K... I'd tend to agree that legalization would not necessarily lead to increased use... might even lead to decreased use as the allure of 'no you can't so I'm going to' is gone. I was going to say if it had been free in my youth I'd likely be dead... but it occured to me that I never paid a cent for it. Even then I saw the potential for addiction... and, of course, knew it wouldn't be free forever ;-) Cost prohibitive was a good thing. So for the most of us in my circle of friends... we didn't actively look for it, but if it was there we did it. Then there were the few who went down that road... every earned cent went to coke... then when they weren't earning anymore, because they didn't care enough to go to work, they found other ways. I'm also not into saving people from themselves... life has choices... This is true, but we all have to deal with them in one way or another. When people don't care about the consequences to themselves they certainly don't care about the consequences to others. That all said... it would be interesting to isolate a piece of society to actually see what would happen if it were all legal and easily obtained. Would that be a productive, functioning society? You'd need users and non-users willing to participate in this experiment... would be interesting.
Funny... I couldn't tell you then any more than I could tell you now why I liked it. Now that I'm thinking about it... the first time or two... it did nothing for me... I was at a loss as to why people would pay that amount of money... thought they were just nuts... the devil's drug... subtle death... cocaine.
Thought I'd look up exactly why/when coke was outlawed... interesting: http://cocaine.org/ Crack-cocaine delivers an intensity of pleasure completely outside the normal range of human experience. It offers the most wonderful state of consciousness, and the most intense sense of being alive, the user will ever enjoy. Can you picture that on a billboard? Surgeon General's Warning: A drug which induces a secular parody of Heaven commonly leads the user into a biological counterpart of Hell.
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