And no, I don't smoke pot or drink alcohol. Well, I don't abstain from alcohol but just never got the taste for it. My "drug" of choice is Neatorama

@Cori - re: Neatorama being plagued by all of this political stuff. Having personally written close to 10,000 posts on Neatorama, I got really tired of just posting innocuous "neat" stuff.

Don't get me wrong - the bulk of Neatorama will continue to be interesting tidbits from around the Net (I promise!), but I'd also like to post something of a more serious nature. The discussions are what I like most about editing for Neatorama, and you don't get serious back and forth on a post about a neat gizmo or something.

By the way, i used to smoke pot from my 16th to my 19th and i haven't done any other drugs(accept alcohol .

@Sasha, I am interested in your perspective on the ADD/ADHD meds that are pushed into increasing numbers of our kids yearly. I think it's an absolute digrace as well. Where we differ is in where the blame is laid. I would rest it with the pediatricians that prescribe it, the schools that pressure the parents into doping their kids, but ultimately responsibility must rest with the parents.

The benefit of such powerful psychoactive medications may be there for a *tiny* fraction of the populace (which is why I do not blame drug companies), but not 10% or more as it is in some government school districts. Parents dope their kids because it makes them easier to control. What a poor message this sends to them as they continue on through life.

If we culled all the drug users out of the population, a great many of your favourite people would be gone. And a great many of the inventions that make your life easier, and the art and entertainment that you enjoy, would never have existed.

You two are really, really myopic.

I also agree that we cannot seem to grasp the idea that you cannot "fight" and abstract or an idea.

You have to know what you're fighting in order to actually wage any sort of half-effective war. You can't fight things like "drugs" or "terror". There is no monster loping around with a nametag that says "Hello, I'm DRuGs." While "drugs" is a great deal more concrete that "terror", the government and school systems haven't been honest or open about it.

Oh, and what happened to America the free? The stuff under the sink and in the medicine cabinet can mess me up worse than most of the stuff I can get on the street. The war on drugs is just a fancy name for prohibition. I don't use drugs nor have I ever. But I still don't think the government should be able to say what one can and cannot put into their body.

You've got to have demand in the first place.

Also, pot isn't psychedelic, as that would make it hallucinogenic. As for it being a 'gateway' drug, it depends on the person who knows the conciquence of their actions.

I assume you don't take drugs?

@VonSkippy "How naive. Supply is always determined by demand." Not with drugs. Because they're addictive, supply will create demand.

Having said that, there have been many missteps and missed opportunities in America's War on Drugs.

- What if reducing the supply involves spraying toxic chemicals over thousands of acres of land and small villages occupied by hundreds of thousands of children and desperately poor subsistence farmers growing innocent crops?

- Is the behavior pattern of smoking marijuana worse than the pattern of binge drinking, huffing solvents, "tripping" on Robitussin, etc.? Why is it the focus of prosecution, when these legal "gateways" are not?

- Are you also willing to pay to imprison the manufacturers of pharmaceuticals that kill and addict, such as Vioxx (killed 20,000) and Oxycontin, respectively? (this from the point of view of an ex-"ADD"-youth who was addicted to and very messed up by my legally prescribed 9 pill a day dose of amphetamines, AKA Dexedrine, throughout high school)

- America has more than twice as many people in prison as *China*. That is not per capita, but an absolute number. Exactly how many tax dollars are you willing to pay? How much freedom are you willing to trade?

If you say you aren't trading any freedom because you don't do drugs, pray that you never upset a police officer who now has the foolproof ability to "find" a planted bag of drugs in your vehicle, locking you away with no recourse and no way to prove they were planted.

Since it started, drug use is much more widespread and users have switched to harder, more dangerous drugs. No matter your opinion on drugs, statistics do not lie.

The government has discredited itself with its one sided propaganda, particularly against marijuana. Now, when the government claims that a genuinely dangerous drug like Ecstasy is dangerous, young people don't believe it and wind up in the hospital. Marijuana itself certainly has addictive properties, but the government is no longer seen as an honest broker of information, so its claims of marijuana's addictiveness are largely treated with derision.

The type of youth who are inclined to use drugs will only be encouraged to use it by anti-drug propaganda and enforcement measures. It comes to represent a "risk" that many young people crave.

If anything, the War on Drugs increases drug use by sensationalizing drugs. Remember the old marketing maxim: "There is no such thing as bad publicity."

People have to be responsible for their own actions. The War on Drugs is Socialism plain and simple. No freedom loving American should support it.

The only people who have a valid reason to support the War on Drugs are the organized crime cartels who profit from it.

Look to the desperate hordes of immigrants streaming across the border from the failed narco-state of Mexico, awash in guns, drug money, and corrupted cops and politicians, and think a little bit about unintended consequences.

Drugs are terrible. The War on Drugs is worse.

P.S. Read Genesis 1:29, and see if that makes you reconsider what a "drug" is.

Your co-worker chose to destroy her life - why should taxes fund a failing strategy to protect her (and others like her) against their own stupidity?

Personally, I'd rather see 500 billion dollars being spent on national health care.

The government is pissing away billions making arbitrary decisions on what bad habits it's citizens can enjoy. If they really "cared" - they'd outlaw alcohol, tobacco, fast food, and soda - all which kill way (WAY) more people then all the abused drugs combined.

Nothing is going to make my mind change on:
- Too much drug out there : cut the supplies!
- Pot is not highly dangerous, but the 'concept of taking it' is : you're opening doors, changing consumption behaviours.
- I'm ready to pay high taxes to get the f*g death sellers behind bars