Sure, yet you'll probably find no-one who is destroying lives (their own or others) for caffeine. THC is certainly a more mixed bag, but at the very least you will never die from it. So "drugs are bad" is just too much of a blanket term, and we should probably come up with better terminology that correctly reflects addiction potential and intrinsic and extrinsic damage. In addition, the illegal market shifts those dangers quite significantyl. Someone can take morphine for the rest of their lives with out much of any bodily harm, but in an illegal market it can be deadly quickly and procurement leads to much pain and harm. Last but not least, humanity will never not want to use drugs, no matter what we do, so we need to come up with harm reduction that is effective (which includes regulation, education and probably also includes doing away with prohibition).
yeah, definitely. "Drugs are bad, actually" is decidedly an over simplification. For the record my drugs of choice are SSRIs, caffeine, and mushrooms.
Full agree with everything you're saying here. The less oversimplified realization I had: In the pros/cons of "Should drugs be fully legalized?" I was counting only the negative aspects of making drugs illegal, not the negative aspects of legalization. I expect others make this error too, so "drugs are bad, actually" is intended as a pithy corrective, less a broad ethical directive.
The specific causes of this realization: the accruing evidence of the downsides of THC, and the easy access of teenagers to extremely potent weed. The ditch weed I bought from Curtis behind The Globe coffee shop in high school simply had less potential for harm.
> we should probably come up with better terminology that correctly reflects addiction potential and intrinsic and extrinsic damage
Full agree. Really there are complex policy trade offs here. I don't pretend to know optimal solutions, and agree that arriving at optimal solutions is unlikely via an extremely polarized discourse.
