I would highly advise mentioning portugal in your report.
The drug war is a joke, people that argue for it fail in a few different areas.
The policing of morals. I am a huge supporter of freedom. I don't think the government has a right to tell you what to do with your own body if you aren't harming others. I'm against things like the seat belt law(I wear my seat belt all the time btw) I don't think it's any of their business what you put into your own body.
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The fact that the drug war doesn't work. Maybe in some utopian bubble world it's a beautiful plan. We could all live together in a drug free world, sing kumbaya, and everything would be sweet. Unfortunately reality called and let us know that something like that isn't going to happen, at least not anytime soon. The drug war spends around 50 billion dollars a year to fill our prisons with non violent drug offenders. Our prison systems are so overloaded, that they can't fit actual criminals into them. Their still putting people in jail for a plant, yet in topeka kansas they've decriminalized domestic violence. That's fucking whack at best.
So with all this money and all this extensive policing we had to have seen some positive results right? Nope. The drug war is a failure from every angle. For every dealer you take down, a few more people step up to take his place.
The drug war has put the $$$ into the black market drug trade. We could get rid of that by making the penalties far harsher right? NOPE The higher the risk, the more money to be made from the transaction. For instance some places with ridiculously harsh drug laws might have prices over 100 per gram of marijuana. Now the drug laws may be very intense there, but there is also a massive profit margin.
Then there's the aspect of the drug war supporting gangs. Everybody bitches about gangs and how we need to get rid of them. The gangs came to power with the drug war. They don't buy their weapons with money from working at mcdonalds part time. They sell fucking drugs. A lot of gang warfare has to do with turf. They don't want anybody else coming into their area and selling drugs taking away from their business. IF we legalize drugs that would do massive damage to the gangs.
Look at the prohibition of alcohol. Stupid bitches fucked a whole bunch of shit up. Yeah they got the right to vote for women, but they also were the ones who got us the income tax. Their arguments were things relating to religion, things relating to domestic violence, and some other reasons. Not completely shitty intentions, but shitty reasons.
If you beat your wife these days it's a crime. If you drive drunk, it's a crime. As far as religion and morals, pushing religion and morals through laws and policing is whack. People make the argument that if we legalize weed everyone's gonna drive around high all the time. Look at beer, it's illegal to be hammered behind the wheel. The drug doesn't have to be illegal.
Also with alcohol prohibition, the opportunity for black market profits brought in the criminals. That's what happens when you make something illegal. It doesn't go away, people just start getting $$$$ off it.
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The there's the aspect of education. If you really want the kids to make good decisions regarding drugs, they need to be informed. I mean actually informed, not d.a.r.e. graduates. A bunch of bullshit propaganda is not education. Telling kids lies about drugs will later discredit anything real you ever told them about drugs, and really hurt your attempts to keep them away from drugs. You tell a kid that marijuana is a super dangerous drug, when he finds out that's bullshit, everything you've taught him about drugs becomes bullshit. If we legalized drugs with a very strong push on real education, we would be in a far better place.
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People think that by making it illegal, they've somehow gotten rid of the drugs. It hasn't happened and it won't happen. Right now drugs are just as prevalent as ever. Some square might not even notice, but the whole time every drug one could want is lurking in the shadows. Where there's a demand there will always be people lining up to supply. And for drugs the demand is fucking massive. Look back in history. Humans have been getting high for a long fucking time. It hasn't changed, and it's not going to. The methods and drugs of choice might have changed, but the mentality is still there.
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There are plenty of reasons why drugs should be legal, and also why they won't be legal.
Look at the pharmy industry. We're talking about a multi billion dollar industry. With that kind of money come a lot of special interests. That money will be there to help fight anyone that tries to legalize drugs. If you could just smoke a joint of sniff some h, would you need to buy pharmy drugs?(I'm not saying that all pharmy drugs are bad)
Then you have the absolute and disgusting thing called marinol. You have a perfectly natural plant growing with almost no side effects that does wonders for helping cancer patients. Instead of making it readily available you make a fucking synthetic drug and sell it to the people. They aren't going to make money on weed, they can't patent it, you can grow it yourself. If weed was legal that would suck for them.
The reasons it was made illegal had nothing to do with harm associated with it.
William randolf hearst loved his yellow journalism. Dude was a fucking scumbag all around. Used racial fears of mexicans and using their word "marijuana" to help make hemp illegal.
Hemp is dope in so many ways. The model t, not only was it built using some hemp products but was designed to run off of hemp fuel.
In an age where sustainable resources is a big deal, we don't seem to do shit about it. We still use trees for paper. We use almost primarily only and the only alternative we see is corn ethanol.
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There are two main problems legalization will face, ignorance, and special interests.
There is a shit ton of money in multiple industries that doesn't want anything to fuck with it. And these day's C.R.E.A.M. People will be willing to spend a shit ton of money to make sure you're never buying a a pack of joints, or growing a hemp garden legally.
The other issue will be ignorance. People are fucking stupid these days. A lot of people have no idea why it's illegal. You also have a lot of people that like the idea of policing morals. To some it should probably be a crime to skip church on sundays. I mean look at all the shitty religious laws still lingering, it's fucking retarded. Many of these ignorant people are the kind of people that drink, but freak out if you toke, that take a shit ton of pharmy pills, but would call the cops if you smoked some opium.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html
^ a little info on poryugal
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/10/12/topeka-kansas-has-decriminalized-domestic-violence/
^kansas domestic violence.
It's a little bit jumbled. I didn't spend much time on it. I can def point you at some good information though. I'd copy and past some stuff from things I've written but It's been a long fucking time since I researched much of this.
Do it like a debate almost. Take everyone of their arguments and destroy them with a shit ton of rock solid facts. With this issue it's not hard to do. The success of the drug war only exists in the minds of the ignorant.
good luck op.
