i was liberal arts and have never taken a drug test for anything. maybe your son should find a new career?
No reason to find a new career. He has always tested clean and is currently in finance. EDIT: That has sort of been my point. Those who use, may limit their careers. Had he been a drug user, he would not have been able to take advantage of the opportunities that have come his way.
But the testing is really due to the war on drugs which subsidizes it, not the employers. It is only career limiting because the government has said so.
I am not arguing that (although private companies pay for their own drug testing as far as I know - at least the war on drugs did not pay for my life insurance drug test cost). But since it IS currently potentially career limiting, I find it hard to understand why folks would put themselves in that position. Folks that are self employed obviously do not have to worry about drug testing in the workplace, but things change. Looking at the big picture it may limit you in some potential endeavor.
That's about as ridiculous as andymoon's assertion that there were no overdoses when drugs were legal. Overdoses started occuring as soon as technology advanced far enough to really isolate the drug from the contributing plant. This is NO correlation between overdoses and legality. And as for employers, why do you think many of them are screening for alcohol abuse now? Alcohol is legal, but alcoholics have productivity problems........just like most drug addicts.
Really? If this were the case then there would be plenty of supporting documentation, right? During the hearings to make drugs illegal, they would have used overdose deaths as one of the reasons, right? There is no such documentation and the hearings never mentioned deaths due to overdose because such things were so rare that people would never have believed it to be true. Instead, the hearings focused on "Cocainized negroes" raping white women, opium using chinamen luring white women into their dens, and mar1juana smoking Mexicans being violent and killing. You know, things that the racists of the time would buy into with very little evidence. When cocaine was legal, the two most common methods of ingestion were in drink mixes, namely Coca-Cola (where do you think they got the name?) and Vin Mariani, a wine mixed with cocaine. There was so little cocaine in these mixtures that overdose would have been nearly impossible. The most common opiate of the time was laudinum, an opium based "patent medicine" that was advertised as a cure for a wide variety of ailments. While there were examples of addiction, just about the only way to overdose on it was on purpose, as Wyatt Earp's first wife tried to do. Of course, these days you could accomplish the same thing with a $10 bottle of Tylenol PM. Once again, you are wrong. In Switzerland, they have had a prescription heroin program for over a decade without a single overdose death. When people know the exact dosage they are getting, it becomes hard to unintentionally overdose. Overdoses are almost exclusively a consequence of prohibition since it is impossible for a user to know if they are getting 98% pure, hardly cut stuff or 50% pure stuff cut with baby laxative, talcum powder, or rat poison. If drug testing could screen for drug ABUSE, I would be on board with you. In fact, I support psychological screening for abuse issues (drug and alcohol) as they do not associate any use with abuse. Millions of people are able to use currently illegal drugs responsibly. They are not drug "addicts," they are drug users. Why should those people be criminalized?
Even leaving drugs out a lot of people do stupid things. For instance even knowing that it might cost them their jobs and reputations why are there teachers that have sex with students? Why did Winona Ryder shoplift? Unfortunately people do stupid things and its impossible to stamp out stupidity through prohibition. The issue of whether small amount of mar1juana and narcotics should be legalized is whether the costs of waging the war on drugs exceeds the benefits. I'm with andymoon and others on this one. I don't think prohibition is succeeding and the resources we are spending on it are a huge opportunity costs that could be used for other things.
If they were using racist arguments about Cocainized negros, opium using Chinamen, and pot smoking Mexicans, the LAST thing they'd want to argue is that these drugs can cause death. Your argument holds no water. But at least you've moved from "virtually zero" to "so rare" which is a positve step. As for Coca Cola and Vin Mariani, they used Coco leave extracts. Yes...Cocaine is also a coco leave extract, but the difference between a line of 90% pure blow and what was found in those drinks is a bit more than just "significant." As I argued above, overdoses didn't start occuring until the drug was significantly isolated from the plant. I'll concede your point about illegal drugs being an unknown quantity in terms of what you get, but I know too many people who have suffered through some ailment or another for a few days just so they can take several days worth of pain meds all at once. I guess if you can distribute drugs to users and ensure that they take them right then and there you could effectively regulate how much they are taking. Listen, I know you've educated yourself rather well on this subject, and I'm sympathetic to some of your arguments, but I see the other side as well. I'd much rather spend some of the money we've blown fighting this on education....even drug education, but your arguments about people being "drug users" not "drug addicts" makes you sound like a proponant of drug use. Despite your obvious knowledge, I question your ability to connect the dots on this subject and most of your arguments seem preconceived. Regardless though, if you come off as a proponent of drug use and you make some outlandish claims, you're never gonna sway anyone your way.
that's his point, they didn't argue that they caused death, because they didn't in those days. if they did, they just would have argued that. I'm not saying I totally agree with andy, but I would like to see statistics on overdoses.
Proponent? Some people shouldn't drink, but yeah......I do, and therefore, I'd hate to give it up. And I'll also concede that pot should be every bit as legal as booze, although I think arguments that people can drive stoned (but not drunk) are greatly exaggerated. Pot may be a gateway drug, but only because its illegal. There, I said it. But no matter how well some of the arguments in favor of legalizing drugs sound, I just can't see legalizing (or being a proponent of) the more addictive and destructive drugs like coke and heroin.
I understand his point.....I just think its false. You're simply NOT going to find statistics on that because those things weren't being accounted for until the general populace became more educated on the subject.
that's fair, and i respect your view, but i just don't see the benefits of legislating what people put in their bodies. we could could try decriminalizing it and ramp up education, if it proves to be a disastrous policy, then nothing will have changed.
"So rare that nobody would have believed it" is "virtually zero" to me. And I would think that if they thought the drugs caused death on top of attacks from black people and Mexicans and in addition to an irresistable lure into the arms of a Chinese man, they would have trumpeted their claims to high heaven. The fact of the matter is that overdose deaths did not start to skyrocket until the government "got tough" by starting the "War on Drugs" in the 1970s. Cocaine was extracted from the coca leaf and mixed in wine so that they could transport it across the Atlantic without it rotting and becoming useless. However, if we regulated the cocaine market such that people could get it in beverages and such to use as a more powerful stimulant than caffeine, most of the problems with it would be minimized. There would be some people who would extract the cocaine from the drinks, but we could have computers sift through purchasing records to identify probable cases of abuse to identify these people and present them with treatment options to be paid for by the tax dollars on the drugs themselves. Crack cocaine would go away virtually overnight since crack was made so that drug dealers would have a fast acting, portable, easily measured dose to sell on the street. Some people might choose to extract the coke, cook it down, and smoke it, but most would ingest it in legal ways. If we provide a legal framework, we will be able to deal more easily with the problems created by drug use. The Swiss heroin program allows the users to pick up their heroin and use it at home. They have not had a single overdose death. If you provide the user with education as to the proper use of the drug, they will not overdose. They are trying to get high, not to die. Education is FAR more effective than prohibition. As evidenced by the recent "treatment not jail" initiative in California, a dollar spent on treatment saves 2.5 dollars over incarceration. Do you not believe that someone could use drugs and not be an "addict?" The estimate is that 30 million Americans use mar1juana once a year or more. Are all of these people addicts? If so, wouldn't we have much more massive problems than we do now? I have a friend who was able to use cocaine "responsibly." Every 4-6 months, he would go out clubbing with friends, snort coke all night long, and not use it again for another 4-6 months. Personally, I don't understand this at all since my body likes cocaine WAY too much for me to use it even if it were to become legal. I learned that lesson when I was 17 and will never put myself through that again. My chemistry is such that I will get addicted if I use cocaine. His is not. Why should he be prohibited from doing something that he enjoys and can do responsibly? When I quit using cocaine at 17, I was the biggest prohibitionist you can imagine to the point that I favored making alcohol illegal again. I wanted drug dealers to get the death penalty. Then, over the course of nearly two decades now, I worked with drug users and addicts, I worked with police officers and judges, and I worked with families of people with drug problems. I got extremely educated on the subject and came to the only logical conclusion: prohibition only makes the problem worse. My arguments are the culmination of a journey that started when I was able to get ahold of illegal drugs at age 16 (actually, I was able to get mar1juana in the 4th grade, but I didn't use anything until I was 16). They are the very opposite of preconception. I have come 360 degrees from childhood, where I thought they should be legal so I could use with impunity, to young adulthood, where I would have personally swung a headsman's axe on a drug dealer, to adulthood, where I think they should be legal to make them more difficult for my children to get. My claims are not "outlandish," though I understand why you think they are. For people who have gotten all of their drug education from the "Just Say No" crowd, my ideas seem revolutionary, to be sure. I am not a proponent of drug use however, as drug use will limit your potential, has the capacity to cloud your judgement, and in extreme cases could kill. However, that does not change the fact that prohibition makes the problem worse, not better and that a model of hardcore regulation (such as I proposed here http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=63243 ) would be a much more effective way of dealing with the two most important topics related to this issue. 1 - Keeping drugs out of the hands of our children. 2 - Dealing with people who become addicted.
"Decriminalization" would prove to be as disastrous as prohibition because you are keeping all of the harms of prohibition (criminal distribution networks, unregulated purity and doses, corruption, etc.) while not taking advantage of all of the benefits of regulation (education, taxation, healthcare). I would be a proponent of killing the federal laws and allowing the states to come up with their own solutions. Then, the federal government can collect data about the different approaches and try to help the states make informed decisions about which policies work and which ones don't.
Viva Mexico!!!! It still doesn't solve the problem for access to youths or help those that are addicted... Another cerveza por favor...
