Ok drug lords, drugs are legal now, but the product liability laws have been specifically beefed up to address these products that can kill you the first time they're used as directed unlike booze, cigarettes or fast food.
And it will only need to happen a few times for you to kiss your profits goodbye. You get several 20 million dollar lawsuits a month that's going to cut into the profits of a business that's already been hit with widespread competition now that drugs are legal.
Now of course you might say "How many people are going to die from smoking weed so this doesn't work." Well, maybe that's something to think about when the discussion of keeping weed illegal comes up.-- doctorremulac3, Mar 08 2011 There wouldn't be any need to make the product liability any stricter than it is for other drugs. I'm currently just about able to make a profit because of the cost of my insurance and in a sense i'm in the drugs business. The problem with illegal recreational drugs seems to be quality control.-- nineteenthly, Mar 08 2011 I used to be a fascist liberal on this subject until my sons became teenagers when I became a fascist. A year or so ago my sister suggested I talk to my eldest as she had seen a reference to miau- miau (mephedrone) on my eldest sons FB page. I spoke to him, the conversation went something like:
"What do you know about mephedrone?" "What do you mean?" "Mephedrone, the drug, have you ever used it?" -skip the usual teenage uhming, aahing, blah, blah - "Yes, once. But it's perfectly legal" "What do you mean, it's legal" "It's legal, anyone can buy it. There's nothing wrong with it, it doesn't do anything to you" "How do you know?" "cause it's legal"
(For the uninitiated, mephedrone is a synthetic cocaine which, for a couple of years, was sold as plant food in the UK)
My point being that kids today have grown up in a risk assessed, method statemented, health and safety approved environment where, if there ain't a law against it, it must be okay for you. We can't easily change a whole generation and somehow re- introduce risk into their lives. If you make any drug legal, no matter how you go about it, kids will think it is harmless. And I doubt the drug barons are going to worry too much about the occasional lawsuit.
Sorry to be all serious on the subject but it is one of my pet peevs.-- The_Saint, Mar 08 2011 I'll bun this if it also involves criminal penalties -- someone dies from your product, you get tried for murder. It might make certain things disappear despite being legal...-- cowtamer, Mar 08 2011 Ok cow-t, sounds good. Kill the profit AND allow that some dealers will get put in the slammer for murder, or at least manslaughter or something. I like that.
//Uh.... booze actually *can* kill you the first time you try it.//
I always like it when 21 says "Uh.." before his comment just trying to add that little sting, that little twist of the knife, that eye rolling incredulity that somebody has actually dared post something he doesn't like on this website yet again.
Uh... how do you find where they bought the drugs? Hey genius, check the guy's credit card receipt. They're legal remember?
Pal.-- doctorremulac3, Mar 08 2011 [The_Saint], i have teenagers myself so i'm not _just_ spouting bollocks, but i think that's an argument for a less regulated society, which would include drugs being legal. Our children engage in hazardous behaviour which doesn't include illegal drug taking and the reason is that many of our adult friends are stoners who are clearly brain-damaged from what they've done to themselves, and many of them have taken harder drugs and damaged themselves further. It isn't a good advert to them to take drugs at all.-- nineteenthly, Mar 08 2011 The_Saint, I'm sorry, but part of your problem is that your kid is kind of stupid... not trying to be insulting but it's just there; even at that young age a person should have some basic personal sense of caveat emptor. Avocados, grapes, and chocolate can kill your dog, you can buy castor oil and that is deadly - you can even buy the plants with the even deadlier seeds, people use pesticides all the time, eyedrops can be deadly taken orally, there have been numerous products sold that turned out to be deadly, like those bead toys that when kids ate them turned into GHB in the body etc. As much as there is a climate of seeming safety-testedness there is also a shrill anti-corporate, anti-technology climate propogated by the media, with plenty of news stories about product failures and recalls. There are idiots who say even eating cooked food is bad for you.-- EdwinBakery, Mar 08 2011 It's not bad for you it's just not as good.-- rcarty, Mar 08 2011 I don't think there's often a need to use the word "stupid". Uneducated, hasty, thoughtless, unthinking, maybe even learning disabled if you want to be PC about it, but "stupid" is, apart from anything else, quite a lazy word to use.-- nineteenthly, Mar 08 2011 [EdwinBakery] No need to get personal, you couldn't possibly know the first thing about my son.
[nineteenthly] I agree that my argument is ultimately for a less regulated society, my point is that we can't easily undo a whole generation of regulation and there are better areas to start fostering personal responsibility than drugs.
Bear in mind that we did try the legalised drugs route here in the UK with GBL, mephedrone and other so-called legal highs. The result was emphatic: lots and lots of kids used them and used them frequently and some even died. Not only were these drugs apparently okay, you couldn't get caught buying them and you didn't even have to follow some dodgy bloke down a back alley. You simply ordered them online and they were delivered next day by UPS.-- The_Saint, Mar 08 2011 OK, good. I suppose what i'm saying is that the unintentional experiment of some kind of underground subculture where drugs were socially acceptable and widely used, there were lots of casualties on the way and the effectiveness of the subculture was impaired, but nowadays, the children look at the wrecks which resulted and come to the firm conclusion that they're not going anywhere near drugs and despise the previous generation for their self-indulgence. Therefore i would expect that doing a similar thing openly would end up regulating itself. Drugs would become socially unacceptable because of the obvious mess they made.
However, it would take some time to get to that point and the hand-holding which seems to go on now doesn't help and would take a long time to recover from, if it happens at all.-- nineteenthly, Mar 08 2011 Same applies to alcohol and tobacco.-- pocmloc, Mar 08 2011 You know, I heard somebody say some funny fucking stuff about this kind of argument. Somebody says "Which is better, Coke or Pepsi?" so you say "I don't know, Coke I guess." then they get this smug look on their face and say something stupid like "Oh yea? What if somebody took a massive shit in the Coke and pissed in it too?"
So at that point you can either go down to that level, engage in the stupid argument and be a moron too, or let it go.-- doctorremulac3, Mar 09 2011 It's impossible to legalize drugs?
Cocaine and heroin used to be legal you know. How did they manage that?
This is one of those "I'll throw 20 dumb arguments out there and hope it equals one good one." It doesn't work that way.
Legalizing it would remove the glamor, much of the cost and much of the incentive. Telling people they bear financial responsibility for their product is hardly a revolutionary idea. But there's that shit in the Coke argument. "What if you can't find where they got if from? How do you know somebody didn't spike their drugs with bad drugs? How do you know they didn't just shoot themselves in the head and hide the gun?"
And as far as not proposing something because it would be controversial, where do I begin to address how wrong that is?
Tell you what 21, I'm going to give you the opportunity you so sorely want. The opportunity to score a K.O. right here right now. It's simple.
Come up with a better idea. If it's good, I'll throw a bun up and give you kudos. In fact, this is what I'll write. I'll cut and past it: "I've got to hand it to you 21, that's a very clever and workable idea to deal with the horrible problem of drug lords talking over Mexico and killing thousands of people."
Go.-- doctorremulac3, Mar 09 2011 The drug itself doesn't have to do harm, but if it provides a gateway to truly harmful drugs, such as tobacco or alcohol, then lawsuits might fly.-- ldischler, Mar 09 2011 You'll probably find that any tort litigation would be settled by the cartel or the "drug lord" way before it made the courts. See Mass tort litigation.
You would also find fine upstanding citizens, people like moi, rounding up those adversely affected by the product and buying out their claim, only to settle it in the comfort of a boardroom at Casa Cocaína, for a small profit.-- 4whom, Mar 09 2011 // Legalizing it would remove the glamor, much of the cost and much of the incentive. //
Your argument that legalising drugs would open up the manufacturers and suppliers to legal challenge has at least some semblance of merit. What makes you think it would remove the glamour? The creative industries (films especially) already glamorise drug use, with legaliised drugs that would hardly decrease and more likely increase. And how does making drugs cheaper improve matters? And finally what incentive does it remove? Legal profits are worth so much more than illegal profits that have to be laundered.-- The_Saint, Mar 09 2011 My dispensary currently contains about a hundred remedies. When i prescribe and dispense herbs, i'm regulated in various ways. There are QC issues about adulteration which are dealt with either by me or the supplier and legally controlled, labelling regulations regarding remedies, a legal requirement to keep records, product and public liability insurance and so on. If i happened to have legalised psychoactive Cannabis on the shelf, it would presumably be subject to the same regulations and could even be a Schedule III if you wanted, in which case it would be in a double- locked cupboard and all prescriptions would be accounted just as they are for something like Datura stramonium. Same applies to whatever else - cocaine, amphetamines, opiates and so on. There is no problem with doing it this way, it would just be a very slight change in my business model. If i ended up killing someone through negligence right now, i would be prosecuted and insurance covers that kind of thing too, so i'd go to prison or go out of business or something. It would be a very small step. I even have the necessary equipment and materials to make some of my own recreational drugs if i really wanted to, but obviously i'm not going to.
This is not a big deal. The only issue is that they're currently illegal and have poor quality control and artificially inflated prices as a result.-- nineteenthly, Mar 09 2011 //Here's my better idea: if you want to solve Mexico's problems, make Mexico better.//
Wow, breakthrough stuff. I'll get the Nobel Prize committee on the line.-- doctorremulac3, Mar 09 2011 I gotta admit quest, I just like messin' with ya.
All in good fun. Like I said, it's good to get the blood angered up every once in a while.-- doctorremulac3, Mar 09 2011 What i'm trying to say is, if drugs of this kind were legalised, this is effectively how they'd be anyway because of the way legislation around the drugs which are currently legal operates.-- nineteenthly, Mar 09 2011 Please don't taunt [21]. Many of us had to give it up for his own good and the good of others, and it's not polite of you to indulge in it when we cannot.-- normzone, Mar 09 2011 An alcohol suppository is an easy way.-- rcarty, Mar 10 2011 Exactly, you can easily kill yourself with quite a small alcoholic enema and people do that, it's not a joke, partly because you get more bang for your buck that way.
[21], depends on the jurisdiction. There are state alcohol monopolies and a whole swathe of countries where it's more or less entirely prohibited.-- nineteenthly, Mar 10 2011 I have to side with 21 on this one. The problems of tracking, determination of fault, prevention of black- marketing, etc. are not easily overcome, especially amongst a crowd of desperately addicted drug-users. Even some less-addictive legal drugs inside the pharmacy control system, while keeping some of these issues in check, have not sufficiently minimized them to a satisfactory degree, despite prolific measures.-- RayfordSteele, Mar 10 2011 Respectfully disagree. This is the "It's not perfect, so let's not do anything and let the drug cartels take over a country and kill everybody who gets in their way" argument.
The vast majority of people selling a product that kills people will be found and taken to court. All the examples given are of the few cases that would lack evidence or otherwise not be prosecutable some of the time, but it only takes a couple of cases to win in court for the financial incentive to be ruined.
21's also managed to drag this idea away from what it's supposed to achieve mainly driving drug cartells out of business which he's failed to address a single time, it's all about one person managing to get drugs and kill themselves and somebody not being prosecuted for one reason or another. He's managed to imply this is supposed to cure all drug addiction, make everybody live forever and part the red sea.
That's not what this is supposed to do, it's supposed to drive the drug cartels that are killing thousands of innocent people a year out of business. Not make every former drug addict healthy as an Olympic athlete.-- doctorremulac3, Mar 10 2011 In order to legalize these drugs, there would have to be some agreed-upon threshold limits which would be declared 'reasonably safe' inside the law, in terms of perhaps blood percentage content or somesuch. But that's a larger problem, because the percentages which could be desribed as 'reasonably safe' for most of them are essentially 0.-- RayfordSteele, Mar 10 2011 Daseva, you're pretty dumb if you think that water has the same risk factor as crack cocain.
21, you're just dumb.-- doctorremulac3, Mar 10 2011 I've often wondered what would happen if i started selling Cannabis because in a way it's a natural extension of what i do now. I suspect that i would be threatened or attacked by criminal gangs sooner or later. Now, the thing is, i think this would happen even if i could do it legally and i'm not sure how this could be stopped. I think organised crime probably depends so much on revenue from drugs that they'd try to enforce their monopoly even if the drugs were legalised. For that reason among others, i don't think this would work.
Incidentally, could someone tell me if i'm being consistent? I have a sneaky feeling i've just contradicted myself.-- nineteenthly, Mar 10 2011 Well, despite the feds attempting to close them down, we do have weed being sold at medical marijuana shops here in California. I haven't heard of any efforts from criminals to intimidate them or shut them down.-- doctorremulac3, Mar 10 2011 Daseva, my clever, clever friend.
You've just said that product liability laws are un-enforcable because people can kill themselves with water.
I'll say it again and in a different way so it might sink in: You've said that there is no such thing as an enforceable product liability law because people can drink too much water and kill themselves. This despite the millions and millions paid out in product liability lawsuits every year.
Thanks for the psych profile. Who got nasty first? And by the way, you'll notice I don't post anything on your ideas but you seem to always seek me out. You're welcome to do it, but when you get nasty don't expect me to not give it right back eh?-- doctorremulac3, Mar 10 2011 Maybe i'm just being paranoid then. I wonder if weed would help me with that?-- nineteenthly, Mar 10 2011 Crack cocain used as directed and manufactured without manufacturing defect can kill you. And the idea clearly states: "Beef Up Civil Liability Laws Regarding Their Sale"
There goes your stupid anno.
Can I talk to nineteenthly now instead of you daseva? Go troll somebody else's idea.
Nine, I wouldn't suggest treating paranoia with weed.-- doctorremulac3, Mar 10 2011 Doc, for god's sake, let it go, man.-- RayfordSteele, Mar 10 2011 There aren't any medical uses for cigarettes either. That doesn't mean they don't sell them.
And they've paid billions in liability suits. Or at least been awarded billions, not sure if they ever paid out.
If you've got something interesing to add Ray, please feel free.-- doctorremulac3, Mar 10 2011 A long time ago, there was this pleasant, entertaining, and rather interesting place on the web, where mature people knew how to have interesting conversations and when to drop subjects without a lot of spite. But sadly, it became commandeered by a bunch of five-year-olds, and most of the adults left.-- RayfordSteele, Mar 10 2011 Like I said, if you've got something interesting to add Ray, please feel free.-- doctorremulac3, Mar 11 2011 Gasp! Not the dreaded MFD!
Go ahead, MFD for: "Not directly cogent to all international and trans-cultural global entities."
Just curious Q old buddy. Out of the hundreds of MFD's you've proudly presented like you're wielding Excalibur, have you ever had a single idea removed from this site?-- doctorremulac3, Mar 11 2011 Ok, fair enough.
So to use your analogy, have the janitors ever once replaced the bulb?-- doctorremulac3, Mar 11 2011 Tell ya what Q. I'm poppin' open a bottle of wine and chillin' out after a hard (but fruitful) day. Suggest you do the same with your beverage of choice.
"Night.-- doctorremulac3, Mar 11 2011 random, halfbakery