This thread is now about prohibitions in general.
Write whatever floats your boat, I don't even care.

hi mum

According to the CDC:
Number of alcoholic liver disease deaths: 15,990
Number of alcohol-induced deaths, excluding accidents and homicides: 25,692

Cigarette smoking causes about one of every five deaths in the United States each year. Cigarette smoking is estimated to cause the following:
More than 480,000 deaths annually (including deaths from secondhand smoke)

I couldn't find anything on CDC to do with marijuana deaths, but FDA lists less than 40 deaths per year (average for 1997-2005).

The alcohol industry is worth about $400b, and the tabaco $35b. The illegal marijuana trade is estimated to be somewhere between $30-100b, with most estimates seeming to be around $50-70b. In terms of deaths-per-dollar, alcohol is 100 deaths/$b, tabaco at 14000 deaths/$b, and marijuana at 0.8 deaths/$b (using $50b estimate).



So what would the consequences by in banning these 3 substances? Yes most people would live longer, yes health care would be cheaper, yes we would remove a whole swath of serious problems related to substance abuse. I'm a bit worried as to what all these drug users would do otherwise - would they move to other drugs (more socially and legally acceptable, or otherwise), or would they abandon drugs?

People get addicted, and wothout some of these things they become out of control.

You can't just cancel it from their lives, even though doing so will help lower death statistics etc, more people could go insane.

My mother had a friend and their girlfriend kept taking cigarettes away from him, every packet he bought, thrown away. After about 4 months without he had really bad anger issues and just couldnt cope with the smallest of things. This went on for another 2 months and he than killed himself, because he couldnt cope with anything. It may seem hard to believe, but people may need these things in order to function properly.

So im not all for removing these things, but it would be nice to slowly work towards by making it very expensive and things like that.

In Australia they are taking a 2-part approach, first they are trying to make smoking less appealing - banning pro-smoking advertising, forcing plain packaging and health warnings , and also increasing tax on cigarettes over time.

So far it has proved fairly effective.

Yes me being from Australia I find this to be great.

But its really not slowing purchases down dramatically, some families still spend hundreds a week on cigarettes, which I find stupid, but its not up to anyone else but them how they spend their money.

Not BAN it but increase the cost of buying alcohol.

Ways To Do This:
- Increase the price.
- Only sell alcohol to people without alcohol driven offenses (will need proof).
- Increase age to buy Alcohol by 2-3 years.
- Health/Risk Warnings (Like on cigarettes).
- Buying Limitations: Men can only buy up to 3-4 and women can only buy up to 2-3.
- Increase Tax.

I wasn't being sexist there, just using the unit system.

The only thing is...there are some people who drink alcohol without any problems so it would be kind of unfair on them. Since it is a beverage it can be a hard thing to decide because it is only alcohol. Then you have people who make alcohol look worse than it should be/is.

Question:
Why do we assume that those things should be banned.

Question #2:
Why do we assume that a ban would work?
Have you never seen any mafia films about the prohibition of alcohol?
Or even Scarface?
Increasing the taxes on those items would be a soft prohibition. Criminals would also benefit from that.
Smugglers don't pay taxes.

I don't think a ban is necessary, I think higher accountability is necessary.

People need to acknowledge that it was their choice to get drunk/smoke/get high, and that any consequences of those actions are their own fault. People should not be able to argue that they were drunk to get away with crimes, their treatment for lung cancer should not be subsidized or covered by government health care, people that get high should be accountable for lack of contribution to society.

If someone is a responsible adult, does not break laws and is not a drain to society then I have no problem with them getting drunk, smoking or getting high.

Well, I'm Australian, so our parallel would be the highly successful firearm amnesty. People acknowledged the problem and unanimously worked to fix it. If your society already has moral problems then of course you will have problems.

No matter how good your laws and logic is, if there are assholes or criminals, then they are going to mess things up.

Some countries are mostly earnest and responsible, some are mostly scum. Different countries need different solutions.

Bans work because the average person follows the law. Media representation of crime blows the population involved out off proportion.

Arguing that because criminal production of the item will increase if it's prohibited, therefore prohibition is bad, is a very weak argument in itself. You have to prove that increased criminal production is bad, which is relatively easy, but then you have to prove either consumption will not decrease in response to the ban to justify the increased production, or that enforcement of the ban, basically stopping the production and selling of the criminal product, is impossible to perform to a reasonable degree.

People don't need to acknowledge anything.
A murderer does not need to acknowledge his actions as bad. Society does it for him.
We have a free will and we can choose to conform with some moral code or another, or none at all.
Trying to limit that freedom with preventive laws does not work very well, in my opinion.
Society already prohibits actions that harm other people, and rightly so because else society wouldn't exist. I see no point in prohibiting methods that could cause others harm, when those methods clearly have other primary functions other than hurting other people.

People are able to argue that they were drunk when they did bad things because it is the truth. Why would you not want people to use the truth in a court?
Surely that does not mean that being drunk is an excuse to do bad things. It just means that their rationality was unable to function properly in that situation.
If being drunk cannot be used to evaluate how bad a crime is, then what can? Anger? Ice cold development of a strategy to harm someone? Not only the result of an action matters in a courtroom. How those actions came to be matters as well. It is a great difference if someone kills his wife during a fight or plans the murder for several weeks and executes it with a calm mind. Intoxication is also a factor that needs to be taken into consideration unless you think that being willfully ignorant is a good thing.

We could declare that the act of advertising drugs is immoral and proceed to ban pro drug ads. I see no problem with that, seeing as ads tend to be very manipulative and that drugs are viewed upon as negative thing in general. That does not limit a person's personal freedom to choose to do those drugs, nor does it heavily affect the economy. That would be a healthy way of going about this situation.

Compared to actual problems we have with drugs, that seems to be a rather minor one.
There are drug related problems that are far greater. Look at South America, for instance. Drug lords vs police.
Drugs are already banned there. The drugs that got prohibited gave those druglords the ability to gain insane amount of moneys by circumventing the laws. Those people have no interest in a change of those laws.
I dare to suggest that prohibiting things that are high in demand is the root of a lot of criminal acts all around the world. Gotta ask yourself what's worse: Legalized junkies or war on the streets. People who want to do illegal drugs can do illegal drugs already. They don't care about them being illegal. It's just insanely unsafe and many people suffer due to that.
Why not provide an environment where those people can do drugs safely in a way that does not endanger people as it does today?
Legalizing it does not mean condoning it, and you still can take measures to prevent people from taking those drugs, as long as those do not interfere with the freedom to choose.

We could also get a take on firearms as well, I guess, since this thread seems to be about everything now.
Banning firearms in a country where the general populace believes that the possession of guns is immoral is correct. If it is the consensus and generally agreed upon there is no problem with that.
The problem occurs once you try to ban firearms in a country where guns are an important part of the culture, and people own firearms traditionally as well as for safety reasons.
In those countries banning firearms would be immoral because people have a high demand for them, and taking away their rights to secure their own safety is not a very clever way to deal with a criminal environment. When a person feels the need to protect himself you should examine his situation closely and then form an opinion if his environment is, in fact, dangerous. Declaring right away that those firearms should be taken off the streets no matter what is a very ignorant way of dealing with the situation.
When there is a high demand for firearms there will be firearms, even if there is a ban. The only thing you are going to accomplish is that many more people will become criminal, some people will make a lot of money with being criminal, and in the end you caused more problems than you solved.
Of course that does not mean that firearms should go totally unchecked. There are certain ones that are more dangerous to your own safety than others. A grenade, for instance, has very little value in a street fight. You cannot defend yourself with it. It can only be used offensively. Therefore the access to grenades should be restricted, and I believe that most people all over the world would agree that the access to grenades should be restricted. The primary function of a grenade is causing a lot of destruction, which is a bad thing. So a ban would make sense here.
The primary function of a handgun, however, is not destruction. It's security. So saying that owning a handgun in general is a bad thing would be wrong.

I could write more now, but I am getting lazy and tired.
Go ahead and plow through my reasoning.