Obama administration drug policy advisor: the case against legalizing mar1juana

I love that one of the tags is "racism". Please tell me that is just automatic when tex posts.

 

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit, so is bigtexxx now for weed legalisation?!!!

 

btw, a rather interesting line from this blog:

Is this actually true? I'd imagine the majority of the 'lost' revenue is from tobacco and health costs rather than alcohol though.

 

Would like texxx's standpoint on this, kinda hard to see why he posted this.

I fully agree with Sabet.

 

Good news for Romney! Sure to win the pot smoker votes now!

 

Voting booths are too tricky.

 

I don't mean to impugn on the author's authority but, considering this doesn't seem to be an investigative study nor authoritative article anyway, I present the contradicting claim by David Nutt, former chairman of the UK Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, on his investigation on the danger of mar1juana and other substances (a study which got him controversially sacked):

 

[rquoter]
Research uniformly reveals that under legalization, the price of drugs would fall substantially, and use would increase. Any tax revenue gained from legal mar1juana would be quickly offset by the social costs resulting from this increased use: witness how today, society receives about $1 in alcohol and tobacco tax revenue for every $10 lost on the social costs of those two legal drugs. Increased drug use means increased costs.[/rquoter]

Then why is tobacco and alcohol legal? He didn't answer that question.

 

No need to legalize it, just decriminalize it.

People will grow their own, trade with friends, get it at the Farmer's market.
Who wouldn't rather have their neighbor's backyard hydroponic hybrid grown with loving care? No guns, no gangsters, no chemicals, no corporations, no taxes and no big mark up.

The return of the god-ordained, peace love and understanding spreading, $10 ounce and $100 pound.

 

that graph is complete bull****. I would like to see their basis of physical harm. MDMA, ecstasy causes irreversible brain damage and is far more potent than amphetamines. Also, cocaine causes far more damage than heroin by a long shot.

 

There are two extremes on this issue. There are the people who believe that there is some huge conspiracy behind pot and that it is completely harmless. That is bull****, it does cause harm and all the stuff texxx posted above but so do other things like cigarettes. Then there is the other side that thinks it should never be legalized and fail to see that there is ALWAYS going to be a considerable portion of the population getting it illegally. I think keeping it illegal is fine, what I do have a problem with is people going to jail for a number of years for something that should be considered a misdemeanor. You have a guy responsible for the largest dog fighting business in the U.S uncovered (so far) getting something like 8 months in prison and people with possession of pot getting far more.

 

Here's the paper:

http://science.iowamedicalmarijuana.org/pdfs/safety/Nutt Rational Scale Drug Harms Lancet 2007.pdf

 

So then you are waiting to see which side Obama takes, immediately take the other stance and call it a failed policy?

 

Read it, no physiological basis for rationalization of the results, just a bunch of "experts" giving a score to each of them which was then averaged.
Kind of funny, it actually acknowledged that a lot of the results were extremely misleading like the fact that a single dose of MTMA can cause extensive damage to the substantia nigra and basal ganglia, inducing parkinson's.

Intravenous Heroin is extremely dangerous due to the fact that it can cause severe respiratory depression, but the way people develop tolerance to it allows it go on for a long period of time. Most heroin addicts just commit suicide. It would be held to a different standard when evaluating stuff like this. Cocaine on the other hand is a widely used stimulant which causes high blood pressure and induces strokes.

 

Legalization is too unrealistic. We can't have that happen, but what we do need to do is reduce sentencing which is also unrealistic at this point.

Gotta take texxx's side on this.

 

Decriminalization makes the most sense. It's ridiculous to put some pothead in lockup.

Also, bigtexxx is a low grade troll trying to endorse the poster formerly known as Hightop technique of saying 'HEY LOOK LIBPIGS! OBAMA DONE DID STUFF U DON'T LIKE! LOL!'

Unfortunately, they think absolutes and don't realize that disliking Obama does not equal a vote for Romney. I won't be voting for Obama, but that doesn't mean that I'm dumb enough to vote for Romney.

 

You should have good basis if you're going to demean their experts.

The purpose of the paper was to present a new scale for drugs. From their survey, their experts produced that graph. If anything, you can criticize their criteria for the various forms of harm - which, really, is the only original content of the paper.

Yes. That's because they gave equal weight to all parameters. Quoting the paragraph:

[rquoter]

Our analysis gave equal weight to each parameter of
harm, and individual scores have simply been averaged.
Such a procedure would not give a valid indication of
harm for a drug that has extreme acute toxicity, such as
the designer drug contaminant MPTP (1-methyl 4-phenyl
1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine), a single dose of which can
damage the substantia nigra of the basal ganglia so
severely that it induces an extreme form of Parkinson’s
disease. [/rquoter]

In other words, it's an extreme harm mitigated by the other parameters scoring low.

They gave another example with tobacco (same paragraph):

[rquoter]
Indeed, this simple method of integrating scores
might not deal adequately with any substance that is
extremely harmful in only one respect. Take tobacco, for
instance. Smoking tobacco beyond the age of 30 years
reduces life expectancy by an average of up to 10 years,9
and it is the commonest cause of drug-related deaths,
placing a huge burden on health services. However,
tobacco’s short-term consequences and social effects are
unexceptional. [/rquoter]

And they suggested a solution for this which is to attribute different weights:

[rquoter]Of course, the weighting of individual
parameters could be varied to emphasise one facet of
risk or another, depending on the importance attached
to each. Other procedural mechanisms, such as those of
multi-criteria decision analysis,20 could be used to take
account of variation of ranking across different
parameters of harm.[/rquoter]

And, finally, they concluded that their method was promising because of the consistency:

[rquoter]
Despite these reservations about
the interpretation of integrated scores and the need for
further consideration of the weighting of parameters of
harm, we were greatly encouraged by the general
consistency of scores across scorers and across
parameters of harm for most drugs.
[/rquoter]

And the point of this block?