re: #62 Fairly Sure I’m Still Obdicut

If we want drug addiction (just like alcohol addiction) to be classed as a medical condition, then the laws should be changed, but even classing them as a medical condition doesn’t affect their use, as we’ve seen w/alcohol. NORML has been lobbying for the legalization of marijuana for 45 yrs, so we know that change comes slowly. In the meantime, laws are laws and those who break them, no matter how unfair we think they are, pay the price.

People at the bottom of the drug chain, the street types, don’t make very much money from their own activities, usually just enough for their own personal use, and are treated by their bosses like pimps treat hookers. At any rate, it’s self-defeating in poor areas because drug addiction just adds to the misery and locking in of poverty. I see it around here all the time, whether it’s illegal hard drugs or pharmaceuticals being illegally pedaled, like oxycontin. These are usually people w/o much of a future who aren’t your middle class who have enough disposable income to smoke a joint as often as they’d like.

As with the pharmaceuticals, though, there will be those people who will purchase anything made legal and create another black market for the drugs to sell to minors and others who might not be eligible to purchase them.

It’s just sad that in spite of what we know about the effects of drugs, whether hard drugs, alcohol or cigarettes or the pharmaceuticals which are used as a substitute for hard drugs, that a lot of people will continue to abuse the very drugs which make them addicted and sick in the first place.

And BTW, Escobar and Lucas were really exceptions to the rule of who makes big money in drugs, by setting up their own cartels and treating it as a business with payoffs to corrupt officials.