In general, writing a node like this in the
libertarian non-
moralistic atmosphere of
e2 is like trying to fit
truck tyres to a
tomato,
time consuming and pointless. Still, with the spirit of one who is at least willing to enter the fray and give it a go, I begin.
My argument isn't with drugs per se, an inanimate chemical structure is morally neutral, and will remain so until human interaction with it creates a moral framework for it's use and or abuse. The point is the effect that drugs have, and as my primary school teacher Mr Ward pointed out a drug is simply a substance which changes the way your body works.
In most cases today, drugs are used for medicinal purposes, because of this very same property, and there can be no argument for the removal of socially stigmatised drugs such as heroin, marijuana and others to be held back when they can genuinely help other human beings. No, why I object to people taking drugs is that the distort mental functions and dissipate the will. The two things that determine most closely the quality of your life are thus diluted and you are left free of responsibility for your actions. Perhaps that is the wrong word, free implies something good, perhaps one should say that your sense of responsibility is diminished, even though the responsibilities are still there. Now sometimes this has the desired effect of relieving the tensions of life and allowing you to enjoy yourself, but other times this can simply mean that you ignore the contours of your life and cause other people harm, or perhaps do harm to yourself. This is often regretted when the drug effect wears of and more tensions are added to the persion who has to deal with a worse situation than when he took the drug in the first place.
This means the person is in need of a greater relief than before and so is more likely to take drugs again if the experience is positive.
"Kids stuff, you say, I have heard it all before." well of course, but kids are some of the clearest thinkers I know. And I do know that one shouldn't look to chemicals to alleviate psychological difficulties. Physical solutions to physical problems, chemical solutions to chemical problems, and mental solutions to mental problems. etc etc.. comments welcome, as always.
Right, I suppose Loinen needs a well thought out response to such a thought provoking writeup. So then, here it is:
vicious circle theory :
You are presupposing the idea that drugs are bad, and then assuming that drugs are good at the end of this paragraph. Even leaving aside this contradiction, the argument doesn't hold. Either a zero-tolerance policy works to lessen the impact of drugs on society or it doesn't. You argue that by forcing a limited cadre of professional criminals into the business it makes it worse, whereas I am arguing that allowing the broad mass of humanity to access it is much much worse by a matter of scale!
Anyway, that is just statistics, and your random ideas as to the nature of the drugs problem in relation to zero-tolerance have nothing to bear on the node topic as a whole.