Are you suggesting that we legalise everything that is currently illegal, so that we would have no need to prohibit anything and turn nobody into criminals?
We could very well apply this logic to say, murder. Why not let us legalise murder, set up appropriate channels for people to hire hitmen to kill each other, so that the underground killers would not have any more customers and then they will gradually die out?
I'm sorry if the original comment came off as inflammatory.
What I'm trying to say is that when there are enough people using illegal drugs it is very difficult to use prisons and courts to get them to stop. Much like you can dam up a river but then the water flows around into other undesirable places. As with prohibition it seems a much more practical strategy to regulate the industry, if effect rerouting the river to where it does the least harm. Use regulation to make drugs safer and to minimize the harm to our communities when the the $100 billion dollars spent every year ends up in criminal hands.
Murder directly harms other people, while drugs directly affect only the person taking them. The line is if it directly harms others it should be illegal; otherwise not.
>We could very well apply this logic to say, murder. Why not let us legalise murder, set up appropriate channels for people to hire hitmen to kill each other, so that the underground killers would not have any more customers and then they will gradually die out?
like a government sponsored drone-strike-for-sale hotline? put the hitmen out of business with pure capitalism and good old legal (international) murder.
People have been taking intoxicants for longer than they have been writing. Cunieform is about 6000 years old, and beer is at least 9000 years old. Intoxicants are so woven through most of the societies that have dotted human history that it's hard to believe your question is serious.
I'm on my mobile so can't do much linking, but there is evidence of narcotics use dating back throughout recorded history.
Drugs are extremely popular today.
Using the two above, I made the assumption that people will be using narcotics so long as our species continues, unless their effects can be explicitly replicated and induced by technology at some stage in the future, although I wouldn't necessarily say that such an act would not be doing drugs.
