"Well, they already tried banning alcohol and it was every bit as successful as banning drugs."


Yeah, in as much as it opened up a huge market for bootleg booze, a la the drugs market now.
I'm for legalization, but I'm for a lot of weird dreams and schemes, so I'm not preaching.
xxx

Get addicted. You'll learn real fast why drugs are illegal.

I don't have a problem with drugs per se (the hypocrisy of people who consume alcohol yet condemn marijuana is absurd) and don't think that we should dictate to people what they put in their own bodies, though this is pretty idealistic and there would have to be a lot of conditions on it to make it work in reality.

If the drugs are produced and consumed ethically then I have no problem with them - it's just that this so rarely occurs. You seem to miss this point completely in your post. There is also the problem of drug takers being a burden on our society - as in, the taxpayer has to pay for their treatment and recovery - so taking drugs seems selfish and not very socially responsible. A reason people do use is that a lot of crime is committed by people on drugs and they can exacerbate the severity of certain personality disorders, though this seems like a pretty poor argument, since if we're to use it against less socially acceptable drugs, we'd also have to apply it to video games and alcohol.

Basically, our society is hypocritical in its attitudes towards different types of stimulant. But you can't just say "drugs" as a generic term...there are so many different kinds that do need treating differently.

That's my take on it, anyway.

Alcohol, abused, is pretty destructive. I'll grant that. But it has been around since man first learned to ferment. It has been used for millenia. I do not consider it anything near the level of a controlled substance. We tried Prohibition before in this nation. It was a dismal failure.

Tobacco does not destroy lives and families. Pot will degrade your lifestyle. It will expose you to, and make you more susceptible, to harder drugs. Narcotics will degrade your lifestyle as well.

Cocaine used to be legal in this nation and was widely used, until we discovered its destructiveness to people and society.

Alcohol and tobacco are just vices. Drugs and narcotics are outright destructive.

That's a stupid thing to say. Alcohol can be incredibly destructive, to people's bodies, lives, families... I don't really see how you get that pot is "outright destructive" when you only give two weak reasons for it being so. One is that it leads to harder drugs in some cases - video games might encourage people in some cases to take a gun into class, but that doesn't mean everyone should be banned from playing them. You're making a massive logical error. The other is that is "degrades your lifestyle", which is again, a bit of a generalisation and an ambiguous phrase. Be more specific.