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To: Smokin' Joe
Look, I like antibiotics, but the use of those is largely controlled, unless you are taking the ones for your pet. I don't particularly see people looking to loot my possessions or rob me or my wife to get their next penicillin fix. Not too many people out there running tetracycline houses. No street gangs fighting over turf to sell cipro. No one engaging in prostitution to get that levaquin high. But there are a few drugs which have the distinct honor of being tied to extensive social problems, to increased crime, wrecked homes and lives, and which do more damage to our culture, society, economy, and nation than can possibly be outweighed by someone's need for a buzz.

Do you see any gangland murders and territorial wars over the distribution of alcohol? Oh, that's right: Prohibition was recognized to be a failed experiment, and summarily revoked. And if tobacco were suddenly declared a Schedule I narcotic, you can bet that a lively trade in illegal cigarettes would soon be claiming hundreds of lives per year.

[...] drugs which have the distinct honor of being tied [...] Yes, those drugs tied to extensive social problems are the ones which have been arbitrarily made illegal, making a) it profitable for organized crime to get involved; b) raising prices; c) thus "forcing" users into criminality to fund their addiction; d) thus justifying a "war on (some) drugs;" etc.

Regards,

66 posted on 05/12/2014 9:09:12 AM PDT by alexander_busek (Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.)
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To: alexander_busek
The drugs were around before the laws. The laws were passed because of the damaging effects of the drugs, not "arbitrarily". That the systematic misplaced zeal in enforcing those laws has seriously damaged the Constitutional rights of the rest of us is just another side effect of the drugs.

Make all the arguments you want. You won't convince me that complete legalization of addictive substances is a good thing. I have seen the effects of those substances on people I love, and that has had effects on my own life as well, even though I wasn't using the drugs.

If you haven't seen someone you love lose their youth and beauty and wreck their life despite trying to get them to stop, if you haven't picked up the pieces from the collateral damage of their addiction, you are just spewing theory and bullshit, anyway, or you are seriously in denial about the destruction that these substances cause on a very personal level.

Multiply those effects by hundreds of people and towns start rotting from the inside, by millions, a nation does.

Maybe you just don't want to see that for personal reasons, maybe you just haven't looked.

78 posted on 05/12/2014 2:46:33 PM PDT by Smokin' Joe (How often God must weep at humans' folly. Stand fast. God knows what He is doing.)
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