acquire from current sources to score pot has detrimental effects versus what would be the case were it legal. Re: "kids would still seek to get it just as they do now seek both weed and alcohol and etc." Yup. Re: "Also, I think the drug itself (not just the people they buy it from) is harmful for young people." Seems likely so, as is true with alcohol, if not necessarily in a truly devastating way for either. Nice to solve half the problem though, through legalization. Hell, the smartest kid in my class was a daily weed user half of his Jr. year and all of his senior year. Heck, he liked to drop LSD on weekends too. In college, he began using LSD several times per week, and smoked weed like it was going out of style morning, noon, & night. He piled on the courses, and became the quickest to ever finish the med. program at his college (2.5 years), at which point he was ready for internship. He went on to become a specialist surgeon (he said there was more money in it, 'natch). Perhaps you wouldn't like to go to him, but in fact, you may have for all I know. Did I mention he drank quite a lot through all of this? Re: "Legalized, there would still be vast profits in drugs, just as there is in cigarettes and alcohol." Your use of the word "vast" fails to note the vast difference that would exist between profits available while illegal and the lesser profits to be had when legal. Re: "With drugs legalized, the greatest peer push as we know it today, will die. Why?" Because the current supply chain would be broken. Kids get alcohol now and absolutely would get weed too, as you've correctly presumed. Re: "Peers push cigarettes and alcohol to one another too. Legalization wouldn't change that." Legalization would change the nature of weed pushing greatly. The difference can be seen as we note that we don't find pushers hanging with H.S. kids in order to make profits selling alcohol or cigarettes. We DO find pushers playing that role for the profits that can be had selling pot, and they actively encourage it's use. This would end. Kids get alcohol, and what we find is young adults, often as not reluctantly, acquiring alcohol for kids who've been begging for it, at cost. Today, kids themselves find great profit available by selling weed, and kids themselves actively encourage other kids, often solely to make a market for themselves. Even if you haven't lived to see your best friend become a pot dealer in H.S. and personally become the root force behind probably 200 new users in a class of 300, or seen non-using H.S. kids making a market for themselves as I have, you might still understand what is really going on thanks to the illegality of pot, and see that a large positive change would come with legalization. With legalization, the bulk of the profit potential and thus motive to push to kids which currently exists, would be gone overnight. Unlike today, when legalized, the suppliers of weed to kids simply won't be getting much for themselves to show for it. This fact will make a huge difference. Just to round this out, let me add the following. Yes, weed would be far cheaper, and likely only legally available to those over 18. The relative cheapness itself is a large part of what would remove the profit motive for active pushers, just as it did with alcohol when it was relegalized. Illegal alcohol spawned Al Capone and the like, for heavens sake. Look at our inner cities today and see if you don't see something similar going on, thanks to the illegal status of drugs. Aside from the hype of the weed dealer, and the shared laughs to lock that hype in, weed is not as easily enjoyed as alcohol at all, and it is simply not terribly well liked by tons of people who've learned to drink just the same. Yes, legalizing pot would likely lessen it's use. Dan B.