I couldn’t stand the phrasing any longer.

I’d add that heroin and cocaine in their pure forms have overwhelmingly fewer bad side effects than the poor quality drugs provided by criminals. Legal and regulated drugs would not kill as many people, and honest, beleivable education regarding the rest of the side effects could save minds as well as bodies. I hear that ethical (and practical) coke dealers used to cut their product with b-vitamins to keep up their customers’ health.

That is why proper regulation is important and why we should legalize and regulate cannabis. Cannabis is a safer alternative to alcohol and tobacco and has some other amazing medicinal and industrial uses as well. The fact that it has been beaten down and twisted into “public enemy number one” should be considered criminal. Cannabis is not dangerous in any way. Yes, I agree that teenagers should not be smoking it or doing anything to alter their developing minds, but responsible adults who are currently given free access to toxic alcohol should be given the safer alternative of cannabis. Why the hell not? Regulate it like alcohol, at least cannabis has never killed anyone (aside from the casualties of the Drug War).

Other truly hard drugs should be regulated as well, but I would never agree with making heroin or meth available for legal sale….

I firmly beleive that, especially heroin and meth have ruined many people who otherwise would have been perfectly happy health productive members of society.

I understand your statement about Social Darwinism, but I don’t think you’d be so pumped on that if it were your friends and/or family members that were destroying themselves.

I’ve personally known about 4 people who have died from overdosing, mainly on heroin or Oxycontin. And there are dozens of people I have met that really have destroyed their bodies and minds from excessive meth use, a couple ended up committing suicide due to the downward spiral meth creates in their lives or guilt of the consequences (for instance a deformed baby from meth use during pregnancy – there’s an innocent victim for ya – the dad ended up hanging himself).

People will probably continue to get it if they really want it. I feel however that if cannabis were taken out of the legal equation that we would have a much easier time focusing on these other truly damaging substances and how to inform and educate the public about how bad they are as well as developing specific treatment programs for users.

I think most people feel like the government has been completely lying to them about cannabis and that has done much to undermine the role of the legal system in controlling the more dangerous substances.

Legalize Cannabis, I am confident that will solve or at least help much of our illegal drug problems… not to mention freeing up resources to focus on real problems instead of “potheads” and medicinal cannabis users.