Ronald Reagan, the Greatest President Of My Lifetime

[WizWom]

You are suggesting that a person can be "educated" to survive being strapped in a chair and electrocuted. (An Analogy for drug usage.)

Mr., you really, really, have no clue about drug use.

As I've said before, the typical user of drugs is productive. The typical user - even of the REALLY hard stuff, like Heroin, does not destroy their life. The typical drug user supports their habit from their earnings in their gainful employment.

The inner city "junkie" stereotype is a small and pathetic subset.

If that is so, how do you explain this?
http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/history/om/om15.htm Then, in 1906, the incredible happened. After over a hundred years of steady demoralization, with half her population opium addicts, or worse still, making enormous profits out of the trade, China determined to give up opium.

Badly researched propaganda.
China had a population of about 400 million. http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/c ... lation.htm
"By 1906, China had 13.5 million addicts consuming some 39,000 tons of opium. With bountiful supplies and legal retail sales, China had 27 percent of its adult males addicted to opium--a level of mass addiction never equaled by any nation before or since." http://opioids.com/opium/history/index.html

27% of adult males, and a total of <5% of the population. An ORDER OF MAGNITUDE less than the propaganda.

[TallDave]

27% of adult males, and a total of <5% of the population. An ORDER OF MAGNITUDE less than the propaganda.

Good find. That's the big problem the drug warriors are facing -- their decades of shameless lying is finally catching up with them in the Internet Age. It's unfortunate because they told so many lies about marijuana that kids end up questioning whether even cocaine or heroin are really dangerous either.

You do however have a point. There really is no way to tell exactly what the percentage of addicts were in China back in 1906. It does however miss a point. It was enough to seriously screw up China and fill them with a determination to eradicate the stuff to the point of killing addicts.

The U.S. was determined to eradicate alcohol around that time. Germany later became convinced they had to eradicate the Jewish disease (Hitler actually referred to them as "tuberculosis germs"). Just because people think there's a problem doesn't mean the use of state force is the answer.

[Diogenes]

Mr., you really, really, have no clue about drug use.

As I've said before, the typical user of drugs is productive. The typical user - even of the REALLY hard stuff, like Heroin, does not destroy their life. The typical drug user supports their habit from their earnings in their gainful employment.

The inner city "junkie" stereotype is a small and pathetic subset.

If that is so, how do you explain this?
http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/history/om/om15.htm Then, in 1906, the incredible happened. After over a hundred years of steady demoralization, with half her population opium addicts, or worse still, making enormous profits out of the trade, China determined to give up opium.

Badly researched propaganda.
China had a population of about 400 million. http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/c ... lation.htm
"By 1906, China had 13.5 million addicts consuming some 39,000 tons of opium. With bountiful supplies and legal retail sales, China had 27 percent of its adult males addicted to opium--a level of mass addiction never equaled by any nation before or since." http://opioids.com/opium/history/index.html

27% of adult males, and a total of <5% of the population. An ORDER OF MAGNITUDE less than the propaganda.

As i've said before, the quote comes from the "DrugLibrary" which I believe is a website that MSimon (the most prominent drug libertarian here.) is fond of quoting from. I make no claims on it's accuracy, just that it is cited by others arguing in favor of drug legalization.

That being said, let us say the number is as you say, 27% of adult males, (who let's face it, are the only people who really mattered in 1906 china.) and so therefore this is acceptable? You cut an enormous number in half, and it's still a pretty big number.

In any case, it still puts the lie to your argument, that drugs are no threat to society, and that the typical drug user (encompassing Marijuana as the majority, no doubt) is a productive worker.

I would also point out, that far more economic activity was dependent on manual labor at that time, and a reduction in available activity might very well be disproportionate to the numbers of people involved. (If it takes four men to carry a certain load, and one of them fails, then the other three cannot work either. )


In any case, you are arguing that having 27% of adult males in America addicted to drugs is oki doki. I don't understand how you expect to sell that theory.

[Diogenes]

27% of adult males, and a total of <5% of the population. An ORDER OF MAGNITUDE less than the propaganda.

Good find. That's the big problem the drug warriors are facing -- their decades of shameless lying is finally catching up with them in the Internet Age. It's unfortunate because they told so many lies about marijuana that kids end up questioning whether even cocaine or heroin are really dangerous either.

"Shameless lying" ? I quote from a source that MSimon uses, and *I'M* lying? How come it isn't lying when he does it? Apart from that, the 5% Number completely ignores the fact that most of the population that isn't an adult male contributes significantly less to the economic output of the nation.

In those days, the Adult males were the primary producers of economic output, and 1/4th of them were out of commission. Back when we had 25% of Americans out of work, we called it the "Great Depression." I can't imagine why the Chinese would object to that!

You do however have a point. There really is no way to tell exactly what the percentage of addicts were in China back in 1906. It does however miss a point. It was enough to seriously screw up China and fill them with a determination to eradicate the stuff to the point of killing addicts.

The U.S. was determined to eradicate alcohol around that time. Germany later became convinced they had to eradicate the Jewish disease (Hitler actually referred to them as "tuberculosis germs"). Just because people think there's a problem doesn't mean the use of state force is the answer.

Sorry, but I don't see the rationale for equating Opium and Jews, and I'm sorry for your sake that you do.

[Betruger]

E.G. I asked you why people are, according to you, incapable of comprehending and thus be readied for the potential dangers of drug use. What are the fundamental and most-significant (can't think of the right English word) differences here with e.g. Sex Ed?

I deal routinely with people who simply cannot comprehend the world around them, nor any attempts to explain it to them.

I don't buy it. Either the attempts are of shoddy method, or badly informed. No human being is immune to clear, transparent logic.

You are suggesting that a person can be "educated" to survive being strapped in a chair and electrocuted. (An Analogy for drug usage.)

How's that analogous? That's not pleasurable and not nearly survivable, and with drugs you strap yourself in the chair. Not someone else. You can look around today for evidence of what the consequences of "chair riding" are. Just like kids know what the consequences of whatever the fad du jour is (e.g. hanging yourself for some out of body experience or whatever); that's precisely why they try it, because they know the effects. All they need to be supplied with is more complete information, the full picture, not just the bright side of the moon.

I am saying that many if not most people can't survive it.

Totally uncomprehensive argument. Everyone is different and so are drugs.

Hell, many people nowadays can't even survive Alcohol, and often take a lot of other people with them on the way out.

Personal responsibility.

I am saying that it is a theory which has DIRE consequences when put into practice. I am also saying those CONSEQUENCES are far worse than any benefit which may occur. 75,000 dead from alcohol per year, many of them innocents. It would get much worse with Cocaine and opium. Why anybody thinks it's a good idea to open another pandora's box, I simply don't understand.

That's obviously not the aim, no matter how much leverage you might get from pretending it is (and this is one more example of you failing to be impartial).
The aim is to encourage a population that's able to take care of itself without some permanent government intensive care. If you don't want to die or suffer, you don't ingest anything past its poisonous threshold. That's all there is to it. You don't need government to understand and follow that notion.

This is not bubonic plague. The bubonic plague is not episodic or regulated by the user's whims. America isn't some random country but a country founded on minimal government and maximum individual liberty and resourcefulness. The USA isn't China. Legal drugs wouldn't be designed and regulated and used the Chinese way.

Do you not pay attention to MSimon's posts on this issue? Usage of the above products were creating massive addiction nationwide in the early part of the 20th century. That is the reason such products were BANNED. Apparently the American Character wasn't enough to protect the populace.

Key word is "wasn't"; it's past tense. America today and in the future isn't America in those days.
I just picked one of the many compounds. I've never argued for some one-size fits all scheme, but the quoted post puts it in a nutshell, in response to your "culture cannot trump physiology". Which is akin to saying we have no free will because we're merely chemical machines. Which excludes any possible flexibility in behavior WRT chemicals ingested or otherwise used; never mind progress in using them. Which I don't know what planet you're living on to conclude that. When I last asked you to explain how people were inherently incapable of learning the potential dangers of drugs (...) your only answer was that you "saw it with your own eyes" and added that alcohol was much the same. I can't quantify them but the overwhelming majority of people I've known (as kids then but people-to-be no less) knew a sick and ruined man when they saw one. Especially when it's for reasons so obvious as drug use, addiction. So your "saw it with your own eyes" justification for people's incapability to know ahead of time the perils of drug use is not credible.
I knew it as a kid, I know it know, friends and family knew it then and now, and you know it too. All people have to do is look around. So the "solution" to the "problem" of people not being able to know ahead of time is to simply look around you for clear evidence; whether under prohibition or legalization. Not only is that particular argument of yours not realistic, it's also non-functional.


Again in a nutshell: The majority of people who ruin their lives with alcohol have only themselves to blame. Starting up on drugs is always a personal responsibility. There's nothing to set this apart from any other instance of that dynamic, e.g. first drink of alcohol you take responsibility for your actions further down the slippery drunken slope.

And uncomprehensive prohibition does nothing to advance what must happen: a comprehensive understanding of our chemical workings, which inevitably leads to the scheme I am arguing for. It also, as implemented now, favors a populace that's less self-reliant and acclimatized to increasingly invasive government. Not at all American. An America that's at peace and healthy only because its population's told to be so, is only a token America.


Anyway this discussion keeps going in circles. All your arguments are the entrenched type, considering only those facts and principles that favor you. E.G. You never do the reasonable thing and take both your side + the other side and weigh the relative costs and benefits of prohibition today and in the foreseeable future (incl. e.g. the govt's infringement on people's rights, or the completely arbitrary nature of legislating what's allowed or not) versus legalization (incl e.g. realistic legalization schemes instead of straw men) to synthesize a realistic solution -- Because the drug war today isn't the solution. "Haven't you been listening to MSimon?".
On top of that my cumulative impression is that you have some kind of cultural blinders on. You speak from insider bias. E.G. the "think of the children" P.K.Dick anecdotes.

[choff]

In one neighbourhood in my city, every single night the firefighters and ambulance services resurrect at least one addict turning blue from an OD. In that one neighbourhood are 1000 government programs for the poor and addicted. If it wasn't for the efforts of these people you would have at least one more dead heroin addict every day 365 days a year, all in an area of probably less than 50,000 residents.

If you were giving these drugs to baby Harp seals Greenpeace would be all over you. If these were animals the SPCA would take half of them to animal shelters and euthanize the other half, but these are humans, so nobody cares.

When some maniac goes berserk with a machine gun we don't legalize it with the expectation fewer people will be killed from tolerance of berserkers.

If all the illegal drugs were eradicated, then addicts would suffer from going cold turkey for a few weeks at most, then they'd start coming back to life. For every addict that is self medicating to deal with personal suffering, there are another ten for whom drugs cause the personal suffering.

The legalization crowd are running a version of 'THE BIG LIE.' They think that if they keep repeating it people will be shocked into submission. The BC Marijuana party has never drawn more than 5% of the vote, even less from an alliance with the Green Party, this in one of the most laid back liberal places on earth. If you can't make it legal here, good luck anywere else.

In those US neighbourhoods that do make it legal you're going to see one crowd of people moving out and another sort of crowd moving in, goodbye property values.

[Betruger]

"The legalization crowd". You're not talking with a crowd here. You're talking with a few people who don't group-think: TallDave, Tom Ligon, MSimon, myself, and others who'll forgive me for (or be grateful that) I forgot.

The Berserker analogy is bunk. Guns aren't chemical agents. Shooting people is not a private individual matter. The reality of gun law in the USA is that any citizen who meets criteria can have certain types of firearms, and is then free to do what he will with them, and pay for any abuse of same. Nothing like your analogy.

Same with the baby seal comparison. A person effectively injects the drugs into the animal. The animal didn't ask for drugs (it's not analogous). If it had, it would be analogous, and in fact that's what horses do with that funny snort they jolt themselves with.

If all the illegal drugs were eradicated, then addicts would suffer from going cold turkey for a few weeks at most, then they'd start coming back to life.

If all people were as informed about drugs as they are about AIDS and other STDs (to paraphrase T.Ligon: why don't we just ban random and/or infectious sex? Then again that's not a good analogy either: it takes two to tango), if drugs were designed and produced in quality and legalized comprehensively as guns are, if the neurochemistry was understood as it eventually would be in legalized circumstances (moreso than under prohibition), you would have a country (not Canada, the specific context is the USA here) dealing with drugs at least as well as it does now with the dysfunctional "war on drugs".
Which of the above conditionals are unfeasible? Is that public service of informing people something which govt funding on par with the current WoD's funding couldn't achieve?

For every addict that is self medicating to deal with personal suffering, there are another ten for whom drugs cause the personal suffering.

Personal responsibility.

If you can't make it legal here, good luck anywere else.

Again right and wrong isn't up for vote or peer pressure.

A major tenet of the authentic USA is an inherent casualty of drug prohibition as we have it.

[Tom Ligon]

Man, has this thread drifted.

Diogenes, Choff, etc, please note that I'm opposed to the use of recreational drugs, detest even being tipsy, and can think of a long list of drugs that are life-destroyers. I was raised learning the horror stories in a society carrying on a war on drugs, bodies on the street at least weekly. It would never have occurred to me that our strategy was wrong ...

... until I read an old interview with Barry Goldwater, of all the unlikely sources.

Now that had to make me stop and think.

The thinking ain't over. I said to Diogenes a page or two back that I was not convinced we should do this with heroin and a relatively long list of other hard drugs with very bad reputations.

This debate may be tedious, but it is worth having.

The Chinese case was that the drug dealers were the British. One government to another, the Chinese could ask the British to cut it out. I would propose that in our current situation, you can ask the drug cartels as nicely as you please to cut it out and you are not going to have any response, except maybe uproarious laughter. The drugs will continue to flow unless you are prepared to get really, really nasty. Unconstitutionally so.

There have been some failed attempts to have legal drug distribution. Methadone was supposed to un-hook heroin addicts, but turned out to be more addictive than heroin.

Cigarettes contain a drug possibly more addictive than opiates, nicotine. In WWII the army passed out cigs by the boatload, literally. The Chinese government has a tobacco monopoly, and was pushing them on the population. The US is now actively discouraging their use and is pushing consumption down. China may just be figuring it out.

We've already talked about booze. It is used by maybe 80% of the population. It is taxed, regulated, and even the makers encourage moderation. In the early history of this country, in some areas, I've seen reports of alcohol abuse levels in the adult male population that probably topped that 27% of adult male opium addicts in China. Somehow we beat that.

Heroin was the big threat when I was a kid. It faded into the background as other drugs came to prominince. LSD was in for a while. Cocaine. Crack. PCP. Meth. A whole bunch that have come and gone so fast we never learned their names. They come and go. Some have shown some staying power. At the moment some of the worst are actually legal drugs illegally obtained, especially Oxycontin, which makes addicts so desperate they make heroin addicts look tame.

The users do not care that it is illegal or dangerous. There is only one way to change this. Change public attitudes. We have done it before.

If attitudes are changed, the drug dealers are out of business.

I don't know how we'll end up dealing with it, but it seems pretty likely that MaryJane is gonna be legalized, at least in selected states, with some level of regulation. Thats going to be the test case. It will be complicated by claims that MJ is actually beneficial. I would point out the same claims were originally made of tobacco.

[choff]

I don't know which offends peoples sensibilities more, the suggestion of the Chinese solution(kill all the users) or my suggestion(eradicate the crops). The drug war in Mexico has reached a state of violence where either the drug cartels overthrow the government or the government wipes out the cartels using marshall law or unconstitutional means.

But just imagine, if all the coca crops and marijuana crops suddenly failed, wiped out. Overnight, the Mexican drug cartels and government are left with no money to kill for and nothing to seize control of. What do they use as a motivation to keep up the carnage, crisis solved.

Also, just imagine, the effect on society if after a few weeks of withdrawal pains, the entire population was 100% stone cold sober. Has anyone ever considered the collective subconsious effect that drug abuse currently has on societal values and public perceptions. Instead of trying to medicate national problems away, all of a sudden everyone wants to confront them head on, because its the only coping option left to them.

[choff]

Regarding this business of free will, during my high school years I had the misfortune of watching people using a variety of drugs for the very first time. My impression was that most of these people couldn't even define free will. The clique leader would just do it when offered and the rest would follow without a moments thought or hesitation. A flock of sheep would look like a debating society in comparison. Same with tobacco, they'd see their parents and parents friends smoking and just go over and start themselves, the adults wouldn't even react.

Advertisers have understood this herd mentality in humans for at least a hundred years. All they have to do is put it on the market, advertise, get some movie star to do it and voila. Most people actually mistrust people who show hesitancy and aren't impulsive. In one high school study, the students were given pictures of criminals, atheletes and nerdy kids. When told to rate them in terms of popularity, the atheletes were on top, criminals second, nerds dead last.

[Betruger]

I don't understand the last bit about ranked archetypes.

[Diogenes]

E.G. I asked you why people are, according to you, incapable of comprehending and thus be readied for the potential dangers of drug use. What are the fundamental and most-significant (can't think of the right English word) differences here with e.g. Sex Ed?

I deal routinely with people who simply cannot comprehend the world around them, nor any attempts to explain it to them.

I don't buy it. Either the attempts are of shoddy method, or badly informed. No human being is immune to clear, transparent logic.

HA ! From my experience, Logic is the method that works the worst! Pure raw emotion seems to be the only argument that will motivate most people. Even people who claim to be "reasonable" are swayed far more easily by an appeal to the heart than an appeal to the mind. This drug issue is a prime example. For the opposition it always boils down to the emotional decree "nobody is going to tell ME how I should live." They personalize it, then they attempt to wax eloquently in righteous indignation.

You are suggesting that a person can be "educated" to survive being strapped in a chair and electrocuted. (An Analogy for drug usage.)

How's that analogous? That's not pleasurable and not nearly survivable, and with drugs you strap yourself in the chair. Not someone else. You can look around today for evidence of what the consequences of "chair riding" are. Just like kids know what the consequences of whatever the fad du jour is (e.g. hanging yourself for some out of body experience or whatever); that's precisely why they try it, because they know the effects. All they need to be supplied with is more complete information, the full picture, not just the bright side of the moon.

You are trying to force the analogy. The only part which is analogous is the fact that some people can survive it, and others can't, and you won't know which is which until they try to ride the lightning. This is exactly the situation with drugs and addiction.

I am saying that many if not most people can't survive it.

Totally uncomprehensive argument. Everyone is different and so are drugs.

Hell, many people nowadays can't even survive Alcohol, and often take a lot of other people with them on the way out.

Personal responsibility.

Yeah, something like that would sure help, but that is the nexus of the problem. Some people are physiologically incapable of being responsible once their "pleasure button" gets pushed by some drug or other. Just saying that people should exhibit "personal responsibility" will do nothing to alleviate the 75,000 deaths per year from alcohol, and would certainly do nothing to stem the tide of millions more should opium be available legally.

I am saying that it is a theory which has DIRE consequences when put into practice. I am also saying those CONSEQUENCES are far worse than any benefit which may occur. 75,000 dead from alcohol per year, many of them innocents. It would get much worse with Cocaine and opium. Why anybody thinks it's a good idea to open another pandora's box, I simply don't understand.

That's obviously not the aim, no matter how much leverage you might get from pretending it is (and this is one more example of you failing to be impartial).

That is not the aim? Says who? You are proposing the theory that individuals have a right to use ANY chemical they want. Indeed, if you put a limit on it, it blows the whole theory, because any kind of limit implies it's not a right in the first place. Sure, you might not WANT millions of dead people, but that is the unavoidable consequence of the theory.

The aim is to encourage a population that's able to take care of itself without some permanent government intensive care. If you don't want to die or suffer, you don't ingest anything past its poisonous threshold. That's all there is to it. You don't need government to understand and follow that notion.

How much rabies virus would be a safe dosage?

This is not bubonic plague. The bubonic plague is not episodic or regulated by the user's whims. America isn't some random country but a country founded on minimal government and maximum individual liberty and resourcefulness. The USA isn't China. Legal drugs wouldn't be designed and regulated and used the Chinese way.

No, drugs are not bubonic plague, but for some people, they might as well be. Many individuals cannot withstand contact with drugs. It kills them, just as a disease might. In fact, some people call it a disease. To those who are immuned, it is not a threat, but the basis of our laws is that all are treated equally, so if you ban it for some, you must ban it for all. (unless of course you go the licensing route, which is still an idea I haven't completely thought through. )

Do you not pay attention to MSimon's posts on this issue? Usage of the above products were creating massive addiction nationwide in the early part of the 20th century. That is the reason such products were BANNED. Apparently the American Character wasn't enough to protect the populace.

Key word is "wasn't"; it's past tense. America today and in the future isn't America in those days.

HA! You can say that again! By every measure, we are a more wicked, deceitful, narcissistic self absorbed bunch of spoiled rotten children then ever existed in the history of this nation. We are far less ready and able to deal with legalized poison than were our far more sturdy and sensible ancestors.

I just picked one of the many compounds. I've never argued for some one-size fits all scheme, but the quoted post puts it in a nutshell, in response to your "culture cannot trump physiology". Which is akin to saying we have no free will because we're merely chemical machines. Which excludes any possible flexibility in behavior WRT chemicals ingested or otherwise used; never mind progress in using them. Which I don't know what planet you're living on to conclude that.

Let someone Dope you up with anesthesia and tell me that you can remain conscious if you want to. PHtphtphtphtphtpth! (that was a rasberry. )

When I last asked you to explain how people were inherently incapable of learning the potential dangers of drugs (...) your only answer was that you "saw it with your own eyes" and added that alcohol was much the same. I can't quantify them but the overwhelming majority of people I've known (as kids then but people-to-be no less) knew a sick and ruined man when they saw one. Especially when it's for reasons so obvious as drug use, addiction. So your "saw it with your own eyes" justification for people's incapability to know ahead of time the perils of drug use is not credible.

Sure, it makes perfect sense that girls want to grow up to be junkies and disease riddled prostitutes. Yeah, that's what they WANTED to happen, because they knew ahead of time how to realize their dream through drug addiction. The only alternative to this argument is that they DIDN'T know it would wreck their life. Which of the two is more plausible?

I knew it as a kid, I know it know, friends and family knew it then and now, and you know it too. All people have to do is look around. So the "solution" to the "problem" of people not being able to know ahead of time is to simply look around you for clear evidence; whether under prohibition or legalization. Not only is that particular argument of yours not realistic, it's also non-functional.

You are arguing that people COULD know. I am arguing that they DON'T know. Your argument is correct, but so is mine. The fact that they COULD know, is not the same as they DO know. Some people are smart and can see by examples that they shouldn't go down that path. Other people don't believe it could happen to them because they are them, not those other people to which bad stuff happens.

It is a fallacious way of thinking, but it is a very common fallacy.

Again in a nutshell: The majority of people who ruin their lives with alcohol have only themselves to blame.

Except it misses the point that had they never been exposed to it, they never would have developed an addiction to it.

Starting up on drugs is always a personal responsibility. There's nothing to set this apart from any other instance of that dynamic, e.g. first drink of alcohol you take responsibility for your actions further down the slippery drunken slope.

Sigh. Let me try another anecdote.

In the 1890s when the Nobel prizewinner, Robert Koch, returned triumphant from the Indies as a hero, a spoilsport awaited him at Munich in the person of the old professor of hygiene, Max Pettenkofer, who had made Munich the cleanest city in Europe by means of effective sanitary services. “Your bacillus can do nothing, my dear Koch. What matters is the organism. If your theory were correct I should be a dead man in 24 hours,” he said, snatching from Koch´s hands a test tube containing a pure culture of cholera germs. In front of his horrified colleagues he swallowed the lot! Koch was the only one to fall ill.

Cholera would have killed most people. This guy got away with it. Do you think he understood how reckless it was before he did it? This is exactly the sort of "Personal Responsibility" that people exhibit towards drugs. They don't know that it will likely kill them, some people get away with it and suffer no ill effects, and they think they know what they are doing.

And uncomprehensive prohibition does nothing to advance what must happen: a comprehensive understanding of our chemical workings, which inevitably leads to the scheme I am arguing for. It also, as implemented now, favors a populace that's less self-reliant and acclimatized to increasingly invasive government. Not at all American. An America that's at peace and healthy only because its population's told to be so, is only a token America.

Being regulated away from an infectious disease is not the same as suffering the rule of a dictator.

Anyway this discussion keeps going in circles. All your arguments are the entrenched type, considering only those facts and principles that favor you. E.G. You never do the reasonable thing and take both your side + the other side and weigh the relative costs and benefits of prohibition today and in the foreseeable future (incl. e.g. the govt's infringement on people's rights, or the completely arbitrary nature of legislating what's allowed or not) versus legalization (incl e.g. realistic legalization schemes instead of straw men) to synthesize a realistic solution -- Because the drug war today isn't the solution. "Haven't you been listening to MSimon?".

For years. I finally got tired of ignoring him on this issue and decided to speak up. Also, the argument isn't going around in circles, we've moved into a couple of new areas. I'll point out two.

1. The Massive addiction in the population of China serves as a real world example of your argument put into practice.

2. The pragmatic realization that no form of government can tolerate a substantial portion of it's population addicted to drugs and survive.

On top of that my cumulative impression is that you have some kind of cultural blinders on. You speak from insider bias. E.G. the "think of the children" P.K.Dick anecdotes.

We all have cultural biases, but my arguments are not only theoretical and philosophically consistent, but pragmatic as well.

[Diogenes]

I'll have to respond to the rest later. I gotta go.

[icarus]

Reality is for people who can't handle drugs.

Evolution takes care of them eventually, the state cannot protect them forever.

[Betruger]

From my experience, Logic is the method that works the worst!

The conclusions from your experience are wrong. Emotion isn't random or chaotic. It's based on the same premise as reason: causality. Reason and emotion stem from the same thing. Someone who refuses to admit plain sense doesn't make that sense any less true; another fallacious argument. I mean what a ridiculous argument. If not reason (no matter how incorrect the reasoning), what's the basis for something being accepted as "true"? It's always causality, logic, reason. It doesn't matter what the flavor is.
...
I'm not arguing any more. It's a waste of time. You don't make sense. You sound like someone who hasn't been out of America or was impermeable to those outsider insights; a major handicap. There's fallacious bits all over your posts and I'm no grammar teacher with a correction fetish.
There's nothing to gain from this: you don't make policy, I don't either, policy makers aren't reading this; and above all I'm not learning anything from arguing with you. Except pretty good evidence that a good part of Americans want a new country that's not true to the founding principles.


E.G.

Cholera would have killed most people. This guy got away with it. Do you think he understood how reckless it was before he did it?

GEE I DON'T KNOW. How could you possibly know, nowadays, that drugs are dangerous?