I Support the Legalization of Marijuana

@Carver it'll happen, the dominoes will fall one by one when the world doesn't end here.

@samueltyler2 Well, the current plan here is to regulate it more or less the same way they do with alcohol. Canada will be an interesting incubator because deciding where and how to sell it, as well as minimum age to buy it, are provincial responsibilities and so it will vary across the country. In this province, all alcohol is sold by the government in liquor stores, and cannabis will be sold in the same stores in the same way, and the minimum age is the same as for alcohol (19). I've read in the papers that the government is aware that they will be competing with a well-established illicit market (in fact, eliminating this market is part of the purpose), and so will not be adopting punitive pricing. We'll see.

These new drugs are frightening and I can only see this getting worse in the future. At least existing drugs have been studied and tested. Banning new drugs would seem to make more sense than a blanket ban on the old ones.

I think you bear the responsibility for what you do when you take a drug for recreational purposes, or in fact when you drive when you're full of benzos which, while prescribed to you, make you unable to operate a vehicle safely.

You're the one with the experience, so ultimately I defer to you, but I was specifically talking about cannabis and not any other drug. I think each drug needs to be treated separately because they all do different things. I certainly don't think they should be selling fentanyl patches in corner stores!

I will watch Canada very carefully. Unfortunately, the US often watches others make mistakes, and then simply repeats them. Let us hope that doesn't happen this time.

Fentanyl is a very different situation. The first serious outbreak of heroin laced with fentanyl was in the 1990s, called China White. Somehow that abated and then started again in 2006 and was traced to illicit manufactured fentanyl. The current outbreak seems to be related to importation of the substance in its raw chemical form. Again, Canada has led the way in dealing with heroin addiction in Vancouver where there are safe, legal places to go to have an addict take his/her fix in a supportive environment which is prepared to deal with an overdose and provides clean equipment. There are some places in the US starting to adopt that model.

@samueltyler2 Have you ever looked at how our prohibition have effected street drugs. They passed a law against smokeable opium, that is when they came up with injectable heroin, it was legal where smokeable opium was not. So they banned heroin. But it goes on and on so many of the bad substances that are killing people came to pass because we banned something else, bath salts that people take, because you cant get pot. They crack down on prescription opiates like hydrocodone and people turn to heroin. To schedule marijuana as a drug with no legitimate value what so ever is simply untrue. The war on drugs has causes worse effects than the drugs themselves ever would. People need to be responsible for their actions and choices and not have the government try to protect them from themselves it just does not work.