I'd like your input on this

[rondon]

I said

people don't buy alcohol on the black market... or smokes either..

tonight on ABC news they showed a shipload of foreign counterfeit ciggerettes that was intercepted... Marlboro's I was looking at.

I stand corrected

[G. Couch]

That's the first I have heard of that! My guess is that the black market for cigarettes is a pretty new thing (could be wrong though). I suppose that's the downside to taxing something at such high rates...It's almost like making them illegal drugs! Banning them from public places is one thing, but if people want to smoke themselves to an early grave, why stop them? ...Not that most smokers even like smoking, most are just addicts to the chemicals inside and have very little control. Which brings up another thought...

When our society talks about illegal drug use, or abuse of legal drugs, we generally put it in terms of a social or political problem. The solutions always seem to be to plug lots more money into law enforcement, a bit into treatment and another bit into prevention...and none of that spending ever seems to yield substantial results. Even when we talk about legalizing drugs, we mention being able to spend the saved money on treatment centers...aren't we just patching wounds and not getting to the source of the problem? Why don't we start looking at this as a scientific problem? Think about it...the alcoholic, the drug abuser, the smoker, etc... are all addicts. If you can learn to shut off that genetic trait, that would go much further to solving the problem than spending more money on treatment centers or police. Of course, now we start to get into the realm of genetic engineering...and I am rambling on and on!

[Ed_L]

Wow, Greg! You really put a new slant on this! The fact is, that when people come up with things out of the norm, we might find all kinds of alternate solutions to different problems. I guess that's what is called "thinking outside the box". Too bad we don't have a lot of others with input. We might actually find something that would work, without having one group against another (except for the ones who profit from the business).

Ed

[pjanak]

I don't know about all drugs. But weed should be. On weed alone the tax revenue is in tens of billions. The laws against weed should be repealed since they were made based on intentionally wrong information about weed to start with. IOW basd on lies. And because weed is only a minute step worse than alcohol in terms of how you act when you are high.
Pete Janak