Lieberman actually qualified his “no” answer with an apology. Dean, Edwards and Kerry just came out and said they did without qualifying that they “didn’t inhale”. 10 years ago, this would have been big news.
That so rules.
Damn, I’m starving.
I’ve never done drugs in my life, other than by prescription, but I still think the War on Drugs is stupid. Don’t we ever learn from the past? Just look at how great the Prohibition went over. The heyday of the mafia, smuggling galore, etc. Yeah, making alcohol legal again just substituted another set of problems (drunk driving, perhaps more spousal abuse), but it really took the wind out of the sails of suppliers, cost the taxpayer less, and wasn’t the violence, the overall death toll, reduced?
Now, it seems like the prisons are filling up with drug users, and they’re giving murders early parole to make room. Of course law enforcement and the legal system, both really big lobbies, will -always- be behind the War on Drugs, because it’s a big part of their industry.
What do y’all think?
I definitely think pot should be legalized, not sure about harder stuff though. SOmething about heroin legal, no matter how regulated, seems a little too much.
Yeah I know what you mean. There are all sorts of nasties out there… PCP, Heroin, crack, whatever.
But if mind-altering drugs were legal, with some sort of loosened FDA regulations, we could have safer LSD, maybe cognitive booster drugs, memory enhancers, I dunno, all sorts of designer drugs.
Recreational drugs could be a huge boon to the biotech industry.
How about doing what we did in ending Prohibition, which is to kick the various questions of legality back to the individual states? In turn, some of them kicked it back to counties and/or towns. There are still dry areas in the US, and if it really bugs people, they move somewhere else.
If you gave states control over which drugs were legal, some would probably legalize marijuana, while crack would probably not get legalized anywhere. But if it did - say, if California let individual cities decide, and San Francisco decided to open the doors wide - people in the rest of the country would probably be happy to see their addicts gradually migrate away.
The destructiveness of many drugs doesn’t change the fact that the solution that’s been adopted and tried out for about a century has produced more ill to society than just letting states decide what level of freaky drug crap they’re willing to put up with.