[The Beast1]

I was enjoying the spirited debate we were having in the Trump thread. Here is its own thread:

Drugs such as alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana should not be scheduled. Psychedelics should be allowed in special shops that babysit you for the duration of the trip.

While I think all drugs should be allowed for us, i'm willing to compromise and leave certain ones off of the table.

Marijuana, shrooms, and LSD aren't harmful drugs. The only risks are panic attacks and which can be mitigated with comforting words and hot coco.

[MMX2010]

If you've read AntiFragile by N. N. Taleb, you know the difference between a natural plant that has been used by humans for thousands of years, and a synthetic chemical that has only been used by humans for less than two centuries.. The former is probably safe, the latter is probably not.

Furthermore, you never rebutted what I said earlier - that the people shop advocate drug use aren't responsible nor wealthy enough to say, "If this drug fucks me up, or causes me to fuck up someone or something else, then I'll be 100.0% fucks responsible."

So if you're not responsible, then the community is responsible. And if the community is responsible, then their perspective should overrule yours.

[Matrixdude]

I was reading your arguments in the Trump thread. Can't seem to make up my mind on this topic yet. Glad you made a thread about it, although it doesn't really concern me since I stay on that sober life.

The freedom-loving libertarian* in me says fuck it, let adults make responsible decisions in to what they put in their bodies.

But the nationalist-conservative in me says drugs are degenerative to society as a whole. People become addicts, families fall apart, communities suffer; that shit happens today with alcoholics - much less hard drugs.

So there should be a middle ground, but it would be extremely arbitrary. Like decriminalize non-addictive substances like marijuana, shrooms, LSD. Keep harmful, addictive, heroin-tier drugs illegal.

[Ghost Tiger]

Guess it's my job to leave this here too then.

Theodore Dalrymple Wrote:

Don’t Legalize Drugs

Advocates have almost convinced Americans that legalization will remove most of the evil that drugs inflict on society. Don’t believe them.

Theodore Dalrymple
Spring 1997

There is a progression in the minds of men: first the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and then it becomes an orthodoxy whose truth seems so obvious that no one remembers that anyone ever thought differently. This is just what is happening with the idea of legalizing drugs: it has reached the stage when millions of thinking men are agreed that allowing people to take whatever they like is the obvious, indeed only, solution to the social problems that arise from the consumption of drugs.

Man’s desire to take mind-altering substances is as old as society itself—as are attempts to regulate their consumption. If intoxication in one form or another is inevitable, then so is customary or legal restraint upon that intoxication. But no society until our own has had to contend with the ready availability of so many different mind-altering drugs, combined with a citizenry jealous of its right to pursue its own pleasures in its own way.

The arguments in favor of legalizing the use of all narcotic and stimulant drugs are twofold: philosophical and pragmatic. Neither argument is negligible, but both are mistaken, I believe, and both miss the point.

The philosophic argument is that, in a free society, adults should be permitted to do whatever they please, always provided that they are prepared to take the consequences of their own choices and that they cause no direct harm to others. The locus classicus for this point of view is John Stuart Mill’s famous essay On Liberty: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of the community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others,” Mill wrote. “His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.” This radical individualism allows society no part whatever in shaping, determining, or enforcing a moral code: in short, we have nothing in common but our contractual agreement not to interfere with one another as we go about seeking our private pleasures.

In practice, of course, it is exceedingly difficult to make people take all the consequences of their own actions—as they must, if Mill’s great principle is to serve as a philosophical guide to policy. Addiction to, or regular use of, most currently prohibited drugs cannot affect only the person who takes them—and not his spouse, children, neighbors, or employers. No man, except possibly a hermit, is an island; and so it is virtually impossible for Mill’s principle to apply to any human action whatever, let alone shooting up heroin or smoking crack. Such a principle is virtually useless in determining what should or should not be permitted.

Perhaps we ought not be too harsh on Mill’s principle: it’s not clear that anyone has ever thought of a better one. But that is precisely the point. Human affairs cannot be decided by an appeal to an infallible rule, expressible in a few words, whose simple application can decide all cases, including whether drugs should be freely available to the entire adult population. Philosophical fundamentalism is not preferable to the religious variety; and because the desiderata of human life are many, and often in conflict with one another, mere philosophical inconsistency in policy—such as permitting the consumption of alcohol while outlawing cocaine—is not a sufficient argument against that policy. We all value freedom, and we all value order; sometimes we sacrifice freedom for order, and sometimes order for freedom. But once a prohibition has been removed, it is hard to restore, even when the newfound freedom proves to have been ill-conceived and socially disastrous.

Even Mill came to see the limitations of his own principle as a guide for policy and to deny that all pleasures were of equal significance for human existence. It was better, he said, to be Socrates discontented than a fool satisfied. Mill acknowledged that some goals were intrinsically worthier of pursuit than others.

This being the case, not all freedoms are equal, and neither are all limitations of freedom: some are serious and some trivial. The freedom we cherish—or should cherish—is not merely that of satisfying our appetites, whatever they happen to be. We are not Dickensian Harold Skimpoles, exclaiming in protest that “Even the butterflies are free!” We are not children who chafe at restrictions because they are restrictions. And we even recognize the apparent paradox that some limitations to our freedoms have the consequence of making us freer overall. The freest man is not the one who slavishly follows his appetites and desires throughout his life—as all too many of my patients have discovered to their cost.

We are prepared to accept limitations to our freedoms for many reasons, not just that of public order. Take an extreme hypothetical case: public exhibitions of necrophilia are quite rightly not permitted, though on Mill’s principle they should be. A corpse has no interests and cannot be harmed, because it is no longer a person; and no member of the public is harmed if he has agreed to attend such an exhibition.

Our resolve to prohibit such exhibitions would not be altered if we discovered that millions of people wished to attend them or even if we discovered that millions already were attending them illicitly. Our objection is not based upon pragmatic considerations or upon a head count: it is based upon the wrongness of the would-be exhibitions themselves. The fact that the prohibition represents a genuine restriction of our freedom is of no account.

It might be argued that the freedom to choose among a variety of intoxicating substances is a much more important freedom and that millions of people have derived innocent fun from taking stimulants and narcotics. But the consumption of drugs has the effect of reducing men’s freedom by circumscribing the range of their interests. It impairs their ability to pursue more important human aims, such as raising a family and fulfilling civic obligations. Very often it impairs their ability to pursue gainful employment and promotes parasitism. Moreover, far from being expanders of consciousness, most drugs severely limit it. One of the most striking characteristics of drug takers is their intense and tedious self-absorption; and their journeys into inner space are generally forays into inner vacuums. Drug taking is a lazy man’s way of pursuing happiness and wisdom, and the shortcut turns out to be the deadest of dead ends. We lose remarkably little by not being permitted to take drugs.

The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one’s whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved. And when such a narrowly conceived freedom is made the touchstone of public policy, a dissolution of society is bound to follow. No culture that makes publicly sanctioned self-indulgence its highest good can long survive: a radical egotism is bound to ensue, in which any limitations upon personal behavior are experienced as infringements of basic rights. Distinctions between the important and the trivial, between the freedom to criticize received ideas and the freedom to take LSD, are precisely the standards that keep societies from barbarism.

So the legalization of drugs cannot be supported by philosophical principle. But if the pragmatic argument in favor of legalization were strong enough, it might overwhelm other objections. It is upon this argument that proponents of legalization rest the larger part of their case.

The argument is that the overwhelming majority of the harm done to society by the consumption of currently illicit drugs is caused not by their pharmacological properties but by their prohibition and the resultant criminal activity that prohibition always calls into being. Simple reflection tells us that a supply invariably grows up to meet a demand; and when the demand is widespread, suppression is useless. Indeed, it is harmful, since—by raising the price of the commodity in question—it raises the profits of middlemen, which gives them an even more powerful incentive to stimulate demand further. The vast profits to be made from cocaine and heroin—which, were it not for their illegality, would be cheap and easily affordable even by the poorest in affluent societies—exert a deeply corrupting effect on producers, distributors, consumers, and law enforcers alike. Besides, it is well known that illegality in itself has attractions for youth already inclined to disaffection. Even many of the harmful physical effects of illicit drugs stem from their illegal status: for example, fluctuations in the purity of heroin bought on the street are responsible for many of the deaths by overdose. If the sale and consumption of such drugs were legalized, consumers would know how much they were taking and thus avoid overdoses.

Moreover, since society already permits the use of some mind-altering substances known to be both addictive and harmful, such as alcohol and nicotine, in prohibiting others it appears hypocritical, arbitrary, and dictatorial. Its hypocrisy, as well as its patent failure to enforce its prohibitions successfully, leads inevitably to a decline in respect for the law as a whole. Thus things fall apart, and the center cannot hold.

It stands to reason, therefore, that all these problems would be resolved at a stroke if everyone were permitted to smoke, swallow, or inject anything he chose. The corruption of the police, the luring of children of 11 and 12 into illegal activities, the making of such vast sums of money by drug dealing that legitimate work seems pointless and silly by comparison, and the turf wars that make poor neighborhoods so exceedingly violent and dangerous, would all cease at once were drug taking to be decriminalized and the supply regulated in the same way as alcohol.

But a certain modesty in the face of an inherently unknowable future is surely advisable. That is why prudence is a political virtue: what stands to reason should happen does not necessarily happen in practice. As Goethe said, all theory (even of the monetarist or free-market variety) is gray, but green springs the golden tree of life. If drugs were legalized, I suspect that the golden tree of life might spring some unpleasant surprises.

It is of course true, but only trivially so, that the present illegality of drugs is the cause of the criminality surrounding their distribution. Likewise, it is the illegality of stealing cars that creates car thieves. In fact, the ultimate cause of all criminality is law. As far as I am aware, no one has ever suggested that law should therefore be abandoned. Moreover, the impossibility of winning the “war” against theft, burglary, robbery, and fraud has never been used as an argument that these categories of crime should be abandoned. And so long as the demand for material goods outstrips supply, people will be tempted to commit criminal acts against the owners of property. This is not an argument, in my view, against private property or in favor of the common ownership of all goods. It does suggest, however, that we shall need a police force for a long time to come.

In any case, there are reasons to doubt whether the crime rate would fall quite as dramatically as advocates of legalization have suggested. Amsterdam, where access to drugs is relatively unproblematic, is among the most violent and squalid cities in Europe. The idea behind crime—of getting rich, or at least richer, quickly and without much effort—is unlikely to disappear once drugs are freely available to all who want them. And it may be that officially sanctioned antisocial behavior—the official lifting of taboos—breeds yet more antisocial behavior, as the “broken windows” theory would suggest.

Having met large numbers of drug dealers in prison, I doubt that they would return to respectable life if the principal article of their commerce were to be legalized. Far from evincing a desire to be reincorporated into the world of regular work, they express a deep contempt for it and regard those who accept the bargain of a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay as cowards and fools. A life of crime has its attractions for many who would otherwise lead a mundane existence. So long as there is the possibility of a lucrative racket or illegal traffic, such people will find it and extend its scope. Therefore, since even legalizers would hesitate to allow children to take drugs, decriminalization might easily result in dealers turning their attentions to younger and younger children, who—in the permissive atmosphere that even now prevails—have already been inducted into the drug subculture in alarmingly high numbers.

Those who do not deal in drugs but commit crimes to fund their consumption of them are, of course, more numerous than large-scale dealers. And it is true that once opiate addicts, for example, enter a treatment program, which often includes maintenance doses of methadone, the rate at which they commit crimes falls markedly. The drug clinic in my hospital claims an 80 percent reduction in criminal convictions among heroin addicts once they have been stabilized on methadone.

This is impressive, but it is not certain that the results should be generalized. First, the patients are self-selected: they have some motivation to change, otherwise they would not have attended the clinic in the first place. Only a minority of addicts attend, and therefore it is not safe to conclude that, if other addicts were to receive methadone, their criminal activity would similarly diminish.

Second, a decline in convictions is not necessarily the same as a decline in criminal acts. If methadone stabilizes an addict’s life, he may become a more efficient, harder-to-catch criminal. Moreover, when the police in our city do catch an addict, they are less likely to prosecute him if he can prove that he is undergoing anything remotely resembling psychiatric treatment. They return him directly to his doctor. Having once had a psychiatric consultation is an all-purpose alibi for a robber or a burglar; the police, who do not want to fill in the 40-plus forms it now takes to charge anyone with anything in England, consider a single contact with a psychiatrist sufficient to deprive anyone of legal responsibility for crime forever.

Third, the rate of criminal activity among those drug addicts who receive methadone from the clinic, though reduced, remains very high. The deputy director of the clinic estimates that the number of criminal acts committed by his average patient (as judged by self-report) was 250 per year before entering treatment and 50 afterward. It may well be that the real difference is considerably less than this, because the patients have an incentive to exaggerate it to secure the continuation of their methadone. But clearly, opiate addicts who receive their drugs legally and free of charge continue to commit large numbers of crimes. In my clinics in prison, I see numerous prisoners who were on methadone when they committed the crime for which they are incarcerated.

Why do addicts given their drug free of charge continue to commit crimes? Some addicts, of course, continue to take drugs other than those prescribed and have to fund their consumption of them. So long as any restriction whatever regulates the consumption of drugs, many addicts will seek them illicitly, regardless of what they receive legally. In addition, the drugs themselves exert a long-term effect on a person’s ability to earn a living and severely limit rather than expand his horizons and mental repertoire. They sap the will or the ability of an addict to make long-term plans. While drugs are the focus of an addict’s life, they are not all he needs to live, and many addicts thus continue to procure the rest of what they need by criminal means.

For the proposed legalization of drugs to have its much vaunted beneficial effect on the rate of criminality, such drugs would have to be both cheap and readily available. The legalizers assume that there is a natural limit to the demand for these drugs, and that if their consumption were legalized, the demand would not increase substantially. Those psychologically unstable persons currently taking drugs would continue to do so, with the necessity to commit crimes removed, while psychologically stabler people (such as you and I and our children) would not be enticed to take drugs by their new legal status and cheapness. But price and availability, I need hardly say, exert a profound effect on consumption: the cheaper alcohol becomes, for example, the more of it is consumed, at least within quite wide limits.

I have personal experience of this effect. I once worked as a doctor on a British government aid project to Africa. We were building a road through remote African bush. The contract stipulated that the construction company could import, free of all taxes, alcoholic drinks from the United Kingdom. These drinks the company then sold to its British workers at cost, in the local currency at the official exchange rate, which was approximately one-sixth the black-market rate. A liter bottle of gin thus cost less than a dollar and could be sold on the open market for almost ten dollars. So it was theoretically possible to remain dead drunk for several years for an initial outlay of less than a dollar.

Of course, the necessity to go to work somewhat limited the workers’ consumption of alcohol. Nevertheless, drunkenness among them far outstripped anything I have ever seen, before or since. I discovered that, when alcohol is effectively free of charge, a fifth of British construction workers will regularly go to bed so drunk that they are incontinent both of urine and feces. I remember one man who very rarely got as far as his bed at night: he fell asleep in the lavatory, where he was usually found the next morning. Half the men shook in the mornings and resorted to the hair of the dog to steady their hands before they drove their bulldozers and other heavy machines (which they frequently wrecked, at enormous expense to the British taxpayer); hangovers were universal. The men were either drunk or hung over for months on end.

Sure, construction workers are notoriously liable to drink heavily, but in these circumstances even formerly moderate drinkers turned alcoholic and eventually suffered from delirium tremens. The heavy drinking occurred not because of the isolation of the African bush: not only did the company provide sports facilities for its workers, but there were many other ways to occupy oneself there. Other groups of workers in the bush whom I visited, who did not have the same rights of importation of alcoholic drink but had to purchase it at normal prices, were not nearly as drunk. And when the company asked its workers what it could do to improve their conditions, they unanimously asked for a further reduction in the price of alcohol, because they could think of nothing else to ask for.

The conclusion was inescapable: that a susceptible population had responded to the low price of alcohol, and the lack of other effective restraints upon its consumption, by drinking destructively large quantities of it. The health of many men suffered as a consequence, as did their capacity for work; and they gained a well-deserved local reputation for reprehensible, violent, antisocial behavior.
It is therefore perfectly possible that the demand for drugs, including opiates, would rise dramatically were their price to fall and their availability to increase. And if it is true that the consumption of these drugs in itself predisposes to criminal behavior (as data from our clinic suggest), it is also possible that the effect on the rate of criminality of this rise in consumption would swamp the decrease that resulted from decriminalization. We would have just as much crime in aggregate as before, but many more addicts.

The intermediate position on drug legalization, such as that espoused by Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith Center, a drug policy research institute sponsored by financier George Soros, is emphatically not the answer to drug-related crime. This view holds that it should be easy for addicts to receive opiate drugs from doctors, either free or at cost, and that they should receive them in municipal injecting rooms, such as now exist in Zurich. But just look at Liverpool, where 2,000 people of a population of 600,000 receive official prescriptions for methadone: this once proud and prosperous city is still the world capital of drug-motivated burglary, according to the police and independent researchers.

Of course, many addicts in Liverpool are not yet on methadone, because the clinics are insufficient in number to deal with the demand. If the city expended more money on clinics, perhaps the number of addicts in treatment could be increased five- or tenfold. But would that solve the problem of burglary in Liverpool? No, because the profits to be made from selling illicit opiates would still be large: dealers would therefore make efforts to expand into parts of the population hitherto relatively untouched, in order to protect their profits. The new addicts would still burgle to feed their habits. Yet more clinics dispensing yet more methadone would then be needed. In fact Britain, which has had a relatively liberal approach to the prescribing of opiate drugs to addicts since 1928 (I myself have prescribed heroin to addicts), has seen an explosive increase in addiction to opiates and all the evils associated with it since the 1960s, despite that liberal policy. A few hundred have become more than a hundred thousand.

At the heart of Nadelmann’s position, then, is an evasion. The legal and liberal provision of drugs for people who are already addicted to them will not reduce the economic benefits to dealers of pushing these drugs, at least until the entire susceptible population is addicted and in a treatment program. So long as there are addicts who have to resort to the black market for their drugs, there will be drug-associated crime. Nadelmann assumes that the number of potential addicts wouldn’t soar under considerably more liberal drug laws. I can’t muster such Panglossian optimism.

The problem of reducing the amount of crime committed by individual addicts is emphatically not the same as the problem of reducing the amount of crime committed by addicts as a whole. I can illustrate what I mean by an analogy: it is often claimed that prison does not work because many prisoners are recidivists who, by definition, failed to be deterred from further wrongdoing by their last prison sentence. But does any sensible person believe that the abolition of prisons in their entirety would not reduce the numbers of the law-abiding? The murder rate in New York and the rate of drunken driving in Britain have not been reduced by a sudden upsurge in the love of humanity, but by the effective threat of punishment. An institution such as prison can work for society even if it does not work for an individual.

The situation could be very much worse than I have suggested hitherto, however, if we legalized the consumption of drugs other than opiates. So far, I have considered only opiates, which exert a generally tranquilizing effect. If opiate addicts commit crimes even when they receive their drugs free of charge, it is because they are unable to meet their other needs any other way; but there are, unfortunately, drugs whose consumption directly leads to violence because of their psychopharmacological properties and not merely because of the criminality associated with their distribution. Stimulant drugs such as crack cocaine provoke paranoia, increase aggression, and promote violence. Much of this violence takes place in the home, as the relatives of crack takers will testify. It is something I know from personal acquaintance by working in the emergency room and in the wards of our hospital. Only someone who has not been assaulted by drug takers rendered psychotic by their drug could view with equanimity the prospect of the further spread of the abuse of stimulants.

And no one should underestimate the possibility that the use of stimulant drugs could spread very much wider, and become far more general, than it is now, if restraints on their use were relaxed. The importation of the mildly stimulant khat is legal in Britain, and a large proportion of the community of Somali refugees there devotes its entire life to chewing the leaves that contain the stimulant, miring these refugees in far worse poverty than they would otherwise experience. The reason that the khat habit has not spread to the rest of the population is that it takes an entire day’s chewing of disgustingly bitter leaves to gain the comparatively mild pharmacological effect. The point is, however, that once the use of a stimulant becomes culturally acceptable and normal, it can easily become so general as to exert devastating social effects. And the kinds of stimulants on offer in Western cities—cocaine, crack, amphetamines—are vastly more attractive than khat.

In claiming that prohibition, not the drugs themselves, is the problem, Nadelmann and many others—even policemen—have said that “the war on drugs is lost.” But to demand a yes or no answer to the question “Is the war against drugs being won?” is like demanding a yes or no answer to the question “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” Never can an unimaginative and fundamentally stupid metaphor have exerted a more baleful effect upon proper thought.

Let us ask whether medicine is winning the war against death. The answer is obviously no, it isn’t winning: the one fundamental rule of human existence remains, unfortunately, one man one death. And this is despite the fact that 14 percent of the gross domestic product of the United States (to say nothing of the efforts of other countries) goes into the fight against death. Was ever a war more expensively lost? Let us then abolish medical schools, hospitals, and departments of public health. If every man has to die, it doesn’t matter very much when he does so.

If the war against drugs is lost, then so are the wars against theft, speeding, incest, fraud, rape, murder, arson, and illegal parking. Few, if any, such wars are winnable. So let us all do anything we choose.

Even the legalizers’ argument that permitting the purchase and use of drugs as freely as Milton Friedman suggests will necessarily result in less governmental and other official interference in our lives doesn’t stand up. To the contrary, if the use of narcotics and stimulants were to become virtually universal, as is by no means impossible, the number of situations in which compulsory checks upon people would have to be carried out, for reasons of public safety, would increase enormously. Pharmacies, banks, schools, hospitals—indeed, all organizations dealing with the public—might feel obliged to check regularly and randomly on the drug consumption of their employees. The general use of such drugs would increase the locus standi of innumerable agencies, public and private, to interfere in our lives; and freedom from interference, far from having increased, would have drastically shrunk.

The present situation is bad, undoubtedly; but few are the situations so bad that they cannot be made worse by a wrong policy decision.

The extreme intellectual elegance of the proposal to legalize the distribution and consumption of drugs, touted as the solution to so many problems at once (AIDS, crime, overcrowding in the prisons, and even the attractiveness of drugs to foolish young people) should give rise to skepticism. Social problems are not usually like that. Analogies with the Prohibition era, often drawn by those who would legalize drugs, are false and inexact: it is one thing to attempt to ban a substance that has been in customary use for centuries by at least nine-tenths of the adult population, and quite another to retain a ban on substances that are still not in customary use, in an attempt to ensure that they never do become customary. Surely we have already slid down enough slippery slopes in the last 30 years without looking for more such slopes to slide down.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/don%E2%...11758.html

I also want to repeat the following:

(09-04-2016 03:44 PM)MMX2010 Wrote:  

Phoenix,

It's disingenuous to say that a practice should be permitted to the masses, specifically because a few famous people (constituting less than 1% of the population) were able to do so while being famous.

I'm long over the fact that his culture maligns excellence in order to make mediocre and marginal people feel better. But legalizing drugs sends the message that not even normal functioning is worth defending.

This. For every 1 Arnold Schwarzenegger style drug user there's more than a hundred addicts getting processed in prison by psychiatrists like Theodore Dalrymple.

Sure the prohibition of alcohol was a bad idea. But one should note that it was a bad idea implemented after second wave feminism broke loose and men made the horrible historical mistake of sending women to the voting booths. Prohibition was a bad idea because we had accepted alcohol as a part of our culture, and letting some snotty puritanical broads tell us whether or not we could have a drink was not something our grandfathers were willing to do (I know mine wasn't). Same with cigarettes and other tobacco products, which were and still are virtually promoted by the military to soldiers in the field (my grandfather learned to smoke a pipe in the Royal Canadian Air Force during WWII hunting submarines).

Cocaine and heroin and meth and all the rest have NOT been accepted as a part of our culture, so let's not accept them by legalizing them. I can cede ground under protest over weed. I'm a wretched Canadian after all and if you thought that was a maple leaf on our flag, you are sorely mistaken. More money comes into the Canadian economy via the exporting of "B.C. Bud" marijuana than any other product, including Alberta oil. So I'm not exactly standing on moral high ground so to speak. But recent studies have indicated that the THC levels in indoor-grown weed are vastly higher than the outdoor-grown variety, and that this higher-level-THC stuff is actually more dangerous because of it. We are seeing weed overdose victims in emergency rooms now because of this change. But weed, like alcohol and nicotine is a genie that's already out of the bottle culturally, particularly here in the great white north. It's actually pretty shitty that Troolander has dragged his ass on legalization here, and it is upsetting a lot of cops. The cops don't know what to with the people they catch with weed nowadays because they just defiantly declare that Troolander is just going to legalize it soon anyway, so why you trippin' pig? Weed is virtually legal here now, so there's no use fighting over it.

But the real killer is heroin, and for very sinister reasons that Dalrymple makes clear in his great book, "Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy".

https://www.amazon.ca/Romancing-Opiates-...1594032254

As a prison psychiatrist, Dalrymple always refused to prescribe methadone to his prison patients, regardless of how much of a fuss they made. As Dalrymple explains, there actually are no severe withdrawal symptoms when addicts withdraw from heroin. They just get really grumpy for a few days and then move on with their lives. The withdrawal symptoms you see in Hollywood movies are actually modeled after the delirium tremens, or "DT's" that alcoholics suffer when withdrawing. It is a myth that heroin addicts suffer such symptoms, and therefore it's true that nobody needs methadone. But that is a dangerous truth to tell, which is one reason why Dalrymple wrote under a pseudonym. Because if the addicts don't need methadone, what in the hell is going on with all these doctors prescribing it? It couldn't be a profit motive, could it? It couldn't be that Soros has money invested in pharmaceuticals now, could it?

[Laner]

I live in the thick of the worst drug addicted neighborhood in Canada. Maybe even North America.

Why?

Lax drug laws, subsidized drugs/housing/food. No incentive to try, everything is taken care of for them. Now Fentanyl is killing people here everyday, and instead of working to take it off the street, they just have places where you can test it before you bump it. This type of access and openness is a magnate for every degenerate in the country. And yes, most drug addicts are degenerates.

I am very much on both sides of the debate. For most people, shit like weed is a non issue. But for a small portion there is a big issue. In my mind, let em ride and suffer the consequences. Trying to protect a small percentage of society that smokes weed all day is not important enough to risk all the time, money and prisons to keep it illegal.

Same with psychedelics. They should be able to be bought in a specialty store in 'microdose' capsules with fairly straight instructions (4 at first, 2 more after 2 hours, etc). Where people get fucked is when they take one hit, and its a monster.

Coke is a special little segment too. For most people, its a non issue. But then for others, look the fuck out. Women need to be especially wary of blow, as it seems to trigger the #YOLO part of their brain. Suddenly they "feel like they look amazing" and are ready to do anything to maintain that feeling.

Opiates should be illegal. They are just too unpredictable and addictive. Like truly addictive. I tried heroin a couple times and its scary how good it feels. Not just physical, but mental too. The words "every junkies like a setting sun" is spot on. And fentanyl, after my cousin died from it two Christmases ago, I tried a couple bumps. Like 4 grains of salt big. It knocked me on my ass, I had a cigarette and puked. I fought to stay grounded, as my body was already telling me to hang on.

Drugs are not an easy one. Especially when so many people are not meant for this earth. There are so many abused kids that grow up to self medicate. Bi polar, sad, lonely, stressed, etc. Its the world that we created for ourselves, and drugs are just such an easy answer to it, especially in places like Canada where there is almost a zero chance you find trouble with the law and taxpayers take care of all your necessities, including your fuck ups.

[Valentine]

Legalise them all and tax the hell out of the most harmful ones.

It's a waste of time (and money) trying to fight a war on drugs as the government will always just turn a blind-eye to their approved drug lords who give them a kickback (e.g. CIA Contra cocaine trafficking). If demand always exists so will supply.

The most harmful ones have proven negative consequences on both the user and those around them so simply levy a tax just like we do with alcohol. The amount spent on repairing infrastructure, police manpower, healthcare etc due to alcohol consumption is offset by the amount of tax revenue generated through sales.

Personally I'd say marijuana, MDMA and psychedelics should be the least taxed. The benefits of medical marijuana, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy and psychedelic therapy are vast, whereas I've never heard of heroin or crack cocaine therapy.

[H1N1]

(09-05-2016 02:16 PM)MMX2010 Wrote:  

If you've read AntiFragile by N. N. Taleb, you know the difference between a natural plant that has been used by humans for thousands of years, and a synthetic chemical that has only been used by humans for less than two centuries.. The former is probably safe, the latter is probably not.

This seems like a terrible argument. Literally thousands of plants are poisonous. The idea that something possesses some special virtue by being natural seems a strange one to me.

I will trust some brilliant and enterprising chemist who makes synthetic drugs over that bastard Nature any day of the week. Very few people seriously argue for homeopathy as a cure for cancer, it seems patently absurd to suggest that recreational drugs should be viewed differently.

I was struck as a teenager when a friend's father, a top neurosurgeon, suggested he'd far rather his child did ecstasy than smoked dope (not that he was advocating either).

As far as morality/legality goes, this is the most lucid opinion I've come across on it:

[MMX2010]

Anything that has been consumed for centuries has been tested across very large numbers of people and cultures, which makes it safe.

Anything just built in a lab hasn't had this long testing, and should not be rated As Safe As a centuries-old or millenia-old substance.

[Enoch]

I agree with posters such as MMX2010 in that drugs are in general harmful and make the average person worse off across many dimensions of their life.

HOWEVER

As a matter of public policy the war on drugs has been a complete failure. We need to provide shelter and rehabilitation services for chronic users. Functional users should not be criminally punished for their addiction, unless it endangers public safety: drunk driving, construction / utility workers showing up high, etc.

I would have no problem with a civic, non criminal record punishment for possession of drugs similar to a speeding ticket.

[Leonard D Neubache]

We all recall how unregulated drug use collapsed all civilised societies prior to our glorious Orwellian communist police state, don't we.
Socialism + drug use = problems.
because
Socialism + anything = problems.

The problem is not drug use.
The problem is socialism.

[911]

(09-05-2016 03:27 PM)H1N1 Wrote:  

(09-05-2016 02:16 PM)MMX2010 Wrote:  

If you've read AntiFragile by N. N. Taleb, you know the difference between a natural plant that has been used by humans for thousands of years, and a synthetic chemical that has only been used by humans for less than two centuries.. The former is probably safe, the latter is probably not.

This seems like a terrible argument. Literally thousands of plants are poisonous. The idea that something possesses some special virtue by being natural seems a strange one to me.

I will trust some brilliant and enterprising chemist who makes synthetic drugs over that bastard Nature any day of the week. Very few people seriously argue for homeopathy as a cure for cancer, it seems patently absurd to suggest that recreational drugs should be viewed differently.

I was struck as a teenager when a friend's father, a top neurosurgeon, suggested he'd far rather his child did ecstasy than smoked dope (not that he was advocating either).

Yes, MJ is destructive for teens, adversely affecting the development of their brain, which unlike say, their bone structure, is not completely formed till their early 20s.

I think Taleb's argument is mis-stated, it's not that all natural herbs are harmless, but more the fact that ancient cultures have learned to use them in a time-tested, less destructive way, unlike what's coming out from the labs today.

A good example is LSD, it is a chemical derivative of ergine/morning glory seed-based lysergic acid (LSA). LSD was a much more potent derivative, developed as part of the MKULTRA project (subproject 22), as a covert project to destabilize enemies.

In the 60s, it was specifically aimed at the youth in order to demoralize and dumb down the growing politically active antiwar youth, carried over by agents like the Grateful Dead. It was wildly successful. It was used on White hippies in the same manner crack cocaine was used decades later to devastate Black neighborhoods.

Huxley foretold this agenda in Brave New World, where the synthetic drug soma was one of the main tools to subjugate the masses.

Sometimes the opiates of the masses are the opiates.

[Suits]

Relevant:

[Gmac]

I did shrooms in college once. Weed a few times but didn't get much out of it. Tried X a few years back. Not really for me but hey I gave it a shot.

Let people have their fun but please do that shit in private and no stupid crazy shit (i.e. bath salts). Don't need everyone driving under the influence or breaking into houses and eating each other's faces.

[LINUX]

(09-05-2016 09:57 PM)Gmac Wrote:  

I did shrooms in college once. Weed a few times but didn't get much out of it. Tried X a few years back. Not really for me but hey I gave it a shot.

Let people have their fun but please do that shit in private and no stupid crazy shit (i.e. bath salts). Don't need everyone driving under the influence or breaking into houses and eating each other's faces.

Give X another shot but only do it in your house, with some trance music playing, while you're in bed about to fuck an 8, with some electric blankets and a pitcher full of gatorade and a few lollipops. It will completely change your life.

[Phoenix]

Drugs being harmful, and drugs being made illegal, are two separate arguments.

I never touch anything stronger than alcohol (even though other stuff is probably less harmful), simply because I have enough other degenerate hedonism in my life without quenching the rest of my self-improvement motivation with even more stuff. That said, it's a fact that other men have succeeded or been outstanding whilst using drugs (e.g. Mozart doing coke). So whatever.

Illegalization is not the same thing as stopping drug use. I suspect it has actually made it more prevalent due to making it seem more exclusive, naughty, and cool.

So:
1) Drug illegalization boosts the price massively, fueling criminal gangs and evil states. The North Korean government is propped up, is subsidized, by Western drug policy. That is evil and monstrous. If GSK built a meth factory, or your local American farmer grew a coca crop, the price of those would drop to nothing. There would be no financial support for NK, and all the drug gangs and their body counts would vaporize.

2) Drug illegalization, by boosting the price, boosts illegality generally. When it costs $1/pound for coke wholesale, there is no need to rob anyone. You can just coke yourself to death in a gutter. There is also no reason to "push" drugs on people, because the incentive is gone.

3) People who still support this form of prohibition are simply not learning from history, or are in favour of the criminality and gangs that was seen (Al Capone and tommy guns) during alcohol prohibition.

4) It is crystal clear that it is unconstitutional for the federal government to prohibit private&personal production and consumption of anything. The commerce clause simply could not be clearer, and has been a victim of judges thinking they can redefine the English language to suit their designs.

5) Demanding social discipline be achieved with a policeman and his gun is stone age thinking and echos the attitude of Saudi and Iranian authorities -- do what I say you should or I'll hurt you. If one can't think of a way to stop drug use short of sticking a gun in someone's face, that's a reflection upon oneself alone.

-- As a very simple example: this forum. When someone behaves in a socially unacceptable way, does Roosh stick a gun in their face? Or does he simply kick them out? How is the social order that has resulted? People don't like being kicked out of communities -- genetically rooted back on the African Sahara, when that was as good as a death penalty.

6) The primary issue is welfare and diminished discrimination rights (freedom of association). Communities can easily ostracise degenerates, bar them from employment, bar them from tenancy, bar them from schools etc, and without high drug prices there are little counter-incentives for crime or drug-pushing.

The solution to drug use is not stuffing large numbers of people in jails, it's allowing a small number to starve to death and OD in gutters in remote outskirts, and citizens shooting them on the spot whenever they attempt a crime, serving as a warning to others, and serving as a stark warning to parents and the schools they choose and how they raise their kids.

Drug illegalization is probably the most anti-social and socially damaging policy ever devised. Well beyond gay marriage and feminism. It is recent, it is an aberration, and it will with all luck be relegated to the history books, and laughed at as one of those strange quirks of history like the alcohol prohibition era.

[Gorgiass]

When I was 16 I would have had no trouble scoring heroin if I wanted it, had friends who were much younger than that when they first tried it. But trying to find beer? Man was that a bitch.

(09-05-2016 02:39 PM)Ghost Tiger Wrote:  

The drug clinic in my hospital claims an 80 percent reduction in criminal convictions among heroin addicts once they have been stabilized on methadone.
...
In my clinics in prison, I see numerous prisoners who were on methadone when they committed the crime for which they are incarcerated.
...
The importation of the mildly stimulant khat is legal in Britain, and a large proportion of the community of Somali refugees there devotes its entire life to chewing the leaves that contain the stimulant, miring these refugees in far worse poverty than they would otherwise experience.

There are some valid points in this article but he repeatedly puts forth anecdotes as if they counter statistics. This is no different than saying that "Watson (or was it Crick) ate acid and smoked weed and he discovered DNA!" I'm really sick of hearing that argument as well, by the way.

Without a double blind study one cannot say that Somali refugees are the way they are because of khat with any authority. Isn't their average collective IQ hovering in the 60s? (No disrespect to any Somali members which we had/have, there will be outliers of course)

The article also repeatedly equates drug illegality with lack of availability which is a fantasy. Almost anyone who wants drugs can get them, they just have to pay more for them. Then when they're caught with the drugs we have to pay $80k/year to lock them up.

In any case, I have long been of the mindset already expressed here that an individual's choices are only society's concern when society has to cover for them, as in the system we have today. This is what make the issue complicated. If refugees want to chew khat on the steps all day I couldn't care less as long as it doesn't cost me anything.

Just think of how many problems could be solved if we removed the stigma behind incentivized voluntary sterilization. One generation and we'd remove a large percentage of those incapable of making good decisions from the gene pool. Maybe someday.

[Omad]

I know I'm under the required 250 posts but I thought this vid should be in this thread. Happy to take the 3 day suspension.

As far as personal responsibility and cost to society, bad diet choices cause massive expense to society, maybe the problem is the system that allows this.

[Suits]

(09-06-2016 02:52 AM)Omad Wrote:  

I know I'm under the required 250 posts but I thought this vid should be in this thread. Happy to take the 3 day suspension.

Dude, you could have just PM'ed me the link to the video and I would have helped you out.

Everyone knows that I'm really good at posting videos in threads (in lieu of quality content).

[TooFineAPoint]

(09-05-2016 06:58 PM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  

We all recall how unregulated drug use collapsed all civilised societies prior to our glorious Orwellian communist police state, don't we.
Socialism + drug use = problems.
because
Socialism + anything = problems.

The problem is not drug use.
The problem is socialism.

Agreed!


Alcohol is my drug of choice. I'm pretty disgusted by all the rest of the stuff. But I don't want to ban anyone from using anything. Pretty sure no one here wants to go back to alcohol prohibitionism. Although I would like MORE lax alcohol laws (eg. sell any time of day, no licensing required to sell, no embargoes and no extra taxes).

However, I'm all for punishing crimes (instances where there are victims -- physically or property-based). I don't care if someone drank too much chocolate milk or did heroin before they stabbed someone. It is the stabbing I care about.

Re: studies showing people being more likely to do violence on certain drugs, or more likely to be dangerous because of a drug-induced lifestyle... well, private communities could choose to make rules barring entry or having drug tests before entry.

Interesting that Dalrymple was brought up. He wrote a book called Romancing Opiates that basically argued (he is a doctor) that heroin is much less dangerous and much easier to kick than alcohol.

[Tactician]

I haven't seen anyone bring these two examples up yet so I'll post them here:

First, under the Misuse of Drugs Act, drug trafficking is punishable by death in Singapore. The amounts in possession needed to qualify for the death sentence are pretty low and even if you have less you might still face corporal punishment (caning) or a very long or even life sentence in prison.

The current rates for drug abuse in Singapore are among the lowest in the world. The argument here is that a lack of drugs results in a lack of drug abuse. (Alcoholism is not very prevalent in Singapore compared to, say, the USA, suggesting people aren't flocking from one substance abuse to another.)

Second example I want to bring up is the Rat Park experiment (conducted by BC's own SFU university). A convenient and fun way to view the experiment is through this handy comic http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/rat-park/.

The researchers conclude that it is not so much the availability of drugs that causes addiction, but rather the living conditions of the potential addicts; a conclusion which can be interpreted as being at odds with Singapore's strict, albeit very successful, solution of preventing drug abuse.
-
A lot of you guys are smarter than me and have more life experience. I don't have any analysis to add at this point, but think these two cases, which examine two opposite ends of the spectrum (no availability of drugs vs high availability), add interesting perspectives to the discussion. Also everyone I've shown it to likes the rat comic. Cheers.

[Ghost Tiger]

(09-05-2016 11:40 PM)Phoenix Wrote:  

Drugs being harmful, and drugs being made illegal, are two separate arguments.

This is the same flawed logic that Milton Friedman uses. We are not talking about making illegal drugs illegal, they are currently illegal. We're talking about making them legal. All your theories about what will happen IF they are made legal are just that - theories. They have been illegal for a long time and before they were made illegal they were non-existent culturally, unlike alcohol which has existed within our culture for thousands of years. Illegal drugs were made illegal as soon as they appeared, and this was done because they are harmful. Ergo, it is not a case of two separate arguments. The illegality of the drugs is directly related to their being harmful.

Phoenix Wrote:

Illegalization is not the same thing as stopping drug use. I suspect it has actually made it more prevalent due to making it seem more exclusive, naughty, and cool.

More prevalent than when? Before they even existed?

Phoenix Wrote:

So:
1) Drug illegalization boosts the price massively

Lowering the price is not a wise goal. This would lead to a parallel of Dalrymple's example of the construction workers drinking themselves into oblivion. The high price reduces consumption of these drugs, which is a good thing.

Phoenix Wrote:

2) Drug illegalization, by boosting the price, boosts illegality generally.

Again, this is a theory. You don't have a time period where these illicit drugs were legal to use for comparison. Dalrymple's (and my) contradictory theory is that most criminals involved in drug-related crime would be criminals even if these drugs were legal. They're not made criminals because drugs are illegal, they're just criminals. Period.

Phoenix Wrote:

3) People who still support this form of prohibition are simply not learning from history, or are in favour of the criminality and gangs that was seen (Al Capone and tommy guns) during alcohol prohibition.

Alcohol was a genie that was already out of the bottle. Prohibition was a bad policy decision made with the help of feminist women who never should have been allowed to vote.



Comparing alcohol prohibition to the ban on illicit drugs is flawed logic. This argument has been soundly defeated.

Phoenix Wrote:

4) It is crystal clear that it is unconstitutional for the federal government to prohibit private&personal production and consumption of anything.

The constitution is not a perfect document. We are not documentalists.

Phoenix Wrote:

5) Demanding social discipline be achieved with a policeman and his gun is stone age thinking and echos the attitude of Saudi and Iranian authorities -- do what I say you should or I'll hurt you. If one can't think of a way to stop drug use short of sticking a gun in someone's face, that's a reflection upon oneself alone.

As I said above, most of these criminals are simply criminals, and if they weren't arrested for drug crimes, they would be arrested for theft, rape, assault, or murder. I agree that no one should be in jail merely for non-violent drug offenses, but the current shortcomings of the police and the prison system are a whole other subject worthy of a whole other thread, so I choose not to digress too much here except to say that the police are clearly over-militarized and the prison system has not even been given a clear objective. Consider this question... which of the following objectives is that of our prison system?:

1) Punishment of the offender

2) Deterrence of future crime

3) Rehabilitation of the offender

Is it one of these? More than one? Something else? Prison administrators aren't sure and so no prioritization has been assigned to these objectives. In other words, the prisons don't even know what the hell they're supposed to be doing.

Phoenix Wrote:

6) The primary issue is welfare and diminished discrimination rights (freedom of association). Communities can easily ostracise degenerates, bar them from employment, bar them from tenancy, bar them from schools etc, and without high drug prices there are little counter-incentives for crime or drug-pushing.

I once did an undercover investigation on a factory in Ontario to determine the rate of illicit drug use among employees. When I began my investigation, my clients expected around 20% were using. I found that around 80% were using. When my clients saw my findings, they became demoralized and politely asked me to destroy my evidence and never mention it again. What could they do? Fire everybody? When the use of illicit drugs reaches a critical mass as Dalrymple (and I) predict it will after legalization... we're fucked. It's over. Everybody's on welfare and no one's working. In Canada, we call this dystopia "The Maritime Provinces"and it is illustrated well in the show "Trailer Park Boys". The rest of Canada is well on its way to catching up. The USA should not follow us.

(09-06-2016 01:30 AM)Gorgiass Wrote:  

There are some valid points in this article but he repeatedly puts forth anecdotes as if they counter statistics.

He's doing that to try to make himself understood. He is being an effective communicator, using rhetoric instead of dialectic in the fashion of Trump, Scott Adams, and Vox Day, and it IS effective. He is an experienced prison psychiatrist. He has put his theories to the test of empirical evidence he observed during his field experience, which is impressive. Dalrymple is the real deal like Holyfield.

Gorgiass Wrote:

The article also repeatedly equates drug illegality with lack of availability which is a fantasy. Almost anyone who wants drugs can get them, they just have to pay more for them. Then when they're caught with the drugs we have to pay $80k/year to lock them up.

Lower the price and the drugs will become MORE available. The situation is bad, but we can make it worse.

Gorgiass Wrote:

In any case, I have long been of the mindset already expressed here that an individual's choices are only society's concern when society has to cover for them

Well we DO have to "cover for" addicts when their lives fall apart. I have a cousin who just washed out of a high-paying job in manufacturing when he failed a drug test. Now he expects us (his family) and everyone else (his government) to wipe his ass because he's "disabled" by his addiction. We recently caught him in the parking lot at his sister's wedding with a syringe in his arm. We don't need more people like this. We need people who wipe their own asses. The situation is bad, but it can get worse.

(09-06-2016 03:49 AM)TooFineAPoint Wrote:  

Interesting that Dalrymple was brought up. He wrote a book called Romancing Opiates that basically argued (he is a doctor) that heroin is much less dangerous and much easier to kick than alcohol.

Interesting that you brought up that particular book... I think someone mentioned it in an earlier post...

(09-05-2016 02:39 PM)Ghost Tiger Wrote:  

But the real killer is heroin, and for very sinister reasons that Dalrymple makes clear in his great book, "Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy".

https://www.amazon.ca/Romancing-Opiates-...1594032254

As a prison psychiatrist, Dalrymple always refused to prescribe methadone to his prison patients, regardless of how much of a fuss they made. As Dalrymple explains, there actually are no severe withdrawal symptoms when addicts withdraw from heroin. They just get really grumpy for a few days and then move on with their lives. The withdrawal symptoms you see in Hollywood movies are actually modeled after the delirium tremens, or "DT's" that alcoholics suffer when withdrawing. It is a myth that heroin addicts suffer such symptoms, and therefore it's true that nobody needs methadone. But that is a dangerous truth to tell, which is one reason why Dalrymple wrote under a pseudonym. Because if the addicts don't need methadone, what in the hell is going on with all these doctors prescribing it? It couldn't be a profit motive, could it? It couldn't be that Soros has money invested in pharmaceuticals now, could it?

[MMX2010]

If the legalizing movement gains momentum, I think I can crush them by asking, "How many drug-addicted twelve year olds is acceptable, so that you can get high?"

This is identical to Vox Day's effective rhetoric which asks an open borders advocate, "How many underage boys and girls getting raped by illegal immigrants is an acceptable number, so that you can feel Not Racist?"

Liberals aren't exactly tough, so it's no surprise that they don't have an answer for the open borders question, but how would you answer the drug one?

[The Beast1]

(09-06-2016 09:18 AM)MMX2010 Wrote:  

If the legalizing movement gains momentum, I think I can crush them by asking, "How many drug-addicted twelve year olds is acceptable, so that you can get high?"

How many drunk 12 year olds are acceptable?

It was easier for me to get marijuana as a child and teen than it was to get alcohol. Legalizing it puts it in the reigns of shops that can restrict it based on age.

I should have also put that in my original post: limit drug accessibility based on age.

Out of curiosity, are you also for restricting access to alcohol and tobacco as well?

[TooFineAPoint]

(09-06-2016 09:11 AM)Ghost Tiger Wrote:  

(09-06-2016 03:49 AM)TooFineAPoint Wrote:  

Interesting that Dalrymple was brought up. He wrote a book called Romancing Opiates that basically argued (he is a doctor) that heroin is much less dangerous and much easier to kick than alcohol.

Interesting that you brought up that particular book... I think someone mentioned it in an earlier post...

(09-05-2016 02:39 PM)Ghost Tiger Wrote:  

But the real killer is heroin, and for very sinister reasons that Dalrymple makes clear in his great book, "Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy".

https://www.amazon.ca/Romancing-Opiates-...1594032254

As a prison psychiatrist, Dalrymple always refused to prescribe methadone to his prison patients, regardless of how much of a fuss they made. As Dalrymple explains, there actually are no severe withdrawal symptoms when addicts withdraw from heroin. They just get really grumpy for a few days and then move on with their lives. The withdrawal symptoms you see in Hollywood movies are actually modeled after the delirium tremens, or "DT's" that alcoholics suffer when withdrawing. It is a myth that heroin addicts suffer such symptoms, and therefore it's true that nobody needs methadone. But that is a dangerous truth to tell, which is one reason why Dalrymple wrote under a pseudonym. Because if the addicts don't need methadone, what in the hell is going on with all these doctors prescribing it? It couldn't be a profit motive, could it? It couldn't be that Soros has money invested in pharmaceuticals now, could it?

Whoops! Yeah I glossed over that post.

But that is exactly the thing that stuck with me from that book -- methadone is not needed and DTs are far worse than anything a heroin addict has to combat.

I think our conclusions differed from reading it though. I'm not saying this is Dalrymple's meaning at all, but to me it was just one more reason to decriminalize heroin.

[MMX2010]

Alcohol was discovered 10,000 years ago. Tobacco was first discovered by the native peoples of Mesoamerica and South America. Since I've already commented on this area, you can predict my answer to your question.

Also, dodging a question to ask an irrelevant question that you already know the answer to is weak sauce. It also plays right into my preception that drug promoters have poor impulse control and don't care about the community.

So I'll ask again, "How many drug addicted 12 year olds is acceptable, just so you can get high?"