There's a lot of people out there who truly believe this. I think a lot of it boils down to the fact that alcohol is legal, and some of the anti-drug campaigns I've seen say things like this.

EDIT: Another source of the issue is the fact that we separate alcohol from drugs and leave the existing drugs to fester together in one big category much of the time.

AFAIK, more people die because of alcohol, either directly or indirectly i.e. drunk drivers.

Because alcohol is easier to obtain than say, heroin. If you were to legalise all drugs and sell them in the same way that alcohol is sold today, the statistics would be different.

However, the argument can be made that not everyone does want to do heroin, but a lot more people want to drink alcohol. So in that case, alcohol would still be a greater cause of death even if all drugs were legalised.

You also should factor in the fact that alcohol is more socially acceptable than, say, heroin or crack cocaine. Even if all drugs suddenly became legal, alcohol would still win out in the number of deaths due to social acceptance alone.

Injection might be okay if it's diluted. You couldn't take a 10 ml dose right in your arm, it'd probably stop your heart.

My father told me one day that there actually people out there who take shots of alcohol anally. Supposedly it gets you drunk without your test on a breathalyzer being triggered. Though, issue with that is they can still arrest you if you're obviously a drunken idiot.

As far as drugs vs alcohol.....I There's really only two drugs that are at least not going to cause people to spaz out on everyone nearby, and that's weed and LSD. Ecstasy I have no clue. All the others kill you outright over time and make you such a shaky little bastard you're liable to attack anything you see as a threat regardless of how little. I don't care to use any drug (I do drink, but hardly ever and never enough to be drunk), but really, giving everyone access to meth or PCP or Heroin is asking for disaster. If it's readily available, the government is forced to get into the drug selling business to help keep the price low. The people who use it normally celebrate and kill themselves off quicker, while having bunches extra to expose strangers or friends to the same thing. I don't see any of it being useful, and even if there are countries out there that have crime rates dropped after legalizing drugs.... Well, that's because you aren't arresting people for selling or using drugs anymore! Who would have thunk it? Making an illegal thing legal leads to less people arrested for a now legal thing. Even if isn't the case, and there were never laws against it in the first place, you have to go about re-writing every list of laws in the US. People who were arrested for doing drugs, those who have sobered and those who are in withdrawal, they're out of jail. People are going to start demanding compensation for wrongful arrest after legalization. In other words, clusterfucking.

Well, I think marijuana would be a close second. Marijuana is seen as fairly safe (provided your weed doesn't have glass shards in it or anything) and more and more people are in favour of its legalisation. Marijuana is often seen as quite a harmless activity as long as people aren't smoking joints whilst operating heavy machinery. Compare that to heroin, where injecting poision into your veins is hardly a socially acceptable behaviour.

It is a damn good ad and it will hopefully change the minds of some people. But know that if Ron Paul got elected (and he had the ability to get his stuff done) it would be a disaster for the environment. Probably even more than if any of the other crackpots got elected, and they seem to be competing in being the most anti-environmental. That bag of manure Santorum even wants to drill in the Florida Everglades.

This is the thing. Ron Paul as most other libertarians have an ideology where they believe that what is in the best interest of humanity (or even, as with Randians that it is the only moral thing) is that everyone is as free from government coercion and intervention as possible. They do not base this upon any scientific theory, yet they claim this idea as a fact. Libertarians are as blind in their ideology as the communists are.
(I would prefer to live in a libertarian state compared a communist state, but if I had the option to choose, I would pick a good mixed economy over either one.)

Libertarians think that it is wrong when one individual uses their freedom to infringe against the freedom of someone else in a direct way (like rape and theft), so most of them are for police and court systems run by the state. But their ideology have severe problems when it comes to indirect harm done to others. What if a chemical factory pollutes your drinking water? What if your air is polluted by a factory in another city.

Libertarians do seem to prefer voluntary measures to prevent pollution and other forms of indirect harm, rather than coercion by the state (which in a democracy also represent you and me). But is it effective? Do you think polluters prefers to continue to pollute or to do something more expensive to stop it?

A lot of environmental regulations we have in the civilized world is made out of not just a calculation of what would be the greatest benefit for all humans in that country but with the idea that nature has a value in itself and that some of it needs to be preserved. (Whether for itself of for the value in will have for humanity in the long therm future.)

Libertarians seem to often lack this. According to their ideology the only thing that has a value in itself is humans and their man-made "rights".

Libertarians and people with an ideology that puts freedom in the front seat do either seem to be ignorant of environmental problems, of the opinion that they are not problems ("anti-nature"), hopelessly naive and of the opinion that voluntary action will be enough or a mix of those.

Environmentalism is incompatible with the ideology of libertarianism and thus libertarians prefer to ignore or fight it.

Do you usually accuse everybody who disagrees with you to have a drug problem?

Are you also saying that people who defend decriminalisation of drugs to all be, or mostly be drug users themselves?

While I dislike Ron Paul it is obvious that you are extremely biased on politics. If you want anyone to take you seriously, especially in a place like this you should try to educate yourself by reading news and opinion pieces from many different sources. (Well except Alex Jones).

I see you use terms as Marxist and Communist. Do you even know what they mean? Hint: Crackpots like Glenn Beck don't know what they mean either :-)

And you said this:

"Things I have seen him say during the debates and interviews he has done: "
"He is old and weak, and he is soft on the enemies of the United States "

I want a source for that one :-)

You do know that this neighborhoods are a result of the criminalization of drug usage? "Demcriminalization" is one of the main issues of the German Judges assosiation. Not really a group I associate with drug abuse.

Well, alcohol aside of course.

The world isn't only 'the West', as in Europe and now America. It's true that alcohol has played a role in the history of Europeans. Likewise, various other drugs have played a significant role in other cultures. Centring this discussion on Europe is inappropriate in the current global context. For example, what about tobacco? Long used by native Americans, it is now also immensely popular in Europe. No millennia of cultural usage there.

As far as danger goes - deaths from drug abuse are almost entirely from overdoses and from impurities. The reason for this is because of the lucrative drug trade, obtaining pure drugs is extremely difficult. Many of the harmful effects of drugs actually derive from the crap that dealers mix into the stuff to get more money. Because users are used to impure drugs, they are used to increasing their doses, which leads to overdoses when the drugs are purer than expected. Both of these are issues can be ameliorated by controlled drug sale and use, as well as education.

The price of alcohol isn't as much on the user as it is on the society.
http://www.ias.org.uk/resources/factsheets/crime_disorder.pdf

I quote:
"from approximately 10.30pm to 3.00am the majority of arrests are for alcohol-related offences"
"there is the potential for routine incidents of public nuisance to escalate to more
serious, especially violent, offence"
Have a look at other statistics. The social cost of alcohol is immense and by far greater than that of class B drugs for example.

Once again, another source (never mind that it's The Daily Mail):
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1263831/Nearly-half-violent-crimes-linked-alcohol-abuse-reveals-secret-report.html
"But the leaked report reveals that nearly half - 47 per cent - of all violent crimes are cited as alcohol-related by victims.
For stranger violence - the type feared most by the public - this rises to 62 per cent of people saying their attacker was under the influence of alcohol.
And heavy drinking, defined as twice the recommended daily limit, is being reported by 36 per cent of prisoners arriving in jail."

Any in any case, the danger / casualty argument is nonsensical. There are far more dangerous things out there than drugs that we have no banned yet.

For example, there's this guy in the UK, David Nutt, who was dismissed from the Advisory Council of the Misuse of Drugs due to his report. Read about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt
Especially pay attention to the little diagram on the right that plots Dependence vs Physical Harm of drugs on a graph. Useful for a little perspective.

Funnily enough he also made the parallel that horse riding is at least as dangerous as ecstasy (as far as deaths go). Hey, let's ban horse riding as well.

For someone who claims to know anything about drug use, you are extremely ignorant. And before you jump in my throat as well, no I am not an addict. In fact, I have never done a single drug in my life (except for booze and maybe the annual cigarette). And no, I am not lying "to your face".

As a small contrast, I lived in Switzerland for 5 years, where marijuana is legal. I am one of the few people in my generation within my friendship group who has never tried the stuff. Most of my friends have tried, some smoke occasionally, some smoke regularly. Some of them are now highly successful professionals. Some of them are wasters. Guess what, of the people who I know who have never tried drugs - some are highly successful professionals, whereas others are wasters.

Let's not forget that your own president would be a criminal (and would not have been able to run for the position) if he had been caught smoking weed as a teenager.
But then again, I suppose you're a Republican whacko and probably blame him for "being weak against the enemies of the US" and for everything that is currently wrong with America.

Way to go.

I lived in Vancouver. I have been to the Downtown Eastside (anyone else who has ever been to Vancouver knows what I'm talking about). I have seen the crazies and heroin addicts who are so addicted they can't even be bothered to shoot up in the safe injection facility. I have seen people on the bus with weed in their pockets and I know people who enjoy the occasional toke. It's disingenous of you to paint a broad stroke on all drugs. It's one thing to say heroin should stay illegal, and we can argue about why that should or shouldn't be the case, but it's another to say that a drug like cannabis should also be illegal. You can't classify all drugs as the same.

I'd like to see some peer-reviewed studies on that.

I'm apathetic and I don't even smoke weed.

Also, alcohol is clearly bad, do you want to make that illegal again? Do you want to ban cigarettes too?

Do you have proof for any of this? Actual scientific studies? Concrete peer-reviewed proof? How can you prove that apathy doesn't lead to smoking marijuana rather than the other way round? How strong is this correlation, how well receieved in the scientific community is it, and how biased is the study?

I like how you're attacking my politicial leanings as well. You should really get a show on talkback radio.