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New Jersey has legalize narcotics for medical use while Washington State has legalized marijuana for any use.
Your opinion, please.
Various states have legalized marijuana for medical use for years, and Washington State and Colorado just legalized marijuana for recreational use. My thoughts:
1) Marijuana is known as a “soft” drug, but in fact it is extremely harmful. Most users experience paranoia or anxiety, which can often persist after the drug use is discontinued (so much for the users’ goal of being happy and mellow). Most alarmingly, recent, well-done epidemiological studies have found that teenage pot use increases the likelihood that the person will come down with schitzoprhenia or psychosis (that is, major psychiatric illnesses that basically can’t be cured and ruin your life)! As R’ Moshe Feinstein mentioned in a teshuvah forbidding marijuana, it can also have other negative effects, such as lack of motivation and mental dullness. We should stay far away from this drug and insist our children and their friends and our friends do too!
2) That said, it should be legal! America has the world’s highest incarceration rate by far, many times the rate of any comparable country, and much of that is because of harsh, often discriminatory enforcement of the drug laws. Incarceration isn’t even a concept in (traditional) Torah criminal law. Nor is banning certain substances. Making it a criminal matter creates more problems than it solves (incarceration ruining people’s lives, violent gangs as with Prohibition, etc.).
3) As a last resort it may be useful as a medicine for some people, so it should be available as a medicine even if it’s not legalized for recreational use, but it shouldn’t be widely used because of the side effects.
I am totally against it. Pot destroys many lives.
The quicker they are legalized, the quicker people will stop shooting for these drugs, and the quicker that their prices will drop from these crazy prices since they are currently are illegal.
The only bad part is, that since US customs officers will then not be on the look out for these drugs, they will have more time on their hands to bother we legal travelers with mundane things like slightly too many gifts or an agricultural product.
I’m not sure in what way NJ is special here. Narcotics are deadly. They are also highly useful. The balanced approach in all states is to allow limited, supervised, use of narcotics when an expert says it is appropriate.
Marijuana is fun, slightly harmful, and not all that useful. The usefulness and the dangers of narcotics significantly outweigh those of weed.
i think that whoever wanted to use drugs for “recreational” purposes was still getting them and if it is legal maybe some violence can be avoided. as for narcotics, i am never against doctors having more resources.
Morphine is a narcotic that has always been legal for medical use. So what did NJ do? Washington allows people to buy small quantities of marijuana from state-regulated shops (none of which exist yet).
What do you mean “legalize narcotics” for medical use. Narcotics are a type of drug that must be prescribed by a doctor. The patient who has received those drugs can for sure use them legally. What is your point?
The mafia/smugglers/drug dealers are the only ones that are keeping it from being legalized. Much like the Prohibition, where the mob/bootleggers only rose to fortune and power through illegal alcohol sales, the drug dealers of today will make sure to bribe and threaten anyone that gets in the way of their business.
In Mexico there’s a war going on where thousands have been killed already, only because the trade is illegal in the US.
Additionally, there is always the “mayim gnuvim yimtaku” psychology. When people have strict rules, they are more likely to do the act than before.
I hope they all end up in federal prison.
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