http://reason.com/9511/BENFORDfeat.html
under the header "BEING HUMAN"
Other developments, just over the horizon, will probably force us to entirely rethink present ideas of good and evil. Within a generation, we will probably be able to make cocaine from a bacterial culture. Kids will grow it or morphine or opiumin bathtubs, not in elaborate labs.
This will do for our current drug prohibition what home-brewed beer did for Prohibition. Even easier ways are plausible: say, a bacterium which lives in your digestive tract and makes just the right level of cocaine every day. (Something like this has happened naturally. A patient turned up who was permanently drunk, from a yeast which made alcohol in his innards. Therapy freed him of a condition others might have envied.) Far more exotic methods of eluding detection, and of making new designer drugs, will no doubt emerge.
Such a ready supply will almost certainly doom a simple "War On Drugs" approach. Legalizing, taxing, and regulating their use will come to be far cheaper than following a Prohibition mentality against an ever-improving biotechnology.
In fact, I believe it already is cheaper and smarter. We have over 1.3 million in American prisons, the majority for drug-related crime. The average sentence for murder in California is for fewer years (eight) than the average sentence for drug crimes.
Prohibition of anything is about power and imposing a uniform value system. Technology in the next century will probably act against central control. This will push our cultural boundaries, with biotech steadily increasing the friction. In the end this may force a new social solution, resembling the European programs already using partial legalization, combined with the social pressure that has reduced tobacco and alcohol use.
I been under the impression that keeping drugs illegal was too "big money" for
them to ever legalize any but this article makes a lot of since.
Any veiws?
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