:
: "The costs would go down". What costs are you talking about? Will you pay the medical costs? No, I didn't think so.
: Drugs really help people. Yeah, right! -for a couple of minutes! Why would you waste your life on doing drugs? It's better to start living! Björn, we do actually produce drugs as part of our normal waking state; the reasons that things like morphine and LSD work is that they mimic drugs we produce naturally; in fact, the human pituitary gland produces dimethyltryptamine ("DMT" or "businessman's acid") as part of its normal function; possession of which can land you 7 years in jail here in the UK. We are chemical beings and we our breaking our own drugs laws merely by existing!
This doesn't have a lot to do with the above, admittedly. But it would be a good idea to consider the number of perfectly legal and fairly toxic drugs we do allow to be consumed freely; ethanol, for example (also known as "alcohol"); ethanol is 2500 times more toxic than tetrahydrocannabinol (the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis). It's possible to drink yourself to death with coffee; doesn't it seem a bit of a double standard to insist that Drug X is illegal on health grounds when Drug Y is a) more harmful and b) legal?
To quote Bill Hicks; "Tobacco and Alcohol are *legal*; whooo, looks like the war on drugs took a day off there!"
Psychological addiction isn't tied to specific drugs; there are millions of alcoholics in the world just as there are millions of coffee addicts; addiction is a state of mind.
And life is something we experience through the filter of drugs every day; it's just the way our body chemistry works.
Gideon.
(Adrenaline, DMT, melanin, serotonin, dopamine; all of these are mood-altering "drugs"; they are also naturally produced in the human body.)
