Smoking and drinking does not mess up your life to the same degree as crack coke, heroin, etc. If you do those, your life is pretty much ruined. Yet there are countless idiots that do them anyway, pretty pathetic.
If you abuse those your life is ruined. There are people who have done those a few times with no real negative effects.
Alcoholism, various cancers, etc. I'd say smoking and drinking could potentially mess your life up just a bad if not worse than the drugs you mentioned.
You could eat too much and mess up your life but it is the degree of damage here. Most of the people will not lose their job due to smoking or drinking. But the percentage of people losing their savings, jobs and homes to drugs is much much higher than that cuased by drinking or smoking. Not that I think drinking or smoking is a good thing.
Informative and insightful, though it gets a little wild in the second to last paragraph trying to hit the points home. Hard to imagine a cheerleader for any real change in this department considering what public and political perception of the issues have been, increasingly throughout our recent history.
I'm coming around to the idea of legalizing and strictly controlling pot. It's an intoxicant, so I think it should be subject to the laws that apply to alcohol, and when smoked I think all the laws that apply to tobacco smoking should apply as well. You might also want to restrict where it's sold. I don't think you want it sold in the local grocery story, for example. But as this article suggests, I think legalizing it is the least bad option right now.
“Government statistics put the number of known addicts in China at 1.2 million, including 700,000 heroin users, more than two-thirds of them under the age of 35.” 1.2 million . . .don't they have over a Billion people? so . . they at less than 1%? and that is failure?? Rocket River
