How's the status of alcohol in that respect? One would think that once legalized, other substances would go in the same bucket.

Hi! Yeah, I do recognize that there's a problem with making alcohol illegal, too. On the other hand, we've seen what happens when we try to make alcoholic beverages illegal; people who don't abuse them (as well as those who do) start up a hefty black market in them that is a worse problem than just treating people who have alcoholism.

But the point there is that not all people who drink alcohol abuse it. Maybe the same thing can be said of marijuana. But when you get to drugs like cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines, those are some really dangerous drugs which can completely destroy just about everyone who's ever been hooked on them.

I suppose there is no 'one size fits all' solution to the question of whether 'recreational' drugs should be legalized, but for the most part, I'm dead set against it.

Chantal

One of the long standing arguments for making drugs legal is to remove their distribution from the criminal element in society as there is a loop there.

If drugs were purchasable like alcohol or cigarettes then they'd soon lose much of their appeal as part of the cool has been linked to the lifestyle. It worked with prohibition as making alcohol illegal led to a huge black market and rise of the mob providing it.

One advantage would be that people could at least obtain the less harmful drugs in purer form and not cut with rat poison just because some pusher wants to make a profit. And, if people were making methamphetamine under regulated conditions, instead of in someone's shed out back, that would probably lead to fewer meth lab explosions. But I'm still not crazy about the idea of making it completely legal.

For me, though--Every week I watch this show called Dog: The Bounty Hunter. It's one of my guilty pleasures. On many episodes, they show drug addicts who are strung out on things like ice or crack. And you can see that it's killing them. If I had a child, I would not want my child to be able to just walk into a drugstore and buy a baggie of the stuff.

Chantal

1) Yes, unquestionably, Colmes is an idiot. He's a faux lib who rolls over whenever pushed, put there strictly so the Manatee has someone to stomp on; that's the way Fixed News operates.

2) It's a slippery slope in either direction. During Prohibition this country proved your argument conclusively about why we can't successfully ban tobacco. Problem is that the very same argument is being proven for other drugs and we're just blithely ignoring it - organized crime? The current drug kingpins would laugh at Capone and Luciano as a couple of amateurs if they showed up today. And there's the allure of the forbidden caersidi already pointed out.

3) It wouldn't necessarily be YOUR tax dollars paying for rehab. The point of the legalization argument in that regard is that the actual cost of production for these drugs is trivial - illegality alone props up the price. We could tax the hell out of the stuff once legalized, allow its sale at half street value, and the taxes from that alone would pay for education outreach and rehab programs far better than what our taxes are currently financing.