War On Drugs

True drug addiction is ugly, but short of removing all drugs and the plants and chemicals they come from off planet, we will always have drug addicts. It comes down to a cost benifit analysis. Is it better to cut down drug and gang violence by making drugs cheap and legal which may increase the number of drug addicts or do we fight a war on drugs that costs trillions, lose anyway, put millions of non-violent people into prison, have hundres of violent durg related shootings and still have large numbers of drug addicts? I would prefer less violence and less money spent on pointless wars on drugs myself. People will always use drugs.We can teach them that they're bad, but they will use them anyway. If you make them illegal, you just turn users into criminals without addressing the fact that to pursue pleasure is part of being, man or animal. I don't believe we will ever be able to solve the drug problem short of rewiring the human brain.

But this misses one of the bigger problems with the drug trade, the violence! We need to remove the profit in the drug trade by making the drugs legal so the druglords and gangs will lose their source of revenue. The reduction in price might also decrease property theft by individuals trying to buy high priced illegal drugs, maybe. We then also need to strongly discourage drug abuse (not use). I personally don't do any drugs harder than alcohol and caffiene, and not because of the legality of the hard stuff. I just don't like the out of control feeling some drugs give you. Maybe I'm a bit callous, but I'm more concerned about the cost to me in dollars and increased societal violence due to the drug trade being illegal then the well being of people who will be addicts whether or not drugs are legal. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for trying to help them, but more concerned about helping myself and other non-drug addicts first. Have you ever been in a major inner city and seen what the violence of the drug trade does to the neighborhood? It's appalling, much more so than the plight of a drug addict!