You miss the point of my argument. I have seen drug abuse of all stripes and agree that it can be devastating. I accept that cannabis psychosis is real and I've seen that too. The fact remains that if people want to use drugs, they will, they always have. It makes no sense whatsoever to gift huge amounts of money to the criminal underclass who exploit that tendency. If you want to to harm the "unscrupulous", then hit them in the pocket. I stick to my views on legalisation. If people are struggling with mental health issues, does it really make sense to label them as criminals too? Legalise it and free up the funds currently used in the fruitless efforts to suppress something that cannot be suppressed and use those funds for better things.
Would you have us ban alcohol as well?
I realise I'm not going to change your mind on this, but neither will you change mine.
Cobbs, I may have misread or misunderstood your original post, if so apologies , as from the quoted post directly above, we may actually have more in common than I thought. Gathering the accumumulated opinions above, I take your point re alcohol; tobacco (which the industry knew for decades was carcinogenic, addictive etc etc, but deliberately suppressed research showing this) could be added and I have to say, taxes raised from both are a considerable sum each year. Rhetorically speaking, I wonder how much of baccy and booze taxation goes
directly to fund 'support services' for lung cancer, alcoholism etc? It would be informative and useful to see empirical figures.
Having broadly agreed with your principle, I would most respectfully propose that we are talking about two very different sets of 'industries':
a) Tobacco and alcohol producers have moved on (in some first world countries) from the shady advertising, poteen making, etc of the nineteen-thirties and -forties and could - with one eye closed - be considered to be "mainstream" today with available accounts, share holders' meetings, yada. yada.
b) Drug provision, as in cannabis, heroin, crystal meth, and derivatives, is certainly NOT as 'visible' and as accountable as those of a). Its 'executives' are emphatically not identifiable to shareholders(!) and as such, are not
sub judice until caught!
I fully agree, it would be lovely, in a utopian world, to skim off a percentage of the revenue generated from drug use to fund the rectification of the problems caused by it. [One could cynically say, those problems would not occur if the drugs were unavailable, so there would be no need to garner said funds, no statistics about drug-related crime and so on?]
Returning to a) vs b) above, given the entrenched criminological inverstment in drugs, are you realistic to ask that we 'legalise' them? I wonder if it would simply make life easier for the Pablo Escobars and José Rodríguez Gachas of this world to operate, massively manipulating the market with their already established supply lines continuing to operate 'under the counter' augmenting the "legal and scrutinised" open network that your idea would create. We would then have the unlovely connundrum of: "how can you tell illegal spliffs from legal ones?".
"
I realise I'm not going to change your mind on this, but neither will you change mine." Please do not assume I am a bigot; I 'spoke' from the heart, having experienced much from 37 years in one of the caring industries. I am certainly open to my ideas and position being challenged; one is never too old to learn or be corrected. Empirical evidence is everything. If you present something I have mis-interpreted, and I can see it to be so, I will, of course, publicly recant and move on the better informed for it.
