"I have not had alcohol pushers trying to sell whisky to my kids. "

Perhaps you should open your eyes. It's everywhere... Look at all the new bottled alcoholic beverages aimed directly at our kids. I have three kids and like you, I'm totally against drugs. I don't even like pseudoephedrin or however you spell it. I just don't like seeing drug lords get filthy rich over our failing attempts to control recreational drugs. And that's exactly what's happening. Our drug laws haven't stopped drug abuse. All our drug laws have accomplished is artificially skyrocketting the value of illegal drugs to the profit of those we would least want to profit from anything.
Hanging drug dealers? I'm all for it. But it would never fly. Too many "he just needs a hug" types that think criminals, adulterers, child molesters and such can be rehabilitated. But even at that, would it work? Maybe not. It might just make the price of illegal drugs that much higher bringing about more burglary, muggings, thefts and murders to obtain the money to buy those illegal drugs.
My thoughts are, make drug possesion legal to make drug trade risk free and that would make drugs cheap taking the profit out of it and that in itself would mean less drug manufacturing. Make drug use illegal and the penalties high. Drug testing by parents, schools and employers should be legal and encouraged. Let the ones who are going to do drugs legal or not do them cheaply so they aren't inclined to rob the rest of us blind to buy them. And if they get caught, hang 'em.
Kinda like drag pipes for my Harley. Making drag pipes is legal. Buying drag pipes is legal. But using drag pipes on public roads is illegal. Treating drugs the same way would take all the profit out of it and take the Mercedes away from the drug dealer. The drug user would have to make a conscious decision about breaking the law and ruining his own life.

 

I like this guy...

TO THOSE OF YOU NOT FAMILIAR WITH JOE ARPAIO
HE IS THE MARICOPA ARIZONA COUNTY SHERIFF AND
HE KEEPS GETTING ELECTED OVER AND OVER.

THIS IS ONE OF THE REASONS WHY:

Sheriff Joe Arpaio (in Arizona) who created the "tent city jail":

He has jail meals down to 40 cents a serving and charges the inmates for
them.

He stopped smoking and porno magazines in the jails. Took away their
weights. Cut off all but "G" movies.


He started chain gangs so the inmates could do free work on county and
city projects.

Then he started chain gangs for women so he wouldn't get sued for
discrimination.

He took away cable TV until he found out there was a federal court order
that required cable TV for jails. So he hooked up the cable TV again
only let in the Disney channel and the weather channel.

When asked why the weather channel he replied, so they will know how hot
it's gonna be while they are working on my chain gangs.

He cut off coffee since it has zero nutritional value.

When the inmates complained, he told them, "This isn't the Ritz/Carlton.
If you don't like it, don't come back."

He bought Newt Gingrich's lecture series on videotape that he pipes into
the jails.

When asked by a reporter if he had any lecture series by a Democrat, he
replied that a democratic lecture series might explain why a lot of the
inmates were in his jails in the first place.

More on the Arizona Sheriff:

With temperatures being even hotter than usual in Phoenix (116 degrees
just set a new record), the Associated Press reports: About 2,000 inmates
living in a barbed-wire-surrounded tent encampment at the Maricopa County
Jail have been given permission to strip down to their government-issued
pink boxer shorts.

On Wednesday, hundreds of men wearing boxers were either curled up on
their bunk beds or chatted in the tents, which reached 138 degrees inside
the week before.


Many were also swathed in wet, pink towels as sweat collected on their
chests and dripped down to their pink socks.

"It feels like we are in a furnace," said James Zanzot, an inmate who has
lived in the tents for 1 year. "It's inhumane."

Joe Arpaio, the tough-guy sheriff who created the tent city and long ago
started making his prisoners wear pink, and eat bologna sandwiches, is not
one bit sympathetic! He said Wednesday that he told all of the inmates:
"It's 120 degrees in Iraq and our soldiers are living in tents too, and
they have to wear full battle gear, but they didn't commit any crimes, so
shut your damned mouths!"

Way to go, Sheriff! Maybe if all prisons were like this one there would be
a lot less crime and/or repeat offenders. Criminals should be punished for
their crimes - not live in luxury until it's time for their parole, only
to go out and commit another crime so they can get back in to live on
taxpayers money and enjoy things taxpayers can't afford to have for
themselves.

 

Used to use this in my signature and probably will again: “Legalize Everything and Print More Money!”

People are going to do what they want to do whether you like it or not. Now i'm not talking about sex with minors rape or murder. We are talking about drugs. Nothing more. I have never been so stoned that I couldn’t function but I have been so drunk that I had no idea where I was when I woke up. Alcohol is one of the worst drugs out there. Just remember prohibition didn’t work and we have lost the drug war. There never really was one anyway.

It could be a huge influx of money instead of a huge waste of money. Kind of like gambling. Look at Las Vegas. It is the fastest growing city in the U.S. but in most places gambling is illegal. Doesn't make any sense.

Something else... we have a bunch of "Dry" counties in AR. This is about the DUMBEST thing I have ever heard of. All a "Dry" county does is promote drunk driving.

Here comes the flames

Britt

 

That's how it would make sense... But it doesn't and heasn't ever worked that way.

People who are going to do drugs do drugs... I don't recall anybody I now ever saying "I don't do drugs because it's against the law". Even the anti-drug programs don't tell kids to avoid drugs because "they're against the law". I've been through my share of Health, DARE and a bunch of other drug-resistence programs, and the fact that drugs are against the law is just a moot point. People who decide whether or not to do drugs aren't going to be influenced by the law.

I will doubt that drug use will increase if they are in-lawed; we might know about more drug use, but use itself won't increase. If anything, it will make it more acceptable to find treatment.

The point is that by making drugs legal we can have a whole lot less criminals that we have to deal with. Remember, laws that don't do anything are BAD and the path to totalitarianism.

And the legal age for alchohol should be decreased as well... I know that if college-drinking was more social and took place in public, then there would be way less deaths.

 

...and people who are going to murder are going to murder, and people who are going to rape are going to rape, so what the hey, let's legalize those as well!

I don't buy into the approach of "Well, if we can't STOP it, let's just LEGALIZE it!"

Rusty

 

Not the same thing. Murder unequivocally causes harm to another individual. If I smoke a doobie or two, eat all the Hostess cupcakes in the house, and fall asleep, I'm not doing any harm to anyone else.

The overall percentage of addicts tends to be the same regardless of the legality or illegality of any given addictive substance. There would be no huge jump in drug users or abusers if we legalized any drug you can think of. Crimes related to the drug trade would fall--when was the last time you heard of Pepsi doing a drive-by on Coke headquarters?--and there would be plenty of room in our prisons for violent criminals, who right now keep getting released because mandatory sentencing laws for even the most non-violent of drug offenses keep the prisons overcrowded.

 

Malone testified that he was in a drug-induced haze at the time of the killing and thought he was fighting for his life against a robber. He claimed voices in his head told him to shoot Green

So if drugs were legal, this guy wouldn't have shot the cop??? Drugs are illegal and the legal system needs to be stricter, not more leinient!!

Aaron

 

Shooting a cop falls into the "doing harm to another" clause. Yes, there should be a law against it... Your victim needs justice.

Smoking a doobie (Hmm... Doobies ) and becoming addicted to drugs harms you, but deals no harm to anybody else.

The two arguments against the above statement are (a) smoking a doobie is highly likely to result in loss of your judgement, which makes you more likely to commit a crime and (b) drug use contributes to the decline of the US economy and society as a whole and should therefore be illegal.

In rebuttal to (a) I must say that the majority of people who get high don't commit a crime, and that addicts don't necessarily do so either. And since anti-drug laws obviously don't prevent addicts from developing, we will always have a trickle of crime from addicts. So, anti-drug laws are useless in that respect.
In rebuttal to (b) I must say that people in the US are free to have whatever affect to society and the economy as they want to. Well, there are limits, but one of the "problems" with living in a "free" country are that we can't force people to become productive members of society. If they want to loaf and vege and eat Hostess cupcakes all day, then we have to live with that. (They are probably happier doing that than I am right now, anyways... I envy them in some ways...) And at least if we made drugs legal, then the money they spend won't go to some third-world drug smuggler.


You see, the point of us anti-anti-druggers is that addicts committing violent crime will always exist; anti-drug laws do not prevent that. The weakness of laws are that they only affect those who participate in the society that passes them, and addicts don't exactly care about the rest of our's society. What the laws do cause is an unneccesary abridgement of freedom on those of us who participate in society; such superflous laws are nothing but the stepping stones to totalitarianism.

In short, drug laws do nothing in the world of drug prevention and only serve to outlaw an increasing number of innocent members of society. And give massive amounts of money to drug lords and fill our justice system with poor folks who had a Doobie fall out of their cigarette pack...

 

Alcohol's legal, do you think no one ever gets drunk and shoots someone? The second sentence is exactly my point--there are too many non-violent offenders clogging the courts and crowding the prisons. Get them out of there, and real criminals can do serious time.

 

S-o-o-o-o-o-o if drugs are leagalized,..........
where are the dope-heads going to get the money to BUY the now-legal, Government inspected, Federal, State & Local County taxed, dope?

Do you REALLY think legalizing their crutch will make them all want to put on suits & ties and become wage earning citizens with real paying jobs?

Also, you sitting at home watching Beevis and Gluteus Maximus-head while tokin' a doobie and eating all the munchies in your house is one thing.......
Joe "dope-freak" getting behind the wheel of a car after dropping Acid is a whole 'nuther matter.

Yeah, and you can say, "Well what about drunk drivers?"
So if one class of chronic drug affected "Torpedo Pilots" is bad, let's add several more, and that will make it better?

 

they're doing it anyway. legal or not. it has already been proven that anti-drug laws do nothing to prevent drug use. the people that are going to use it are going too whether you like it or not. we might as well tax the very product that is being used and take the money away from the drug dealers. seems to work just fine in amsterdam.

marijuana is far less a drug than alcohol. when was the last time that you have seen 2 stoners get agressive toward one another? all pot does is take away your ambition. i live next door to a bunch of alcoholics that fight every night. if they were smoking pot it would be a much better place to live.

what could anyone possibly have against marijuana anyway? how could anyone possibly care what someone else does behind closed doors? if they are not hurting anyone, what difference does it make????????????????????

it's people that try to make laws telling me what i can do with my own time in my own house that i pay for that really [Self Edited] me off. they should keep their morals to themselves. i don't impose mine on anyone and shouldn't have to deal with anyone elses.

once again we are talking about DRUGS.... not murder, rape, or all the other crimes out there that cause harm to someone else.

britt

 

Well written T-7.... Couldn't have said it better myself.

 

thank you. i would put that in my sig. but i like it the way it is right now

britt

 

The same way it would have been if drugs were illegal.

Oh, wait- drugs are illegal!


You said it best- laws are useless, and cannot begin to replace morality. Since useless laws are enemies of democracy, we need morality.

I personally believe that people today are just as moral as people have always been. There is no "moral decline" of civilization due to a lack of parental supervision... People have always been this stupid and immoral, and always will. I don't blame the parents, the government or anything else. People will always be people, and there will always be a good number of ones that you don't respect in the slightest. It isn't some modern phenomonon due to a lack of parental supervision.

So in other words, the rate of druggies and drug use will remain a constant, and there's nothing we can do about it. But what we can't do about it is pass superflous laws and waste tons of money.

 

Now back to the original thread------My Mom and Dad raised myself and my two brothers to be good citizens. Mom had a plastic spoon that stung like hell. Dad never had to hit us (ok-mabye once) we were smart enough and respectful enough to realize what was right and wrong. Oh----did I say respect???

That is the problem-most parents don't "teach" respect anymore.

The drug/alcohol thing-I grew up with alcohol being served at family functions and dad had beer at and or after dinner-it was no big deal. We could have a taste if we wanted-it sucked. Fast forward to high school and college-now I canget it/have it-still no big deal, (Yes I got plastered once or twice and still might every now and again)BUT my friends who had parents that said NO IT WAS BAD-went crazy, it was a big deal to them-they had to get plastered all the time, this BAD thing was now available and it consumed them.

While I don't really think legalization is the solution it might take the "notareity" out of the drug use thing???