What Is The Primary Reason Why Drugs Are Illegal?

Rational thinking on this issue needs to be used. People personal freedoms are at play in this issue. its not right to tell someone not to get stoned or trip out. Our own lord and master president is an ex-cokehead, that should be plenty of an example why drugs are bad, but some arent. in fact cannabis recently was just proven in a study to increase IQ and intuition but decrease short term as we all know. Tripping has led people to spiritual enlightenment and helped in overcoming addictions. I have the personal belief drugs are the earth aiding us in our evolution if used properly with proper intent, not a gangster slinger mentality or suburban drunk hippie mindset. You need intellect and focus while you journey into the landscape of the mind.

do you think that any drug that is under classification now, will EVER be legalised?

Originally posted by Briles
do you think that any drug that is under classification now, will EVER be legalised?

I think at some point marijuana is going to be legalized. Slowly but surely states are legalizing medical use and some have now reached the point where they're considering full scale legalization. It may be 5 years, it may be 10 years...but I think it's coming.

Originally posted by BlueTriangle

Originally posted by beastamerica
because your government can't tax it and corporations can't make money out of it...

That argument makes no sense. If drugs were legal, they could tax it and corporations could make money off of it .

then it wouldn't be called illegal drugs.
it would be MARLB's Lights or ABSULOT Vodka or Tylenol with Codeine...

My ex-husband had a hidden and serious drug and alcohol addiction when I married him. He was violent when high and moody as all get out when off the dope or alcohol. Too many times, I would come home to a destroyed house where he had a temper tantrum while I was gone. I won't go into the abuse I suffered or how he tried to pimp me out to his friends to pay his drug debts. And some men wonder where the hard a** bi***** come from.

I believe God made certain chemicals to be used in moderation and in a short span of time and under a physician's care. Marijuana eases the effects of chemo and increases appetite. Even alcohol is mentioned in the Old Testament as something given to someone in large quantities while wasting away from a deadly disease, but the drunkard is scorned because he has no real excuse for staying stupefied.

Human nature being what it is guarantees that if it makes some people feel good no matter the consequences, they'll ingest, snort, or shoot it. Even if it means their baby wears four day old diapers full of maggoty crap or an elderly parent dies from neglect while in their care.

[edit on 21-7-2008 by Bowcatz001]

Gee as you all are describing why drugs are illegal it reminds me of what's happening to Legal drugs.. Ya know the ones you get from your DR? They can be addictive
(i.e. OxyCotton)
What makes a drug dangerous or helpful is not really in question, what is in question is how the man keeps legal drugs legal and Illegal ones well illegal...

Perscription Drug Addiction

Originally posted by beastamerica
because your government can't tax it and corporations can't make money out of it...

YES THEY CAN.

ARGH. I'm so sick of seeing this bull on these boards. It seems like 70% of the posters on ATS are messed up on drugs and looking to justify/push it onto everyone else, or caught up in some stupid conspiracy about 'The Man' keeping them down.

They're taxable and corporations could grow them, easily, there is no limit on that sort of thing. They're not taxed now, so what?

Do you apply this thinking to everything? Say if somebody (somehow) develops free energy tomorrow, do you really think it'd be free for the consumer? Sure, we might have much more access to power globally (ie. in poor nations) and it might be cheaper, but we would still pay. Why? Because someone has to profit as long as we live in a capitalist society.

I'm not flaming you so much as I am everyone with this ridiculous nonsensical opinion. It's just one of those things drug advocates throw at you for no freaking reason and it has no thought put into it whatsoever.

In short: Governments or corporations take over supply legally, you'll pay for it and it'll be taxed like anything else.

Anyway as for the OP's question, you hit the nail on the head. They damage individual's health, they damage the health and wellbeing of others as the people who do them inevitably seek out funding and whatever to fuel the habit. Outside of that there's things like property damage or violence based on people who 'don't know what they're doing'.

Anyway I'm not interested in reading any other replies in this thread. I know half of them will be 17-page replies on HOW AWESUM TEH DRUGSZ RRR!!! Cus lIek, my unlke he liek tooks them 4 15 yers and is the smartetst helthiest guy EBVAER!!!! AND NO ONE CAN TELL ME OTHERWISE.

URGH. Drugs advocacy and idiocy - the cancers of ATS.

Originally posted by nahsik
well for one thing they can kill you through overdosage.
They create problems for society.

kind of like ummm oh yes PRESCRIPTION DRUGS . am i getting warmer ??
who here can say pain killers ????

In terms of the 'more' drugs (P/crack/heroin/etc) I can understand why.. they wish to take the choice away from people to (most usually) harm themselves. Obviously this approach does not work, education and help is needed for addicts, not a prison where it's just as easy to get drugs like that, and be introduced to different ones.

However, drugs like '___'/Psilocybin/hemp etc I do not see why they are illegal when you compare them to legal drugs available and the benefits they have.
They simply don't want you thinking outside the square

First i don't think any drugs should be illegal. Many of the drugs out there are extremely hazardous to your health ex. heroine. But there are some drugs that i do not believe is as bad for your health as is claimed. I will use the typical example of cannabis. Cannabis is illegal primarily because it is associated with the lower more poor classes. Another reason it is illegal is because it is a plant and you cant patent a plant or make much money off it.

reply to post by Duality


What an incredibly ignorant viewpoint you have there. Do some real research or experimenting yourself then come back to this topic when you have an actual educated response to share with us. But you probably won't read this response or half the others, as you so blatantly stated.

Drugs are illegal for a plethora of reasons, many of which have been listed previously. Education about substances is so incredibly important for people to be able to benefit from them (some of them... '___', Marijuana, Shrooms, '___')
There is wonderfully lucrative Black Market right now because drugs are illegal. We can thank the CIA for must of our drugs that we get.

reply to post by beastamerica


Agree. This is the founding reason. Many of our drugs ARE legal, and I'm not talking about prescription drugs, I'm talking about alcohol, nicotine and caffiene. Those are all taxed, and at least in the local sense here, heavily taxed (although we have the foresight to call them duties).

I think a peripheral reason is quality control. I believe that many drugs are not currently distributed with a consistent quality, and that is an important aspect of taxation as well. It needs to be measurable, it needs to be consistent, and packaging must be wasteful. That appears, to me, to be the pattern.

One other thing -- when, in the process of law enforcement pulling over a naughty driver, there would have to be testing and standards to determine when someone has "had enough", which could be performed on the spot, and didn't involve police drawing blood.

There. I think that's enough reasons. Do I think drugs should be legal? Honestly..... I have no problem with marijuna being legal, some psychotropics. I think coc aine is an elusive bitch and I've seen her drag more than one friend down to the bone. Maybe that's also true of legal drugs too, such as alcohol.

We have to keep talking about this and other freedom issues is we are ever to start to be free. That's why I love this board because people are daring to speak the truth.

Conservative skeptics like "Duality" will never be convinced. They're happy with the status quo no matter how much it hurts everyone. And especially they hate to be exposed to the truth that the majority of people want to see some sensible changes in the law and respect for those wanting to properly explore the Above Three-D Universe.

The Rockefellers supported prohibition to prevent alcohol from competing with gas. Then the same model was used by the DuPonts to to prevent hemp from competing with nylon.
All of this was going on while opiates imported from the Far East were legal.

I saw a Florida state senator stand up and say that it was alarming that '___' use was increasing among the 18 to 24 year old group. The Florida Association of Psychologists lobbied for an exemption for medical treatment but did not get it.

I think at that age it is time to explore reality and see if Dan Rather has been telling the whole truth all these years. Maybe the Native Americans really have something valuable to contribute to our spiritually after all.

To ask if you can trust the wolf you must first acknowledge that the wolf exists and develop the tools to deal with it.

Why is it still illegal? I think we have to wait for the control freaks to die out. They have no interest in listening to logic that goes outside their box. Marvin Gaye's father killed him because of the freedom Marvin brought to our consciousness. And my own parents hated marijuana and loved alcohol.

Legalize; The Mind?, Caring?, Love?, Alien Contact?, Nature?, Kindness?

P.S. Free Energy is illegal. Google Invention Secrecy Act of 1951.

"Come on talk to me
So we can see
What's goin on..." - Marvin Gaye

reply to post by Briles


1. The illegal street price will always undercut the legalized price...

2. Because of it's underground movement it could never be taxed...

3. The government cannot target Ghetto's and use them as labratories of control to keep the penile system and it's legal affiliates paid in full.

4. There are neatly packaged legalized drugs that have a strong hold on mainstream housewives... to get them through yelling kids & yoga class, billions are made here.

Why are drugs illegal? You are asking the wrong question. Here is the correct question:

Why did we need a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol, but not one to ban drugs?

THAT is the question you should ask every prosecutor, attorney, and judge in America.

We need to question what we consider to be altered states. It is the human condition to seek these states, be it spinning around as a child or a roller coaster and so forth. Also anything we put in our bodies are drugs that affect our mood and state of being. The earth has provided many medicinal plants for the body and incredibly, healing plants for the mind as well. Our master chemists who created antidepressant drugs mimicked compounds found in sacred plants. What we are doing is sick. In our current social status, entheogenic plants make one question reality, that is why they're illegal. Many have a lot at stake in this reality. They want you to fear and to never see past ones ego. As Terrance Mckenna said "Culture is your operating system and the best way to clear some disk space is with psilocybin in silent darkness". There is many ways to achieve these states and understandings: Dancing, chanting, fasting, drumming, meditation. However; today in western society and many others it is useful to reboot your idea of what life is and how contrived the conditioning has been. In a world where nothing is certain these mystical experiences remain consistent in every ecosystem. Realize how recent all this prohibition is! It's your mind, your path, your God given right! Thanks for the discussion-Gonz

Posting from work anon....
The primary reason drugs are illegal are economic reasons.
The CIA thru their puppets push the dope (coc aine, heroin & who knows what else) in the streets of USA thru the pushers. That's a lot of money. Then you factor in how much business the USA banks do in money laundering essentially with all the drug money from the dope the CIA brought in. That trickles into mainstream business, stock market etc...

Then there's the whole 'war on drugs' market on the other side.
I new a lawyer who previously had 12 years under his belt with the local county Sherrif department as a deputy before he got his law degree and started doing criminal defense.
I asked him once why ridiculous amounts of law enforcement will arrive for small things like someone getting popped for a few joints.. It always seems like 3-4+ patrol cars will arrive to bust the 15 year old that got caught smoking a joint.
He said this was common practice for multiple cars/patrolmen and or detectives to show up on the scene for minor drug busts and infractions. In essence, 6 cops show up for some stoner that gets popped with a dime sack, then the 6 cops can each report the 'bust', inflating the numbers and thereby gaining more federal funding for the 'War On Drugs'.
It's all about money.

In the end, alcohol causes more deaths, medical problems, family and psychological problems than marijuana/hash could ever even be dreamed of causing.
For references to the CIA involvement:
www.csun.edu...
query.nytimes.com...

Just google it.

My suggestion would be to that they are made illegal to cut the population and to destroy the genome of humans so there would develop a subspecies or it could be to slow the rapid evolution of humans into uncontrollable (in a good way) species that do not conform to the mass hypnosis state most of us are in

Could be also because if legal drugs would not be used so widely and would be much cheaper and would not bring so big profits to government and related bodies. Afghanistan is a good example I guess. Before invasion it was apparently not that widespread to grow them than it is now.


After all we do not know if they could be a gateway to a higher truth if used in an appropriate manner.

reply to post by aggadoo


I think agga had a partially good point, but too much bias showing there. lol You can't class drugs as a whole and get a reason, as he said. The origin of banning substances? Two things. One, social views on them. Two, the effects they could have on those who did not choose to partake of them.

I'll give you two examples:

For the societal view, lets take alcohol and the prohibition. Societal effects aside, of which there are plenty, most of the drive behind the prohibition was the non-drinkers trying to force their views on everyone else. (At least, in a really oversimplified way of putting it.) I'm sure, if you put a little thought into it, you can come up with some similar laws being bandied about today, in that regard. And while Im not a fan of the drunken binges that have come to be synonymous with entertainment these days, such laws violate the rights of the individual. Even so, legally consumption is restricted to locations where those who choose the participate are exposed, as should be the case. If only such laws were enforced more strenuously!

Now for the banning of substances because of the effect they would have on passerby, if you will. Pot is an excellent example here. (as is the growing restriction on tobacco smoking.) The issue with a substance that is to be smoked is, if you walk through a cloud of smoke, you're exposed to the substance against your will. Tobacco is one thing to be exposed to, because, while it can lead to cancer and so on, by and large, occasional exposure, for most, is not of any great harm. But when it's pot, its a little different. Not that a tiny exposure is likely to get you high; its a bit more complex that than. You see, no employer is ever going to want employees who smoke pot. They don't exactly tend to make good employees, as a whole, for a number of reasons. How to prevent this? Drug testing. But how could you verify if someone is a pot smoker or not, if they could be randomly exposed to it walking down the street? You would have people losing their jobs over accidental exposure. And there would be a risk, if not a high one in MOST areas, of a more extensive involuntary exposure leading to the passerby suffering the effects of pot use. Basically, since there would be no realistic way to control exposure of those who are not willing to be exposed, making it legal would violate the rights of all of us who would rather find meaningful enlightenment within ourselves, instead of in a drug-induced stupor.

Obviously, there are a million other aspects I've not even mentioned, but I think that is a good enough example to make the point. Restriction of substances is rooted in societal views and in personal rights issues. Now, that has since grown to the classification of substances with similar effects being banned more for their similarity than any real issues with them, as a matter of expediency, its true. But I would hope that these examples might lay some groundwork for the OP to understand the basis and logic behind controlling and banning substances, and thus to help understand the dynamics of freedom and society, both in the positive and negative ways it can be implemented, from a more personal perspective.

[edit on 7/21/2008 by saturnine_sweet]