You lucky bastards in Colorado and Washington.......TOKE AWAY!!!!!

[xenophobe]

We aren't legalizing murder because because we can't prevent it from happening, you don't see anyone raising the speedlimits by 50mph because people keep speeding

The National Speed Limit used to be 55 MPH. 55 Saves Lives, remember? In many areas it is now 75. lol

[Axewielder]

The debate will rage on I'm sure, but there's an old saying that you can't police the people more than they want to be policed. These ballot results in Washington and Colorado that are north of 50% in favor make a strong statement. At the end of the day, that overrides everything else. If alcohol prohibition worked in the 20's, it would probably still be the law today. The only difference is that there has been a smaller, more repressible percentage of Americans who tolerate marijuana. I don't think the feds are going to be able to intervene here, nor are the people who wish to sanitize the world of anything that might "harm the children" or stoke some sort of harmful addiction in a small percentage of people. The "slippery slope" arguments have begin to ring hollow, and in fact there is even a theory that marijuana prohibition is the slippery slope. The theory is that under marijuana prohibition, you basically have to deal with criminals in order to make a purchase. Those criminals are likely to also have other harder, more lucrative drugs that they are going to try to push on you. It's high time we cleaned it up (pun intended).

[Shawn Lutz]

The National Speed Limit used to be 55 MPH. 55 Saves Lives, remember? In many areas it is now 75. lol

We have an 85 MPH highway down here....

[VitaminG]

But I kind of agree with Nightbat, you don't start smoking or drinking because it's legal or not,

sure they do. Loads of kids start drinking & smoking because they're told by their parents and the law that it is not allowed. So they grow their hair, stitch Venom back patches to denim jackets with the sleeves ripped off, spend their school day hanging out behind the bikeshed smoking cigarettes and ditch school to drink cheap & nasty beer. Because doing all of those things they've been told they're not old enough to do makes them feel badass. Outlaw mentality. Some people never get over that - not to be a career criminal and ripoff convenience stores, rape or murder - but to feel the badassness of railing against authority.

If we legalised cannibis we should legalise everything, legalise nudism and public sex acts and beastiality

you are hilarious!

[horns666]

Make ALL Churches pay taxes!

Let God protectect his right hand man ..ban the popemobile. Let him cruise JFK-style.

I think sodomy with under age boys should be very illegal. Make a pay-per-view event of Ron Jeremy bangin' the Pope! Call it 'Holy Rat Zinger!!'.

[xenophobe]

We have an 85 MPH highway down here....

And there you have it! And I'm way fucking jelly too. I want 85 MPH highways here. :\

[Ward]

We have an 85 MPH highway down here....

Are you in Texas? Before I posted my response I looked up the highest limit, and what I found was 85 in Texas. Not sure if any other states have that yet.

[Shawn Lutz]

Are you in Texas? Before I posted my response I looked up the highest limit, and what I found was 85 in Texas. Not sure if any other states have that yet.

Yep, I'm outside of Dallas. The 85 MPH is a toll road I think between San Antonio and Austin. I take a toll road to get to work and its 70 and its far from rural too. We love to drive fast, carry weapons, right to protect property now if we can legalize weed it would really be cool

[horns666]

[Nightbat]

First off, many polls have shown that now teenagers can obtain weed MUCH more easily than alcohol. That was certainly the case when I was a teen. An illegal dealer doesn't care if you are of legal age, a legal retailer who could lose his license or go to jail for selling to a minor would care. Legalization also means regulation, and that regulation actually makes it tougher to obtain outside the rules than it is now

That's the good news, that it's just weed that's easy to come by
If we want to keep it like that, taking its profits away from organized crime is gonna mean they'll be increasing their efforts on other stuff

I guess the main disagreement we have is that you call it a 'problem ' at all. I do not consider weed a problem, I consider laws against it a problem. It is a victimless crime that was originally made illegal by politicians and profiteers for their own personal gains/agendas.

We aren't legalizing murder because there is a victim in the crime. Did you really just compare smoking weed to murder?

Nope, not weed, weed is the least of our worries, in 'damage' even lower than alcohol or cigarettes, I was talking about legalizing every bloody thing

Basically what Ginsambo said, for me, rings true on a lot of things

[Ward]

Ah, my bad. I thought you were speaking specifically of weed, not the whole lot.

I'll agree with you there. Weed has always been easy to find, while the other stuff always seemed to require a lot more effort. But I've never cared about any of it other than pot, so my experience is quite limited.

But I still don't agree with keeping pot illegal because other harder drugs are bad.

[Rsmacker]

We should legalise everything, legalise nudism and public sex acts and beastiality

Ohhhh alright then. (Go to the South of France at the same time as me, you'll see me, on the beach in broad daylight, bollock naked, fucking the odd pig or two. And being given a round of applause afterwards.)

I think that rather than legalising dope, they ought to be stamping down hard on those who think it is already legal. Fucking hard. Build more prisons, or just cram them in. The appeal of smoking dope might lessen with the very real prospect of being fucked hard in the showers by beefy black men. (Sit down Wilksy Baby, I know that sounds like heaven to you)
When I was young, people smoked hash, but they did it very discreetly. These days people walk down the street with a pungent spliff lit up with impunity (walking a Pit Bull in a harness). Before any relaxation of the law, these idiots need to be hammered, legally and anally. I've no idea whether smoking dope leads to harder drugs in general, but I suspect that if dope were legal, the Pit Bull walkers would be openly flouting the law with harder drugs. There is your slippery slope, it becomes "normal".

One thing which I do have a major problem with is the difficulty in gauging how stoned someone is. I know that I can have one and a half pints of strong lager before I am over the drink-drive limit, even though I feel fine. I can drink 5 pints before it would affect my driving (or my taste in women). The law says otherwise, and if I am caught behind the wheel, breathalysed and fail the test, I lose my licence and possibly go to jail.

Who is to say how much marijuana someone can ingest before they are a fucking mong, and how does Mr Plod determine it when he is testing a driver who has fallen asleep and mowed 6 innocent Girl Guides out picking flowers? What about the next day? After a lager frenzy I know I am going to be still over the limit for the whole next day, even though I possibly feel fine enough to drive. The law, through science, has determined how much alcohol in my blood is detrimental to co-ordination and mental agility. It's there in black and white, and I can even test myself with a cheap DIY kit before I take to the wheel. (In France it's the law to carry 2 kits if using a motor vehicle.)

How long will marijuana stay in my system? Depends on body type, food intake, type of dope, amount smoked, eaten blah blah, right? When am I stoned? When I drool, start saying "hey man" or get the munchies? I bet it's a rarity for any user to say "I'm baked, I'd better not risk driving home until my system is clear". That might be days, clinically.

I know that if my kids were killed by a driver who had ANY trace of dope in their system, I'd want them hanged. No excuses, no ifs or buts, I'd want their head on a plate. Even in an "accident" (which I believe is a term the police no longer use because it implies no-one is at fault, whereas there is ALWAYS fault to some degree, be it lack of attention, speeding, not taking the weather conditions into consideration etc etc), my instinct would be to blame the person with marijuana in their system and demand blood.

Whilst I couldn't really give a toss what someone does for recreational purposes in private, the moment I or my loved ones are put in danger, I become fucking concerned. It's dangerous enough without having to worry about fuckwits who think they are just relaxing by having the odd toke. It's ignorance and selfishness of the worst kind for them to suggest that THEY should be free to do this or that, when I might be picking up the pieces of my life afterwards.

Finally, the people who decide whether legalisation should be allowed ought to be people who haven't indulged in it themselves. Smokers will always say how harmless it is, how they are totally normal, yet cannot see what everyone else sees - a stoner. Good phrase that, there's a reason they call it dope. Users will NEVER admit that it slows them down mentally and physically, no matter how sharp they feel. It's a bit like people who own house cats - they swear blind that their house doesn't smell of piss. Everyone else is too polite to tell them, or get accused of being anti-cat if they do!

I can tell people who smoke regularly, and they piss me off being so laid back. They don't get upset or agitated about things they really should care about. Perhaps the Govt secretly like that - let's face it, you will never see mobs of dope smokers taking part in civil disobedience (unless the price of Chocolate Hob Nobs goes up.). Maybe there are many many more people who smoke regularly and it doesn't affect them in any noticable way? Then again, what's the point in smoking it? Because the taste is nice, or to mellow out after a hard day? Hmmmm...

[ginsambo]

Yeah, particularly miffed they won't legalise beastiality. Well it might happen in Europe but the Republicans will never allow it over there.

The amount of leading establishment politicians connected to paedeophilia over here would run a 300 page essay. Unfortunately the establishment is making good scapegoats of leading celebrities and putting the quiet on the evidence very well. Now ifd only we could somehow bring down the Rothschilds. As for the Catholic church, it has been as rampant as taking money off the people.

I started smoking cigarettes at 13 because it was fucking cold waiting for the school bus in the dark of the mornings on my own and my rock idols smoked, we were in a band and we thought we were living on Sunset Strip, those are the only reasons really, eventually my parents let me smoke in my room after I refused to stop at 15, mates who smoked loads of cannabis would be allowed to smoke in their rooms. That is when, age 15 or so they started getting a bit dark, freaky and weird stealing to sustain their pot habit which they did way too much of for it to be considered a healthy habit and it's then when they started avoiding people. We don't have the middle class Victorian values like the new world does, this is liberal and permissive Europe with experience. Eight year old kids wonder about the streets here like ferrel rats at 2 in the morning, parents couldn't care less about where they are and this isn't a bad neighbourhood. Everyone is too scared to discipline them because they might get branded a paedo or a feud might start with the family and the police won't do anything to help. Typically in the UK you start drinking heavily at around 14 or 15 and I mean half bottles of Vokda and diamond white. By age 16 you can't even remember who you have slept with. We have the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the whole of Europe and the worse child poverty rate and no religion. We are going back to working class Victorian times, they'll introduce workhouses soon.

We have a very fucked up culture, kids are becoming alco's or career criminals at 13. We don't have a rigid conservative and contradictory, republican tea party backbone like the USA does or any sense of neighbouring German style local community like the USA does. Although the estblishment does still exist, it is mainly to serve themselves with corrupt cowboy capitalism and plenty of defecting oligarchs are running here to join the old boys club and get knighted and fill the ranks. All political parties are fairly liberal, take backhanders who have other interests and fuck all is done for the people, especially by the police on the streets. As far as the politicians are concerned we can be left to rot as long as they can take their cut. Recently some 15 year old kid got sentenced for armed robbery at a jewellers, he got 12 months, he'll be out in 6. And this is in a country where guns are outlawed. None of this three strikes your gone like in the USA.

If you can imagine the worst neighbour near you, you know the neighbour the police don't ever set foot in, well that is what policing in the UK is like. And jail terms are a joke. We are going down the pan with the cistern handle stuck on overflow.

If we could combine the best of the UK with the best of the USA, I think it would be a pretty perfect country, but as it is, I don't think either system works.

So my point was, that a liberal permissive society isn't what it is cracked up to be, if you legalise stuff and make it cheaper, kids will just get even more fucked up, because that is the culture, it's not about rebellion, it's about oblivion.

Take a statistic, for example does capital punishment work? Well people are crying out for it here, the prisons are full, but in the USA, there are even more violent crimes and murders per head than the UK, so obviously it doesn't work. It's the same theory if we start legalising everything to stop crime and reduce substance abuse, I just don't think it'll work, probably the opposite will happen, you have to fundamentally re-engineer society and the root causes of substance abuse for anything to really work and that will never be done or addressed.

Fuck this country, I'm moving to France, where they appreciate the good things in life and it's legal.

I think a key example of the differences in culture between the USA and the UK would be this, recently I was over there and kids were playing, their parents were encouraging them to shout and gain self confidence and be self aware, you know hold there own with there peers, how it should be. I got back here and all the parents were like 'Be quiet, don't show off, you'll get a smack!'. The poor kids were only trying to have fun. That is the worst thing you can do for a kid's confidence and that is how we raise them, stiff upper lip and no community responsibility. The only kids that get raised the American way go to Eton. In the USA, if you try your best but fail because of circumstances out of your control you can a pat on the back and respect, in the UK if you try your best and fail because of circumstances out of your control you are regarded as a loser waste of space and never given a second chance and put on the scrap pile.

[Rsmacker]

Fuck this country, I'm moving to France, where they appreciate the good things in life and it's legal.

Join me on the beach, but I do have to tell you, I'm a one pastyboy-guy. (And his na-aame is Siiiiimey the Liiiiimey. Yeah)

Personally, I like it when parents tell their noisy brats to STFU, it's the ones who think the world revolves around their precious Snowflake that piss me off - I have a right to peace and quiet, as much as Snowflake has to spaz out. Only I'm older, so my wishes have priority. And no, Snowflake doesn't have learning difficulties, ADHD, nor is he autistic. He just needs a fucking good hiding every now and again to teach him some manners, respect and the way of the world. Otherwise, he roams the streets, calling old men like me cunts and pushing dog poo through our letter boxes. Then he lights up a spliff because he doesn't know what's wrong and right.

I'm not saying I was an angel as a kid, and may possibly have indulged in the odd eighth of Moroccan Black, but I did it in secret, I KNEW I was in the wrong and the consequences. (It made me puke up when drinking, so that was the end of that.
Dope = Neil the Hippy. Lager = Vyvyan. No contest.)

[Endrik]

*meanwhile in the civilized world, people are wondering if the existential crisis of consumer class in english speaking societies is some kind of new humour, a meta-modernist live-action vaudeville or the puritan dreariness simply has reached new heights.