Just how many deaths are there from drunk driving, compared to the death rates on the roads overall, and the general death rate?
Where alcohol-fueled abuse of family members was vanishingly rare.
How common is it now?
A nation where almost no one lost days to hangovers or binges; where no one had to be fired because of alcohol; where marriages weren't destroyed by alcoholism, where children almost never had to sacrifice their childhood to take care of their drunken parents.
I was not aware these were common problems.
Here's the thing that the drug-legalizers conveniently forget: Drugs are devastatingly harmful whether they're banned or not.
Some are, some aren't. They don't all need to be legalized.
And if they were legalized, it is hard to imagine that the drugs themselves would not do far more damage to America than the crimes associated with drugs are doing right now.
Take a look around at the damage that drug prohibition does, in the huge amount of crime and deaths that result from it. It's hard for me to imagine that legalizing it would have a worse long-term effect.
A person on cocaine would still be unable to maintain a relationship or be reliable on a job, whether it was legal or not.
Why? Plenty of them do it now. And if it was legal, then they'd probably get found out more quickly and get some help.
A person on marijuana would still live in a haze of irresponsibility.
A person "on" marijuana? A joint or two on the weekends, which is what it would end up being for most people more than a year or so out of college, won't result in someone wandering around in a "haze of irrepsonsibility".
Children whose parents were on drugs would be just as neglected as the children of alcoholics.
So any use of currently illegal drugs at all equates one to the same state as a gross alcohol abuser?
Sane parents don't want to raise kids who become drug-taking machines, which is all that addicts function as.
Every drug user is an addict? Addicts function only as drug-taking machines? That should be interesting to all the coffee drinkers and tobacco smokers (almost all of whom are addicts).
Furthermore, since drug-takers are parasites on society, producing next to nothing, but consuming as much as any productive citizen, our whole society would limp along, dragging these useless anchors through the bottom mud.
Again with the analogy to coffee drinkers and tobacco users. And alcohol drinkers, for that matter. They're all parasites on society, I see.
Mr. Card is a wonderful writer, and I admire his fiction. But the above is short on facts and long on fine-sounding but illogical conclusions.
The drug-legalizers like to paint an idyllic picture of "harmless recreational drug use." But there is no such thing as harmless drug use.
There is for non-addictive drugs. There even is for addictive drugs such as caffeine.
One thing is certain: If drugs are legalized, their use will increase vastly over what we have today.
IIRC, when drugs were legalized in the Netherlands, there was a short term rise, but then levels subsided back down to pre-legalization levels.
So, sure, maybe the drug kingpins will be put out of business; but the toll in broken homes, traffic accident deaths, unproductive workers, and dampened national creativity will more than take up the slack.
What the hell is the toll from broken homes, shootings, and twisted national culture glorifying drug dealers and the addicts and whores they live off of now?
The funny thing is, the people whom I was trying to impress with my "tolerance" were actually grossly intolerant of me. That was made plain both then and later.
Then you were hanging out with pretentious assholes. I've been to parties where people were smoking weed, and if you didn't care to partake no one thought twice about it, anymore than someone who was at a picnic and didn't care to have beer.
While I agree with most of your points....I gotta take issue with this one. I saw it in college all the time - kids that were "on" marijuana more than they were off of it. They didn't last long in school. I'd say that among users, it was about 50-50 - kids that didn't know when to stop, and kids that only smoked occasionally.
I always thought it was a real waste. Lots of smart teenagers got into dope and eventually failed out of school.
To be honest, I think I probably saw it more with alcohol, though. Hard to pass your classes when you're out partying four nights a week. I know that much from experience - learned after failing a semester to limit my partying to vacations and weekends.
And, in a related point, My Dad went to college in the early 60s. He says he didn't even know anyone who had tried pot. I went to college in the early 90s. While I was in school, I only knew of 3 people (including myself) that hadn't used it. What a difference a generation makes.
You can't equate caffeine with alcohol or weed. It isn't mind altering, and taking too much just makes you feel bad. While it is addictive, the addiction is mild and can be broken in a couple of days.
He's a Mormon, and Mormons - generally speaking - don't even drink coffee. He's coming at the question from a very staunchly anti-drug upbringing, so it's not too surprising that he's bought in to the prohibitionist propaganda.
He's a smart guy, and I would have expected better from him, but I'll grant him that it's hard to research serious and well-constructed counterarguments against that which is woven into your own sense of identity.
Don't know what it is now, but prior to the big push to marginalize Drinking and Driving in the late 70s/early 80s, about 2/3 of all traffic fatalities involved alcohol...though from me way it was stated, it surely includes some drunk pedestrians wandering into traffic. This would translate into about 35,000 people a year.