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Diablo
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[*] posted on 29-6-2012 at 20:41


Sorry I misunderstood your post, and while you are right that "If the potential for abuse exists, it will be abused." this is not only true of drugs. People can and will abuse anything that gives them pleasue, from video games, to drugs, to the internet, to sex, people can get addicted to anything. However this does not mean these things should be illegal. As for alcohol related deaths are so common, it would be, and indeed was, much worse if alcohol were to be illegal. Especially considering that one could never be sure if what they were drinking would kill them.
The prescription drug problem is mainly that many people have no idea what the medications their taking actually are. In fact I have a friend who recieves stimulants for ADHD and guess what he doesn't even know what a stimulant is. If people would actually learn what they were doing they would likely be more careful.

If murder were made legal, would you go out and kill that guy who cut in line? If so are you only going to do it because its now legal, also since its now legal would you not worry about their family's revenge? In the minds of people who would commit murder, legality makes no difference, they will do it. Your right though that one would work itself out for the most part.;)




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Rogeryermaw
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[*] posted on 29-6-2012 at 20:58


bromic i do have to agree with some of your points. i cannot judges the possible actions of others by my own experiences. self control and will power are not popular these days and it is easy to see how one out of control behavior could lead to another. it is only my own personal belief that people should be left to their own devices because i have proven to myself that i can decide when enough is enough. a quick look around me shows that this is not always true and is not true for all people. what is good for the goose is not always good for the gander. but at the same time, how is it fair to restrict everyone based on the actions of a minority? some chemists blow themselves and others to kingdom come, but we would all be howling if our hobby was stripped away outright.

if a group of people do not have the responsibility to experiment with drugs safely then no one should have them. by the same token, if a group of people cannot experiment with chemicals safely, no one should have them. our world is coming to this soon enough. i personally am in no rush to get there.
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watson.fawkes
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[*] posted on 30-6-2012 at 07:45


Quote: Originally posted by BromicAcid  
Also I didn't even get into the violence, just the annihilation of the family unit by the drugs themselves. If the potential for abuse exists, it will be abused.
Few people would disagree with you that there is harm caused by the use of drugs. The question is what to do about it. There are more answers than simply making them illegal. If it were the case that making drugs illegal also made them unavailable, then the case for prohibition would be much stronger. Alas for simplistic approaches, this isn't true; availability is seldom much affected in the long term by prohibition and interdiction.
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chemrox
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[*] posted on 30-6-2012 at 12:49


I live in an area where the big boogie man is meth. We passed laws for the realtors that made precursors out of iodine, P, all sudafed or ephedrine cold tablets and added restrictions and penalties. Simple possession of meth is a felony and felonies are so common now they simply hand a ticket to the arrestee and send him on his way. Cui bono? The meth community is better off having gone from home baked poison to Mexican made d-methamphetamine HCl. On the other hand, life is increasingly hopeless for them because they nearly all have felony records. Mexico is now in utter gang war chaos ala Chicago 1930 with much better weapons. The US federal cops have much larger budgets and the average citizen has agreed to sacrifice more civil liberties to combat the 'scourge.'



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[*] posted on 30-6-2012 at 14:37


Quote: Originally posted by chemrox  
The "rave" scene and it's X use. (Is mdma a psychedelic?)

It's certainly not a classic psychedelic. But IMHO it has some minor psychedelic aspects - sometimes things get a little bit weird. Compared to real psychedelics, these aspects of the drug are of course complete kindergarten. So both kinds of drugs open up your mind - but to completely different aspects of the human psyche. I guess I'm a sick person, I prefer psychedelics. (But sometimes the absolutely superficial happiness of a night spent with friends on speed is nice as well. ;))

Quote:
I'd liketo see a lot more cook and taste going on.

Absolutely! The proof of the pudding is in the tasting. :) Just like lead block tests (or whatever they do) are an integral part of the science of energetic materials, so is tasting an integral part of the chemistry of the other-kind-of-energetic materials. ;) And what could be considered madder science than tasting various psychoactives? Not much me thinks.

The problem is that people here are simply not able to pull it off (and I'm not excluding myself). The first obstacle is to source the necessary materials and perform a multi-step synthesis. And honestly, apart from a few exceptions all I see here is lots of talk and little real chemistry beyond high school level. Then even if you manage to make some clean material, a taste test is of little worth unless you have a significant amount of experience with other materials. A naive person will be impressed by practically any psychedelic compound and not be able to characterize it correctly. And even if you have the necessary experience, you will need the time to do multiple sessions. The problem is that often at first you will mostly notice what the new material does _not_ have compared to the parent compounds that you have tasted. Only after a few sessions will the real characteristics of a compound manifest themselves. You have to know what to look for. And finally you have to be able to express all that concisely with the correct vocabulary. Everybody who thinks the work of the Shulgins et. al. is trivial is a complete fuckwit in my opinion.

Quote:
Many years ago there was a lot going on at the Hive and ADC. Some of the more paranoid members were sure DEA watched the sites; listening in. I talked with some "diversion control" cops from DEA about this. They didn't know about ADC or the Hive and expressed zero interest. Bees just aren't a big threat. A partcularly naive friend who used the nom du guerre of eleusis got in serious trouble because he was selling through the mail and admitted so when investigators visited his parents. It had nothing to with posting on ADC.

But times changed a lot since a.d.c! Unfortunately police aren't as internet-ignorant as they were back then.

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And what is the limit to what one can say in this context without massive group flaming?

Why bother? Let the whiners whine. *shrug*
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chemrox
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[*] posted on 4-7-2012 at 11:33


Bromic claims special knowledge from "living near the ghetto." The ghettos may present special situations. Just about everything there is toxic including sex, alcohol and air. Many feel that is a deliberate situation and that sales of ghetto drugs ie tar heroin and crack are actually encouraged. Contragate kind of proved that. Tragic as life there is this it is not a model of what happens with access to drugs. Indeed better examples would be the US in the Victorian era or California in the 1960's. The US crackdown on drugs was politically motivated. It was an effort to control a counter-culture more than anything else. What was most objectionable about the counter-culture was its opposition to war. Drug laws were not made for our health and well being. One way of defining a free society is one in which people make their own decisions about what goes into their bodies. The US has always wielded powerful influence in the world and the US has always been ambivalent about freedom. I fear that in the last two decades the anti-freedom forces in the US have gained overwhelming influence. South American peoples had psychedelics and shamanic traditions. The Conquistadors did everything they could to try and stamp these out. Some of the responses have read here have amazed and disappointed me. It's like there's a generation that grew up on "The Killer Weed" movies and took them seriously or are naive enough to believe, "we're from the government, we're here to help you." Puhlease! There's parallel to the 'what would happen?' argument in colonialism. The British have hung onto Ulster with the argument that if they left a bloodbath would ensue. Instead there's been a bloodbath since they colonized Ireland in 1400 or so. The British made the same argument against Indian home rule but Gandhi faced them down with sheer numbers. The partition resulted and after that the predicted bloodbath was over. After almost a half century of prohibition there would be some problems if it were lifted but much fewer than the hysterical den mothers imagine. Pot is legal in many places and is becoming legal in the US in increments. The situation with meth is that prohibition has created brutal gang warfare in Mexico as Cocaine has in South America. Before that the ways it was made caused 90% of the health problems. I believe legalizing would provide an opportunity to intervene in pregnancy situations which is where the greatest problems arise IMHO. I have to concede that before meth is put on the pharmacy shelf in the US, we should have a public health care system. The US is probably ten to twenty years behind civilized western countries in that regard. The psychedelics are another matter. Psychedelics have always been available and legal to those who want them. The argument that we have a benevolent health care system is for those who have taken Jesus as their personal savior. There's no point in trying to talk sense to them. The psychedelics the govt goes after are the ones that threaten it or initiate the jerk of the knee. LSD was a symbol of the counter-culture. MDMA became a party drug and was being made by unscrupulous exploiters of the young who put whatever was cheap in with it. Now that it's illegal its being made by cooks with varying amounts of skill using things like Hg amalgam. Thank heavens they caught that one and made it illegal. I don't know what threat 2CB was supposed to represent. Making people more loving?

[Edited on 4-7-2012 by chemrox]




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watson.fawkes
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[*] posted on 4-7-2012 at 13:21


Quote: Originally posted by chemrox  
The US crackdown on drugs was politically motivated. It was an effort to control a counter-culture more than anything else. What was most objectionable about the counter-culture was its opposition to war.
Well, no. I'd suggest learning some history. The "crackdown" goes way farther back than that; it started more than 100 years ago. It starts with the Pure Food and Drug Act, which amongst other things was going after opium-tinctured patent medicines. That was 1906. And after that the next few decades were principally racially motivated: opium as anti-Chinese and marijuana as anti-Mexican.

See The History of the Non-Medical Use of Drugs in the United States by Charles Whitebread, still one of the best introductory essays on the subject.
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[*] posted on 30-7-2012 at 20:01


I think it's safe to say (and widely acknowledged) that most illicit drugs have some use or another in medicine. After all, the strongest painkillers, psychedelics, stimulants and depressants are all derived from presently illicit drugs.

As some have already said, it's a shame that these substances are illegal because it's making medical research more difficult and it's only through further research that we will better understand the effects of these substances and their derivatives. By fully understanding the effects of these chemicals, we will ultimately learn more about ourselves.

On the legal side of things, I used to think that only the most destructive drugs should be kept illegal (meth, cocaine, heroin). The sad truth is that legislation does not discourage drug use in the least, it merely gives a reason to throw someone into a jail. Since prisons in the US are privately owned, they welcome new people with open arms; more prisoners, more money, more profit. Business and government are tightly intertwined, so I don't see legalisation happening any time soon, no matter how much sense it might make.




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[*] posted on 30-7-2012 at 20:44


Here in NZ we've had issues around synthetic cannabis. In a rather clever move the govt has banned all such products until the vendors have scientifically proven their safety. So they are not exactly illegal, but do have to meet certain standards. This puts the rather significant costs of safety testing protocols squarely on the shoulders of the manufacturers, just like big pharma. The result is that only 'safe' drugs make it into stores, instead of the random mixtures of crap usually peddled by the party drug crowd. And yes, I know there are plenty of pharma backed drugs released and then recalled due to problems.

So maybe thats one way forward - provided the drug meets all the safety standards applied to therapeutic pharmaceuticals then it could be approved for general consumption, with the testing paid for by the manufacturers. Instead of the knee-jerk drug = bad reaction we get well researched answers. Knowledge instead of ignorance. Knowledge useful to users and abusers too.

Now ask yourself just how many currently illegal substances would pass muster? Alcohol and tobacco certainly wouldn't.

[Edited on 31-7-2012 by Twospoons]




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[*] posted on 23-8-2012 at 23:21


Science fiction rules in this discussion. If murder were made legal? Wake up, murder is legal for the establishment, and they practice regular like. And for those of you who actually believe society would crumble if all drugs were legal I say Hey, what planet do you live on? Society IS crumbling and one of the reasons is the people who use drugs are branded criminals, and in a society where one percent has all the money there are going to be large numbers of poor and they are going to use drugs/alcohol to ease their suffering. So why use up so much energy punishing these people who are already suffering? Do you want a utopian society where you can walk the streets at night and not worry about locking your home? Try Nazi Germany 1936.
So why not try an experiment? Legalise drugs in one state and see if it crumbles or decays into anarchy, or if it goes on as usual, or what? Because if you dont then your arguments are based on fiction and have no basis in fact.
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[*] posted on 24-8-2012 at 00:38


I have to agree with watson.fawkes, everybody should read the essay he mentions. It is indeed priceless. I agree with some of it but not all,even still it is a well written and very informative essay on the subject.
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[*] posted on 24-8-2012 at 06:58


It is a crime to make drugs illegal, but without crime/black markets, where are the illicit profits? Yes, sarcasm.

Lots of good writings in thread here;)
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