Should marijuana be legal?

Come on Tal you can do better than that.
Show me the evils of this drug.

 

I think Tal was just responding to my comment that it was not fatal. He wasn't saying that it causes mass deaths, just that there was one incident where someone did in fact die from it. His only other argument one way or the other was this

This is true, however my original point was that someone who smokes marijuana is not necessarily going to go on to harder drugs, even though most people who use harder drugs have smoked marijuana in the past. Confused? Look at it this way, most people who smoke marijuana smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol, but MOST cigarette smokers and alcohol drinkers do not smoke marijuana (statistics will back me up on this). A few people (Laches) seemed to understand this point I was trying to make, I am not sure if Tal did or not.

Another point I would like to bring up is that here in the US, our jails are overflowing and us taxpayers are footing the bill for them. The cost of keeping someone in prison for a year is more than $40,000.

Considering the relatively benign effects that it does have on people, $40,000+ per year seems far too high of a cost to keep people in prison for smoking pot. And that's not including the time and money spent by the police enforcing these laws, and the court system to prosecute them. Well great you say, let's make everything legal, and save ourselves a bundle! But you have to strike a balance between the cost of putting violators through the system, versus how much damage it does to societly. The damage that legalizing something like cocaine or heroin would cause is too high, wheras in my opinion, Marijuana does not cause most of the problems that other drugs do.

There may be some questions as to what the long term effects of it on the lungs and brain are, but for the most part it does not cause the withdrawal symptoms that heroin and other "hard" drugs do, it does not cause people to fly into violent rages the way alcohol sometimes does. It does not cause the depression that some other substances do. Alcohol, for example, is responsible, for 50% of all fatal car accidents in the US, and is a factor in 65% of all murders, and is resposible for 150,000 deaths per year (not including the auto accidents). Tobacco kills 350,000 to 450,000 people in the US every year. Prescription drug overdoses are responsible for more than 15,000 deaths per year.
Other than Tal's example, I could find NO statistics on the number of people dying from marijuana use.

So, to me the real question is not is it harmful, but is the extremely high cost of keeping it off of the streets worth it considering any damage it may cause? Would it not be better to legalize it, tax it, and use the money for beneficial purposes?

 

Ah well said Nutrimat.You beat me too it.I just reasearched some of the facts you pointed out to clarify some of my points.
The whole gateway issue still leads me to some debate.Almost all the reports I have read saying this were studies done on hard core drug addicts with no control group.Makes the results suspect in my opinion.

 

Well, personally, I feel that there has to be found a way to make the usage of softdrug less attractive. Banning it outright wouldn't solve anything.

Coming from a country where Marihuana is condoned (Not legal though.) because of practical matters, I have tried a 'joint' myself once. Just as I've tried a waterpipe, regular sigarettes, coffee and alcohol. Except for alcohol on parties, I found none of them worth my time. (And I only consume lots of Alchol a few times a year. There has in fact been a long time when I chose not to drink at all.) A joint or waterpipe didn't work for me (Even though my friend brought the finest Dutch Weeds ) sigarettes smell (as does marihuana) and makes me cough and coffee is too bitter for my tastes.

But back to the topic. I find a lot of young people my age stuck to this lifestyle that's stereotypical of someone who smokes joints. They're being retards by choice. (Being doped 90% of the day, and this isn't an exaggeration, I've seen it, leads to nothing but trouble. Low grades, trouble with those that are clean, no job.) And I've known someone in my class who did make the jump from Marihuana to Heroin, Cocain, Morphine and whatever else he could get his hands on. And I'm not talking someone with an illness, I'm talking about a doctor's kid who could've played in the national soccerteam in a few years. And he smoked/sniffed/injected it all away.

So in my opinion? Drugs are bad, and we need to do something about them that works. But I don't think banning will work. (Not without very harsh punishments to deter people from it anyway.)

 

I guess Tal has no response...

 

If anyone does know the chemistry behind this, please tell.

 

Ok Tal, IMO, your opinion was among the "ludicrous". You weren't exactly a fountain of wisodom here.

You made a claim that someone did in fact die from this. Your claim is the first fatality I've heard of (and I have done some research on this). If I made a claim like this, I would expect people to question it, and provide more details. Yet you got irritable and sarcastic when you were repeatedly pressed for details.

Your response to my first post made me wonder if you read and understood what I was trying to say. You and several other people dismissed my first argument (which I got from a published scientific study) as "ridiculous" on the grounds that it happened to a few of your friends, so I must be wrong. I then made a few attempts to clarify what I wrote, thinking it would help, but got no response.

Then you berated the entire thread as being "a lost cause" and mocked most of the people who took the time to post because of the ludicrous opinions presented. This despite the fact that you presented no sensible or logical arguments yourself. I agree that a lot of the opinions presented were rather illogical, but I'm not going to start insulting anyone because of it. I thought Flaming was against the forum rules.

There are countries where the use of this drug is at least partially legal, and some (notably the US and Canada) have made attempts to legalize it, so I thought this would be an interesting issue to bring up for discussion.

I then attempted to get things back on track by presenting another, rarely discussed aspect of the issue (cost). I backed up my points with some statistics, and I and others invited you to make some reasonable and logical counterpoints, since I do have some respect for your opinion, and you seem to be firmly in the "against" camp. Again, no response, just a further deriding of the entire thread.

I am disappointed. I thought the webmaster of this site would be a little more professional, and be able to provide some compelling and interesting points of view as you have done in other cases. I don't think I've ever seen you rip on any other thread this bad.

I was going to add a bit of a side discussion about the medical uses of marijuana, and try to ask the question of why people do drugs in the first place, but I am disgusted. Thanks for everyone who posted. I have nothing further to say.

[ January 24, 2003, 18:45: Message edited by: Nutrimat ]