Movements
There have been many movements calling for the legalization of recreational drugs (the most notable one being cannabis). Examples of such movements are the Worldwide Marijuana March, Hemp Day, and 4/20. Several movements that call for the legalization of drugs, not from an argument of their safety but rather from an argument that this issue should be considered a medical one and not a criminal one, also exist, primarily in North America. One such organization is the Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP). The British drug reform group Transform believes that taxation and regulation of drugs by the government would significantly decrease crime while increasing the health of drug users and addicts. Impact varies from country to country, depending on its legality. Also, there are many anti-drug movements, specifically Straight Edge and The Partnership For A Drug Free America, calling for the continuation of its current illegality.
In a blog article titled "Drugs and the meaning of life", author and neuroscientist Sam Harris argues "The fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them, at enormous expense, constitutes one of the great moral failures of our time." He says that he dreads the thought of his daughter's ever taking an interest in crack cocaine. On the other hand, he feels that she might be missing out if she never tried psychedelics like psilocybin. Harris also laments that a drug's legality, social status, and risks of harm rarely correlate reasonably.
Read more about this topic: Recreational Drug Use
Famous quotes containing the word movements:
“Justice begins with the recognition of the necessity of sharing. The oldest law is that which regulates it, and this is still the most important law today and, as such, has remained the basic concern of all movements which have at heart the community of human activities and of human existence in general.”
—Elias Canetti (b. 1905)
“Awareness of the stars and their light pervades the Koran, which reflects the brightness of the heavenly bodies in many verses. The blossoming of mathematics and astronomy was a natural consequence of this awareness. Understanding the cosmos and the movements of the stars means understanding the marvels created by Allah. There would be no persecuted Galileo in Islam, because Islam, unlike Christianity, did not force people to believe in a “fixed” heaven.”
—Fatima Mernissi, Moroccan sociologist. Islam and Democracy, ch. 9, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. (Trans. 1992)
“Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connexion with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)