Drug

Drugs are substances that have an effect on the body or mind. Drugs have long been used as medicines to treat illness or injury, as a means of changing one's mood or perception, and as a means of obtaining religious or spiritual experiences.

Attitude to drugs
Different societies have allowed or prohibited the social use of different drugs. The use of alcohol, (can cause fatal liver damage and other problems) nicotine (can cause lung cancer and other problems) caffeine (relatively harmless in moderation but can cause severe problems taken to excess)  is permitted in most Western countries. Alcohol is prohibited in many Islamic countries.

Conservatives
Conservatives, with typical hypocrisy, have long considered recreational drug use to be immoral, discussing the topic over a scotch and a cigarette, followed by a cup of coffee. Also, they tend to believe that when a doctor prescribes it, it's "medicine", but if a person decides to take something that makes them feel better on their own initiative, it's a "drug". The better it makes you feel, the more "abuse potential" will be ascribed to it. Therefore, we now have people believing that for medication to be OK to use, it has to not make you feel better.&nbsp. Seriously doctors understand the effects of drugs better than we do and know better when a drug is likely to help along with when it can do harm. Conservatives tend to believe users of drugs are basically second class citizens. People stay in jail longer for drug "offenses" than they do for murder. What's the point of hating drugs for ostensibly ruining lives, and then letting people who flat-out end them get second chances, but drug people get the "mandatory minimums".

Making drugs illegal may not help
What has caused part of the "drug problem" was the illegalization of it. It created two things: a glamorous rebel culture which itself is a smattering of different subcultures that develop around particular drugs of choice, and the fashions and musics that go along with them. And it created a conduit for a lot of money to be available to unskilled workers and professional criminals, which meant that a lot of people get their drugs from people who did not have their best interests in mind. People who get addicted to crack and heroin will prostitute themselves and rob people and drain huge bank accounts to get their fix once the "jones" sets in. But even a junkie's life involves far less of this BS when they're maintained on cheap doses of methadone.

Harry Anslinger may have started this in the days after alcohol prohibition had ended, thus leaving lots of bathtub-booze cops out of their jobs overnight. Harry was one of them. He found a solution to the problem: use the "new media" of the 1930s, radio, to ramp up a horror campaign about cannabis. Before that went down, hardly anyone smoked weed except jazz musicians and migrant farm workers. They kept to themselves. The plant was used for rope and fields of it were all over and no one cared until Anslinger started in with the whole notion that marijuana smoking made Mexicans and Blacks want to rape white women or enslave them on drugs, He got people believing a toke of pot would make a person go into a PCP-like murder frenzy. And since no one really knew anyone who smoked it, America believed him.

Each generation of authority figures has tried to position themselves as saviours from the horrible dope problem, and it has gone on for so long now that there's a whole industry around it: rehabs for high school students believed to merely be at risk for trying drugs which bilk parents out of thousands of dollars to lock them up at a remote camp, set them up in hierarchical teams and then allow them to torture themselves for being such evil people. Sometimes there are murders. There are companies that spend every day and night testing urine samples for molecules indicating that various employees (many of them holding jobs that require sharp minds to preserve the public safety, such as being a janitor at Apple Computer, or a clerk at Circuit City) are having proscribed types of fun or taking unapproved medicine, and those companies are making shitloads of money sending these people out of their own jobs and onto unemployment or welfare. We also now have privatized prisons that farm out prison labour to corporations, which is just slavery with a new species of nigger called "druggie". Then there's the police departments having weekly auctions of confiscated property, since being a drug person causes you to lose your right to not have cops take your cars, boats or homes away from you. That's a lot of money changing hands, going from citizens to armed enforcers. .

Seriously other nations make many bad drugs illegal as well as the United States so it probably isn’t just prejudice. But the USA always seems to be pushing this agenda with the most zeal, particularly in the Reagan years, and then ever since.

The case for drug legalization
Ending drug prohibition is an issue that's finally getting talked about by people that could conceivably do something about it, thanks in part to a recession that's like a bad staph sore that just won't seem to ever go away. (Kind of like drug prohibition.) Legalizing marijuana is producing legislation that's actually going somewhere for a change. That "tax and regulate" thing is starting to look awfully good, now. Besides, everyone knows someone who does drugs (sometimes, themselves) and so now, it's getting hard to make anyone take the ONDCP propaganda seriously at all. Think of the money this country'd have if the DEA and the ONDCP were nullified. That would be lots of money to help people who are too addicted get less that way, and help people who take drugs of any kind have less need of emergency rooms, and even help them to regulate their use, and the rest of their lives. Imagine what could happen if, say, in a post-drug-war society, you could buy dope from a dealer, or you could buy it from the state, who sells it half-price to anyone who agrees to enter a moderation program. People make use of these facilities at methadone clinics, already, and learn to keep their lives a bit more together than they would without that sort of non-judgmental help in an environment where the drug user's needs are attended to, and addressed in their language, not the time-worn drug-czar party line.

The fact that believable medical professionals (and the American Medical Association) are finally managing to collate and disseminate the data showing that marijuana has medical use (actually, a whole lot of different ones--including possibly preventing cancer) has also been an important breakthrough in this cause. As of 2009 there are 13 states (aka "the 13 free colonies") that have made it legal for doctors to prescribe marijuana to patients.

At this time, there are massive discrepancies between federal policy and state policy, but it's hard to ignore the change that is happening in the cities of these states, especially in California--where one now sees just about as many marijuana shops as Starbucks. Which is, of course, how drug users think it should be. It's surreal that conservatives are whining about this, since they're always yammering so much about the holiness of Free Enterprise.

Free speech
Not all Liberapedians are likely to agree about drug legalization, but that's OK, because liberals tend to be intelligent enough to have a set of personal beliefs that don't follow one agreed-upon "party line". (Many of them used to be more that way - especially in the 1960s - but then they started realising that's kind of dumb, and started thinking for themselves more.)