"Drugs like guns, hammers, ego, and global corporate are not innately good nor bad. Their worth is in how they are used." Recher

"The problem is not drug use but drug abuse" Recher (?)

The use of mind-altering chemicals derived from plant sources is a universal habit.

All freedoms in a democracy: speech, press, mobility, religion… are in reality reflections of our most precious inalienable right: the control over one’s own body and mind.

The government is not the policeman of my mouth nor is the state the custom agent of my consciousness.

Illegal drugs are no more of a danger than nicotine and ethanol. Therefore it is poisonous to a healthy democratic society to permit the consumption of tobacco and alcohol with all their attendant health and social problems while treating users of prohibited drugs as criminals.

The hypocrisy of prescribing anti-depressants (i.e. Prozac) and tranquillisers (i.e. Valium) in order to effect mood change while criminalizing those who self-prescribe with marijuana, etc. is persecution.

Ask yourself how you would feel if alcohol were illegal and pot was legal but you were getting sniffed out by dogs and arrested for possessing a 6-pack?

What really is happening in our society is one group has inflicted and enforced their morality and their particular taste for drugs onto a sub-group with different values and a predilection for other chemicals. This is persecution sanctioned by law.

If society could eliminate the prime source of corruption in the police force, stop the major input of cash to organized crime, free up 2 billion dollars and thousands of hours of police time plus eliminate at least 80% of all house break-ins, muggings and theft crime, we would, of course, do it.

But we do not. We are scared of the solution.

The answer is the regulated trial re-legalization of all currently prohibited mind-altering drugs: cannabis, amphetamine, LSD, opiates, cocaine, ‘ecstasy’, etcetera.

It is a ludicrous waste of resources to arrest cannabis users at the rate of seven hundred thousand per year in the USA and three hundred in Lismore.

The response to the re-legalization proposal is invariably "Look at the problems we have with legal ones. To make more drugs legally accessible will only increase the social mayhem."

When asked to back up their assertion of how society will be worse off the answer is silence. The only negative outcome I can perceive is increased abuse of cocaine as a white powder.

It is a ludicrous waste of resources to arrest cannabis users at the rate of seven hundred thousand per year in the USA and three hundred in Lismore.

With trial re-legalization, society becomes a more compassionate community by recognizing drug abuse is not a crime but a health problem like tobacco and alcohol addiction.

Finally, if unforeseen negative outcomes result from re-legalizatiion, society can always re-prohibit!