Cheech and Chong - Dave

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Marijuana as a Gateway Drug

An argument used by the opposition is that marijuana is a so-called "gateway drug". If by this they mean that many victims of heroin, cocaine, and other "hard" drugs used marijuana first, prior to moving on to the harder stuff, I concede the point. Most of us would probably agree, and I would expect studies would confirm this.

Having said that, we need to walk this dog a little further. How many users of marijuana (and the "hard" drugs) first used alcohol, or for that matter tobacco? If nicotine and alcohol are drugs that have a negative effect on society, and they are, and if we're interested in pursuing "gateway drugs", wouldn't it be reasonable to target them as well?

Put another way, if we are continuing to criminalize marijuana use because it's a gateway drug, shouldn't we also make tobacco and alcohol use illegal?

http://partyseeking.blogspot.com/2011/03/marijuana-as-gateway-drug.html

1 comment:

  1. The reason it's a gateway drug is because it's sold by criminals who also sell other drugs and if you lie to people about one drug, they don't believe you when you say another drug is bad.
    If you want to control a problem you need to be in the position to regulate, prohibition just throws control away, if there's a demand someone will supply, giving it to crime gangs who pay no contribution to society in taxes is just plain stupid.
    In Holland, any hard drug offences make it impossible to open a coffeeshop, if any hard drugs are found on the premises and the coffeeshop is closed down there and then, you have to show photo ID to prove you're 18 just to get in the place.
    As a result Holland has one of the lowest crime rate in the world and has just closed 8 prisons because there's not enough prisoners to fill them.
    It's non-users who should be most angry about this, they're paying taxes to harrass and imprison us when we commit the terrible crime of smoking flowers, while the government are saying we need cuts to public services because the bankers have robbed us.
    How stupid are our so called leaders when then can't see their wasting their time and our money.

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