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Outside of an illegal activity, please specify which jobs are helped when you take illegal drugs? If one person is denied a job or fired because of a drug test, I've made my point. Now support yours. Outside of college in the real world if you have to take a drug test and fail it you're often out of the job.

Frazzled wrote:Outside of an illegal activity, please specify which jobs are helped when you take illegal drugs? If one person is denied a job or fired because of a drug test, I've made my point. Now support yours. Outside of college in the real world if you have to take a drug test and fail it you're often out of the job.

But why are you out of job for failing a drug test? Is it because the drugs were negatively affecting your performance? Or is it because drug use is frequently a criminal offense? If you have never been convicted of a drug crime why should you be denied employment? If I get a speeding ticket should my employer have the right to fire me?

My point isn't that taking drugs helps you get a job. My point is that drugs are not the primary cause of unemployment, and actually serve as an indicator of larger social inequities which erect class barriers.. Like the assumption that previously existential poverty, and the drug use which frequently accompanies that, is somehow indicative of a person's capacity to perform a task. The data I gave you supports that point.

Athlete.
Fighter pilot, if taking illegal rather than legal Benzedrine. (As I mentioned above, it's given to US pilots legally, for its performance enhancing qualities.)

Seriously though, it's difficult to do research into whether job performance is helped or hindered by taking illegal drugs or whether it doesn't make any difference, because the activity of doing the research would be fraught with legal dangers.

I suspect that in many jobs, indulgence in recreational drug use at weekends has no worse effect than getting drunk.

Frazzled: Outside of an illegal activity, please specify which jobs are helped when you take illegal drugs?

Cab driving, Trucking, any restaurant work especially back-of-house, even accounting and programming during crunch periods
so any occupation were you work 8-14 hours with no breaks, high concentration and little-to-no margin of error
legally obtained stimulates like caffeine and nicotine don't cut it sometimes

Then don't do the job, your clearly not cut out for it...

Sorry guys, but there is no excuse. I'm extremely anti-drugs as a very good friend of mine had a severe nervous breakdown due to 'recreational' drugs use. To all intents and purposes, the guy I know is dead. He is a totally different person, and not in a good way.

Wow what a bunch of misguided druggees I'm arguing with.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:Then don't do the job, your clearly not cut out for it...

Sorry guys, but there is no excuse. I'm extremely anti-drugs as a very good friend of mine had a severe nervous breakdown due to 'recreational' drugs use. To all intents and purposes, the guy I know is dead. He is a totally different person, and not in a good way.

Sure there is. Your friend was not emotionally stable enough to use drugs, so he had a breakdown. Many people are not emotionally stable enough to use alcohol, yet it remains legal despite clear correlation to spousal and child abuse. This isn't to say that your friend was a bad person, or that he was somehow personally deficient, only that he made a mistake. That's part of life. Criminalization should focus on the deleterious affects of drugs, not the drugs themselves. DUI laws are a good example of this. As are child and family laws.

Frazzled:
Wow what a bunch of misguided druggees I'm arguing with.

It's all good.
You could always support you views through personal action.
Just never buy anything shipped on a rig, ride in a cab or eat out at a restaurant.
(remember, you can drive a car if you follow that plan)
Then have all the confidence in the world to judge away.
Let me know how misguided I am then.
. . . but really I'm just funning you, no intelligent well educated person would ever see practical value in the use of illegal substances
(unless they were writing a thesis while working a full-time position, but THAT never happens)

1. This way off topic from whatever the topic was.
2. I truly could care less if you fry your brain. Thats your right. Frankly it works out better for me if you do that-more jobs for me. So Smoke Up! Of course that nagging Christian thing probably says something about helping others, I'm sure its related here somehow. Mmm yes time to give to the Salvation Army again.
3. I'll leave it to the docs about whether there is a practical use vs. the cost, but I've seen people destroyed by it too so to me, there's no net positive here.
4. I do not that transportation workers were some fo the first groups heavily tested, as it was felt that drug use would DETRACT from their performance. I'll note there's the certain matter fo the drug sea captain wrecking a certain oil tanker, and the more recent accident cause by someone using drugs.
5. I will say heavy drug use detracts from your ability to get or keep a job, if nothing else failing those drug tests does wonders for your unemployment opportunities.

But again, its your right so smoke that meth up baby!

Frazzled wrote:Wow what a bunch of misguided druggees I'm arguing with.

I never touch anything except alcohol and the occasional cigarette.

Chocolate. You forgot chocolate KK.

No, I'm on a diet.

SINNER! BLASPHEMER! GET THEE BEHIND ME SATAN!

Kilkrazy wrote:No, I'm on a diet.

Innocence proves nothing.

Anyway, all of this discussion of your chances of getting a job and so forth is completely irrelevant to my original point concerning the fact that drugs shouldn't be illegal, because regardless of how harmful they are, it's your own business, you don't deserve to be punished for punishing yourself, and making it illegal causes more people to do it, worsening the problem.

Furthermore, if we assume that people who are unemployed are more likely to become drug-addicts as I believe someone in the preceding debate was saying, then if the government is spending your money to catch drug-users, more people will become unemployed due to the higher taxes, and then there will be more drug-users for the government to catch, which will necessitate higher taxes.

It's an interesting point, and it would seem to me, living in downtown Calgary, that unemployed people are more likely to become addicted to drugs. That probably explains a lot about our current unemployment problem.

Envy89 wrote:all of the "recreational" drug users that i knew in high school are still either unemployed, or flipping burgers (dose that really count as "Employed" if you are out of high school?)... some of them went on to try other more hardcore drugs, and ended up in prision.

Every single one? That flies in the face of my experience and the experiences of just about everyone I know.

I think it’s likely that you didn’t actually know who was and who wasn’t taking drugs in your highschool. It was probably somewhere around half of all kids, around half of whom were regular users. It’s likely you were only aware of the problem users.

Drugs are bad but the idea that drug use inevitably leads to a life wasted belongs on after-school specials.

Frazzled wrote:3. I'll leave it to the docs about whether there is a practical use vs. the cost, but I've seen people destroyed by it too so to me, there's no net positive here.

I don’t think anyone is arguing illegal drug use is a net positive, just that the extreme claims given in this thread went far to far the other way. People were arguing that drug use always ruined lives, and that’s clearly not true to anyone who’s spent time in and around drug users.

5. I will say heavy drug use detracts from your ability to get or keep a job, if nothing else failing those drug tests does wonders for your unemployment opportunities.

Again, no-one argued otherwise. People were simply saying that heavy drug use was often the result of limited or no access to decent work opportunities.

But again, its your right so smoke that meth up baby!

I’m not sure how you can argue something is a right when it’s illegal. That seems contradictory.

I’m not sure how you can argue something is a right when it’s illegal. That seems contradictory.

Rights are not granted by the government. Everyone has the same rights no matter what. The government can refuse to acknowledge your rights, but they cannot take them away.

captain.gordino wrote:Rights are not granted by the government. Everyone has the same rights no matter what. The government can refuse to acknowledge your rights, but they cannot take them away.

Yeah, I’ve heard that before, and really it doesn’t amount to anything more than argument by pointless redefinition. If government denies that right or fails to protect a right, you don’t have it any more. You can argue all you want about it’s inherent nature, but you don’t have it any more.

I could claim that I have an apple. I could talk all day about my ownership of the apple. If someone took it, I could continue to spend days on end talking about my inherent ownership of the apple, but I don’t have the apple.

There is a distinction between a right and the practical availability of the effect of that right.

For example, slavery is against human rights and illegal everywhere. But there are still many thousands of people in bonded labour and other forms of what amounts to slavery.

captain.gordino wrote:

I’m not sure how you can argue something is a right when it’s illegal. That seems contradictory.

Rights are not granted by the government. Everyone has the same rights no matter what. The government can refuse to acknowledge your rights, but they cannot take them away.

What he said.

Illegal Drug Users!

Ever stopped to consider the impact your habit has on the wider world? Fond of Coke? Can't wait to hit up on Heroin? Depend on Speed to see you through the day?

Try investigating where these come from, and how the growers are treated. I think you'd be surprised. Did you know, for example, that the majority of Heroin comes from Afghanistan, and is grown by local Warlords? Fancy explaining to your local War Widow why you've been funding the Terrorists? No? Lack the balls? Thought so.

It's not worth it guys. Not worth it all.

Except for chocolate cake of course. It is SO worth it...

But Chocs aren't illegals.

Only for Fatties.

Kilkrazy wrote:There is a distinction between a right and the practical availability of the effect of that right.

For example, slavery is against human rights and illegal everywhere. But there are still many thousands of people in bonded labour and other forms of what amounts to slavery.

And if we were talking about fundamental rights, freedom from slavery, freedom from political expression, sure thing. Because then even if that right isn't protected, you could be reasonably talking in terms of 'should'.

But we aren't talking about that. We're talking about taking illegal drugs, in a thread where a lot of people involved believe those drugs should continue to be illegal. It makes no sense in that context.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:Illegal Drug Users!

Ever stopped to consider the impact your habit has on the wider world? Fond of Coke? Can't wait to hit up on Heroin? Depend on Speed to see you through the day?

Try investigating where these come from, and how the growers are treated. I think you'd be surprised. Did you know, for example, that the majority of Heroin comes from Afghanistan, and is grown by local Warlords? Fancy explaining to your local War Widow why you've been funding the Terrorists? No? Lack the balls? Thought so.

It's not worth it guys. Not worth it all.

Yet another very potent argument for legalisation in my eyes.

dogma wrote:Inevitably this still doesn't answer the question of why these people turned to drugs. Narcotics are a manifestation of a problem, not a problem in and of themselves.

My problem was that I had 3500 point of Tau to paint. Cannabis helps... a lot.

Illegal Drug Users!

Ever stopped to consider the impact your habit has on the wider world? Fond of Coke? Can't wait to hit up on Heroin? Depend on Speed to see you through the day?

Try investigating where these come from, and how the growers are treated. I think you'd be surprised. Did you know, for example, that the majority of Heroin comes from Afghanistan, and is grown by local Warlords? Fancy explaining to your local War Widow why you've been funding the Terrorists? No? Lack the balls? Thought so.

It's not worth it guys. Not worth it all.

Don't do coke, never done heroin. Don't drink alcohol. Just cannabis. I know where it comes from too. I know the guy who grows it. It comes from the good old US of A and if it were legal then the production of narcotics could be regulated to prevent money from being handed off to organized crime and terrorists. Workers would be covered under US labor laws. By making drugs illegal you allow for black markets which don't give a good god damn about human rights (or the safety of their products, the number one cause of death for drug users is contaminate overdose.) . Everything you've mention is good reason to legalize and regulate.

Is it?

Because a work force ripped to it's sweaty tits on E's and Wobbly Eggs is going to be sooooo productive.

Add in the tax on such commodities would be sky high, the illegal supply would not halt. And all you would be doing, without a global legalisation (and that is not going to happen) is make it easier for the crap to circulate.

But hey, because if it was legal, you wouldn't be funding Terrorists or Militants, thats a-ok to do so now yeah! Rock on in the free world!

So you think people are seriously going to drive to the scariest part of town late at night to buy from someone they barely know to purchase a legalized substance? And as far as price goes, I would seriously pay more if I didn't have to worry about the law. Also a pack of cigarettes is ten dollars in New York. Have you heard stories about tobacco smuggling that I haven't? Also, if the same amount of cannabis cost only ten dollars then it would be a substantial price DROP.

Because a work force ripped to it's sweaty tits on E's and Wobbly Eggs is going to be sooooo productive.

Worked retail lately? they already are.

But hey, because if it was legal, you wouldn't be funding Terrorists or Militants, thats a-ok to do so now yeah! Rock on in the free world!

Read my previous post. I help a guy I've known since high school pay rent. The system you advocate allows for black markets to handle drug trading. Seriously you think people are going to buy from the mob when the same product is available for (let's face it the overhead cost of growing cannabis is the same as any other crop) less elsewhere?

Won't be less though. Never in a million years. Legalise it to control it still doesn't mean it's accepted. Ergo, very, VERY high tax rate. The only, and I mean, the only reason illegal drugs are the price they are is because you can't get them anywhere else. Threaten the livelyhood, and BOOM! prices drop, as long as the crop remains.

But like I said, don't you worry your pretty little head about it. Sure, you help some guy pay his rent (I help my friends out too. They have a 2 yr old and Baby Twins) so this suddenly makes your illegal activities which have a substantial negative impact on soceity good and proper yeah? Pull the other, it's got bells on.

Illegal and immoral are two entirely different things. I can live with breaking a pointless socially destructive law. Also please prove that marijuana and marijuana alone has a substantial negative impact on society. Since you stated it as a fact you must be able to back this assertion up, yes?