Drugs and the internet
Drugs and the internetDrugs and the Internet
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, ever generation has had its own personality; its own new fad to inspire a whole new group of children and young adults, and to drive the elders crazy. The twenties had the Charleston, the fifties sported huge neon blue and pink finned automobiles. The sixties invented the hippie craze, and the seventies inspired the world with the magically funkadelic sounds of disco. The eighties were unfortunate enough to grace us with glam rock, big hair, and pastels. Nearly any member of the youth of the nineties surely would say that one of the most influential developments this decade is the Internet. The Internet has given everyone, regardless of age, access to never before imagined volumes of knowledge. Undoubtedly, if someone had the time to search, they could find anything they needed. Pornography, car racing, multi-player games, chat rooms, and shopping malls are just a finite portion of the content of the Internet. While some content is certainly beneficial to today’s Internet society, a large portion condones, encourages, and develops negative contributions to everyday life. One such issue, the avocation of illegal drug use through websites, Usenet, email, and countless other media plagues our society, especially the impressionable youth. The encouragement of drug use, and avocation of different methods of drug use enhancement is certainly harmful to society; the real question at hand is whether the U.S. government, or any institution for that matter, has an ethical authority to censor, regulate, maintain, or altogether ban sites that advocate illegal drug use.
With a simple search on the Netscape version of the Excite search engine, one can find a veritable gold mine of information on illegal drug use. Illegal drug use, in fact, seems to be the only major topic of interest in these searches. Take for example a search on “Marijuana”: 32700 links were returned on that search string alone, the top three all links to pro-marijuana use sites. One such site, High Times, has a magazine in publication as well. The content of these top three sites all tend to discuss the same issues: why drugs are good, why drugs should be legal, why we as a society should enjoy the benefits of using drugs, how to use drugs better, and how to maintain your health as you use drugs. Some websites actually sell drugs themselves, equipment to better use drugs, and drugs to make it look like a user does not really use drugs at all. While some people would instantly argue the existence of these obviously unethical knowledge bases, some Internet users would ask them to look deeper.
After scrutinizing some illegal drug use sites, one might find content that is less than malevolent in society’s general eye. One can find any number of health risk warnings, as well as sections pertaining...
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