The "Freeola Customer Forum" forum, which includes Retro Game Reviews, has been archived and is now read-only. You cannot post here or create a new thread or review on this forum.
Warning: this will be a controversial topic.
With the predictability of gravity, supposedly left wing Mp's are rallying against the liberalization of certain drug laws. Now I think that the Future of Gaming Forums spans quite a small section of society, but the intellectual range is frighteningly well represented; from the swamp matter intellect of some posters to the colossal, dictionary swallowing genius of other posters, to the people who write ONLY IN CAPITALS, the intellectual divide is well evident here. So I feel it'd be interesting to see different peoples opinions on the following matters:
The legalization of cannabis
The legalization of Ecstasy
Prescribing Heroin
First of all, I don’t smoke weed (I am officially the 3rd laziest person that ever lived, smoking weed would probably push me to the top of that undesirable list) mainly because my lungs can’t take any smoke at all, and I’m certainly not a heroine addict. The image of evil drug pushers is a totally made up one, no one sells drugs, drugs sell themselves, if someone doesn’t want to buy them you don’t, as a dealer, try and convince them because there’s always going to be someone else wanting to buy them, you never see a crack dealer sitting on a pile of drugs saying "Shat, just how am I going to shift all this crack?". People want to get high; in the same way people want to play computer games. You may be asking how I know this. Well, I have my friends…
As for heroin, the truth of the matter is that street heroin is bad because it’s mixed with stuff, yet you can inject pure heroin all your life and it causes very little lasting damage. Secondly, heroin is very cheap to produce, its only expensive on the street because the dealers are risking 30 year jail sentences, the smugglers are risking condoms full of smack bursting in their intestines, and the users will keep coming back, giving you a good business opportunity to charge what you want. If heroin was prescribed, it would clean up the lives of heroin users, and presumably someone won’t want to be a skag-head all their lives, given the opportunity to be sedated through cold turkey most people would find coming off heroin a lot less daunting, heroin related crime would go down (because it would be prescribed) and overdoses would happen a lot less because the dosage would be standardized. Legalizing them would help the quality, but drugs are dangerous in the wrongs hands. I think they affect people in different ways too, both psychologically and physically. Plus, when buying ecstasy you don't really know what you are buying. It could be painkillers or something else.
A general point as well, what I do to my own body should really be my choice. If I want to eat full English breakfast every morning, smoke 20 fags a day, eat fried chicken all the time and drink like George Best, I should be allowed to. I may become a fat with a weak heart, but it’s my body and it should be my choice. Keeping drugs like ecstasy and marijuana illegal is purely down to the desire to control. In my opinion, however, Ecstasy is nasty stuff, and best left well alone. I would say it is far worse than coke, or even ketamine. The early E's were the good ones if you can say that but these days it’s the same as coke or ketamine no worse or better. Ecstasy is bad and deserves its class A status, though it does apparently have therapeutic effects for Parkinson’s sufferers (I think it's Parkinson’s.) Drug laws are rather stupid, they need to be a bit broader (5 classes maybe), since Cocaine is not as bad as heroine (although both are hell dangerous mainly due to the crap that gets mixed in with them). LSD is one thing to leave well alone, bloody nasty stuff, well worse that E in my opinion…
Cigarette related illness kill a couple of hundred thousand people per year, alcohol accounts for an estimated 40% of the violence in Britain and another couple of hundred thousand deaths, while there hasn’t ever been a single death related to marijuana, and an estimated 20 people a year die from taking ecstasy (which would drop considerably if you knew exactly what was in your pills, and how any to take etc). Alcohol is implicated in the majority of suicides and smoking is the leading cause of premature death in the "developed" world. I realize most of you have very short attention spans (its all that playing computer games, it rots your brains y'know!) but please post your opinions, and if I’m being a liberal hippy feel free to tell me, man. Just don’t ignorantly call me a junky, because you'd be very much mistaken.
As I always like to say, there are two sides to every argument, and this is no exception:
Comparing the effects of drugs with those of alcohol and cigarettes and saying that drugs do less damage is not an argument in favor of drugs, it's an argument against cigarettes and alcohol. If they were invented today and presented to the government health advisors to be tested for legalization, they'd in all probability refuse to legalize them on account of the damage they do. Just because they slipped under the net doesn't mean drugs should too. Legalization simply because drugs are widely used, as is being recommended now, is just stupid. Would we legalize theft in an effort to deal with rising burglaries? Legalization would also reward those people who have spent years ignoring the law on drugs. Now, I believe that if a law is truly damaging to you, for example if the law against stealing prevents you from being able to eat because you've been evicted, you've nowhere to go and you have two children to feed, then there are mitigating circumstances to be taken into account when you break it. But in the case of drugs, people are breaking the law - the most important basis of our society - purely for personal pleasure. We can question laws - that is the point of a democracy - but if we break them, there must be moral reasons for it. That's why I support investigation into the use of certain drugs for medicinal purposes - there is a moral reason for that - but regard everyone who uses them for recreational purposes as a criminal, and legalizing drugs as pandering to those criminals.
Quite frankly, the argument that keeping drugs criminalized increases deaths holds no fears for me - just as I would shed no tears for someone who broke their neck trying to climb into my house and burgle it, so I am unmoved by the deaths of other criminals like drug users. If you knowingly break the law without moral justification, you are a criminal. Drug users must lead pathetically sad and boring lives if they feel the need to spice them up with drugs. Get a tube of Jaffa Cakes instead - they're just as addictive, but they're legal. Perhaps all this legalizing stuff and going easy is a mistake you’re always going to get people experimenting but it's almost like people are encouraging people these days. If you have a brain don’t waste it, trust me, it's not worth the buzz. People up your lungs with the smoke, and no matter what people say, is a little addictive, not to mention the tolerance your body builds up, so you end up having to buy more and more to get the same effect. Whilst smoking increases your risk of lung cancer more than cannabis, cannabis still has a great effect. As well as infertility and lung cancer it also destroys a huge number of brain cells, increases risk of numerous other cancers and a load more of other things.
I was thinking: if drugs were legalized, then lots of people would loose a lot of money to drug dealers, but if it was legalized, it could be regulated, with better quality and pricing, and with proper 'instructions', I can see some drugs being ok to legalize. After all, the police is there to protect kids too young to make an educated choice plus when that pill up and you are close to death its amazing how quickly that opinion seems stupid as you pray to live. E's, even good ones, are not good for you and you can up badly when your heart feels like its exploding, your left arms cramping up and you can’t breathe, reality hits hard and that’s why people want to make sure you don’t have to experience it for yourself. There are no proper instructions - take them and risk your life, that’s it, but there can be guidelines, to make risks as minimal as possible. There are guidelines, and in moderation things such as skunk can be fine.
I'm actually in favor of legalizing Cannabis, but as for the rest...the government has the right to intervene when you're getting it to pay for having you scraped off the floor when you OD or get high and then run over because you aren't paying attention, or have a bad reaction or any of the other drug-related things that land you in hospital. Get a personal A&E department and ambulance and then maybe there'd be an argument there. If it was legalized it would, from my point of view, be harder to get hold of and probably way more expensive, due to tax. The 'my body, my choice' point was recently proved to be illegal when Diane Pretty's request to be killed was denied by the courts. The town, city or country has a duty to protect its citizens, and that includes protecting them from themselves. Don’t even get me started on euthanasia issues. Of course, I'm saying that as someone who has Ann Widdecombe's autograph…
Right, I’ve done a little research and discovered that legalization of Cannabis is on its way - yet another cash crop for the government to tax us on. As for the E. Go check out www.urban75.com if you want the lowdown on drugs with no Also if you are taking pills I’d seriously suggest www.pillreports.com and that you buy a pill testing kit from there so you can tell what your actually taking. The effects of drugs smoked near Asthma, as far as I know haven’t been tested. So as far as I know, if Cannabis is legalized, all the Asthma sufferers in the country are dead. Cannabis stinks. That's my argument for keeping it illegal. When some pothead comes on the train it stinks out the whole carriage. I think that people should be allowed to smoke pot if they want because it's just like cigarettes, and there shouldn't be double standards, so while I'm for legalization on principle, I hate the smell - so I would vote to keep it illegal. Geez, my hands are cream-crackad! Basically my argument against legalization is that more people will take drugs. If drugs have a negative effect then this should be discouraged, and so they should be kept illegal.
Thanks for reading,
LF
With the predictability of gravity, supposedly left wing Mp's are rallying against the liberalization of certain drug laws. Now I think that the Future of Gaming Forums spans quite a small section of society, but the intellectual range is frighteningly well represented; from the swamp matter intellect of some posters to the colossal, dictionary swallowing genius of other posters, to the people who write ONLY IN CAPITALS, the intellectual divide is well evident here. So I feel it'd be interesting to see different peoples opinions on the following matters:
The legalization of cannabis
The legalization of Ecstasy
Prescribing Heroin
First of all, I don’t smoke weed (I am officially the 3rd laziest person that ever lived, smoking weed would probably push me to the top of that undesirable list) mainly because my lungs can’t take any smoke at all, and I’m certainly not a heroine addict. The image of evil drug pushers is a totally made up one, no one sells drugs, drugs sell themselves, if someone doesn’t want to buy them you don’t, as a dealer, try and convince them because there’s always going to be someone else wanting to buy them, you never see a crack dealer sitting on a pile of drugs saying "Shat, just how am I going to shift all this crack?". People want to get high; in the same way people want to play computer games. You may be asking how I know this. Well, I have my friends…
As for heroin, the truth of the matter is that street heroin is bad because it’s mixed with stuff, yet you can inject pure heroin all your life and it causes very little lasting damage. Secondly, heroin is very cheap to produce, its only expensive on the street because the dealers are risking 30 year jail sentences, the smugglers are risking condoms full of smack bursting in their intestines, and the users will keep coming back, giving you a good business opportunity to charge what you want. If heroin was prescribed, it would clean up the lives of heroin users, and presumably someone won’t want to be a skag-head all their lives, given the opportunity to be sedated through cold turkey most people would find coming off heroin a lot less daunting, heroin related crime would go down (because it would be prescribed) and overdoses would happen a lot less because the dosage would be standardized. Legalizing them would help the quality, but drugs are dangerous in the wrongs hands. I think they affect people in different ways too, both psychologically and physically. Plus, when buying ecstasy you don't really know what you are buying. It could be painkillers or something else.
A general point as well, what I do to my own body should really be my choice. If I want to eat full English breakfast every morning, smoke 20 fags a day, eat fried chicken all the time and drink like George Best, I should be allowed to. I may become a fat with a weak heart, but it’s my body and it should be my choice. Keeping drugs like ecstasy and marijuana illegal is purely down to the desire to control. In my opinion, however, Ecstasy is nasty stuff, and best left well alone. I would say it is far worse than coke, or even ketamine. The early E's were the good ones if you can say that but these days it’s the same as coke or ketamine no worse or better. Ecstasy is bad and deserves its class A status, though it does apparently have therapeutic effects for Parkinson’s sufferers (I think it's Parkinson’s.) Drug laws are rather stupid, they need to be a bit broader (5 classes maybe), since Cocaine is not as bad as heroine (although both are hell dangerous mainly due to the crap that gets mixed in with them). LSD is one thing to leave well alone, bloody nasty stuff, well worse that E in my opinion…
Cigarette related illness kill a couple of hundred thousand people per year, alcohol accounts for an estimated 40% of the violence in Britain and another couple of hundred thousand deaths, while there hasn’t ever been a single death related to marijuana, and an estimated 20 people a year die from taking ecstasy (which would drop considerably if you knew exactly what was in your pills, and how any to take etc). Alcohol is implicated in the majority of suicides and smoking is the leading cause of premature death in the "developed" world. I realize most of you have very short attention spans (its all that playing computer games, it rots your brains y'know!) but please post your opinions, and if I’m being a liberal hippy feel free to tell me, man. Just don’t ignorantly call me a junky, because you'd be very much mistaken.
As I always like to say, there are two sides to every argument, and this is no exception:
Comparing the effects of drugs with those of alcohol and cigarettes and saying that drugs do less damage is not an argument in favor of drugs, it's an argument against cigarettes and alcohol. If they were invented today and presented to the government health advisors to be tested for legalization, they'd in all probability refuse to legalize them on account of the damage they do. Just because they slipped under the net doesn't mean drugs should too. Legalization simply because drugs are widely used, as is being recommended now, is just stupid. Would we legalize theft in an effort to deal with rising burglaries? Legalization would also reward those people who have spent years ignoring the law on drugs. Now, I believe that if a law is truly damaging to you, for example if the law against stealing prevents you from being able to eat because you've been evicted, you've nowhere to go and you have two children to feed, then there are mitigating circumstances to be taken into account when you break it. But in the case of drugs, people are breaking the law - the most important basis of our society - purely for personal pleasure. We can question laws - that is the point of a democracy - but if we break them, there must be moral reasons for it. That's why I support investigation into the use of certain drugs for medicinal purposes - there is a moral reason for that - but regard everyone who uses them for recreational purposes as a criminal, and legalizing drugs as pandering to those criminals.
Quite frankly, the argument that keeping drugs criminalized increases deaths holds no fears for me - just as I would shed no tears for someone who broke their neck trying to climb into my house and burgle it, so I am unmoved by the deaths of other criminals like drug users. If you knowingly break the law without moral justification, you are a criminal. Drug users must lead pathetically sad and boring lives if they feel the need to spice them up with drugs. Get a tube of Jaffa Cakes instead - they're just as addictive, but they're legal. Perhaps all this legalizing stuff and going easy is a mistake you’re always going to get people experimenting but it's almost like people are encouraging people these days. If you have a brain don’t waste it, trust me, it's not worth the buzz. People up your lungs with the smoke, and no matter what people say, is a little addictive, not to mention the tolerance your body builds up, so you end up having to buy more and more to get the same effect. Whilst smoking increases your risk of lung cancer more than cannabis, cannabis still has a great effect. As well as infertility and lung cancer it also destroys a huge number of brain cells, increases risk of numerous other cancers and a load more of other things.
I was thinking: if drugs were legalized, then lots of people would loose a lot of money to drug dealers, but if it was legalized, it could be regulated, with better quality and pricing, and with proper 'instructions', I can see some drugs being ok to legalize. After all, the police is there to protect kids too young to make an educated choice plus when that pill up and you are close to death its amazing how quickly that opinion seems stupid as you pray to live. E's, even good ones, are not good for you and you can up badly when your heart feels like its exploding, your left arms cramping up and you can’t breathe, reality hits hard and that’s why people want to make sure you don’t have to experience it for yourself. There are no proper instructions - take them and risk your life, that’s it, but there can be guidelines, to make risks as minimal as possible. There are guidelines, and in moderation things such as skunk can be fine.
I'm actually in favor of legalizing Cannabis, but as for the rest...the government has the right to intervene when you're getting it to pay for having you scraped off the floor when you OD or get high and then run over because you aren't paying attention, or have a bad reaction or any of the other drug-related things that land you in hospital. Get a personal A&E department and ambulance and then maybe there'd be an argument there. If it was legalized it would, from my point of view, be harder to get hold of and probably way more expensive, due to tax. The 'my body, my choice' point was recently proved to be illegal when Diane Pretty's request to be killed was denied by the courts. The town, city or country has a duty to protect its citizens, and that includes protecting them from themselves. Don’t even get me started on euthanasia issues. Of course, I'm saying that as someone who has Ann Widdecombe's autograph…
Right, I’ve done a little research and discovered that legalization of Cannabis is on its way - yet another cash crop for the government to tax us on. As for the E. Go check out www.urban75.com if you want the lowdown on drugs with no Also if you are taking pills I’d seriously suggest www.pillreports.com and that you buy a pill testing kit from there so you can tell what your actually taking. The effects of drugs smoked near Asthma, as far as I know haven’t been tested. So as far as I know, if Cannabis is legalized, all the Asthma sufferers in the country are dead. Cannabis stinks. That's my argument for keeping it illegal. When some pothead comes on the train it stinks out the whole carriage. I think that people should be allowed to smoke pot if they want because it's just like cigarettes, and there shouldn't be double standards, so while I'm for legalization on principle, I hate the smell - so I would vote to keep it illegal. Geez, my hands are cream-crackad! Basically my argument against legalization is that more people will take drugs. If drugs have a negative effect then this should be discouraged, and so they should be kept illegal.
Thanks for reading,
LF
Good post...
My personal opinion on cannabis legalisation is that the government is being foolish not to legalise, for purely economic reasons. Let's face it, anyone that wants to smoke dope in the UK pretty much does so at the moment. It's easy to get hold of, pretty much wherever you are. The fact that it's illegal prevents very few people smoking.
Now, if the governement were to legalise it, they could put a large wedge of tax on it, and still keep the price below the current street price. Of course, this is essential, or the legalisation effort will be a waste of time, as the smokers will continue to get their dope throught their normal illicit sources.
Of course, there are the political ramifications; I believe that in a generation's time, the general populace's attitude to drugs as a whole will be much more lax - we, more than any previous generation, have grown up with drugs as a facet of our lives, and are far more drug-savvy than our previous generations. However, at the moment, any party that makes a mass legalisation of any drug will likely have their popularity among the older voters, which could hurt them badly. And this could possibly outweigh the gains of taxes gained through legalisation.
I'd also like to dispel the myth that 'soft' drugs lead to hard drugs. If this were the case, everyone in the country who enjoyed a few beers on a saturday night would be smackheads within a few years. In my opinion, the real situation is that hard drugs lead to soft drugs. Do a poll of people you know who take pills or coke. I guarantee you they'll smoke dope as well. Do a poll of people who smoke dope. I guarantee most will drink alcohol. But far far from all will be doing pills, coke or crack. Everyone who takes drugs picks (whether consciously or unconsciously) their own maximum drug limit. While it's true that most people who take 'harder' drugs start off with weed, and then move onto pills, coke, acid or whatever, this is usually down to the relative ease with which dope can be bought over the others.
I thought I had more to write, but that's all I can think of at the moment.
My personal opinion on cannabis legalisation is that the government is being foolish not to legalise, for purely economic reasons. Let's face it, anyone that wants to smoke dope in the UK pretty much does so at the moment. It's easy to get hold of, pretty much wherever you are. The fact that it's illegal prevents very few people smoking.
Now, if the governement were to legalise it, they could put a large wedge of tax on it, and still keep the price below the current street price. Of course, this is essential, or the legalisation effort will be a waste of time, as the smokers will continue to get their dope throught their normal illicit sources.
Of course, there are the political ramifications; I believe that in a generation's time, the general populace's attitude to drugs as a whole will be much more lax - we, more than any previous generation, have grown up with drugs as a facet of our lives, and are far more drug-savvy than our previous generations. However, at the moment, any party that makes a mass legalisation of any drug will likely have their popularity among the older voters, which could hurt them badly. And this could possibly outweigh the gains of taxes gained through legalisation.
I'd also like to dispel the myth that 'soft' drugs lead to hard drugs. If this were the case, everyone in the country who enjoyed a few beers on a saturday night would be smackheads within a few years. In my opinion, the real situation is that hard drugs lead to soft drugs. Do a poll of people you know who take pills or coke. I guarantee you they'll smoke dope as well. Do a poll of people who smoke dope. I guarantee most will drink alcohol. But far far from all will be doing pills, coke or crack. Everyone who takes drugs picks (whether consciously or unconsciously) their own maximum drug limit. While it's true that most people who take 'harder' drugs start off with weed, and then move onto pills, coke, acid or whatever, this is usually down to the relative ease with which dope can be bought over the others.
I thought I had more to write, but that's all I can think of at the moment.
Warning: this will be a controversial topic.
With the predictability of gravity, supposedly left wing Mp's are rallying against the liberalization of certain drug laws. Now I think that the Future of Gaming Forums spans quite a small section of society, but the intellectual range is frighteningly well represented; from the swamp matter intellect of some posters to the colossal, dictionary swallowing genius of other posters, to the people who write ONLY IN CAPITALS, the intellectual divide is well evident here. So I feel it'd be interesting to see different peoples opinions on the following matters:
The legalization of cannabis
The legalization of Ecstasy
Prescribing Heroin
First of all, I don’t smoke weed (I am officially the 3rd laziest person that ever lived, smoking weed would probably push me to the top of that undesirable list) mainly because my lungs can’t take any smoke at all, and I’m certainly not a heroine addict. The image of evil drug pushers is a totally made up one, no one sells drugs, drugs sell themselves, if someone doesn’t want to buy them you don’t, as a dealer, try and convince them because there’s always going to be someone else wanting to buy them, you never see a crack dealer sitting on a pile of drugs saying "Shat, just how am I going to shift all this crack?". People want to get high; in the same way people want to play computer games. You may be asking how I know this. Well, I have my friends…
As for heroin, the truth of the matter is that street heroin is bad because it’s mixed with stuff, yet you can inject pure heroin all your life and it causes very little lasting damage. Secondly, heroin is very cheap to produce, its only expensive on the street because the dealers are risking 30 year jail sentences, the smugglers are risking condoms full of smack bursting in their intestines, and the users will keep coming back, giving you a good business opportunity to charge what you want. If heroin was prescribed, it would clean up the lives of heroin users, and presumably someone won’t want to be a skag-head all their lives, given the opportunity to be sedated through cold turkey most people would find coming off heroin a lot less daunting, heroin related crime would go down (because it would be prescribed) and overdoses would happen a lot less because the dosage would be standardized. Legalizing them would help the quality, but drugs are dangerous in the wrongs hands. I think they affect people in different ways too, both psychologically and physically. Plus, when buying ecstasy you don't really know what you are buying. It could be painkillers or something else.
A general point as well, what I do to my own body should really be my choice. If I want to eat full English breakfast every morning, smoke 20 fags a day, eat fried chicken all the time and drink like George Best, I should be allowed to. I may become a fat with a weak heart, but it’s my body and it should be my choice. Keeping drugs like ecstasy and marijuana illegal is purely down to the desire to control. In my opinion, however, Ecstasy is nasty stuff, and best left well alone. I would say it is far worse than coke, or even ketamine. The early E's were the good ones if you can say that but these days it’s the same as coke or ketamine no worse or better. Ecstasy is bad and deserves its class A status, though it does apparently have therapeutic effects for Parkinson’s sufferers (I think it's Parkinson’s.) Drug laws are rather stupid, they need to be a bit broader (5 classes maybe), since Cocaine is not as bad as heroine (although both are hell dangerous mainly due to the crap that gets mixed in with them). LSD is one thing to leave well alone, bloody nasty stuff, well worse that E in my opinion…
Cigarette related illness kill a couple of hundred thousand people per year, alcohol accounts for an estimated 40% of the violence in Britain and another couple of hundred thousand deaths, while there hasn’t ever been a single death related to marijuana, and an estimated 20 people a year die from taking ecstasy (which would drop considerably if you knew exactly what was in your pills, and how any to take etc). Alcohol is implicated in the majority of suicides and smoking is the leading cause of premature death in the "developed" world. I realize most of you have very short attention spans (its all that playing computer games, it rots your brains y'know!) but please post your opinions, and if I’m being a liberal hippy feel free to tell me, man. Just don’t ignorantly call me a junky, because you'd be very much mistaken.
As I always like to say, there are two sides to every argument, and this is no exception:
Comparing the effects of drugs with those of alcohol and cigarettes and saying that drugs do less damage is not an argument in favor of drugs, it's an argument against cigarettes and alcohol. If they were invented today and presented to the government health advisors to be tested for legalization, they'd in all probability refuse to legalize them on account of the damage they do. Just because they slipped under the net doesn't mean drugs should too. Legalization simply because drugs are widely used, as is being recommended now, is just stupid. Would we legalize theft in an effort to deal with rising burglaries? Legalization would also reward those people who have spent years ignoring the law on drugs. Now, I believe that if a law is truly damaging to you, for example if the law against stealing prevents you from being able to eat because you've been evicted, you've nowhere to go and you have two children to feed, then there are mitigating circumstances to be taken into account when you break it. But in the case of drugs, people are breaking the law - the most important basis of our society - purely for personal pleasure. We can question laws - that is the point of a democracy - but if we break them, there must be moral reasons for it. That's why I support investigation into the use of certain drugs for medicinal purposes - there is a moral reason for that - but regard everyone who uses them for recreational purposes as a criminal, and legalizing drugs as pandering to those criminals.
Quite frankly, the argument that keeping drugs criminalized increases deaths holds no fears for me - just as I would shed no tears for someone who broke their neck trying to climb into my house and burgle it, so I am unmoved by the deaths of other criminals like drug users. If you knowingly break the law without moral justification, you are a criminal. Drug users must lead pathetically sad and boring lives if they feel the need to spice them up with drugs. Get a tube of Jaffa Cakes instead - they're just as addictive, but they're legal. Perhaps all this legalizing stuff and going easy is a mistake you’re always going to get people experimenting but it's almost like people are encouraging people these days. If you have a brain don’t waste it, trust me, it's not worth the buzz. People up your lungs with the smoke, and no matter what people say, is a little addictive, not to mention the tolerance your body builds up, so you end up having to buy more and more to get the same effect. Whilst smoking increases your risk of lung cancer more than cannabis, cannabis still has a great effect. As well as infertility and lung cancer it also destroys a huge number of brain cells, increases risk of numerous other cancers and a load more of other things.
I was thinking: if drugs were legalized, then lots of people would loose a lot of money to drug dealers, but if it was legalized, it could be regulated, with better quality and pricing, and with proper 'instructions', I can see some drugs being ok to legalize. After all, the police is there to protect kids too young to make an educated choice plus when that pill up and you are close to death its amazing how quickly that opinion seems stupid as you pray to live. E's, even good ones, are not good for you and you can up badly when your heart feels like its exploding, your left arms cramping up and you can’t breathe, reality hits hard and that’s why people want to make sure you don’t have to experience it for yourself. There are no proper instructions - take them and risk your life, that’s it, but there can be guidelines, to make risks as minimal as possible. There are guidelines, and in moderation things such as skunk can be fine.
I'm actually in favor of legalizing Cannabis, but as for the rest...the government has the right to intervene when you're getting it to pay for having you scraped off the floor when you OD or get high and then run over because you aren't paying attention, or have a bad reaction or any of the other drug-related things that land you in hospital. Get a personal A&E department and ambulance and then maybe there'd be an argument there. If it was legalized it would, from my point of view, be harder to get hold of and probably way more expensive, due to tax. The 'my body, my choice' point was recently proved to be illegal when Diane Pretty's request to be killed was denied by the courts. The town, city or country has a duty to protect its citizens, and that includes protecting them from themselves. Don’t even get me started on euthanasia issues. Of course, I'm saying that as someone who has Ann Widdecombe's autograph…
Right, I’ve done a little research and discovered that legalization of Cannabis is on its way - yet another cash crop for the government to tax us on. As for the E. Go check out www.urban75.com if you want the lowdown on drugs with no Also if you are taking pills I’d seriously suggest www.pillreports.com and that you buy a pill testing kit from there so you can tell what your actually taking. The effects of drugs smoked near Asthma, as far as I know haven’t been tested. So as far as I know, if Cannabis is legalized, all the Asthma sufferers in the country are dead. Cannabis stinks. That's my argument for keeping it illegal. When some pothead comes on the train it stinks out the whole carriage. I think that people should be allowed to smoke pot if they want because it's just like cigarettes, and there shouldn't be double standards, so while I'm for legalization on principle, I hate the smell - so I would vote to keep it illegal. Geez, my hands are cream-crackad! Basically my argument against legalization is that more people will take drugs. If drugs have a negative effect then this should be discouraged, and so they should be kept illegal.
Thanks for reading,
LF
With the predictability of gravity, supposedly left wing Mp's are rallying against the liberalization of certain drug laws. Now I think that the Future of Gaming Forums spans quite a small section of society, but the intellectual range is frighteningly well represented; from the swamp matter intellect of some posters to the colossal, dictionary swallowing genius of other posters, to the people who write ONLY IN CAPITALS, the intellectual divide is well evident here. So I feel it'd be interesting to see different peoples opinions on the following matters:
The legalization of cannabis
The legalization of Ecstasy
Prescribing Heroin
First of all, I don’t smoke weed (I am officially the 3rd laziest person that ever lived, smoking weed would probably push me to the top of that undesirable list) mainly because my lungs can’t take any smoke at all, and I’m certainly not a heroine addict. The image of evil drug pushers is a totally made up one, no one sells drugs, drugs sell themselves, if someone doesn’t want to buy them you don’t, as a dealer, try and convince them because there’s always going to be someone else wanting to buy them, you never see a crack dealer sitting on a pile of drugs saying "Shat, just how am I going to shift all this crack?". People want to get high; in the same way people want to play computer games. You may be asking how I know this. Well, I have my friends…
As for heroin, the truth of the matter is that street heroin is bad because it’s mixed with stuff, yet you can inject pure heroin all your life and it causes very little lasting damage. Secondly, heroin is very cheap to produce, its only expensive on the street because the dealers are risking 30 year jail sentences, the smugglers are risking condoms full of smack bursting in their intestines, and the users will keep coming back, giving you a good business opportunity to charge what you want. If heroin was prescribed, it would clean up the lives of heroin users, and presumably someone won’t want to be a skag-head all their lives, given the opportunity to be sedated through cold turkey most people would find coming off heroin a lot less daunting, heroin related crime would go down (because it would be prescribed) and overdoses would happen a lot less because the dosage would be standardized. Legalizing them would help the quality, but drugs are dangerous in the wrongs hands. I think they affect people in different ways too, both psychologically and physically. Plus, when buying ecstasy you don't really know what you are buying. It could be painkillers or something else.
A general point as well, what I do to my own body should really be my choice. If I want to eat full English breakfast every morning, smoke 20 fags a day, eat fried chicken all the time and drink like George Best, I should be allowed to. I may become a fat with a weak heart, but it’s my body and it should be my choice. Keeping drugs like ecstasy and marijuana illegal is purely down to the desire to control. In my opinion, however, Ecstasy is nasty stuff, and best left well alone. I would say it is far worse than coke, or even ketamine. The early E's were the good ones if you can say that but these days it’s the same as coke or ketamine no worse or better. Ecstasy is bad and deserves its class A status, though it does apparently have therapeutic effects for Parkinson’s sufferers (I think it's Parkinson’s.) Drug laws are rather stupid, they need to be a bit broader (5 classes maybe), since Cocaine is not as bad as heroine (although both are hell dangerous mainly due to the crap that gets mixed in with them). LSD is one thing to leave well alone, bloody nasty stuff, well worse that E in my opinion…
Cigarette related illness kill a couple of hundred thousand people per year, alcohol accounts for an estimated 40% of the violence in Britain and another couple of hundred thousand deaths, while there hasn’t ever been a single death related to marijuana, and an estimated 20 people a year die from taking ecstasy (which would drop considerably if you knew exactly what was in your pills, and how any to take etc). Alcohol is implicated in the majority of suicides and smoking is the leading cause of premature death in the "developed" world. I realize most of you have very short attention spans (its all that playing computer games, it rots your brains y'know!) but please post your opinions, and if I’m being a liberal hippy feel free to tell me, man. Just don’t ignorantly call me a junky, because you'd be very much mistaken.
As I always like to say, there are two sides to every argument, and this is no exception:
Comparing the effects of drugs with those of alcohol and cigarettes and saying that drugs do less damage is not an argument in favor of drugs, it's an argument against cigarettes and alcohol. If they were invented today and presented to the government health advisors to be tested for legalization, they'd in all probability refuse to legalize them on account of the damage they do. Just because they slipped under the net doesn't mean drugs should too. Legalization simply because drugs are widely used, as is being recommended now, is just stupid. Would we legalize theft in an effort to deal with rising burglaries? Legalization would also reward those people who have spent years ignoring the law on drugs. Now, I believe that if a law is truly damaging to you, for example if the law against stealing prevents you from being able to eat because you've been evicted, you've nowhere to go and you have two children to feed, then there are mitigating circumstances to be taken into account when you break it. But in the case of drugs, people are breaking the law - the most important basis of our society - purely for personal pleasure. We can question laws - that is the point of a democracy - but if we break them, there must be moral reasons for it. That's why I support investigation into the use of certain drugs for medicinal purposes - there is a moral reason for that - but regard everyone who uses them for recreational purposes as a criminal, and legalizing drugs as pandering to those criminals.
Quite frankly, the argument that keeping drugs criminalized increases deaths holds no fears for me - just as I would shed no tears for someone who broke their neck trying to climb into my house and burgle it, so I am unmoved by the deaths of other criminals like drug users. If you knowingly break the law without moral justification, you are a criminal. Drug users must lead pathetically sad and boring lives if they feel the need to spice them up with drugs. Get a tube of Jaffa Cakes instead - they're just as addictive, but they're legal. Perhaps all this legalizing stuff and going easy is a mistake you’re always going to get people experimenting but it's almost like people are encouraging people these days. If you have a brain don’t waste it, trust me, it's not worth the buzz. People up your lungs with the smoke, and no matter what people say, is a little addictive, not to mention the tolerance your body builds up, so you end up having to buy more and more to get the same effect. Whilst smoking increases your risk of lung cancer more than cannabis, cannabis still has a great effect. As well as infertility and lung cancer it also destroys a huge number of brain cells, increases risk of numerous other cancers and a load more of other things.
I was thinking: if drugs were legalized, then lots of people would loose a lot of money to drug dealers, but if it was legalized, it could be regulated, with better quality and pricing, and with proper 'instructions', I can see some drugs being ok to legalize. After all, the police is there to protect kids too young to make an educated choice plus when that pill up and you are close to death its amazing how quickly that opinion seems stupid as you pray to live. E's, even good ones, are not good for you and you can up badly when your heart feels like its exploding, your left arms cramping up and you can’t breathe, reality hits hard and that’s why people want to make sure you don’t have to experience it for yourself. There are no proper instructions - take them and risk your life, that’s it, but there can be guidelines, to make risks as minimal as possible. There are guidelines, and in moderation things such as skunk can be fine.
I'm actually in favor of legalizing Cannabis, but as for the rest...the government has the right to intervene when you're getting it to pay for having you scraped off the floor when you OD or get high and then run over because you aren't paying attention, or have a bad reaction or any of the other drug-related things that land you in hospital. Get a personal A&E department and ambulance and then maybe there'd be an argument there. If it was legalized it would, from my point of view, be harder to get hold of and probably way more expensive, due to tax. The 'my body, my choice' point was recently proved to be illegal when Diane Pretty's request to be killed was denied by the courts. The town, city or country has a duty to protect its citizens, and that includes protecting them from themselves. Don’t even get me started on euthanasia issues. Of course, I'm saying that as someone who has Ann Widdecombe's autograph…
Right, I’ve done a little research and discovered that legalization of Cannabis is on its way - yet another cash crop for the government to tax us on. As for the E. Go check out www.urban75.com if you want the lowdown on drugs with no Also if you are taking pills I’d seriously suggest www.pillreports.com and that you buy a pill testing kit from there so you can tell what your actually taking. The effects of drugs smoked near Asthma, as far as I know haven’t been tested. So as far as I know, if Cannabis is legalized, all the Asthma sufferers in the country are dead. Cannabis stinks. That's my argument for keeping it illegal. When some pothead comes on the train it stinks out the whole carriage. I think that people should be allowed to smoke pot if they want because it's just like cigarettes, and there shouldn't be double standards, so while I'm for legalization on principle, I hate the smell - so I would vote to keep it illegal. Geez, my hands are cream-crackad! Basically my argument against legalization is that more people will take drugs. If drugs have a negative effect then this should be discouraged, and so they should be kept illegal.
Thanks for reading,
LF