Bobby, 

So should we go back to Prohibition?  I'm sure you're not advocating
that.  I found this article on Prohibition, its repeal, and the repeal
of the Volstead Act.  The arguments for the repeal of Prohibition and
Volstead were very similar to the ones I made for currently illegal
drugs.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/p1/prohibit.asp

This is another, more scholarly, article on the reasons for the repeal
of prohibition, drawing parallels to the present "War on Drugs."

www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-157.html

It's from the Cato Institute, so I'm straying quite a bit from my
"liberal" moorings, and getting closer to my "damned redneck" roots.

Ken Barber and I might be politically closer than I thought....

Kendall Corbett

An unreasonable man (but my wife says that's redundant!)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-George Bernard Shaw 1856-1950


-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 2:28 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: if you're against the iraqi war...

I strongly disagree with this logic. It sounds very logical and
pragmatic,
except for one fact. Alcohol, a legal drug, causes more deaths,
illnesses, crime
 and cost corpoarate America more money than all illegal drugs put
together.
What if we added marijuana, heroin and cocaine to the legal drugs????

Bbby
Actually I'm not as surprised as you might think.  By legalizing drugs,
and
taxing them heavily, a portion of the budget deficit could be addressed.
Also,
by treating drug abuse problems as a medical or psychological issue, a
large
portion of the prison population would go away, and IMHO, prisons often
serve
as training centers for criminal behavior.  I don't have figures on
this, but
it seems like it would be a lot less expensive to treat drug users
(offenders?) in the community rather than in the penal system.