: The recreational use of drugs (including alcohol) is universal among humanity, and can even be found in the animal kingdom. Why do you condemn this practice? Abusing drugs is one thing, but using them to enjoy a pleasurable experience is no different from eating a good meal or reading a good book.Except for the fact that you alter your biochemical physiology, thus diluting in a very noticeable and specific way who "you" really are. Except for the fact that alcohol affects you as it does because it's poison and drunkenness is only the debateably cool effect of your body trying to recover. Drug use for spiritual enhancement in ritual is one thing, recreation is another. Universally practiced, maybe. But someone once asked me if something was right just because everyone did it. What do you think the answer was?
: You are making a big assumption here: that people who use drugs recreationally can "only" be amused in this way, or that they are wasting their time. Says who? If you would rather spend all your free time enjoying yourself without ever using drugs, that's fine, but do not tell the rest of us that if we want to spend an enjoyable evening smoking a joint and listening to jazz, for example, that we are somehow wasting our time or avoiding life.
You waste resources, only a lesser of which is time. The drug can be used once by one person before it's gone, but was very expensive to purchase, difficult and risky to cultivate or produce in a lab, and as it currently stands, might even have cost human lives somewhere in the process. (Drug buyers help bear the burden of guilt for DEA raids where people get shot) You see, the pursuit of drugs is the pursuit of pleasure at the exorbitant waste of resources.
: Also, there is no merit to your argument that when one uses drugs, they "go up in smoke") (or up the nose or out the veins, etc.). So what? When you eat a banana, all the effort that went into providing you with that banana is consumed in a matter of minutes. But you enjoyed the end product, did you not, so it was worth it.
But you need to eat. You require food, be it banana or fish or legumes. You don't require drugs, and shockingly, do not require pleasure to live. These are accessories that some feel enhance the quality of life, but the banana is a form of necessity. Drugs have no durable pleasurable effects, the high disappears. With it goes your money, and you're not financially, physically, or possibly even mentally better off. Your pleasure levels might have increased, but at such a sacrifice as to make the exchange a costly one.
: Lastly, since this is a "Kids" section, I would point out that while I am in favor of legalizing drugs, they ought not be used by growing children or, if they are, only with strict adult supervision (as when allowing a child a sip of wine). Drugs and emotional/mental/physicial development simply do not mix.
Correct, and I would assert that emotional/mental/physical development never ceases, from our conception to the instant that we die. Therefore drugs always "do not mix" as you claim, and we can never be justified in taking them. I do not mean to say you cannot- certainly you are an agent of willful action and can do as you well please. But you'll have to accept that not everything you do is necessarily justified. The real question is does that matter to you?
