Should U.S Legalized Drugs?
Question by Oskar: Should U.S Legalized Drugs?
What drugs should be legal and what drugs should stay the same and why …personally i think all drugs should be legal ..this drug war is causing lots of billions a year money that could be used for something better..and little kids and teen get drugs easier then liquor or tobacco…give me you opinion and the best answer would be voted by the community.
Best answer:
Answer by Dieselpwr59
Well, I guess we should legalize rape then also, because the government spends tons of money locking up rapists, and yet thousands of women get raped every year….
Answer by LeonKrahe
They should all be legalized. Forget about keeping drugs out of schools, they can’t even keep drugs out of prisons! So if anybody entertains dreams of a “Drug-Free America”, then turning the entire country into a fortress with guards and cameras in every house and armed guards on towers on every corner still isn’t enough to make it happen. Guards (and law enforcement for that matter) have repetitively been caught selling/dealing drugs while turning around and arresting the people that use them, so only having robo-cops in a Fortress America could provide any hope of eliminating drug use.
On top of that, it’s a issue of rights. I own my own body, not the Government, so I should have the final say on what substances I put into it. As long as I’m not putting anyone’s lives in danger by being stupid like driving a car while high or beating my future wife and kids, then there are no victims except myself, if I should become addicted to whatever substance I use. The fact is most drug users actually are responsible! Obviously opiates and stimulants are more dangerous for people to use, but that should be treated as a Health problem, not a Law problem! If we spent even 1/4th the money we now spend to put such people in prison cells to provide drug treatment and rehab and education about the true affects and risks of doing drugs, there would far fewer addicts than the ones that hide in the shadows with their shame and stigma and fear of incarceration.
Speaking of the Law, I can’t fathom how the heck drug prohibition is legal given the lack of Constitutional authority for Congress to pass laws banning drugs! Congress knew they didn’t have the power to ban such things when Prohibition was passed, since they had to get a constitutional amendment in order to give themselves the power to outlaw alcohol… and that has been repealed. So how did they get the power to outlaw a whole slew of other substance decades later when the Constitution has remained unchanged?
Also dealing with the Constitution, I’d argue that under the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of Freedom of Religion, drug use particularly regarding to entheogens is protected. Although I suppose the Government considers only Anglo-Saxon and Native American religions (that use Peyote/Mescaline in their ceremonies) as the only real religions, and believe Rastafarian to be a made-up religion as just an excuse to smoke pot under a false guise. Ancient Aztec religions too apparently are considered unprotected, since they used Psilocybin-containing mushrooms in their rituals to produce spiritual visions, which modern-day users consider to be powerful life-changing experiences as significant as any other spiritual experience. But alas, religions that are both old and new are a minority in this country, and the Government successfully gets away with persecuting them for their choice in sacrament.
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Seems like some of the prohibitionists love the argument “Would you want a brain surgeon operating on you while high on weed?”, or insert bus drivers or pilots or any other career in there to make their point. Well to answer them, no I wouldn’t want a brain surgeon high on weed to operate on me… nor would I want him to be drunk, or distracted by a cigarette craving, or jittery from too much coffee. If they’re just going to use drugs on their down-time at home, when the effects have worn off by the time they get to work, then what’s the harm? And I’ve never heard of anybody arguing that drugs being legalized means they shouldn’t be regulated either. I’d be well within a business’s right to fire any employees caught high on company time.
And then there’s the counter-argument that we can’t use the reason that law enforcement’s continued failure to win the war on drugs as a justification to end it, because rape and bank robberies and such still happen in spite of police’s best efforts, so if we legalize drugs then we should just legalize those things too. That’s completely apples and oranges: rape, theft, murder, ect. are all violent acts of one person violating the natural rights of another person. A person consuming a tab of LSD on the weekend in their bedroom isn’t hurting anybody else. Now if somebody is driving while high or attacks somebody while full of methamphetamine, then that is already a crime and is irresponsible and should be punished, perhaps even more severely if drugs are shown to be involved, but the person still chose to behave in those manners, the drug didn’t “make them” do it any more than the devil did. I would support State intervention in cases where parents make their home unsuitable for raising children because of their heroin addictions, but again if legalized and the stigma/fear of seeking help were removed, cases like that would become rarer.
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The whole war on drugs in my opinion, is completely illegal and immoral.