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Personally I'm anti drug use because of how many friends and family members I've seen turn their lives to shit after starting weed etc. I know there's a lot of

Personally I'm anti drug use because of how many friends and family members I've seen turn their lives to shit after starting weed etc. I know there's a lot of fine users but so many of my friends turned to weed to cope and then from there went onto harder stuff like crack/cocaine. And really, I don't support people altering their mind states through the use of recreational drugs, alcohol included. It saddens me to see that no one can see any reason against drug use besides "it locks up black people in prison" because for me at least, that has nothing to do with marijuana legislation at all.

deelowe 8y ago
This article and the associated discussion thread you're contributing to here has zero to do with recreational use. Is this the core issue? People can't separate the two? Do people generally not realize that because of how it's scheduled there is no possibility for medical use and that this is starting to look like a really bad thing given the circumstances?
jakelazaroff 8y ago
Can we not agree, though, that scare tactics around victimless crimes (in the sense that the victim is also the perpetrator) are demonstrably ineffectual? Abstinence-only sex education, for example, correlates positively with teen pregnancy rates [1], whereas opioid overdose education is shown to decrease opioid death rates [2]. Without getting into the moral argument of whether or not people should be able to choose to alter their mental state through drugs (are we cool with coffee as well?), it seems clear to me that the best policy is one of education and harm reduction, not FUD and prohibition. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/ [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4688551/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4688551/
anon08142018 8y ago
Can you understand the perspective from other people who have literally never seen anyone move on from weed to crack cocaine? Have you ever asked yourself if prohibition was the best way to combat drug problems? I would suggest reading the book "Rise of the warrior cop" and then ask yourself if you still support prohibition.
erikpukinskis 8y ago
I’m with you, and I think this is an important part of the discussion so I hope people will make space for it. Pot, alcohol, even mushrooms can be dangerous psychologically. Society must address this. However I don’t think this has any bearing on legalization. Whether something should be illegal is a different question than whether it is harmful. If prohibition, in practice, will cause intolerable side effects, then it’s not a just policy. Even if we agree that the prohibited behavior is destructive. It’s also not universally true that prohibition even decreases the prohibited behavior. Especially with teenagers it can sometimes have the opposite effect. I am against abortion bans, not because I think abortion is harmless, but because I think prohibition has terrible effects. Lastly, there are positive effects of a general culture of freedom. Freedom to make mistakes, not just freedom within a set of formally approved activities. We are able as a group to more effectively explore the space of safe activities if we allow personal exploration of unsafe activities to a degree. This is why some people advocate not for prohibition of all harmful activities, but prohibition only of those that harm non-consensual participants. It’s illegal to hit your domestic partner. It’s legal to hit your sparring partner at the gym. That’s not because hitting is harmless (it’s not). It’s because many of us think the law is best suited to dampen harmful non-consensual activities, while other means (ministry, fellowship, etc) are more effective means to dampen consensual harmful activity.

deelowe 8y ago

This article and the associated discussion thread you're contributing to here has zero to do with recreational use. Is this the core issue? People can't separate the two? Do people generally not realize that because of how it's scheduled there is no possibility for medical use and that this is starting to look like a really bad thing given the circumstances?

jakelazaroff 8y ago

Can we not agree, though, that scare tactics around victimless crimes (in the sense that the victim is also the perpetrator) are demonstrably ineffectual? Abstinence-only sex education, for example, correlates positively with teen pregnancy rates [1], whereas opioid overdose education is shown to decrease opioid death rates [2]. Without getting into the moral argument of whether or not people should be able to choose to alter their mental state through drugs (are we cool with coffee as well?), it seems clear to me that the best policy is one of education and harm reduction, not FUD and prohibition. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/ [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4688551/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4688551/

anon08142018 8y ago

Can you understand the perspective from other people who have literally never seen anyone move on from weed to crack cocaine? Have you ever asked yourself if prohibition was the best way to combat drug problems? I would suggest reading the book "Rise of the warrior cop" and then ask yourself if you still support prohibition.

erikpukinskis 8y ago

I’m with you, and I think this is an important part of the discussion so I hope people will make space for it. Pot, alcohol, even mushrooms can be dangerous psychologically. Society must address this. However I don’t think this has any bearing on legalization. Whether something should be illegal is a different question than whether it is harmful. If prohibition, in practice, will cause intolerable side effects, then it’s not a just policy. Even if we agree that the prohibited behavior is destructive. It’s also not universally true that prohibition even decreases the prohibited behavior. Especially with teenagers it can sometimes have the opposite effect. I am against abortion bans, not because I think abortion is harmless, but because I think prohibition has terrible effects. Lastly, there are positive effects of a general culture of freedom. Freedom to make mistakes, not just freedom within a set of formally approved activities. We are able as a group to more effectively explore the space of safe activities if we allow personal exploration of unsafe activities to a degree. This is why some people advocate not for prohibition of all harmful activities, but prohibition only of those that harm non-consensual participants. It’s illegal to hit your domestic partner. It’s legal to hit your sparring partner at the gym. That’s not because hitting is harmless (it’s not). It’s because many of us think the law is best suited to dampen harmful non-consensual activities, while other means (ministry, fellowship, etc) are more effective means to dampen consensual harmful activity.