TED Conversations

Jonathan Marschall

This conversation is closed. Start a new conversation
or join one »

Should alcohol be banned or be more regulated?

So many deaths, car crashes, marriages have been broken up due to the consumption of alcohol.

What good does alochol do for our society. Alcohol is far more dangerous than marijuana. When was the last time you ever heard of a person getting into a car accident due to marijuana or starting a fight due to marijuana.

Was the lifting of prohibition a mistake?

0
Share:

Showing single comment thread. View the full conversation.

  • thumb

    Gail . 50+

    • +1
    Oct 14 2012: Putting pot into the black market is the mistake. Alcoholism went UP during prohibition, and went down after it. Alcoholism makes you violent. Pot makes you sleepy.

    This being said, I don't think that government should be establishing black markets for anything. They are dangerous.

    • Zdenek Smith 100+

      • 0
      HostAssociate
      Oct 14 2012: I do agree that banning alcohol is not the way to go. We should focus on education and prevention as well as implement tough laws or implement a technology to discourage drunk driving.

      However allowing hard drugs to be accessible openly will lead to huge problems for individuals and societies. Hard drugs can become highly addictive and damaging to the individual in a very short period of time. The society will be affected as crime and medical expensive will substantially raise.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_drugs
      • thumb

        Gail . 50+

        • 0
        Oct 15 2012: If you look at Portugal, you will see how drug use, crime, and sexually transmitted diseases DECREASED when drug possession (all drugs) were decriminalized. It's still unlawful to traffic, but people may possess a 10-day supply. Pot is overlooked, though it is included in the law. Hard drug users who are arrested (public intoxication) face a panel that contains a judge and a social worker and one more. This panel has the right to force treatment, require education and/or fines, or let the user go. It's not a criminal offense, so there is no criminal record.

        Holland also has amazing results, and they found that by legalizing pot possession in small amounts (for adults), hard drug use plummeted, hard drug users were forced into treatment, The streets are finally empty of addicts, which decreases crime, and STDs dramatically decreased, resulting in lower health-care costs for tax payers.

        These two countries are finding the same thing that America found when it experimented with abolition.

        Close down the black market, violence goes way down, drug use decreases because there is an acceptable alternative.

        The black market is very profitable - not just for the black marketeers, but for those companies and government agencies that thrive because of it. It's also very dangerous.

        • Zdenek Smith 100+

          • 0
          HostAssociate
          Oct 15 2012: It does not look like the evidence is clear on the consequences of legalizing certain drugs:

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_the_Netherlands

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portugal_2001_decriminalization_of_drug_use

          e.g. Reported lifetime use of "all illicit drugs" increased from 7.8% to 12%, lifetime use of cannabis increased from 7.6% to 11.7%, cocaine use more than doubled, from 0.9% to 1.9%, ecstasy nearly doubled from 0.7% to 1.3%, and heroin increased from 0.7% to 1.1%[14] It has been proposed that this effect may have been related to the candor of interviewees, who may have been inclined to answer more truthfully due to a reduction in the stigma associated with drug use.[15] However, during the same period, the use of heroin and cannabis also increased in Spain and Italy, where drugs for personal use was decriminalised many years earlier than in Portugal [15][16] while the use of Cannabis and heroin decreased in the rest of Western Europe.[

Showing single comment thread. View the full conversation.