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...drugs are created to help sick people and to deal with their pain but this stuff needs to be outlawed.

I cannot agree with that.

I have been in law enforcement for nearly 40 years, in one capacity or another.

I have seen the destruction of lives wrought from the illegal use of drugs.

I have also seen (and am personally aware of) the relief afforded genuinely affected people, whose lives, or in some cases, end of life, would have been horrific were it not for these drugs, administered legally and under medical supervision.

I am very much aware of the problem...enforcement is extremely difficult...there are some really, really stupid "knee jerk" laws out there that result in making it harder to enforce the few sane ones that exist.

Making a blanket statement to the effect: "drugs are bad, get rid of all drugs"...is similar to the libs mantra of "guns bad, get rid of all guns".

I am against the absolute availability of guns...as there are some people that just simply do not need a gun, should not handle one, should not be allowed access to one and anyone that argues against that is being very disingenuous and knows damn well that they are.

The same applies to these drugs.

I myself have had to use pain meds...(two total knee replacements, one shoulder reconstruction, broken femur, broken ribs, broken clavicle, broken jaw...and a few more things...not all at once, but over a period of some years), so I am intimately familiar with pain and I know it can be relieved by these drugs.

I also watched my first wife die of cancer, and while she initially refused pain management, she realized that as she transitioned to her inevitable death, she would be happier and so would her children and I, if she were able to interact with us, relatively pain-free...as she died.

But I have absolutely no sympathy for the recreational drug user.

Or the weak-willed idiots that get some Percocet or Norco for their boo-boo, from a doctor that has no idea of what he has wrought, decided they like the little bit of a "high" they got and went on to other stuff.

Nine times out of ten...they are the one's that would steal your kid's bike out of the yard or snatch your grandmothers purse, and they are definitely the one's that blame everyone else for their woes.

We cannot simply outlaw something simply because of abuse from idiots, thugs, weak-willed assholes and just plain stupid damned people.

We've been working on this problem for well over a hundred years...longer, even, when you consider the acceptance of the use of morphine and opium in common household balms and potions...some directed toward infants, for crying out loud.

But we didn't really know how to medically manage the stuff then...and even now, the stigma is such that many doctors use them as a last resort.

One hell of a conundrum...and it ain't going away.

And wholesale banning and outlawing will NOT work.