Would your hypothetical country ban my sweet delicious coffee, then?

And how do we know something else didn’t happen to cause a change? Somehow, “he partied too hard one night, man” just doesn’t seem to be the whole story.

Besides, alcohol can cause brain damage, too — and overdose.  Pretty easily, actually, if you overdo it one night or over a long weekend…

Shall we do prohibition over again or have we learned our lesson?

But it’s far more likely that the people you’re talking about were simply drunk in addition to being on x and that being drunk is what caused them to act stupidly and crash cars.

I get the sense that you haven’t taken any yourself and so I’m definitely not going to trust your judgments on the effects.  But if you tried some MDMA I bet you’d be surprised how clear-thinking and lucid you are through the whole thing.

It gets thrown around, source-less, matter of factly, in countless “articles” on the subject and overall makes the rest of the piece suspect.

In order to be good at selling drugs, you have to be able to make connections with customers without them being cops or telling the cops about you. This is difficult, because if you only ever sell to people you know very well, you won’t make the volume required to do well as a professional dealer. Therefore, in order to be good at dealing drugs, you have to be a very good judge of a certain kind of character.When you sell drugs, you deal with drug users. Some of them have their shit together and understand the mores of buying and selling. Some of them do not. You need to be able to interact with the ones who do not without pissing them off, both because you want their business and because you don’t want them to rat you out for revenge. This is also a very special kind of charisma that not everyone has.

When you sell drugs, eventually someone will think that you shorted them, or that what you sold them is not what you said it was. Dealing with this requires a certain type of charisma that not everyone has.

So, yes, if all that was involved in selling drugs was exchanging them for cash, they would be easy to sell, But it’s not. If you don’t have the right personality and skill set, your career as a drug dealer will be very short. You will either end up in prison; or you will end up having run off all your customers to a different dealer, leaving you sitting on a huge pile of drugs and no one to buy them; or you will somehow end up having sold all your drugs and not recouped your investment in them, because everyone will have wheedled you into selling for less than you should have, or for giving them “free samples” or some such.

Knowing a little organic chemistry lab technique and how badly and easily you can fuck it up and make something toxic has made me completely uninterested in stuff that comes in a tablet from a mystery lab / dudes basement.  

It is sad, because the largest harm you have from a lot of these drugs, especially the non-addictive kind, is the fact that the maker can fuck it up or cut it.  Add on top of that the fact that it is impossible to dose out properly, and, well, you have a number of hurt or dead people.

I really wish SOME nation would try just full on outright legalization of anything that isn’t chemically addictive and isn’t overtly toxic.  If a company could make this stuff in a clean and well regulated lab and dose it out properly, most of the issues with these drugs would vanish.  Give them good labels to describe what sort of effects to expect and the known and unknown dangers of long term damage on a nice color scale, and people could make informed decisions.

In fact, if companies could research drugs and know that they could sell them, you might simply “solve” the drug problem by making a “perfect” drug that isn’t addictive, a good time, and doesn’t leave damage.

Sure it’s just an anecdote, but why the rush to dismiss it out of hand?

Do you really? Try carrying that thought to its conclusion.

If the marketing for legal drugs is anything to go by, there is definitely some salesmanship and charm put into moving all but the lousiest product.

“I’m really good at selling drugs — like really good,” Ragan said right before she climbed up the stairs to do a four-figure deal with one of her Manhattan clients.

As Chris Rock put it (more or less), you don’t sell drugs, you offer them. No drug dealer ever worries about how they’re going to unload all their drug inventory.

I’m a dumpy middle-aged guy who might as well be wearing a beauty pageant sash reading “NARC OF THE YEAR,” and I bet I’d “sell” ecstasy like hotcakes too in a target-rich environment like NYU.

‘The general public, especially the younger generation, are disillusioned with the lack of balanced political debate about drugs. This lack of rational debate can undermine the trust in government in relation to drug misuse and thereby undermining the government’s message in public information campaigns. The media in general seem to have an interest in scare stories about illicit drugs, though there are some exceptions (Horizon, 2008).[88] A telling review of 10-year media reporting of drug deaths in Scotland illustrates the distorted media perspective very well (Forsyth, 2001).[89] During this decade, the likelihood of a newspaper reporting a death from paracetamol was in [sic] per 250 deaths, for diazepam it was 1 in 50, whereas for amphetamine it was 1 in 3 and for ecstasy every associated death was reported.’
. .The most carefully designed study so far was published in February 2011[52] in the journal Addiction, comparing the effect on cognitive skills in 52 ecstasy users against 59 very closely matched non-users. The study, performed by the group of Prof. Halpern of Harvard Medical School, eliminated potential confounding factors like the use of other drugs and history of drug-use. The study found no short- or long-term differences in cognitive skills in the test group (users) versus the control group (non-users).. . .

Or, maybe he already had a learning disability? And you just didn’t notice? It’s not as if you guys were best pals.

Wow. You don’t say. They were impaired, then made the CHOICE to drive while very impaired, and crashed? NO WAY!

Dude, as someone who has partied her share, you do not lose all ability to think while on X. They made the dumb choice to DRIVE WHILE INTOXICATED. That’s always dumb, no matter the drug.

Also, if you find a really great dealer and/or can test your stuff, then the chances of you finding “poison” are very, very slim. And, you don’t have to get pills; you can get “molly” (powder) which is harder to lace.

In a word, yes. For instance, it is reported that oxycodone is far more expensive on the black market than in the primary market.

It isn’t rocket science. You can enjoy many drugs safely if you just expend a smidgen of forethought. The real danger of most drugs has to do with their illegality. Because they are illegal, it is much harder to ensure quality. If you have problems, you generally can’t go to the authorities. Make them legal and the vast majority of the danger of most drugs drops to near zero.

As far as the stupid stuff that people do on drugs, that is just people being stupid. You can do dumb shit on alcohol. You can do dumb shit on cough syrup if that really gets your rocks off. Most people who do stupid things are drugs are just stupid people to begin with. Drugs, be they alcohol or ecstasy are just are just an excuse.