Most economies would switch places with CA in a New York minute. Abundant natural resources...oceans, oil, gas, gold, beaches,mountains, fresh water,timber, tourism....What's CA's problem?

America...sweet...America

God done shed his grace on thee

(and we ought to thank him for it)

                     ---Ray Charles.

My experience with recreational chemicals has been as an observer, but I ask your indulgence. 

 

I was a small child when my mother first got in trouble using marijuana back in the 1950's (yes, it happened back then). She was, I guess, an outlier of the beatnik subculture in San Francisco. She progressed on to heroin use. I was five with I began seeing her use modified eyedroppers as hypodermic needles. I thought it was medicine.

 

Life changed radically. My mother had to explain to the children why her husband, my step-father, was going to prison. My older stepsister and step-brother went to live with relatives. Mother began sleeping through the days. We began to have days without food; sometimes without furniture or clothing.Then those things would reappear.

 

One confused evening a bunch of people were in the kitchen. I was standing by my mother. There was talk about people coming to take things from us.  There was an enormously loud noise, and my mother was down of the floor clutching her right thigh, which was bleeding. The rest of the evening was a confused trip to a hospital and then another night in a strange room on the floor. 

 

 Mother died of an overdose in March of 1962. I didn't see it, Thank You Father God. She was at a drug party, and the hosts dumped her body into the lawn by the entrance of a San Francisco hospital. At that time I was in a foster home under the care of a woman who could have qualified as a concentration camp guard. When she got mad at me, she would beat me until she was too tired to lift her arms. What really hurt, however, were her vicious diatribes when she poured spite and ridicule on me. Mother's death was was front page news in the San Francisco Chronicle. She read it to me; with glee. I heard some time later that she had killed her next foster child. 

 

The libertarian viewpoint tends to speak of drug traffic like it is describing rational economic transactions in a book by Adam Smith or Milton Friedman. When addiction enters the equation, however, there is no possibility of rational transactions. This is nothing less then chemical slavery, one where slaves are forced to buy their own chains.

 

Most importantly to me, however, is to speak for those who have no voice in those allegedly rational economic transactions. I speak for the children shaking with fear and pain, with loss and bewilderment. I speak for the children who hurt and cannot understand why this is happening to them. I speak for them because I didn't have the words when I was six, but with God as my witness, I have them now. 

 

Legalizing addictive drugs is wrong! It is morally and even logically wrong!  We're lazy. It's hard work to push those vile predators off the streets and out of our communities. It's easier to "manag a problem." Heck, it's easier to snort and chortle at Cheech and Chong. I understand that, but there's an alternative viewpoint. I was reading the Psalms in the Bible and came across a verse where it said, "he who saves a life, it is though he had saved an entire world." I later saw that same verse when I was reading the Koran. So don't give up. Go out and save a world; one scared child at a time.  

 

 

sorry for the rant, but if I've got a hot button this is it.      

I'm sorry to hear about the impact of drugs on your family. My brother is a heavy marajuana smoker and it has turned him into a completely useless individual, basically he lives his life like a 16 year old and he is in his in his thirties. It isn't nearly as bad as what has happenned to you but I do know the cost of drug use.

 

However, I've also seen the heavy cost that alcoholism and smoking can inflict on families. For instance, my grandfather was an alcoholic over the course of 12 years before he got too sick to drink and made my grandmother's life a misery. On one occasion he tried to put her head through a glass window and my family had to have the police take him to the lockup. I've also seen my grandmother and a close family friend die miserably from smoking related illnesses. Beyond that I was a nurse for 10 years and have seen the most serious possible consequences of both legal and illegal drug use.

 

 Frankly in my experience all of those drugs are as bad as each other and I can't see a justification for making one group of users criminals while the drugs that others use are legal. Apart from the hypocracy, which matters in its own right because it makes an ass of the law, the practical conseqences of prohibiting certain types of drugs is that you add to the already considerable costs the costs of criminality and you alienate users from the society that they need to help manage and treat any problems arising out of their drug use. I also believe that the scapegoating of illicit drug users may provide a false sense of moral justification to alcohol users and smokers for what they are doing to themselves and others. Driving the problem underground hasn't made it go away and may in fact have made it worse.

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Fair enough point. We do have serious problems with alcoholism. If you legalize something, you (at least tacitly) encourage it. I don't want that kind of encouragement for drug use.

 

We have thousands of years of tradition surrounding alcohol use. Alcohol was one of the few ways people preserve food (smoking, salting, drying and pickling being the others). Beer brewing recipes are some of the earliest written records in civilization. In the Middle Ages and into the Enlightenment eras there were laws in "enlightened" countries that prohibited parents from letting their children drink water (too likely to be polluted, beer was safer). People enthuse about arcane aspects of brewing, ingredients, taste and varieties of alcoholic beverages. All these things tend to cushion society from abuse. It's pretty thin protection, (thin enough that I don't use alcohol) but it's there.  

 

Nobody enthuses about the color, clarity, bouquet and taste of pot. They take it to get stoned. They decriminalized pot in the UK a few years back. Thanks to modern agricultural techniques, the hallucinogenic ingredient is 25 to 30 times higher in today's pot. Now people are suffering psychotic episodes after using it. This is a serious public health issue in the UK (over 10,000 people hospitalized in the UK), and people who advocated for decriminalization  are calling for re-regulating its use. I'll try to find the article about that.  

 

You're right, we have a serious problem with alcohol abuse. I don't want to compound that with an equally serious pot problem.  

IMHO, drug users aren't criminals. They have a medical problem and THAT should be the angle of attack. Once a person develops the dependency, you can forget about the law or any of that. They will find away to satisfy the dependency. Lets not even worry about "drugs". Just look at Cigs. For $hits and Giggles I went on a ride along with a good friend who works for a local LEO. Our last call of the day was a woman who passed away from smoking related illness. When I removed the sheets from over her body to inspect for foul play, the first thing I noticed was the oxygen tube still in her nose! That's how hooked she was. And the results were obvious. Yet its perfectly legal to walk into a 7-11 and buy a carton of cigs. Heck, look at this...

ht*p://buy.cigs-sale.com/index.php?sectiune=prod_detail&id_prod=1115&page=10&id_categ=16&lang=en 

...can legally buy right now and have delivered.

Yet, weed is illegal. Makes no sense. Then there is the violence that goes along with making an addictive high demand product illegal. Nothing is really new here. This is Prohibition redux.

-DA

p.s. Condolences to those with losses 

I personally smoke, not like i used to but when i'm winding down a busy day it works wonders. The best part is that unlike drinking I dont have to worry about a hang over the next day and actually wake up feeling refreshed.

Sounds great to me, and will probably be a advertising selling point for marijuana dealers were it legalized.  Hell, that little tidbit alone would entice a lot of people to give it a try, and once it's legal and you can buy it at the local head shop without running the risk of going to jail or paying a fine, why not? 

 

All talk about gateway drugs are nonsense and irrelevant since it would no longer be a "DRUG" were it to be legalize. The gate way part comes from the mentality that "well if all drugs are equally bad and weed turned out to be not so bad at all, maybe i should try coke too ect...". And if the smoking part still makes you think its dangerous then how bout we just make brownies with it? NO danger there what so ever.

 

Marijuana is not a drug, but THC, the chemical that causes marijuana's intoxicating effects, will be a drug whether it's legal or not.  As far as the gateway drug issue goes, well, very few people who drink alcohol started with whiskey, scotch, or tequila.  Most began with beer, wine coolers, or some sort of mixed drink.  The reason for this is obvious.  Those drinks are cheap, easy to get, and for the most part pleasant tasting.  Plus, it takes a lot more wine coolers to get a good buzz than it does if you try to drink the equivalent amount of hard liquor.  Eventually you work your way up to the harder liquors.  The same principal applies with marijuana.  Plus, smoking marijuana for the first time breaks that whole drug taboo that has been pounded into your head your whole life.  Once you've started smoking marijuana on the weekends, what's the big deal about taking an ecstacy pill at a concert or snorting a line of coke at a party?  Smoking pot probably won't make you want to use other, harder, drugs, but smoking pot will probably loosen your inhibitions and make you more open to using other drugs should the opportunity arise.