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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (324435)	9/18/2009 8:44:28 AM
From: alanrs	2 Recommendations Respond to of 793931

"no one ever claimed legalization would solve the drug problem, that's a straw man. Good, we should all remember that." I was thinking about this as I rebuild a bathroom and a few things came to mind. As I see it, the term "drug problem" has come to mean a whole nexus of problems and that this clouds the issue. I define the drug problem as 1) some people enjoy getting high, 2) some portion of the population (3%? Wonder how this compares to the extreme obesity numbers) takes this to extremes, and 3) this has costs to society and the individual. Legalizing, in and of itself, would do little to ameliorate this, except possibly removing some of the 'cool' factor. (Here I'm tempted to build a parallel with tweenkies, contrasting someone who enjoys an occasional twinkie with a 700 pound tweenkie vacuum cleaner.) So we have a drug problem and the solution applied has been to make the activity illegal. This has created ancillary problems, without much evidence that it is an effective solution to the actual problem, which have costs to society and the individual. Legalization will not solve the drug problem, just as illegalization has not solved the drug problem. ARS