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I see a country filled with people who've been conned over multiple generations slowly, steadily, but very surely into abandonment of their own true meaning and importance, ready to surrender the very life they live to whimsy and fate believing there's no point. That's not a nation to turn into potheads.
The nation that began and ended prohibition is not the same as today. They were much more level headed. They were much more religious, civic minded, conscious of community and neighborhood, and better behaved. They didn't suffer from massive class warfare enabled and exploited pathologies boiling down to abdication of the will. Massive numbers of single parent families, undereducated demotivated young people, people who voted not for Obama but against the media created idea of George Bush and made the first stand-alone complex presidency ever, and don't seem to care or notice. That's 2009, not the 20s and 30s.
We're not ready. Our people are already too willing to crawl into a hole in the Internet or television as it is. A biochemical one will only make things immeasurably worse for that kind of society. At least with the net and tv, we have a chance to inject them with a wake-up call. I don't suppose we can spike the pot with some sort of confidence booster and motivator and even if we could, do we want a society where free will is trumped by a pharmaceutical system of total thought and mood control? Again, we need to be very careful here.
Who are you to make that determination?
Clearly, many Americans feel they're ready. And despite generations of more and more draconian drug policy, we haven't put a dent in drug use.
It's time to devise an exit strategy from this war.
I don't believe that Marijuana creates a compelling need for the government to become involved.
I've never tried it. If anyone cares I used to be against legalization. However through discussions on this forum I came to the realization that marijuana should be decriminalized.
People prone to abusing marijuana would likely be abusing something else (alcohol, etc.) if not using marijuana. And let's be frank, they're probably using marijuana. Because if you want it, you can get it.
We're wasting out time trying to ban it.
And very likely stimulating demand ("forbidden fruit") among those most likely to abuse it (e.g., rebellious teenagers).
The current war on drugs has done almost nothing to abate the use of drugs. A new strategy is needed.
The cure is far worse than the disease.
Of course, she's just an accomplice to Obama's and Barney Frank's desire for "legalization", since a stoned populace is easier to control and to deceive.
It's a big mistake to think that increasing taxes helps anything. It just makes govt bigger, greedier and more intrusive.
Who is society to make the determination that one is allowed to get shot to pieces on a battlefield on the other side of the world for a war many of them couldn't find on a map and don't have any care for, but they can't have a drink when they're eighteen?
We crossed the libertarian bridge and burned it a long time ago when we decided as a society that rights are not unlimited and absolute. You have every right to cry "fire" in a crowded theater under the First Amendment, but speech is an action and we hold people responsible for theirs and if yours induces others to death there's a certain culpability. We already as a society have decided that what we do to ourselves is not inherently beyond the interests of the society that must put up with the results.
If we had, do you really think we'd do anything with drug overdose cases but let them die because they decided to take the drugs? We care for them, we eat the medical costs when they have no insurance, we send them to treatment or jail or both. We look ahead to the consequences of human susceptibility to temptation to stupidity versus getting high and being a drain on society and say that there's enough people willing to do it while illegal never mind legal. Fear of punishment is all that there is left between many people in our country and doing anything that pops into their heads because positive cause and effect they've stopped believing in.
A dispirited people dumb enough to elect Obama (with the idea that he would save us as opposed to wake us up as to how big our pants are) are not a people to be doling out neurochemical monkeywrenches to. You start down that path, and bet your ass they will be tell you, "go home, smoke a joint, leave the work of government to us..." and we already are doing that and we got Obama for it. We as a country screwed up in putting that sorry excuse for a middle management reject in the most powerful office in the land. What better could we do high on pot? People need to get sober straight and quick. Crunch time.
I don't say that people shouldn't do pot because they're too stupid to handle it, but because it will increase their natural stupidity opening them to everything else. Whether you like it or not, people have a gigantic stupid quotient. They also have the ability to do great and nearly superhuman things. They don't do those great nearly superhuman things while demotivated, and they definitely don't do them while high, and high is not a state to clean up your outlook on life.
[b]Uncomfortable fact[/b]: up until the mid to late 70s it was actually legal and state regulated in one European nation, covered by psychologist and doctor reviews of performers, legal contracts, government protections. Unsightly. Not what we'd like. Something we cannot approve of. But for a time, it was working for some people. The operative part is SOME.
My point is: what do you want to gamble on society being ready to handle it? Are a few people you know ready? What's the numbers we can reasonably extrapolate that will? What won't? What will the likely fallout be from those who can't? What will society have to do to cover those effects?
There's plenty of people who can handle alcohol, sex, fighting, and all the other hotbutton things at an earlier age, but the questions are, how many out of the total, and those who can't, what will be the effects on them, and what are we going to have to do because as a society we've decided that even if the damage is self-inflicted by choice, we can't stand by and not help?
For what it is worth, I am against casual sex even within a marriage for all the damage it can do when both people aren't into it and it turns out often enough into something that wasn't as great as either of you thought it would. I tell people I know to stop giving a damn about it. [b]When it is time, when it is ready, it will happen.[/b] Anticipation is not always a good thing. Sometimes people can only see what they want to be, not what was the last seventy times, and [b]they let themselves down again by forcing the moment[/b]. If your relationship is sound, she or he will be there when the time is right. Have faith.
But... they are adults and we as a society have decided there's a general age below which we're not willing to gamble and above which we don't bloody care unless it is for vicarious enjoyment. We lie to ourselves because we don't want to admit that we weren't capable of screwing at twelve and doing it with flair and total coolness. We want desperately to see ourselves as hot and smart and beyond our years. It's always [b]other[/b] people who are scarred for life. So we say that sex for young people is emotionally damaging even though we know it couldn't be any more damaging for them than it would have been for us. So either we dangerously deceive ourselves which is not good for keeping one's moral ground when one's own kids hit the age of interest, or we play a hypocrite game given away by the fact that sex one day before at seventeen is considered emotionally traumatizing and the next day at eighteen is somehow okay by the passage of 24 hours.
Ask most women about their first time and I guarantee you they won't believe that at all. Don't think people don't notice and lose respect for the previous generation on some level. Note that we may have laws against sex below eighteen but on a personal level, we're way more permissive every passing year. Our emotional response becomes more and more muted. Sooner or later, we'll not find a movement to change the age of consent laws beyond the pale. We will resist it less and less. Our moral outrage will get less as our hypocrisy increases the screaming of our conscience and in embarrassment we cannot find the voice to even say, "probably not a good idea". Dino's understanding of sex between men and boys will be common, accepted, expected even. What in the hell will get a rise out of our spider sense then?
Somehow, this gamble generally works. Most people eighteen and older who have sex manage to not totally mess up everything for themselves. They manage not to have complexes feeling like victims of the other person's manipulations and they manage not to get a poor body image and poor self image, and they manage not to all get pregnant without being ready and not to transmit massive amounts of STDs, and they manage not to go through three marriages and ten "relationships"... Or not because the news tells me there's a lot of 30-somethings who are totally neurotic, obsessed, and hating themselves and every partner they take into bed for a quickie.
I often wonder how much of our energies are devoted to cleaning up the messes we make by rushing in where angels fear to tread. As bad as things are, they aren't that bad. Things of great consequence should be treated lightly. Things of small consequence treated seriously. Sweat the small stuff. There's a reason to.
Oh come on. That's right out of the liberal talking points on the news throughout the 80s and we all know that it isn't true. The battle against drugs through education and law enforcement has definitely turned the nation from where it was headed. Once it was being posited by straight-laced university futurist types who never did any drugs and never drank, that in the future we'd have legal drug use of most any kind, and delivered by the pharmaceutical industry, and computer controlled doses, and all the rest of the wishful thinking in total denial of the human race's nature as if we'd nosh on pate, shoot up, giggle like idiots, not get angry over a social faux pas, and then eaten up over it with biochemical destabilization helping turn around and murder someone.
[b]We do that all the time without drugs or alcohol[/b]. Why decrease inhibitions?
People don't do drugs just to get high. They do them to avoid dealing with a world they've been steadily conned through near omnipresent messages throughout culture and media that tell them the world is too hard. That their job is too hard. That their life is too hard. Everything is so unfair. They have no future. No hope. No matter how hard they try, there's no point.
Now how much they believe that varies all over, but it is there in the back of their minds like a little cartoon devil on the shoulder telling them to ignore the angel on the other shoulder. It's okay to give up. Get stoned. You'll feel better. It'll make you funnier. It'll loosen you up. People will like you more. Pay no attention to the nagging sense of self-preservation telling you to take control of your damn life.
And isn't that another thing modern society has been trying to beat into us? That it isn't important if we're good people? That it isn't important that we can look at ourselves in the mirror straight? That all that matters is what other people think of us?
Marcus Aurelius: [quote]I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others. If then a god or a wise teacher should present himself to a man and bid him to think of nothing and to design nothing which he would not express as soon as he conceived it, he could not endure it even for a single day. So much more respect have we to what our neighbours shall think of us than to what we shall
think of ourselves. [/quote]
So it isn't new, but we certainly take this to new heights today. We make ourselves superficially relevant to others and almost not at all to ourselves.
I'm sure you're being funny, but there's some people who'd gladly do it. Imagine the government selling them because dealers right now will shoot cops without too much thought. No one likes tax collectors. You think there won't be massive underground sales to avoid and a criminal underworld to go with it and violence? The only way to make it happen is to make goverment the exclusive dealer. Consider the nightmare boobs we have had running this nation one way or another since the sixties, especially the current lot, selling drugs. People are already bamboozled enough without their neural processing being screwed to hell and gone. Forget anything but THX-1138 meets 1984 if that happens.
I'll sing along with those that say legalize drugs. Here is my drug platform:
1. Legalize absolutely everything for anyone of age to use.
2. Make it illegal to be under the influence of any drug at the workplace. Is a safety hazard to others. I'd do this for EVERY job, no matter how mundane. Make people under the influence at work liable for mandatory immediate loss of their job without appeal. Perhaps let them be re-hired after a year or so.
3. Let every single individual who suffers illness or disability from their drug use liable for their own medical bills. Let the government pay only for rehabilitation and recovery from addiction, but only a maximum of 3 tries.
4. Tax the hell out of them! Lay a big ass tax on all drugs not sold for medicinal reasons and not prescribed by an MD.
5. Put them under the control of the FDA.
Of course this would never happen because we Americans are too soft hearted... we can't stand to see our wither and die,even if they aren't family.
[IMG]http://i43.tinypic.com/33dujc4.jpg[/IMG]
And just as clearly many more feel the country isn't.
[quote]People prone to abusing marijuana would likely be abusing something else (alcohol, etc.) if not using marijuana.[/quote]
What other drugs should we legalize just because they might use something else? perscription pain killers, morphine, meth, speed, LSD? That argument means nothing. Should we give criminals the right to own a gun just becuase they might use a knife, baseball bat, crowbar instead?
[quote]Who are you to make that determination?[/quote]
Who are you to make the determination that the country is ready? agian the argument means nothing.
There are some long significant long term side effects to marijuana use, lowered mental capacity is actually one. So there are good reasons to keep it illegal.
All I posted is that we need another strategy without suggesting what. What Michael D posted sounds a whole lot more logical than what we have.
i also know im living in a dream land if i thought the gov would actually use the dollars like they should be.... re; cig lawsuit.
Marijuana isn't that dangerous and we're going broke trying to keep it prohibited.
And prohibition is absolutely a liberal position. Its more than a little disheartening to see so many that consider themselves to be conservative abandon principle out of some misguided desire to run their neighbor's life for their neighbor's own good.
Finally Mexico is to blame for its violent crime because Mexico can't control its own population. There are too many Mexicans. Poor families down there have way too many kids. They grow up into a narco culture that sings Tejano music about loading your truck with crystal and coke and driving it to Chicago.
Don't let the problem get out of hand, if it hasn't [url=http://www.newsy.com/videos/on_the_border_of_the_drug_war/]already.[/url]