When we’re children, most of us learn that drugs are bad things for bad people and you should never engage with them. Then, like with most things in life, you grow up and realize the world is more complicated than that.
First of all, “drugs” is an insanely broad category that includes everything from caffeine to Tylenol to LSD to Xanax to MDMA.
Secondly, it’s not as clean cut as: “Over-the-counter, prescription, and other kinds of legal drugs are all harmless, while illegal drugs are dangerous and ruin lives.” There are drugs being used both beneficially and life-ruiningly in all of these categories. Society uses the legal/illegal line to determine which drugs should be stigmatized—and those stigmas run deep—but if you look at the history and the politics behind how legality decisions are made in the first place, you realize that it’s not that intelligently thought out.
I’ll incriminate myself in a full drug-related post at some point, but for today, I’d like to hear your thoughts on how the law in your country treats various drugs. If you were starting your own country, which drugs would you make legal and illegal, and why?
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