Dawson writes:
> I favor legalization, too.
[ ... ]
> I'm saying that the "opium is benign" claim is no different
> logically than "guns don't kill people; people kill people" excuse.
I don't think they are the same. For one, "opium is benign" was just brought up by someone here as a provocative statement. While technically true, it doesn't show the whole story (which point you've [over] made several times). So while "opium is benign" is true in the abstract, the rest of the lifestyle (and economic structure) is where the details are.
In the case of the "people kill people" issue, it's a question of scope: if "guns kill people" then we'd all be dead, because there are so many guns out there that we'd quickly be down to a few pistoleros. But we aren't. In fact, only about half of "gun death" [in the US] is "gun crime" (the rest is largely suicide, which has been shown in gun-unfriendly places to keep going full steam ahead without guns) and the vast majority of "gun crime" is really just "violent crime" (of which "gun crime" is a significant but not overly so part: most violent crime uses fists as the weapon). So it's convenient that the handgun is an effective weapon (brining death in like 1% of violent crime), but violent crime won't disappear overnight if you got rid of handguns: and the part that would is very small, so what's your point?
But let's take this a step further: since you "favor legalization" but are arguing this other case pretty hard (despite Doug's admonishment about the volume), and you think the "opium is benign" thing is dumb, you'll probably agree that IF "opium is benign" were the _whole_ story (that is: if you can find people who are opium addicts who don't have a [negative] societal impact via things like mugging someone to get enough money for their next hit -- let's call them "recreational drug users" and make sure they only do it at home and don't perform surgery while high, etc.) then you should be all against things like the banning of (so-called) "assault weapons" [and especially .50cal rifles!] because they are almost exclusively owned by law-abiding citizens who put holes in paper on weekends and are almost never used in actual crimes.
Ba-da-bing: "recreational drug users" are "like" "recreational firearms owners" (80M handguns, ~8k handgun deaths/yr ... sounds like a statistical anomoly to me) and you should be all for it. In fact, the NRA would love a guy like you to join. They like how you think.
/jordan