Thanks Markit, but I find it hard to believe you support the legalising of all drugs. You mention Portugal, but they've only decriminalised drug use, they still search for and punish drug dealers. This makes sense to me.
I think you're lumping all recreational drugs into a benign category similar to Marijuana (no really so benign anymore but safer than most). Do you really want Ice and heroin to be freely available to all? You can make the argument that the quality of the drugs would be better regulated, but I'm pretty sure this won't change their main detrimental health effects. Please read the article I linked to above and explain to me how making Ice legal would help the situation. I'll keep an open mind, but I really can't think what you could possibly say.
Also, I'd say the outcome of legalisation that you'd see in developed countries would be vastly different to what you'd see in countries like Indonesia. There's no safety net here outside of family and friends and I don't know if you've noticed, but taking responsibility for your own actions isn't a huge part of Balinese or Indonesian culture.
Often I hear people saying that it's no different than alcohol being legal, but pretty much every society where alcohol is legal has large societal problems with alcohol! It seems they're arguing that to avoid being hypocritical, we should just put up with a cornucopia of addictions, no matter what the cost to society. Hypocrisy is better.
In Canada we have some aboriginal kids who fill a plastic bag with gasoline and sniff it till their head spins...and then they rampage.
Gasoline isn't illegal....:icon_e_surprised:
Exactly! Thanks Davita. There's an identical problem in outback Aboriginal communities in Australia and the only way they were able to make a dent in the problem was to switch to a non-sniffable fuel. And when I say dent I mean a pretty large one - a 94% reduction.
Northern Territory rollout of non-sniffable fuel passes milestone with launch of Darwin storage tank - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Basically, in any society there's a large percentage of people that will make poor choices if given the opportunity. It's my opinion that we shouldn't make it easy for them to do so. Libertarians be damned!
