[lentulusgracchus]

....stop hyperinflating drug profits and channeling them into criminal hands, which is what drug prohibition does

So by all means, let's remove all the impediments so kids can tweak affordably every night.

Opium ruined China. How many more large-scale demonstrations do you need? Or do you just want your cheap joints?

[JustSayNoToNannies]

stop hyperinflating drug profits and channeling them into criminal hands, which is what drug prohibition does

So by all means, let's remove all the impediments so kids can tweak affordably every night.

Since kids report that they can get marijuana more easily than beer or cigarettes, it seems the best way to keep substances out of kids' hands is to legalize them for adults, giving their sellers a disincentive to sell to kids (namely, the loss of their legal adult market).

Opium ruined China.

When opium was legal in the USA, its use never got anywhere near the levels in China - and the addiction rate was no higher than heroin addiction today:

"The peak of opiate addiction in the United States occurred about the turn of the century, when the number probably was close to 250,000 in a population of 76 million" - David F. Musto MD, http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/History/ophs.htm

"numbers like heroin addiction. You can find numbers that go from 255,000 up to the one I'm currently using, 980,000, if I remember the last time we updated it, and those are all valid scientific studies." --Drug Czar Mcaffrey, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/symposium/panelmccaffrey.html