And, of course, there must be an extraordinary investment in medical facilities in Michigan to take care of the wrecked people who suffer the effects of drugs.

Those Detroit people were wrecked long before anybody heard of crack, pot, or heroine. With people like that, drugs are a symptom, not a problem.

Likewise, the trailer park crowd in okie country were sniffing glue,etc, long before meth was invented. With their ancestors, it was moonshine liquor.

The government can't hold every single idiot by his hand all the time.

Take the $50,000,000 we spend in the War On Drugs every year, and just give the scum bags their drugs. That way, they don't have to rob the rest of us to pay for their fix.

And, of course, we can initiate a program of executing all mentally deficient people, schizophrenics and paranoids, autistic kids, and people who can't spell Mississippi. Save lots of money that way.

Sand, that's a great way to change the subject. Is that because you don't want to discuss the drug problem, or do you think the WOD is being won ?

Some see this idea as a way to control people.I think it means less control over people. It simply allows them to do their drugs in a certain area. More manageable and less waste. People fly to Holland to smoke pot all the time. Maybe it will be good for Michigan tourism.

I don't doubt that some people can control a drug habit but it is also very evident that a good number of drug addicts are people in deep personal trouble and casting them out of all human compassion is an extremely nasty thing to do. Victim blaming is one of the more disgusting habits of people who are unconcerned with helpless people.

Some drugs ruin peoples lives, some drugs save lives, and other drugs make life endurable. The WOD just ruins lives. Even Rush Limbaugh got caught using pain relievers illegally. Imagine that! Illegal pain relief! So where is the compassion in the WOD?

The compassion in the WOD is that it provides lots of high-paying jobs for DEA agents, FBI agents, customs agents, prison guards, prison plumbers, prison teachers, parole officers, and so on. The little guy gets nothing out of it, except higher taxes and higher crime.

When I was a teenager, I didn't know what pot was. Now it is being grown in the national forests and parks, out in the open. Why ? BECAUSE IT IS ILLEGAL. And because it is illegal, they can charge a lot and make a lot.

One funny thing about the folks who oppose a different approach to "the drug problem" is that they don't want their taxes increased to pay for a meaningful, effective, prosecution of the WOD. So we just go on shelling out 50 billion a year, and spinning our wheels.

Amen.

Frankly, I am very suspicious about the suppression of drugs. Any business that automatically creates customers that find they cannot do without the product and brings in billions of dollars regularly must have some sort of official consent behind their operations wherein governments take their slice of the profits. And I doubt that any government is clean in this matter. There is just too much money involved.

Louis Farrakhan said for years that the drug problem was a conspiracy, to keep certain minorities down.

Some folks say it is a form of foreign aid, because of the billions in drug money which flow overseas. What would Columbia's economy be without US drug customers ?

i don't want to go to michigan and i can't see why anyone else would. why don't they just legalize drugs and give people the right to destroy there bodies if they want too? that will get rid of gang violence and alot of those pesky drug enforcement issues. heyy, it makes more sense then a drug colony!

Before the rise and fall of Detroit, Michigan was a beautiful place, and most of it still is. There's some great steelhead fishing in the rivers up north. Ernest Hemingway spent a lot of time there, and wrote about it. You still see wolverine tracks in the snow.

If you don't want to go to Michigan, it's because you don't want to see the hell-hole of Detroit, which is where the rest of us are headed.