TAXES - & Utopias

On 11/28/05, Dan Wylie-Sears wrote:
(...)
> And I've met a bunch who were doing just fine at good colleges.
> What *else* were the ones you met using besides pot? Alcohol for
> one, I'll bet.
(...)
> If you don't even distinguish between pot and cocaine, how can you
> hope to have any credibility. Most people people who use pot use it
> at college, graduate, are no longer in a social situation where it's
> common, and never use it again.
(...)

Of course that varies from country to country. In my country I have
seen adults in respectable professions and widely recognized as top
professionals (for instance, a pediatrician friend of mine over 40 and
a software engineer in my work reaching 30 yo) who freely admit that
they use marijuana regularly. Theoretically, it is forbidden, but in
practice it is widely consumed. (Personally, I don't like the smell
and the effect is quite boring, but there are tastes for everything;
caffeine for now remains my only chemical addiction. ;-) Nevertheless,
I never saw someone having his or her career finished because of pot,
though I have seen a few cases of people who destroyed their lives
altogether - work, relationships, family, etc - through alcohol abuse.

BTW, would a drug market be a viable commerce option for some space
habitats? I've heard that some drugs are so potent that a few
micrograms have quite an effect, so perhaps a few kilograms could
conceivably be delivered to Earth and still generate profit if there
were a unsatisfied big demand for it. That could be an economic option
for habitats if somehow someone tries to make Earth free of drug
production in the future. (The international "War Against Drugs" comes
to my mind.)