Drugs

[Comrade Anarchist]

In my opinion i have no fucking clue. Drugs are good and yet they aren't. I see why people want to legalize everything under the sun and just hope society blocks the harder stuff. But the ones that do not make you addicted with one hit like weed, lsd, extacy, salvia, and etc can be used by the ruling classes to keep us dumbed down. I mean lsd pretty much killed any chance of a 60's revolution. So should we want to use them or would we rather just push them away in favor of our own thought.

[Catbus]

I think part of the idea behind total legalization, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that if all drugs are legal then getting help for addictions would be easier then it is now, since fear of possession charges/jail time wouldn't be a factor in deciding to get clean.

[LeninBalls]

I think part of the idea behind total legalization, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that if all drugs are legal then getting help for addictions would be easier then it is now, since fear of possession charges/jail time wouldn't be a factor in deciding to get clean.

Not to mention the illegality of some drugs cause these drug users to do difficult things to get some. For example, nicotine is more addictive and harmful than heroin, but heroin is far more damaging to a person as it's illegal and much harder to obtain and as a result people breed dependence because they cannot get a hold of this drug since it's illegal and not easy to find and will continue to do lots of things to get a fix. "Things" include giving up jobs, families, friends, etc for financial reasons to support your heroin use, damaging other people to get heroin, doing chores for drug lords to get heroin, etc and worst of all there is no social help for these people.

Imagine if tobacco and/or alcohol was illegal, both more addicting and harmful than heroin. Yet it's legalized and our society works fine.

As for me personally, I like drugs. I think they're interesting and they're fine a way to expand creativity and certain drugs put you in a totally different dimension never reachable in the sober world.

I'm not an addict though, I'd easily give up drugs for someone/something else if it needed be.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Yeah, in the US the "drug war" is the legal justification for everything from racial profiling to three strikes laws that punish crack and meth users more harshly than people caught with coke or weed.

For me, this is the main reason drugs should be at least decriminalized. I think now is a good time to make these arguments because the wide-spread use of pot makes a mockery of the drug war and the proliferation of prescription drugs that are sometimes as potent (and often more addicting) than criminalized drugs illustrates the hypocrisy of US drug policies. Additionally, the US courts recently had to admit that the way the justice system treats crack use vs. cocaine use was racially and socio-economically biased. Lastly, the economic crisis means that there is a potential to really go after the State governments for cutting social programs while building up the repressive institutions of prisons and heavily armed urban police forces. In California, the state lawmakers spoke about shared sacrifice and the desperate need to make cuts across the board... they cut all levels of education, lunch programs for poor kids, and even threatened to close all state parks. The day after the cuts passed, Arnold approved the building of a new Death Row in San Quentin prison estimated to cost half a billion dollars!

Right now in California libertarians and the "pot lobby?" have a legalization measure for the next election in 2010 to legalize pot in order to raise tax revenue... like the new state lotto or something. This will likely pass, but these are the totally wrong reasons and may lead to politicians argue that pot-tax dollars should go to fighting "the really bad drugs".

I think radicals should only support decrimilization efforts in an organized way if it is explicitly part of an overall critique of and challenge to the criminal justice system or the use of tax funds to punish people rather than provide support and services for workers. A legalization/decriminalization argument can even be made into a case for universal healthcare: instead of spending state funds to build prisons and arm cops, taxes should be used for universal health care which included free drug treatment.

[tehpevis]

Different drugs are different. For instance, Crack and PCP are just simply bad for you, and shitty Mexican weed profits go to slaveowning drug lords. That's why I go with locally grown Marijuana.

Yes, I am high right now.

[ellipsis]

But the ones that do not make you addicted with one hit like weed, lsd, extacy, salvia, and etc can be used by the ruling classes to keep us dumbed down. I mean lsd pretty much killed any chance of a 60's revolution.

Drugs can be used to stimulate thought. There was movement in the 60s where scientists took low doses of LSD to grease the brain cogs. Either Watson or Crick took LSD and visualized the double helix of DNA. Renound Astronomer Carl Sagan used Marijuana. All drugs can be abused, it is just a matter of too much too fast.

And COINTELPRO had nothing to do with killing revolution in the 60s.

[tehpevis]

Drugs can be used to stimulate thought. There was movement in the 60s where scientists took low doses of LSD to grease the brain cogs. Either Watson or Crick took LSD and visualized the double helix of DNA. Renound Astronomer Carl Sagan used Marijuana. All drugs can be abused, it is just a matter of too much too fast.

And COINTELPRO had nothing to do with killing revolution in the 60s.

On drug abuse and overdose, look at my sig. This only applies to Marijuana, for the record.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I don't think LSD or any drug had any impact one way or another on radicalism in the 1960s. The media connected these things; no young person would turn against his country unless he was on dope - no soldiers would resist the war unless they were on dope!

It's probably true that many young political people used drugs, but many apolitical people also did drugs. In fact, if anything it was political radicalism and seeing the "authorities" beating up Catholic priests and young black civil rights protesters that created a social space where people said, fuck what the government says is good or bad for me, because if war and racism are good, I'm going to be bad.

However, the government did use the illegality of drugs to arrest and harass many radicals. When they tried arresting or even murdering Black Panthers or Anti-war radicals, the radicals just became more popular and made the government look even worse - getting them for drugs, though meant that they could get rid of the radicals without making them martyrs.

Anyway, the connection between drugs and radicalism is greatly exaggerated and even the drug-related harassment I mentioned above did not cause the 60s and 70s movements to decline - there's a whole series of political reasons why these movements failed, but I won't touch that here.

The connection between drugs and music and art however, can never be overstated. Mmmm, who's coming to Coachella with me next year?

[Tatarin]

While I see drugs as a recreational thing, I still think that drugs now is a non-question. There is still more important things to solve than legalizing drugs.

[Comrade B]

I don't get the leftist obsession with drugs. It is way too much of a conspiracy theory to say that the ruling class used lsd to prevent a revolution in the 60s, being that they also made it illegal, and I have never heard a report of the government profiting at all from it. Drugs should be treated like watching television in a socialist world. People use television or a drug to entertain themselves, or whatever they say it is doing, really, they are just bored as fuck usually. If you are bored, you can do what you want to entertain you or pass time, however if all you do is watch television, or use a drug, you are harming society. It is your own choice if you want to hurt yourself with some drugs, but you cannot simply live off of the benefits of communism without putting any effort into being a good member of society. The person must be sent to a rehabilitation facility if it is proven their habits have interfered with their work.

[ArrowLance]

Depends on the drug, situation, and person. So I vote other.

[mykittyhasaboner]

I do drugs.

[gorillafuck]

But the ones that do not make you addicted with one hit like weed, lsd, extacy, salvia, and etc can be used by the ruling classes to keep us dumbed down.
Drugs are not "used by the ruling class to keep us dumbed down". They are illegal (and the drug war is used as an excuse for terrible things), the ruling class isn't out distributing drugs to people to keep them in line. Not everything is a capitalist conspiracy.


I mean lsd pretty much killed any chance of a 60's revolution. So should we want to use them or would we rather just push them away in favor of our own thought.What do you mean "in favor of our own thought"?

[Pirate turtle the 11th]

They should be legalized and proper information about them should be widely available. They should not be fetishized nor should there users be seen as the scum of society.

[Vendetta]

I mean lsd pretty much killed any chance of a 60's revolution.

And how'd you arrive at that conclusion?

[tehpevis]

And how'd you arrive at that conclusion?

My guess would be that he A. Believes that people were too high for revolution, which may or may not have been exploited by counterrevolutionaries or B. LSD users gave the general populace a bad first impression of the potential revolutionaries. Both of these make sense to a degree, although I don't necessarily agree with it.

[FSL]

Drug addiction should be fought and anyone profiteering from massproducing/trading them should be jailed.


I voted other since I put drug addiction in the same category with the need for sleeping pills/ anti-deprescants, food disorders etc., ie a sign of decandence. "A sad culture's victims"


What makes them worse though is that they can have very adverse effects on someone's physical well-being as well.

[rebelmouse]

I am against the state, so I am against their decision about i/legality of drugs. every community must decide for themselves. I am personally against limitation for people, already today young people hide themselves if parents forbid them something, so forbidding is without sense. so i would agitate in my community to avoid forbidding of drugs for people. in the end, drugs are different, if it is forbidden, people will find peyotes or any thing which can produce hallucinations. so I think it is not possible to forbid everything what can be drugs.
every individual must decide for himself/herself, society can just learn people about positive and negative side of something.

[Lyev]

Paracelsus said "Everything is poison, there is poison in everything. Only the dose makes a thing not a poison." which I think comes into it partly. Things like cocaine and herione are very damaging to society and very damaging to people, as individuals.

Things like cannabis and LSD, on the other hand, aren't so damaging in either of the above respects, so I haven't really gotta problem with them, personally.

Another thing is, a lot of the time people aren't anti-drugs because there's some deeply thought out reasoning behind it, they're anti-drug because the newspapers and society say so.

[Irish commie]

Im for the legalising of certain drugs but dont think that it should be made a huge priority when other revolutionary reforms are neccesary

[Catbus]

Another thing is, a lot of the time people aren't anti-drugs because there's some deeply thought out reasoning behind it, they're anti-drug because the newspapers and society say so.

It's essentially the same reason that more people aren't leftists of some variety. A lack of education plus a bombardment of negative propaganda never yields good results.

[Comrade Anarchist]

What i mean by the ruling class controling us is that they rely on the fact that mainly teens and yound adults (the ones who are more likely communistic) are likely to use these things so instead of having them think freely, why not group them together with social drugs and then arrest them and throw them in prison and pretty much fuck their futures up preventing them from having large effects on modern day revolutionary activity.

[gorillafuck]

What i mean by the ruling class controling us is that they rely on the fact that mainly teens and yound adults (the ones who are more likely communistic) are likely to use these things so instead of having them think freely, why not group them together with social drugs and then arrest them and throw them in prison and pretty much fuck their futures up preventing them from having large effects on modern day revolutionary activity.
That's really a stretch. Teens aren't arrested for using drugs on the basis that they might be communists.

[Manifesto]

Just saying I know for a fact that crack was invented to control the black community and do not ask how.

[Invincible Summer]

What i mean by the ruling class controling us is that they rely on the fact that mainly teens and yound adults (the ones who are more likely communistic) are likely to use these things so instead of having them think freely, why not group them together with social drugs and then arrest them and throw them in prison and pretty much fuck their futures up preventing them from having large effects on modern day revolutionary activity.

You're making it sound like the drug dealer on the corner of the street is actually a covert government operative that is dealing drugs for the state in order to stop our fresh-faced youth from becoming dirty Communists.

All this despite the fact that lots of my friends have had mind-opening experiences while taking certain drugs that have led them to become more left-leaning (albeit not communist.... yet)

[Stranger Than Paradise]

The war on drugs is a war on the working class. People who smoke dope in the middle class suburbs are not gonna get raided by the police and put in jail. Yet it is much more likely that this WILL happen if you live in a poor area.

[bricolage]

Despite people dismissing these things as mere conspiracy theories there is strong evidence to suggest involvement of the state/ruling classes in the propogation of drugs. For example the CIA links to cocaine trafficking during their support of the Contras. Furthermore Americas heroin addict population fell from 20,000 in 1924 to a tenth of that figure at the end of WW2 where there was a real belief that heroin addiction might disappear completely. However to fight its Cold War aims in Southeast Asia it is believed the CIA aided in the formation of secret armies in Laos and Burma. It was these armies in these areas and the protection they received that allowed them to revive the heroin trade that had been heavily disrupted by WW2 and effectively create what we know now as the Golden Triangle.

Then there's the theory best summed up by Kanye West; "How we stop the black panthers? Ronald Reagan cooked up an answer"

Now I don't know the facts about this but when you look at the links to Nicaragua and the effects of the imposition of crack onto the streets of America it doesn't seem so far fetched. However I wouldn't like to make any comment of it due to my lack of knowledge.

Of course none of these means that the US government goes around giving drugs to kids to stop them taking down the state but it does indicate that these things are not often as simple as we'd like to think.

[FSL]

The war on drugs is a war on the working class. People who smoke dope in the middle class suburbs are not gonna get raided by the police and put in jail. Yet it is much more likely that this WILL happen if you live in a poor area.


The "war on drugs" is a catch-phrase used by the us government to justify interventionism and military presence in other countries. I don't think anyone supports that or police raids for drugs in poor suburbs. So, that seems like a strawman.



the fact that lots of my friends have had mind-opening experiences while taking certain drugs


What people might have a problem with are claims that marijuana or whatever drug leads to class consience.

[Stranger Than Paradise]

The "war on drugs" is a catch-phrase used by the us government to justify interventionism and military presence in other countries. I don't think anyone supports that or police raids for drugs in poor suburbs. So, that seems like a strawman.

I thought the war on drugs just referred in general to certain governments policies in attempts to crack down on the drug trade whilst at the same time they participating in it. Sorry bout that.

Also, I don't agree with the drug trade. It is a mechanism engineered to inebriate the masses. It is an enemy to our communities. To me legalising drugs would not end this, legalisation in Capitalist society would inevitably benefit the Capitalist class.

[Искра]

Ok,
first of all I'm 100% against drugs :)
I don't drink, smoke or take drugs. I haven't ever tried to use something, so I don't know how does beer taste.
But, I respect others decisions to get wasted and to poison their bodies. I'm not preacher and I don't preach to other people how should they live. I expect the same thing from others.

Regarding drugs they are certainty used by ruling class to control working class. When I say drugs I also include alcohol, which is maybe stuff which ruling class uses the most to control proletariat. You know, give them something to drink so that we can exploit them. There are a lot of historical proves of what I'm talking about, we can start from Indians, Russia (before and after the revolution, until now), China, England, hippies from 60's etc.

But, also, drugs are substances which will people use without ruling class forcing them. And they have a right to use it...

Main problem with drugs (alcohol included) is addiction. We all know where does that lead, and how do addicts behave.

I think that if we were living in class free anti-authoritarian society (aka. communism) less people will use drugs, because today they mostly use them as a get away ticket from reality.

Malatesta wrote interesting article about how drugs should be available as cigarettes or alcohol. I was thinking about that and I don't agree with that 100%, because I'm looking at people of my age, who are pretty stupid and their main goal is to get wasted every weekend. If heroin and other shit are avaible as cigars and booze, how many of those people will reach 30s?

[tehpevis]

I'm in complete agreement, with exceptions. I smoke pot, and don't drink or smoke cigarettes. I recognize the two latter as largely poisonous and addictive, but Cannabis isn't addictive, and I just really like the feeling of getting high.

[Искра]

You can't say that marijuana isn't addictive and harmful. My comrade smoke pot for at least 10 years. He damaged his memory really hard, he's paranoid all the time, and he can't focus to read, write or something similar.

[hefty_lefty]

The problem tehpevis is that that great feeling of getting high is addictive, not pot, anyway, not the point.I'd say drugs can be good for the individual, drugs can help you see reality in different ways, think differently, get you out of our little prison of reality.But as far as the broader picture, drugs are bad for society. Drugs breed reclusivness, selfishness and , it can't be denied, they rob us of our precious brain cells :P Not to mention drugs will compell you to live in your parents basement until youre 35, eating chicken fingers by the boxes, watching the mating habits of the manatee on the discovery channel ;) There is something about drugs being illegal that make it seem dirtier, like you have to smoke your crack pipe behing the dumpster with the rats.Legalization would create a cleaner environment for drug users, but do we want to encourage drugs...I'd say no, but then again, a world without drugs frightens me a bit.

[Искра]

I really don't like the fact that people here, on revolutionary left forum, talk about LEGALISATION.
Legalisation means that State approves something. Why the hell should we care about that, when we want to abolish state and capitalism?

[Invincible Summer]

I drink because I have social anxiety disorder, and need a few beers to get me social at parties and such. Plus, I actually like the flavours in beer and wine.

I hardly ever get "wasted." I know that there are probably other people like me too - it's not that we drink to get away from our problems, but because it helps us get along socially, and it can taste good at the same time.

[RotStern]

Im still debating with myself on if harder drugs should be legalized. But softer drugs like Weed, Shrooms, etc should certainly be legalized.
Perhaps if you legalized the softer drugs, Then there wouldn't be so many people who go after the harder drugs.
Just a thought though.
Harder drugs cause a lot of terrible things to happen.
Though prohibition hasn't done much to stop these things from happening.
In The Netherlands where weed is legalized, general drug use has gone down.
On another note, criminalizing these drugs is quite expensive.
I think maybe drugs should be legalized but decriminalized.

[Pierson's]

yeah, i can certainly see problems with drugs, but come on! we don't want the capitalist state to tell us what is good, and what is bad.

in a socialist society, i think that many drugs will be freely avaliable. maybe not all drugs in all comunities, but at least the non-addictive ones (thc, lsd and similar), will be around for who ever wants them.

[gorillafuck]

I really don't like the fact that people here, on revolutionary left forum, talk about LEGALISATION.
Legalisation means that State approves something. Why the hell should we care about that, when we want to abolish state and capitalism?
Because people are being put in jail for minor drug offenses.

[bcbm]

Because people are being put in jail for minor drug offenses.

i think decriminalization is the answer here.

[mykittyhasaboner]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXnUZBD_qV4

[Misanthrope]

I mean lsd pretty much killed any chance of a 60's revolution.

Hippies were not a revolutionary vanguard.

[bcbm]

please stop spamming the thread with videos; this is learning, not chit chat.

[What Would Durruti Do?]

They are substances that exist whether we like them or not and we must educate the masses about their dangers and benefits alike.

[Uncle Hank]

Pot at the very least should be decriminalized. I'm not sure where I stand on most other drugs though. It's hard to tell whether most of the info that goes out about drugs is true or just puritanistic garbage. Although we all know what the most dangerous drug is- religion. ;)

[tehpevis]

Pot at the very least should be decriminalized. I'm not sure where I stand on most other drugs though. It's hard to tell whether most of the info that goes out about drugs is true or just puritanistic garbage. Although we all know what the most dangerous drug is- religion. ;)

In modern times, it seems that Consumerism has gone to replace Religion with the title of "Opiate of the Masses".

[Uncle Hank]

In modern times, it seems that Consumerism has gone to replace Religion with the title of "Opiate of the Masses".
I dunno, I still meet frightening amounts of people with deep ties to religion despite the fact I don't go to a catholic school anymore. Though consumerism is up there, the problem with talking about it as the opiate of the masses is it can end up being elitist. There's a big difference between someone on MTV Cribz and someone who's working a couple of jobs and wants a nice TV, you know. Sometimes wanting material improvement is a good thing, I guess that's what I'm saying. It's just important to make distinctions.