williatw wrote:Diogenes wrote:williatw wrote:Men have a way of convincing themselves that the things they desire (like control of others) are "right" and "necessary" and "unavoidable".
I believe this is normally referred to as "Facts", "Reason", and
"Experience."
More like "rationalizations";
Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein
It isn't "rationalization" when we have real world experiments that confirm the phenomena. Drugs brought down the 4,000 year old Emperor form of government in China, a mere 70 years after Opium was legalized.
williatw wrote:
Diogenes wrote:Let us give up on the fantasy that men won't be governed by other men.
No such condition exists for any length of time.
Once you accept the premise that there WILL BE a government, then you can move on to ponder how it must operate A fundamental postulate is this. Any government unwilling to insure it's existence, will not exist for long, but will instead be replaced by one that will insure it's own existence.
Agreed. But I also agree with the statement(s) that:
Henry David Thoreau (1817–62)
QUOTATION: I heartily accept the motto,—“That government is best which governs least;”
http://www.bartleby.com/73/753.html
and:
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.
http://napoleonlive.info/did-you-know/w ... l-address/
some dispute whether Washington said this.
Neither statement is in conflict with the need to ban drugs. Did they not exist, we would not need laws to control them, but as they do, we have to deal with them, just as we have to deal with rape, robbery and murder.
Therefore a Minimal system of governance requires the need to ban drugs.
williatw wrote:
Pot use which was/is the focal point of the WOD is decidedly not a "fundamental threat to the continued existence of a government";
The philosophical foundation upon which the legalization of pot rests, legalizes all other drugs. As I have said so many times that I am tired of saying it, "Pot, is the camel's nose in the tent."
williatw wrote:
the WOD probably caused the huge spike in the THC content of pot surely didn't prevent it. Your favorite example China's massive Opium addiction wasn't caused by lack of government action, it was created by government action. The British government conquering China and forcing Opium down people's throats any way they could.
You do realize, that I regard that statement as utter nonsense. Drugs don't need British soldiers grabbing people and forcing them to smoke opium, they will market themselves with no further input of energy. Do not forget, I have substantial experience hanging out with drug addicts. I have WATCHED people who never smoked crack turn into addicts. Nobody came along and shoved the crack pipe in their mouths, they just saw that other people enjoyed it, and then they wanted to try it themselves.
williatw wrote:
There was nothing "natural" about the progression it was a deliberately engineered by the British government to produce the effect it did to offset their balance of trade from exporting vast quantities of Chinese Silk. Opium (along with pot) were legal in Britain & the United States at the time and hadn't produced anywhere like the level of deleterious effects.
I have also addressed this point until I am fed up with repeating myself. You and others keep comparing very different circumstances and asserting an equality which is false.
The United States had no drug laws prior to 1906 because they didn't need them. They didn't need them because they weren't having problems with abuse of drugs. They weren't having problems with the abuse of drugs because prior to the 1860s, there was very little supply, and very little knowledge among the public regarding the pleasurable effects of narcotics. Cocainoids were virtually unknown at this time, and what narcotics were available were mostly regarded as "Medicine."
Apart from that, there were widespread and common religion based disdains for the use of mind altering substances among the general populace.
The Civil War changed everything. Not only did it massively spike the demand for Opiates and Cocainoids, it acquainted hundreds of thousands of people with the pleasurable effects of narcotic drugs. Various sources assert that there were 400,000 wounded soldiers who became victims of the
"Soldier's Disease."
Add to this efforts like
John Pemberton's beverages (~1865) which contained about
nine milligrams of cocaine per glass, and you can see how addiction was just starting to take off when people started noticing the problems caused by these drugs.
williatw wrote:
Diogenes wrote:What the War on Drugs does is keep the percentage of addiction from growing very much. It's been a hundred years, and addiction is still hovering around 2%.
Just as it likely was "around 2%" the 100yrs prior to the WOD and the 100yrs before that. No evidence the WOD is holding the line on anything just wishful thinking or "rationalizing".
It was very likely less than 0.00001 % prior to the Civil War. It *ROSE* to 2% due to the Civil war's priming of the drug supply/demand pump.
williatw wrote:
No the fault lies with the people who saw the problem of drug addiction not as a medical condition requiring medical treatment but as an excuse for a power grab and with the gullible public who went along with it; as long as the right sort (urban male minority youth) were the ones being targeted.
Is Terrorism also a medical condition? I argue it makes no difference to Human government what is the pathology of a threat, the fact is, a Human government must deal with a threat regardless of it's source or cause.
Your argument completely overlooks the fact that similarity to the human endocrine components used in natural bodily functions is why drugs operate on the human body. They are not normal to human existence, they are mockeries or distortions of needed and normal human hormones. They were evolved to resemble mammalian endocrinal secretions for the purpose of mitigating predation on the plant which evolved them as a defense mechanism.
You can't argue it's a "Medical condition" when those particular plant-version of the chemicals were never meant to be in the Human body at all, and especially not in the levels attained by using a drug.
Also if crime stats indicated inner city minority males were committing 3% of the overall crime, (which is about their percentage of the population) you would have a point. But from what I can see, their tendency to commit crime in all forms hovers around 40% of the total crime, which pretty much destroys any argument that they are singled out for persecution regarding drug crimes.
williatw wrote:
Again the fault lies with those who saw the Terrorist attack of 9/11 as an excuse to torpedo the Constitution and the frightened gullible gutless pu&%ys among the general public who sold their liberty down the river to feel "safe"; unworthy inheritors of our hard fought liberties. Do you think if during WWII if Boston (or any American city) had been hit with the exact sequence of "terrorist" attacks that the Boston Bomber did they would have practically shut down the whole city and told people to hide in their homes? Factories vital to war efforts shut down or even slowed down? Imagine what Hitler would have done if he had known that just a few bombs going off in a city or two or a plane crashing into a building or two would have paralyzed the American public with fright.
Because this message is already too long, i'm not going to address this other than to say it is a false equivalence argument.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —