Yeah, and there were a lot of Germans who decided to "go the distance" in the '40's too. What good did it do them? Just because you have already started a war is no particular justification for carrying it on...but politicians and generals, like other people, are very loathe to admit to having made a mistake. The worse the mistake is, the more they will deny and prevaricate.



Cruiser - you mentioned in your original post..."Illegal drugs should never be legalized". What I am wondering is, does this mean you believe that alcoholic beverages should STILL be illegal, as they were during Prohibition? Or that coffee and tea should still be illegal, as they were at one time in respectable English society? What I am suggesting is that society arbitrarily decides what is permissible and not permissible at any given time. That decision is usually based on rumour, prejudice, and changing religious and social notions...rather than on reality or practicality. Alcohol has destroyed more lives than all the other drugs put together (with the possible exception of tobacco), but both alcohol and tobacco are legal, simply because so many people are accustomed to using them, and so many vested interests are tied up in producing them. Any attempt to make either of them illegal would result in an explosion of organized crime that would make the present "drug wars" look like a tea party...because people WILL have their favorite drug of choice regardless of whether it's legal or not! And I mean respectable, conventional, normally law-abiding people. So what do you think of that? Why do you consider a very minor and innocuous drug (like marijuana) to be such a threat that it must be forever kept illegal? I suggest that you do that not because marijuana is in fact dangerous (it isn't) but because it simply exists outside the comfort zone of conventional society that you are used to...and therefore it can easily be deemed "taboo" from the perspective of a cultural majority who are fairly unfamiliar with it in the first place.

Making such drugs illegal only provides criminals, large and small, with a lucrative market to exploit...and cops, prisons, and judges with lots of meaningless work to do running around busting people over something that doesn't matter in the first place.

I say this as someone who does NOT choose to smoke marijuana or anything else either. I don't have the right to deny another adult human being their own free decision whether or not to privately indulge in the use of a drug. That's their business, not mine.

- LH