so, under the circumstances of addiction, I’d like to amend #30 to propose that only non-addicted ‘weekend recreational users’ of this sort of drug be executed.

but seriously, folks. I did get off them, and without robbing anyone or running over any children.

YOu know why? Because I came up against choices I COULD NOT MAKE, and getting off the drugs was easier than becoming a thug and a criminal.

If you remove the barriers of law, and therefore approve of and subsidize addiction, you put many millions more people in a bad place, people who right now are NOT there because they want to be good citizens. With legalized drugs, nobody will feel they shouldn’t use drugs. The country would eventually collapse under the weight of mentally ill and otherwise useless people.

some define it as ‘government attempts to interdict supply’..

I define it as ‘people using drugs that wreck them physically, cause mental illness and make their behavior irrational.’

NOT exactly something our society can tolerate. Cocaine wrecks you mentally and physically. Opiates, when kicked in, make you drowsy and physically slow. What, you’re going to make a law that says they can’t drive or operate heavy machinery while on opiates? In the first place, laws don’t stop drunk driving. In the second place, opiates are something you have to be on ALL THE TIME once you’re hooked, or else it’s withdrawal. Opiates are worse than alcohol, which most drunks can stop drinking for several hours in the morning.

And dope smoking is like smoking twenty packs of cigarettes a day. Eventually an addict (not everyone gets addicted to dope, of course) is a physical wreck who will need publicly financed medical care for emphysema or stroke or cancer, because he’s spent all his money on dope and can’t hold a job.

These are NOT OPTIONS for any society which wishes to remain productive and self-determinative. Drugs, more or less, create slaves. Make them legal and you have ’subsidized’ them, and you’ve vastly expanded the number of dangerous or useless people to be cared for and fed by the rest of us.

There are only drunk drivers now, in excess, because it’s not illegal to drink. Imagine how many dangerous drivers you’ll have at late stage cocaine addiction, opiate addiction and so forth. People lose their MINDS over this stuff. Do you want to work with them, drive with them, care for them, feed them?

It’s bad enough now. Without the putative attempts by our government to protect some of us from the rest of us by interdicting, America could change so radically that you wouldn’t recognize it in twenty five years.

And isn’t a key difference between the war on drugs and the war on terror that no one consumes terror voluntarily?