[DiogenesLamp]

Psychoactive recreational drugs are bad. Keeping them illegal makes them worse, not just for the users, but for society as a whole.

Yeah, except for the fact that history doesn't agree with your theory there. China did it your way, and it collapsed. A small scale experiment in Zurich Switzerland did it your way and also collapsed.

This is what it looked like before they re-criminalized it.

None of the dire things drug warriors predict would happen under legalization were true in the 19th century when the government didn’t prevent trade in or use of marijuana, peyote, cocaine or opiates, includ laudanum (tincture of opium) which was suprisingly popular.

And about this you do not know what you are talking about. You are simply repeating the endless Libertarian drivel on the subject. Drugs were neither widely known or widely available prior to the civil war. The ones that were known were rightly considered medicines and used for medicinal purposes.

During the civil war, there started to be greatly increased demand for Opiates and Cocanoids to be used as pain killers. After the civil war, the nation had 400,000 addicts on both sides. Shortly thereafter Pemberton started marketing his French Wine Coca which was becoming increasingly popular, and later he came out with Coca Cola which gave everyone a nice dose of cocaine in every drink.

The problems with drug addiction were just getting started by the 1890s when Doctors started writing about various addictions.

It is literally a bald faced lie to keep repeating that garbage about the stuff being legal and there were no problems. Yes, there were problems, and they were getting worse with each passing year, but the Drug legalizers simply keep repeating that same crap, and they have now got so many people believing it who ought to know better.

Just what the F*** do you think would have happened had Coca Cola continued to contain cocaine? Do you really think that we wouldn't have had a huge mass of the population addicted to the sh*t?

Un-Freakin-real what some people are willing to believe.

[ConservingFreedom]

they were getting worse with each passing year

You told me there were no good records from that time - so what's your evidence for this claim?

[The_Reader_David]

Of course it was the 1890’s when physicians started writing about addictions, just as the Progressive “promotion of moral improvement” was getting warmed up. The same arguments were made against drink, and proved invalid. And, in fact, the experience with alcohol prohibition shows the social harms created by a prohibition regime.

Can you provide some more recent photos from, say Colorado or Washington? A photo of a park trashed by dope-heads rejoicing at no longer being criminals is about as valid an argument for marijuana prohibition is as Hogarth’s etching “Gin Lane” is an argument alcohol prohibition. Honestly, I know I can find closing-time photos from the bar district in Cardiff, Wales, that make you social-collapse in Zurich picture look literally like a picnic in the park in comparison. (You can, too, just do a Google image search on these search terms: closing time Cardiff drunks.)

[ConservingFreedom]

After the civil war, the nation had 400,000 addicts

Do you have a source for this statement other than the DEA page that also says the addiction rate was LOWER in 1900?