Thread: Why are drugs illegal?

the football thing was a joke to an extent.

I notice that you use Freudian psychology to justify the supposedly qualitative benefit of the drugs. Specifically that they suppress the Ego and expose "denial". Freudian psychology is not scientific, due to common unfalsifiability and lack of empirical methods, according to modern psychologists. Hence it is a precarious thing to use it as justification in a real, political debate, with implications to society. Moreover, denial is not a serious clinically-recognised psychological conditon. Although I have heard of LSD healing depression from a link posted by 27 on behalf of Howie.

Aldrich meant:
Criminal law punishes crimes based on ones state of mind on mental blameworthiness.
-Intention to commit a crime is the worst and most punishable. i.e. me pointing a gun at you, and killing you on purpose.

Recklessness is taking a risk with awareness that a crime may occur in your actions, not intending the crime, but taking the risk. i.e. I wish to shoot an apple above your head, knowing that I could kill you by accident but still take the risk. Recklessness is less punishable than Intention, and likely to lead to a more lenient sentence even with the same crime. i.e. killing by intention equals murder and killing by recklessness equals manslaughter.

Now to Aldrich: lets say a person killed another person intentionally. They could say that they were high on drugs and use this to say that they did not intend and were only reckless. i.e reckless in taking the drugs because of the lack of control associated with some drugs and that taking them can lead to the partially involuntary harm of others. This would lessen their punishment as their state of crime would be regarded as due to reckless rather than intention. Hope i'm clear and you understand.






If you think drugs help you,SKA, and you use them in a controlled environment, then thats your choice, the problem with blanket legalisation is that people arent like you and won't use them in this controlled way, as Amazeo and Howie concur