Why did societies criminalize drugs?

>It turned out that outlawing it did more harm then keeping it legal
This could be applied to all drugs.

>Hindsight is 50/50
What is this supposed to mean?

>Hindsight is 50/50

Wha... What? I really hope English isn't your first language son

Religion, culture, protectionism, etc.

Some drugs are genuinely a bad idea to be legal. But the concept gets extended to everything, taking an adults right away from him to decide what they put in their body.

Which drugs specifically, and why are they worse than others?

in an ideal society everyone is supposed to be on the same wavelength and help eachother out

a dude stoned out of his mind all the time is a liability and embarrassing as fuck

>in an ideal society everyone is supposed to be on the same wavelength and help eachother out
Drugs are not what is holding us back from an "ideal society", and it is naive to even imply such a thing. Also, people who use drugs have no problem helping each other out.

>a dude stoned out of his mind all the time is a liability and embarrassing as fuck
Then why do all successful businessmen choose coke?

this meme is no longer funny, discontinue use immediately

>Drugs are not what is holding us back from an "ideal society"
im not saying they are
>people who use drugs have no problem helping each other out
get syringes maybe
>Then why do all successful businessmen choose coke?
because its fun and gets you hype af

I'm not particularly well educated on drugs, just the few that are highly addictive and totally ruin lives.

successful businessmen are no different ultimately

Opium, crack, cocaine and heroine have all caused quite a lot of trouble. Cocaine itself isn't that bad for your system but it has a really strong mental hook which leads to abusive use

Drugs like Marijuana, LSD, mushrooms (as well as similar psychedelic drugs) and amphetamine are far less dangerous but the public doesn't exactly see the difference between different kinds of drugs.
It should also be noted that LSD, though very safe for your body and impossible to overdose with, can fuck your mind up big time if you take big doses and don't know what to expect. These are no toys

Reminder that the US destroyed Japan's hemp industry during the occupation even though virtually no one even imagined smoking it.

Why are you equating being using drugs with being high all the time?

Moreover, proper use of drugs at home and at other designated places for suing them can allow a person to function better as a productive member of society. Of course using drugs (especially alcohol) can lead to a slippery slope of abuse and addiction, but that should be every adults own issue to process.

As far as being on the same wavelength, generally people are not, we do our best to tune in by using culture to guide our behavior, but people are rarely ever in sync as a group.

Prosocial drugs like MDMA or LSD can produce powerful feelings of oneness with others, even over entire crowds of people. And this is a feeling that you can carry with you if you cultivate it properly.

Some people use MDMA once every three months or so to bond with strangers and the people they love the most, leaving them with positive feelings for a life time.....and others will abuse it until their brain stops pumping out dopamine.

There are risks, but the positive things are too positive to simply be set aside.

Guise, it's a joke. Just like "commit sodoku".

Hey, don't blame me, these posts are a diamond in a dozen.

>This could be applied to all drugs.
Obviously not. Drugs are illegal and the world is still in orbit

Opium usage was an epidemic in the UK. Lords were fine using it because they had the money to keep up their habit and use it more responsibily but the poor were really suffering for it.

It's very easy for people to say "but people should be able to make their own decisions!" but also fail to realize how harmful addictions can be. Nobody who is addicted to a drug wants to be that way, pretty much every single addict wants to go back to a normal life.

This spread to China and literally started two wars because Britain knew from the beginning just how much the Chinese would crave more.

Marijuana is addictive too, I hate the DUDE WEED LMAO types for this reason. They claim that weed is not addictive yet literally every person I know who smokes it has done it on a regular basis for years and uses the excuse "I could quite if I wanted to, I just don't want to"

Self-destructive behavior is bad for society.

>"I could quite if I wanted to, I just don't want to"
And you don't believe that, why?

Smoking a joint between two people is the equivalent (as far as impairment) as drinking two beers.

Do you really believe that a guy who has two beers with dinner after work is a drunk and "in denial about his addiction"?

What's more - most drugs are trivially cheap to produce in 2016, the price is only propped up because of illegality.

Meth, Heroin, or cocaine would be habits that cost less than a dollar a day were they all legal. Do I recommend these drugs for general recreational use? No.

However I would much rather have them be cheap and plentiful for addicts than have addicts steal my fucking trampoline set while I am at work to the sell the metal it a recycling plant.

In the US anyway it's because of puritan nonsense that also led to the criminalization of alcoholic beverages and prostitution.

Democracy.

Taking advantage of a moral panic is one of the easiest ways to get the uninformed masses to vote for you.

>literally every person I know who smokes it has done it on a regular basis for years and uses the excuse "I could quite if I wanted to, I just don't want to"
yet I know plenty of smokers who only do it on special occasions and the statistics favor me on this do. Not everybody does it daily

Weed isn't phisically addictive, but i too know lots of people who become psychologically dependent (myself included for a few years in my early 20ies). At first ever thing is more interesting and fun when your high, then everything is incredibly dull if your not high. However as you get older lots of those people will grow out of it and become more like .

Most of the heavy smokers I knew in my youth have 9 to 5 jobs and are no longer need to get high to feel normal. Buy there are definitely some who have ruined their life and their mid by staying high for 5 or 6 years.

But as a former heavy smoker of both weed and tobacco, I have very little sympathy for anyone who claims a debilitating addiction to either. It's a matter of willpower.

Not that guy but while Marijuana doesnt cause chemical addiction it's still a habit you can get hooked to, specially if there is a social or emotional aspect that makes you want to consume more. The DUDE WEED LMAO kids really do consume in excess because they've incorporated weed and being high as part of their personality, and it affects them negatively with reduced lung capacity, attention deficit and short term memory loss, eventually causing brain damage, like how old hippies ended up.

Drugs are literally the opiate of the masses.

We criminalize certain drugs because their use is often the cause for malicious side effects that would easily ruin otherwise normal people's lives. There are some substances that are simply too potent to be kept legal.

This comment was incredibly profound. I wish you the best of luck in life.

Because shit like bath salts can make you harm other people

literally the fault of housewives and old maids

Because contrary to DUDE WEED LMAO belief, a joint a day is actually more dangerous than a beer a day, since it can cause all kinds of neurological problems

>Hindsight is 50/50.
Only because we don't learn from history.

Not a user myself, but I fully recognize that the vast majority of the harm drugs cause derives from the violent black market making them illegal creates.

Not to mention that the fact that McDonalds and the like do drug testing means that even mild addicts can't get entry level jobs, and thus enter proper society, and thus are FORCED into a life of crime to support their habit.

certain parties benefit from being able to sell it for more than it is worth.

That remains to be corroborated as research remains outside the overton window.

Do you know how THC effects the brain? If you do, can you really tell me there would be no negative effects of using it regularly?

The truth?

We try to stamp out tobacco because it's the most profitable cash crop our third world proxy governments have - almost profitable enough to risk them coming out of debt.

Coffee is up there too, but our banks and coroprations have almost total control of the coffee market. Same with cocoa.

Drugs that come from the likes of like pot, cocaine, poppies, etc., are, for the most part, much cheaper than tobacco to produce and would be exponentially more profitable, even if they were legal.

Debt is what keeps us in control of the developing world. If they break that cycle, we lose our hold over them, and "the system" falls apart.

Before you ask, no we wouldn't just grow it here, because we dominate the world's food supply, agriculturally, by providing mass subsides to our farms - this, combined with trade agreements that prevent developing nations from leveling the playing field (eg. NAFTA), and the efforts of Monsanto, keeps us in control of the world's food supply, in addition to preventing competition from developing nations, despite their lower labor and production costs.

Additionally, drug profits allow us to conduct all our less savory business, through diversions of funds, providing a near infinite, near untraceable cash source for anything nefarious we have to do off the books.

So we do we keep drugs illegal Pinky? Simple: So we can take over the world.

The magnitude of harm, while non-zero, is of less than alcohol. You used to be able to get everything over the counter at apothecaries and druggists however in america's case each drug become removed due to an outgroup association. Alcohol was from the german and catholics, Opiates and Orientals, Blacks and Grass, Wetbacks and cocaine.

That episode was surprisingly redpilled for a children's program.

...

>Because not everyone is liberal.
>For some people, since drugs are bad for those that use it and society, they should be outlawed.
Conservative preaching collectivism over individualism...

...As I always say, it's not a political spectrum, nor a political horseshoe - it's a political mobius strip.

which one?

I feel drugs are outlawed because they interfere with a fundamental code of societal life. The production and consumption of resources on a mass, yet efficient, scale.

Following my theory that life exists to disperse mass and energy more effectively than inanimate objects, intelligence and rational thought place heavy demand on said resources.

If large portions of a community stop doing their tasks to support the needs of others while in turn granting themselves momentary happiness, they're not expending resources efficiently enough to be deemed "worthwhile".

(It's easier to consume resources when your nuclear power plant workers aren't on drugs.)

There's also a need for drugs too, however. When we consume enough resources and reverse entropy to a point of stability, existence becomes meaningless (for the moment). Dopamine counters that boredom and (illegal) drugs are one of the easiest, oldest, most sought after medium for release.

When all your needs have been met, then you can grow as an individual and take in experiences with full concentration. Drugs are that experience, self imposed and of less danger than most situations.

Powerful uppers and downers that completely override your own delicately balanced reward/motivation hormonal chemistry, opiates and amphetamines being the main offenders. They basically ruin your ability to function as a normal person by heavily screwing with your sources of feeling reward and motivation. You subconsciously learn that rather than doing the things that normally make you feel good about yourself, which tend to be things that help you function and survive, it's easier to get that feeling by acquiring more of the drug. It's why crackheads and methheads and heroin junkies are such a problem in society, whereas drugs with more esoteric effects on brain chemistry like pot, alcohol, and hallucinogens are much easier to enjoy responsibly.

I thought you were quoting a monologue from Pinky & The Brain.

Wetbacks brought marijuana and cocaine, actually. The west doesn't owe any drug culture to Africa, even though tobacco is grown there en masse nowadays. The taboos of marijuana/cocaine abuse arose in European musician and artist circles, greatly predated the jazz culture of Black america, and that itself was imported as an orientalist fascination with the Near East.

Honore de Balzac smoked a disgusting amount of hash earlier in life before becoming the number one fan of java for instance.

Alcohol and tobacco right off the bat

the only Western drug cultures uniquely innovated by blacks that come to mind are crack cocaine (coca is of course originally peruvian, but "refined" in the ghetto) and purple drank

Drugs are mostly illegal because they stop workers working for their overlords, and it is masked in a concern for "public morality and health".

Nobody really gives a shit if you're a heroin addict, they just want you to make money.

PCP

>Powerful uppers and downers that completely override your own delicately balanced reward/motivation hormonal chemistry, opiates and amphetamines being the main offenders. They basically ruin your ability to function as a normal person by heavily screwing with your sources of feeling reward and motivation. You subconsciously learn that rather than doing the things that normally make you feel good about yourself, which tend to be things that help you function and survive, it's easier to get that feeling by acquiring more of the drug
This can be explained in detail by current neurological research, specifically (i.g., we know the neurotransmitters and neural pathways involved in decision-making, and how these are disrupted and altered permanently by active addiction, and remain damaged even after lengthy periods of abstinence.) I've seen it explained in detail in a documentary that iirc is over 5 years old... The forefront of the medical science on addiction does not match up with our models of rehabilitation (especially in the case of opiate addiction, which has become an epidemic in several cities across the United States); 12 steps programs are good, and can be a great help, but they aren't ideal for opiate addicts, and are severely lacking in combatting the problem as a standard model.

1/2

Religious extremism in america, and then the rest of the world copied them

What I stated in the previous post means then, is that thinking like
>I have very little sympathy for anyone who claims a debilitating addiction to either. It's a matter of willpower.
Needs to stop.
Not only is it an outdated and errant way of thinking, it's inimical for the problem of addiction as a whole and to addicts as individuals who attempt or would attempt to recover.

It's true an addict made a poor decision to try the drug they got hooked to a first, or second time. Who hadn't made a choice they regret? we can't judge people who need medical intervention and treatment. If a kid decides to play in an area marked "danger", and hurts himself - would we refuse to help? if the kid sprained an ankle, would we say "it's your own fault, walk outta there yourself - it's just a matter of will power"?
People choose to experiment with drugs, but no one chooses to become an addict. And not only that, once the neural pathways in their brains are altered - the addict had lost their ability to "choose" not using; their brain chemistry is faulty and they no longer have the ability to make decisions the way a non-addict would.

>drug testing means that even mild addicts can't get entry level jobs, and thus enter proper society, and thus are FORCED into a life of crime to support their habit.
Drug testing isn't as big of a problem as the criminality of illegal drugs, in my opinion. If recovered addicts (including doctors, lawyers, businessmen, dealers - all) can't get a decent job because of past charges, what should they do? Decriminalization is a must for non-violent offenders. Even people who robbed to support their habit need a chance to get their life back, or make a new one. Right? At any rate, fighting to stay sober while fighting the legal system can be a lethal combo. Addicts too often lose the battle to get sober, perhaps if they didn't have to fight the stigma and judgment from society and the laws involved, they'd have a better chance.

>LSD is a whole different deal but I don't think we're ready to legalize something as potent as that
Opinion completely disregarded.

Kill yourself.

>Why did societies criminalize drugs?
Because free-labor is the corner stone of US economics, that's why drug offenders get time in double digits.

youtube.com/watch?v=6lIqNjC1RKU

I used your words as an example, and took them out of context - I wanted to make it clear that when you mentioned "will power" it was in reference to weed and tobacco.
Nicotine is actually significantly similar in its mechanisms and effects to the brain - it's just more socially acceptable (heavily taxed but legal) and way less dangerous as in it doesn't kill you in one dose but slowly over your lifetime (and so often taking the end of it! It's arguably way more costly to our health care system than many other drugs with its extremely high association with and as the cause of the major chronic illnesses, COPD and CHF chief among these... Alcohol is costly too - ask anyone whose ever worked in an ER/ED on Fri and Sat nights).

Weed has been demonstrated to cause physical addiction, at least research something before you act like experts on it.

Yeah, it's not like hemp was used exclusively for nooses or somethi- oh wait