ID required to buy Surefire Batteries?

[sigmtnman]

I don't buy into the whole gateway thing. Sugar and caffeine were both classified as drugs in the past. Wheat is proven to affect brain function in the same way as a drug as well.

Wouldn't alcohol be a gateway drug as well?

[hammerdrop99]

Maybe I'm not pc enough, but let the meth heads do what they want and poison themselves. If I need some batteries for my flashlight and my toilet is stopped up and i need drano don't treat me like a criminal. When will it stop. There is all kinds of products on the market that could be used in the wrong way. Maybe we should all move into a padded room and let the gov tell us whats good for us.

I agree totally. This is the same feeling I get when I fly somewhere and must submit to searches, frisking and delays at the airport. The terrorists have won. To disrupt the lives of all Americans was there goal and they have succeeded.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

I may be too pessimistic but from experience long ago working in substance abuse counselling-- Any and all addiction treatments may be helpful somehow in difficult to measure dimensions. However, untreated addicts often seem to improve at about the same rate as treated addicts, unless you carefully control admissions and reject many potential clients with unpromising prognosis. It remains dicey even with restricted admissions because if you use the same admissions standards on an untreated control group, it may be doubtful that we would see a statistically significant improvement in the treated group. If the admissions filtering process really is effective in identifying "high-odds-of-improvement" clients (not a forgone conclusion), then filtering the untreated control group to the same standards should also improve odds of improvement in the filtered control group.

Haven't thought about it much lately, but in the past decided it would be better for the law to generally ignore adult drug usage except when it affects public safety. You don't want stoned pilots, air traffic controllers, train engineers, surgeons, auto drivers, etc. Employers should likely filter employees to avoid employer liability exposure, but a drunk surgeon might also deserve criminal justice consequences?

If a person uses a drug in moderation and does not make any trouble then it seems a waste to spend resources hassling that person. If a person's addiction leads to criminal behavior or danger to public safety, prosecute them for the criminal behavior rather than the drug use. If a person's addiction leads to child abuse/neglect or domestic abuse, deal with it the same as with non-addicted child abusers, negligent parents, or domestic abusers.

It is a trickier issue with amphetamines or PCP. Those can cause temporary psychosis and violent/unpredictable behavior. Some drugs might be so likely to cause anti-social behavior that they should be suppressed just because of excessive nuisance value to society? Meth heads too often do not just quietly self-destruct. Of course even alcohol causes predictable violence from certain people, but perhaps the "crazy violent" population incidence from alcohol is lower than from amphetamines? Dunno.

Some amphetamine health hazards surely involve the nature of the drug and dose, but other common meth head health problems may just be a consequence of a person's poor health habits? It is well known that some of the health problems of alcoholics are caused by severe malnutrition rather than alcohol abuse.

Some amphetamine health hazards may be blamed on impure poisonous street meth? Maybe methheads would live a little longer (maybe live long enough to decide to quit) if they could buy pharmaceutically pure meth?

Amphetamines are still medically used for certain conditions such as severe narcolepsy or ADHD. "Normal people" long-term taking the stuff under medical supervision do not seem especially likely to have their teeth fall out or grow old at hyper-speed. Of course amphetamines are bad enough drugs to be avoided unless nothing else will work. Numerous undesirable side-effects.