And pot is illegal...why, again?
"Florida: Legal Drugs Kill More Than Illegal"
From The New York Times:
"MIAMI — From "Scarface" to "Miami Vice," Florida’s drug problem has been portrayed as the story of a single narcotic: cocaine. But for Floridians, prescription drugs are increasingly a far more lethal habit.
An analysis of autopsies in 2007 released this week by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission found that the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined.
....The report’s findings track with similar studies by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which has found that roughly seven million Americans are abusing prescription drugs. If accurate, that would be an increase of 80 percent in six years and more than the total abusing cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, Ecstasy and inhalants.[..]"
Don't get me started about Big Pharma pushing pills for all our ills constantly on TV...I want to talk about a non-dangerous drug, marijuana.
Like I've always said -- the urge to alter our perceptions and our mood is strong in humans...people have been using mind altering substances from the beginning of time (pot seeds were found in cavemen's gear), and no threat of jail or fines will stop them.
It's also interesting that in those 4,179 legal incidences, "alcohol was the most commonly occurring drug" found in bodies of the dead, although listed as the sole cause of death in only 466.
BUT marijuana remains the only so-called dangerous drug which has not been attributed as the cause of a single fatality in what?...5,000 years.
Yet in 2007 there were almost 45,000 Americans imprisoned at the state and federal level solely for marijuana offenses...a natural herb. There's no numbers for the ones held in local and county jails.
We didn't learn our lesson from alcohol prohibition...and we're doing the same silly thing with cannabis prohibition. It was declared illegal in 1937, and if it hasn't worked in the last 60 years, it won't ever work.
Yet we still keep throwing billions of dollars at the failed policies of eradication, interdiction and incarceration, when we could invest a fraction of that money in treatment facilities that would actually solve the problems of addiction and abuse of hard-core drugs like heroin, etc.
