^Because chocolate is healthy in moderation.

I'm alright with the decriminalization of drugs. But I think it sends the wrong message to fully legalize drugs. We don't want to make the use of drugs a normal occurrence or to promote it as a socio-cultural step towards adulthood (like alcohol).

well cigarettes are still legal (in america anyway) and they are becoming very unpopular, not only because they have been super taxed, but because people have seen from personal experience the benefits of not smoking. there's no need to make something like that illegal at this point because it is no longer popular enough to be a big problem.

i have plenty of friends who quit smoking marijuana because they just didn't want to do it anymore. they weren't busted for it, they don't get regularly drug tested, they just grew out of it and quit. if marijuana is addictive it's on par with caffeine, which is to say not very addictive at all. and marijuana is entrenched, it's already normalized.

and i doubt harder drugs would ever be normalized if made legal. i could easily get access to all sorts of opiates, but i know they could ruin my life if i abused them. most adults i know are even careful about opiates prescribed to them, afraid of inadvertently getting a habit. cocaine is something you either grow out of or die from, i don't know anyone who has kept up a long term addiction unless they were already too far gone (and thus likely to abuse it whether illegal or not).

a lot of drug users are exposed to drugs well before their 18th birthday. i smoked pot for the first time when i was 14. i smoked a joint laced with coke when i was 16 (and the kid who offered it to me was 10!). his brother was a drug dealer, so he likely stole it from him. now, if cocaine was legal and you could get it for even slightly cheaper from a government regulated business, then i doubt this kid's brother would be a cocaine dealer (why sell it if you can't make money on it and it's still a felony?), that kid wouldn't pick up a cocaine addiction (likely scenario anyway), and my 16 yr old self would not have tried cocaine for the first and only time. what i'm saying is, taking drugs out of the black market will mean less drug dealers, less chance of kids being exposed to drugs, and less dumb kid decisions involving drugs. it won't be a magic bullet, but it would be a lot better than what we have now.

i know the idea of legalizing messed up drugs like meth and heroin seems really really awful. when i first heard about this idea (when portugal legalized all drugs) i was repulsed. those kinds of drugs are truly evil and disgusting. but really drugs can't be evil. they are just things without a consciousness or soul. it is the people who sell and get more people addicted to these drugs that are truly evil. and taking those people out of the equation is at least a step in the right direction.

another point is that drug abuse should be treated as a medical condition and not a crime. yes, people made the choice to become drug addicts, it is their responsibility, but just punishing them does nothing for that person or society. and if you believe that personal responsibility is enough to deny someone medical care or to consider their problem as criminal, i invite you to google the causes of heart disease.

if drugs were legal people wouldn't be as afraid to seek treatment for addiction, and it wouldn't be as hard for drug addicts to function in society (prison and criminal records make it very hard to be a responsible adult). in my particular case, if i was addicted to a drug, i would never be able to seek treatment and hold my job. i would have to choose: keep barely functioning in society as an addict while my health fails, or seek treatment and be denied the time off or even fired from work because drug addiction is considered criminal. being unemployed or having to start over is not easy to do for anyone, but it is especially difficult for those whose brains' are wired to use drugs to escape when bad situations arise. thus it can be a vicious circle.

Well tobacco smoking is still a problem in my opinion: In 2014, nearly 17 of every 100 U.S. adults aged 18 years or older (16.8%) currently* smoked cigarettes. This means an estimated 40 million adults in the United States currently smoke cigarettes (CDC).

The problem is that its an addiction so no matter how much its taxed people will continue to buy it if they don't seek help.

Shyb is totally right that the drug problem starts early in America (middle school and high school). So the big issue moving forward is how do we combat early drug use. Programs like Dare and Just Say No seem to have utterly failed in my opinion. Also the leniency which school districts show drug offenders is pathetic. We need to deter them early in my opinion.

Do people think programs like Dare work and if not what other alternatives do we have at the young-adult/teenage level?

if marijuana is addictive it's on par with caffeine, which is to say not very addictive at all

Just for the record, caffeine is quite addictive, though not dangerously so. You can get withdrawal effects from trying to stop caffeine after regular daily usage, such as nasty headaches and just a general feeling of shittyness and lack of focus (essentially the opposite of its stimulant effect). Fortunately, unlike more dangerous drugs, the withdrawal effects, while really nasty-feeling in the short term, usually last no more than one week (which I found surprising, but it's true) or even as short as a couple days. I was recently (a year or two ago) able to quit caffeine and have avoided it since, and I'm glad I did.

Marijuana on the other hand has no withdrawal nastiness, and so is not chemically addictive in that sense. Any addiction is more out of psychological enjoyment or merely behavioural habit. But you don't get physical withdrawal effects if you stop. So, I think it's fair to say that caffeine is much more addictive than marijuana.

dare in concept is not a bad idea. i think where they got it wrong is demonizing drugs so much and in such a boring, detached-from-real-life way, that no one really took it seriously. dare told me that drugs were bad, and i learned that in a rote way, but when i developed stronger critical thinking skills i realized that they were absolutely wrong about marijuana, and no longer trustworthy about other drugs. dare's biggest problem is treating children like gullible idiots and at the same time assuming that they would somehow magically listen to a dare officer over an older brother or the "cool" guy in the neighborhood.

my real fear of hard drugs came from personally seeing the terrible effects it had on people i knew, and i consider myself lucky that i was never really exposed to them when i was still too young to know or care about how bad they really were.

So if I get you right: you found their explanation of the dangers of marijuana wrong, which made you see the program as untrustworthy in its whole. I can't argue from that standpoint...in fact I think scare-tactics have steadily eroded in their effectiveness thanks to pop culture and the internet. That being said I don't see a real solution to the problem of alcoholism or rampant drug use in suburban areas. DARE is a childish and meaningless program in my opinion that does too little. I actually believe our school district only does it to seem like they care about drugs and alcoholism. For over 10 years...our school district has made no institutional changes in the way they deal with alcohol or drugs even though its use in our area has increased dramatically. Most parents don't seem to care. Again I was hoping for some community ideas about how to solve the issue at the local and teen levels.

Also what is people's opinions of mandatory and random drug testing of students? For or against?

^ Got the explanation, Jai is a Veggie smoking weed, peace!

In my experience, withdrawal from heavy marijuana smoking is on par with withdrawal from daily coffee drinking - both are unpleasant, neither is debilitating.

I agree with shyb - the way to go is full legalization of all drugs, with an intelligent system of regulation. It wouldn't do to have profit-driven enterprises advertising heroin to children, but guess what - we currently have (illegal) profit-driven enterprises advertising heroin to children. A combination of reliable information, social stigma, and availability of treatment for addiction would minimize the harm from hard drugs more effectively than punitive enforcement of our current laws, and at a lower cost.

On the subject of LSD - on average, it's not very harmful, and should be legal.