At 10:39 AM 8/23/2005, Trei, Peter wrote:

Tyler Durden writes:

...

Yes, but the old question needs to be asked: How much of this crime would go away if crystal meth were legal?

Actually, if we ever managed to kill the culture of prohibition, I suspect that crystal meth would be about as popular is bathtub gin is today. It's terrible stuff.

Meth is not fundamentally that different from Sudafed, and the nasty chemical processes of extracting the sugar coating and filler material and moving around a couple of methyl and hydroxy groups and disposing of the bodies of the people you thought were ratting you out to the police and the space alien biker gangs could all be avoided if you could make it legally at a big pharma company. Before the War on Drugs started helping us by making Sudafed hard to get, the generic pills tended to be on sale for about ten cents per 30mg dose. If I'm reading Erowid correctly, and guessing the kinds of quantities a tweaker might use if it were readily available and nearly free, a buck or two a day would cover all the meth you could use, and you could easily make that much at a minimum-wage job in the extra hours you've got that you used to waste sleeping, and you wouldn't have to resort to crime unless it seemed like more fun. Also, you could use somewhat calmer amphetamine relatives instead of meth; can't be *that* much nastier than tobacco, and much of the cost of legal pharmaceutical amphetamines today is the DEA paperwork. Opiates are another drug for which crime would be unnecessary if the stuff were legal. The last time I got codeine for dental work, I think I spent about $5 for 20-30 pills. That's enough for a day of Rush-Limbaugh-quantity abuse, and enough for a couple of days' worth of withdrawal-prevention for an average addict, and stronger opiates are similar in cost; opiate addiction doesn't need to be as expensive as tobacco addiction. By the way, if you've watched the TV medical drama "House", the star is an acerbic doctor who's addicted to Vicodin, as an after-effect of leg injury, and it's interesting to see the wall of political correctness cracking a bit.