Drugs: A moral decision, a matter of choice, or a national health risk?

[MusicLovingAtheist]

I think that Eminem had a much more realistic (and I'm being loose with the word here.....incredibly) portrayal of drug use and slinging dope than the "I'm on a yacht with a limo and 8 supermodels" crowd. It doesn't matter though, it's all fantasy (and it's produced not for the dope slinging crowd...or even the ghetto crowd - but young white suburbanites...they're the ones with the cash that buys the cds and merch).

Without buyers there would be no sellers. What I'm suggesting, is that it is neither the buying -nor- the selling that are to blame for these problems you see. Lets say that you and I sell coke to roughly the same clientele - and we have a "business dispute". Can I litigate you? Can I hire a lawyer and take you to a civil court in order to negotiate an agreement between us? No, I cannot. I can, however, shoot you - all of your employees...and perhaps a few of your customers. If I don't - given the slims margins involved, I may be out of a living shortly. Does this sort of business model attract "morally flexible" people? Yes. If I -could- litigate you, how much room would there be for those gangbangers in the coke market? Sure, those people who would get into shootouts would still do so - but not for this. You don't see the manager of the 7-11 on top of his store firing an ak at the manager of the Circle K across the street on his roof, with his norinco, -over accusations of slurpee price fixing or market infringement, eh?

You're suggesting that with or without freedom of drugs there will be drug use. You're saying that legalizing drugs will make the scenario less violent. I concur with that statement. Is the war on drugs a viable solution to all these problems? Obviously not. It's apparently failing and costing the world a lot of money. I think this could be a "the grass is always greener" dilemma though. How do you know that legalizing drugs would make the united states better. I imagine that if drugs got legalized, without regulations, there would be a massive bonanza of hardcore drug use and celebration. I suspect that may people's lives would be lost. Countless people would develop addiction. As well as more unforeseen issues, all in the first week.

So maybe it would be a matter of regulating the drug use. Don't allow the most severely heavy drugs, like heroin etc. on the market and allowed people access to less sever drugs, in regulated amounts, perhaps that would alleviate some drug war tension. No one would want to use those sever drugs like heroin after the safer drugs are available. My guess is that hard drugs are cheap. So if you allow some to be legalized, I'm sure the taxes would be high and the price of the drugs would be high as well. Just look at the price of cigarettes. Yet people still smoke them and I don't ever hear about a cigarette black market. I also like the idea of not criminalizing drug users and cleaner quality of drugs through professional regulated distribution. I think that would be a good solution. Would you agree?