Why we say yes to drugs
salon.com
salon.com
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/14/portugal/
"Evaluating the policy strictly from an empirical perspective, decriminalization has been an unquestionable success, leading to improvements in virtually every relevant category and enabling Portugal to manage drug-related problems (and drug usage rates) far better than most Western nations that continue to treat adult drug consumption as a criminal offense."
It might very well be "to get high" ;)
A value in re-asserting a broad, cross-cultural interest in getting high is that it helps demystify it, helps people realize that the drive to get high it is not because of week will or moral turpitude or twisted genes.
It, like the desire to have kids, is simple a common, basic, human desire.
The example of LSD's fall from popularity is correct as far as it goes, but the LSD market was so distorted that it's a poor example. The DEA couldn't get a handle on it when it was hot (I recall reading a policymaker summary complaining that LSD dealers seemed largely unmotivated by money and were thus hard to track by normal means) and a single supplier who produced `90% of global supply isn't exactly normal either.
I do agree with the underlying premise of the article that a well-informed public is likely to produce more users but fewer casualties.
Steve Yegge wrote a great Article/Essay on this http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali... . Seems to me that the hardest problem surrounding is actually implementing the legalization(IE// all the minuscule changes in law that surround it, taxing, etc)
(this is more in response to many of the comments on here, not the article)
Yes, there are drug wars, there is gang violence, and there are people in jail who by most accounts shouldn't, but most of these discussions don't go anywhere, and no real action is going to effect a significant improvement with respect to any of these situations any time soon.
First of all, even if people in high places (why yes, I am that good) start thinking legalization of <your-favorite-chemical-here> might be a good idea, it'll take years, decades even, to come up with a sound policy about exactly how to do it, what degree of legality is involved, and how to enforce it.
After that happens, do you really think many peoples' lives will be changed? You can't even smoke cigarettes in bars anymore; do you think you'll be able to smoke pot on the street? Probably not. Will you see high/spun/tripping people everywhere? No. You'll go about your business as usual, and if you're the sort of person that wants to do these drugs, you'll still be doing them in the same places, under the same circumstances, as before. Maybe 50 years later culture will get around to adjusting to it, but I can't see it. Maybe I'm too young, or too old, or just too cynical.
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted to get in on the business. Seems like a high-risk high-reward situation.
Of course the book Freakonomics posed the question of why so many street-level drug dealers still live with their (usually single) parents, and the answer was that most of those dealers don't actually make much money. But, yes, the DREAM of making big money draws young people into dealing when studying their math and English lessons would almost surely produce more return on investment for their time.
Or look at the end of segregation. Again, to large percentage of the US population at the time it seemed not only that segregation was the way things were, but that it was the way it was meant to be (with much more irrational and passionate attitudes against desegregation than even the anti-drug hysteria we have in the US today), and very few would have expected it to end so soon. And yet all of a sudden there was a mass movement that resulted in desegregation within a decade (though a good argument could be made that the process still isn't complete today).
It is easy enough to find many other examples of fast, radical change throughout history. Just look at the history of any number of revolutions or fights for independence (though, of course, some are take much longer, like the Irish and Palestinian quest for independence).
The point is that history has a way of changing radically, and very quickly. Just because the goal may seem far off today doesn't mean that it will remain so. History is being made as we speak.
Where in the article did it argue for or against drugs? It is more of a sociolgical reading, discussing patterns of drug use among Americans across generations, rather than an activist paper calling for legalization, or a populist one calling for stricter control. Anthropologists have studied and documented all manners of "unacceptable" human behaviour in primitive/savage societies, including cannibalism, incest, and pedophilia among others, but that doesn't mean they're passing judgment on their subject culture. I think we can extend a similar academic courtesy to the greatest and most savage of all societies :-)
I'm not strongly against the opinions put forth in this article, but I think that we should be clear that it is pro-drug.
Nothing more, really.