Talk-Polywell.org

Lugano, Switzerland –- A ground-breaking international collaborative survey, published today in Annals of Oncology, shows that more than half of the world’s population live in countries where regulations that aim to stem drug misuse leave cancer patients without access to opioid medicines for managing cancer pain.

http://classicalvalues.com/2013/11/let-them-have-pain/

There is some evidence that during prohibition, the average age of onset of alcohol use went down significantly, possibly because since alcohol sale was illegal in the first place, age restrictions on sales no longer applied. (A curious parallel can be seen today; young people take up using marijuana in greater percentages and at a younger age in the US than they do in the Netherlands, where marijuana is effectively legal but regulated.)

Alcohol prohibition was largely the work of religious conservatives who saw it as a way to combat the growing hedonism of urban dwellers; a return to old-time values and morality by attacking immoral lifestyles. The Protestant majority included in this category of 'social undesirables' the Catholics, whom they associated with alcohol use. Ironically, the passage of national prohibition marked the start of the Roaring Twenties, a period of drunken excess and sexual promiscuity that would not be equaled again until the Hippies.

Although alcohol use sharply declined immediately after the passage of prohibition, it immediately began an inexorable climb back up towards pre-ban usage levels. As public sentiment turned against prohibition, it became harder and harder to get juries to convict offenders. Finally admitting defeat, alcohol prohibition, America's "noble experiment", was repealed on December 5, 1933, and an unlucky thirteen years of government intrusion into people's lives ended in wild drunken celebrations.

http://thedea.org/prohibhistory.html

What none of the solutions—whether tending toward radical reform, or severe enforcement—addresses is the impulse that led Pavel to drugs in the first place. He is a lawyer who runs a market stall, a frustrated man who evidently prefers to corrode his veins rather than prolong his misery with sobriety and good health. Ultimately, the solution to the drug problem might be the solution to the problem of life, which is how to navigate our time here with minimal suffering. Unfortunately, the policy that offers that solution will be not a drug policy but an existential one, and it remains as elusive as ever.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113051/

In Vietnam, soldiers who drank heavily almost never used heroin, and the people who used heroin only rarely drank. The mystery of the gateway drug was revealed to be mostly a matter of choice and availability. One way or another, addicts found their way to the gate, and pushed on through.
http://addiction-dirkh.blogspot.com/201 ... study.html

MSimon wrote:Reposted from: viewtopic.php?p=108339#p108339

D,

I was wondering. At the same time China was going opium mad opiates (including heroin after it was invented) were freely available in the US. Could you explain why our use rates never approached China's? Links if you have them.

Diogenes wrote:

MSimon wrote:Reposted from: viewtopic.php?p=108339#p108339

D,

I was wondering. At the same time China was going opium mad opiates (including heroin after it was invented) were freely available in the US. Could you explain why our use rates never approached China's? Links if you have them.

No Simon, I will not explain it. I will not explain it because i've already explained it fifteen hundred times to you, but here you are again, asking me to explain it once more.


You don't want an explanation, you simply want to keep repeating your mantra about drugs previously being legal.


That is all you want to do. You do not want to debate, you want to propagandize. You want to deliberately mislead people into believing that drugs were not outlawed because they were killing people, but because of racism, or some desire to CONTROL people's vices or some other nonsensical thing.


And all of this distortion just to justify Marijuana.

Jccarlton wrote:

Diogenes,
Just because he's propagandizing on this stuff doesn't necessarily mean he's wrong. The more I look into the people who originally set up the drug laws in the first place, the loonier they get. Now Msimon might be obsessing about the pot thing. But the people who put the laws in place were worse, by far.

Jccarlton wrote: Looking back at all the outrageous claims made by the prohibition crowd for alchohol and extending that to drug use,

Jccarlton wrote: I have come to realize that much of the stuff I and probably most of is were taught in school was wrong and may be pure propaganda. Once you realize that those people were rigging their studies to get the results they wanted, it's hard to mak an objective judgment anymore.

Jccarlton wrote: The problem is that once one study gets rigged, they all become suspect. Yes, addiction is bad. But is addiction a symptom or the disease? Are those people sick because they are addicted or addicted because they are sick? The longer I look at it the more convinced I am that addiction is a symptom and not the disease itself. That the problem is not drug prohibition, but the control freak and the sick society they have made for us.

Diogenes wrote:. . .it is a very different thing to take a drug like alcohol which has been used by humanity for several thousand years, and for which there was an already existing high demand, and compare it to a more dangerous drug such as cocaine, for which the demand was only getting started.

Diogenes wrote:

Jccarlton wrote:

Diogenes,
Just because he's propagandizing on this stuff doesn't necessarily mean he's wrong. The more I look into the people who originally set up the drug laws in the first place, the loonier they get. Now Msimon might be obsessing about the pot thing. But the people who put the laws in place were worse, by far.

What on earth are you talking about? Those patent medicines were killing people right and left. The pure food and drug act of 1906 was passed in response to a need for accurate labeling on ingredients. Too many of various concoctions contained dangerous drugs. Indeed, most of the "magic ingredient" in them turned out to be opium or cocaine.

Jccarlton wrote: Looking back at all the outrageous claims made by the prohibition crowd for alchohol and extending that to drug use,

How do I know the studies were rigged? Because the food and rug act had as it's father a power hungry crusader:
http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/on ... wiley.aspx
Once you get one of the these guys on the warpath you can expect that reasoned arguments and facts go right out the window and that everything goes in the name of "The Cause." That's one pattern that keeps repeating itself. The one thing I do know is that somewhere along the line there are lies involved. Especially when said crusader has things like a poison squad and says he's being thwarted by unnamed "interests." I might not be able to find all the details through the accretions of a century of propaganda telling us how important the bureaucrats of the FDA are and how they keep us all safe, but I can spot the patterns that all the things seem to have. Maybe the Food And Drug Act didn't come about in pile of lies, propaganda, muckraking and backroom deals, but the evidence seems to show that that's exactly what happened and if it didn't it would be a first.


You cannot extend it to drug use. As I pointed out above, it is a very different thing to take a drug like alcohol which has been used by humanity for several thousand years, and for which there was an already existing high demand, and compare it to a more dangerous drug such as cocaine, for which the demand was only getting started.

It is either naive or dishonest to do so.

Jccarlton wrote: I have come to realize that much of the stuff I and probably most of is were taught in school was wrong and may be pure propaganda. Once you realize that those people were rigging their studies to get the results they wanted, it's hard to mak an objective judgment anymore.

Again, what are you talking about? I presume you are referring to the efforts to criminalize Marijuana, (about which there may actually be a point) and are ignoring the very real dangers posed by opium and cocaine.


You have an example of a study rigged to make opium or cocaine more dangerous? I know of no such studies. Those drugs ARE dangerous. I've seen cocaine and meth abuse first hand.

Jccarlton wrote: The problem is that once one study gets rigged, they all become suspect. Yes, addiction is bad. But is addiction a symptom or the disease? Are those people sick because they are addicted or addicted because they are sick? The longer I look at it the more convinced I am that addiction is a symptom and not the disease itself. That the problem is not drug prohibition, but the control freak and the sick society they have made for us.

Simon will argue that addiction is a symptom of a larger cause of unhappiness within individuals. In some cases he asserts the root is a naturally occurring chemical imbalance in a person's biochemistry, and in others some sort of mental anguish caused by life's traumas.

My position is that life's traumas will not evaporate when someone decides to dose themselves with plant toxins. Indeed, they generally make things worse, and the problems caused thereby generally spill over onto people around them.

As for naturally occurring chemical imbalances that need to be corrected by medication? Get a D@mn doctor to sign off on it by providing scientific proof of the condition.


As for whether or not the chicken comes before the egg, I will say that there appear to be those in society for whom addiction is not a problem if they never come in contact with an addictive substance. It stands to reason that with the differences in people's biochemistry, not all have the same level of dependency on various known addictive substances.


I have met people who tried crack and heroin, and walked away from it. I have known others who became snagged on their first hit of crack.

Jccarlton wrote:

Diogenes wrote:
What on earth are you talking about? Those patent medicines were killing people right and left. The pure food and drug act of 1906 was passed in response to a need for accurate labeling on ingredients. Too many of various concoctions contained dangerous drugs. Indeed, most of the "magic ingredient" in them turned out to be opium or cocaine.

How do I know the studies were rigged? Because the food and rug act had as it's father a power hungry crusader:
http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/on ... wiley.aspx

Jccarlton wrote: Once you get one of the these guys on the warpath you can expect that reasoned arguments and facts go right out the window and that everything goes in the name of "The Cause."

Jccarlton wrote:
That's one pattern that keeps repeating itself. The one thing I do know is that somewhere along the line there are lies involved. Especially when said crusader has things like a poison squad and says he's being thwarted by unnamed "interests." I might not be able to find all the details through the accretions of a century of propaganda telling us how important the bureaucrats of the FDA are and how they keep us all safe, but I can spot the patterns that all the things seem to have. Maybe the Food And Drug Act didn't come about in pile of lies, propaganda, muckraking and backroom deals, but the evidence seems to show that that's exactly what happened and if it didn't it would be a first.

The link you provided argues to the contrary; That it came about through an evolved process starting with concern for the public health.

The usual assumption is that the Prohibitionist answer to how a society should deal with drug use was born purely of a noble desire to protect users from harming themselves. The real story...is far less virtuous.

<snip>

The Black Menace

<snip>

In the US, cocaine abuse was associated with black men, first in the form of laborers using the drug to increase endurance while working long, grueling hours, then in the form of widespread use by Jazz musicians at scandalously racially integrated nightclubs. In yet another echo of opium's history, the press began to spread lurid stories of "cocaine crazed Negroes" attacking white women in the southern states. In response to this fear of drug-fueled blacks, some police departments switched to more powerful handguns out of concern that their current pistols were not powerful enough to bring down such rampaging monsters. Later, Harry Anslinger (head of what would eventually become the DEA) called for harsher penalties for cocaine by describing scenes of racially mixed groups dancing together at clubs under the presumptive influence of cocaine.

http://thedea.org/prohibhistory.html

"If the people were to ever find out what we have done, we would be chased down the streets and lynched."

-- George Bush, cited in the June, 1992 Sarah McClendon Newsletter

http://whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/PO ... A/mena.php