Quote:
Originally Posted by TheMercenary
Sorry but that does not follow the common sense rule for me. Make it more available, and then redirect the money to rehab. Which essentially is an admission that you made a problem but you are going to have the money to treat it, so no problem. I can't buy that. Certainly taking money from the current approach and redirecting to better education it is one thing, similar to what is being done with smoking. The anti-smoking approach has been effective in decreasing the number of people who smoke, in the form of education and bans on when and where you can smoke. You are going to have a hard time convincing me that legalization of heroin and cocaine is a good thing.
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First, the legalization is not a "good" thing, I am arguing that it might be better than what we have now.
Second, education and rehabilitation will have to work hand in hand. Education will work to prevent people from start using those drugs in the first place and rehabilitation will work to keep people who are addicted from using the drugs in the future.
Third, my reason is not that it will change the individual usage and those negative effects, but the negative social effects. There are NO positive effects to pushing drugs to the black market, none. That is my main reason for my stance and reason I posted the article in the first place and you have never addressed that part.
To look at this issue rationally we have two main factors, individual negative effects and social negative effects and both need to be addressed.
To address the individual effects, we have to do what I said in my second point, focus on education and rehabilitation. I am very confident, as with your smoking cigarettes example, that education can lower drug abuse in teenagers. I am also confident that rehabilitation can get people to quit drugs and lower the massive amounts of negative effects that come with addiction. There are other methods to keep people from abusing drugs than making it illegal and as far as I am concerned, making drugs illegal hasn't worked at all so far so other methods should be explored.
To address the social effects, we need to keep drugs off the black market. I have personal experience with this and am aware of how negative and far reaching the social effects can be and it all stems from the black market and organized crime. Take a look at organized crime during the prohibition, it booms from popular illegal (emphasis both popular and illegal) substances. If full out legalization works, fine, if prescriptions work, fine, if alternative methods work, fine, but the goal of legalization is to get the drug trade off the streets.
That is why I believe proper education, rehabilitation, and the legalization of cocaine and heroin can have positive effects on our society. Education will prevent kids from abusing drugs in the first place. Rehabilitation will reduce the number of addicts. Legalization will take the drug trade off the black market. With those three, we can easily be efficient in lowering drug abuse and still be able to put money elsewhere as UT suggested.