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Good Ole Mother Nature should be legal and don't start bringing those other hard core drugs into the picture. Legalizing would get it off the street corners and onto the tax rolls.
The DEA position on marijuana is a total myth. Other studies ( http://www.mapinc.org/lib/limited.pdf ) have found that marijuana use is in fact higher in the USA. The DEA cherrypicked data in order to come to a scary conclusion. Which you then swallowed without bothering to verify. Huzzah.
The key is not that marijuana usage goes up or down with decriminalization, it's that there appears to be no relationship.
Quote:
Proponents of criminalization attribute to
their preferred drug-control regime a special
power to affect user behavior. Our findings
cast doubt on such attributions. Despite
widespread lawful availability of cannabis in
Amsterdam, there were no differences be-
tween the 2 cities in age at onset of use, age
at first regular use, or age at the start of max-
imum use. Either availability in San Fran-
cisco is equivalent to that in Amsterdam de-
spite policy differences, or availability per se
does not strongly influence onset or other ca-
reer phases.
The DEA position on marijuana is a total myth. Other studies ( http://www.mapinc.org/lib/limited.pdf ) have found that marijuana use is in fact higher in the USA. The DEA cherrypicked data in order to come to a scary conclusion. Which you then swallowed without bothering to verify. Huzzah.
The key is not that marijuana usage goes up or down with decriminalization, it's that there appears to be no relationship.
I say your data is cherry picked. I trust the DEA over Mapinc.org.lib. How can you verify your data? We can go back and forth forever with links that dispute each other.
They did not legalize all drugs they decriminalized them. Thats much different than legalization. Were debating legalization which is very different. That was a good link and it will be interesting to see the long term results. My position is the less user's the better. I am open to whatever works best. I just do not want us to be the litmus test.
I say your data is cherry picked. I trust the DEA over Mapinc.org.lib. How can you verify your data? We can go back and forth forever with links that dispute each other.
You trust publication by the DEA, who have an obvious interest in marijuana being an illegal drug (the DEA would shrink dramatically if it wasn't as the FDA took over reducing the fiefdom of those at the DEA) more than you trust a peer reviewed publication in one of the most respected and influential medical journals in the world?
How can you verify your data? We can go back and forth forever with links that dispute each other.
Sholden already answered this point. This study was sponsored by the US NDIA, which doesn't have a vested interest in scaring the crap out of you, and the result was, of course, much more balanced than one random statistic cherry picked by the DEA. That it went through peer review to be published in a prestigious medical journal lends it even more credence.
In any case, the idea that legal marijuana would result in an explosion of marijuana use flies in the face of the available evidence. This is not a question of choosing whom to believe, it's a question of fact that has a right answer. If you choose to believe the DEA's one statistic about one age group over a small time interval, without any follow up about usage over time, frequency of usage, basically any context at all over this paper's scientific conclusions, you are choosing to believe an incomplete, misleading and invalid picture. That makes you wrong.
The reality of the matter is that legality has never limited availability in any substantial way, and that cultural factors are much stronger in determining who smokes marijuana and who doesn't. If you look at any available drug - take tobacco, for instance - you can see that despite being legal to smoke, awareness of the negatives has driven down usage steadily over time. Legality never entered into it until recently, with smoking bans in bars and the like. Legalizing marijuana and treating it like cigarettes would generate more or less the same behavior as cigarettes - usage would be a function of prevailing social norms, which would in turn be determined by public perception of safety/risk and reward. The taxpayer would save money, society would continue on as it does right now, with the exception that marijuana users wouldn't be forced into the shadows. There would be no widespread social ramifications, except whatever positives came from the victory of pragmatic rationalism over blinkered moralism in drug policy.
Sholden already answered this point. This study was sponsored by the US NDIA, which doesn't have a vested interest in scaring the crap out of you, and the result was, of course, much more balanced than one random statistic cherry picked by the DEA. That it went through peer review to be published in a prestigious medical journal lends it even more credence.
In any case, the idea that legal marijuana would result in an explosion of marijuana use flies in the face of the available evidence. This is not a question of choosing whom to believe, it's a question of fact that has a right answer. If you choose to believe the DEA's one statistic about one age group over a small time interval, without any follow up about usage over time, frequency of usage, basically any context at all over this paper's scientific conclusions, you are choosing to believe an incomplete, misleading and invalid picture. That makes you wrong.
The reality of the matter is that legality has never limited availability in any substantial way, and that cultural factors are much stronger in determining who smokes marijuana and who doesn't. If you look at any available drug - take tobacco, for instance - you can see that despite being legal to smoke, awareness of the negatives has driven down usage steadily over time. Legality never entered into it until recently, with smoking bans in bars and the like. Legalizing marijuana and treating it like cigarettes would generate more or less the same behavior as cigarettes - usage would be a function of prevailing social norms, which would in turn be determined by public perception of safety/risk and reward. The taxpayer would save money, society would continue on as it does right now, with the exception that marijuana users wouldn't be forced into the shadows. There would be no widespread social ramifications, except whatever positives came from the victory of pragmatic rationalism over blinkered moralism in drug policy.
Who or what is th US NDIA? I just goggeled it and got "National Defense Industrial Association" Who are these "Peer reviewer's'? And what prestigious medical journal are you referring to? I certainly hope it's not that fluff piece you posted from time magazine. Lets clear this up.
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