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Diablo
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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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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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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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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.'
"When you let the dumbasses vote you end up with populism followed by autocracy and getting back is a bitch." Plato (sort of)
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turd
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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.
| Quote: | | 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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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]
"When you let the dumbasses vote you end up with populism followed by autocracy and getting back is a bitch." Plato (sort of)
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watson.fawkes
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| 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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White Yeti
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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.
"Ja, Kalzium, das ist alles!" -Otto Loewi
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Twospoons
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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]
Helicopter: "helico" -> spiral, "pter" -> with wings
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edgeofacliff
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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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edgeofacliff
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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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SM2
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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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