----- Original Message ----- From: "Rebekah" Subject: Re: Faces of meth images
> wow, that's crazy. I feel so bad for people that get trapped into > stuff like that. I've never been much interested in illegal drugs. > Honestly, I once tried weed in college because everyone seemed so > obsessed with it, and it seemed "safer" than other things I could have > tried. I came away with the decision that it was definitely not worth > it and I'd rather eat ice cream, which is much more legal ;) > Addicting recreational drugs are so unnessary and should be completely > banished from the planet. I listened to a documentary about cocaine addiction a few years ago. The fellow being interviewed was of the opinion that banning drugs is a fools game (look how successful your country's "war on drugs" has been), in that all it does is give the banned substance a cachet value which makes it more enticing, and increases secondary crime, since the price of the product goes up with the risk factor. In a nutshell, banning drugs, be it meth, coke, marijuana or alcohol has little negative effect on consumption, but has a tremendous positive effect on crimes like break and enter, armed robbery and murder, as the addicts will tend to do whatever they need to do to feed their addiction. OTOH, if you decriminalize the stuff, the risk factors of production and selling go down a lot, the price goes down a lot, addicts no longer need to be marginalized into a criminal element that may be very violent and abusive (yer basic street whore is often dead before she hits 30), and since you are no longer building jails to hold the people you have criminalized unnecessarily, you have a lot more funds for treatment programs to help people get off whatever is jonesing them to death. What we are doing now isn't working, and will never work. The choice we have is to continue playing the fools game or try a different approach, perhaps finding something that will work. William Robb -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
