You are always going on about prohibition, but the history of alcohol usage and effects bears little resemblance to the history of hard drugs and their effects.
True. Long term heavy opiate use is much less damaging to the body than long term heavy alcohol use.
From a medical standpoint alcohol is one of the hardest drugs commonly available.
It is amazing D how authoritative your statements are based on such meager evidence. Well other than the popular press.
You are aware that if you look at alcohol consumption in the US it parallels opiate consumption in China. As living conditions improved consumption went down. With China about 100 years behind the US in living standards their drug use rates are also about 100 years behind American rates. And of course - thanks to the British and the Americans profiting from the opium trade their drug habits were different.
Here is a report (from the era) of opium use in Nantucket 1792 (emph added)
But where is the society perfectly free from error or folly; the least imperfect is undoubtedly that where the greatest good preponderates; and agreeable to this rule, I can truly say, that I never was acquainted with a less vicious or more harmless one. http://classicalvalues.com/2012/08/opiu ... cket-1792/
And this:
Alcohol, despite being legal in all western societies, has more undesirable side effects than almost any recreational drug around. In addition to causing brain and liver damage alcohol can also produce violent social behaviour and is the number one cause of domestic abuse and murder in the US.
Given all the ill social effects of alcohol (not mentioned in the above is traffic fatalities) I'm surprised it is not banned.
And if we could only get heavy alcohol users to switch to pot the collateral damage could be reduced. http://healthland.time.com/2011/12/02/w ... ic-deaths/
If I was into control as much as you are I'd ban alcohol and legalize pot. My attitude though is that individuals should be allowed to make their own choices.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Diogenes wrote:
Don't buy into Simon's propaganda, the move towards totalitarianism is a function of the disintegration of society, and has little to nothing to do with the war on drugs. Sure, the war on drugs may speed it along a bit, but we would still be moving in that direction with or without the war on drugs.
Soviet Russia didn't have a "War on Drugs" and they still ended up with a totalitarian State. Same thing with Germany and Italy. There are simply those people in any society that thinks government should be in control of everything. Sometimes these people convince enough of the others to make it happen.
“Political tags—such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal conservative, and so forth—are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.”
“Being generous is inborn; being altruistic is a learned perversity. No resemblance—“
Here is a quote from Jefferson saying much the same thing.
"Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests. In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. Call them, therefore, Liberals and Serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, Whigs and Tories, Republicans and Federalists, Aristocrats and Democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same parties still and pursue the same object. The last one of Aristocrats and Democrats is the true one expressing the essence of all."
- Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, 1824. ME 16:73
Last edited by williatw on Fri Nov 22, 2013 1:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
"Controlling a minority activity that harms society in general is hardly the same as trying to run EVERYONE's life like the lefties."
It doesn't harm "society" any where nearly as bad as trying to stop people from doing what they have a right to do does. Trying to do that always fails, never works, and destroys legitimacy.
molon labe
montani semper liberi
para fides paternae patria
hanelyp wrote:Stubby apparently likes to insult people and confuse the topic.
Controlling a minority activity that harms society in general is hardly the same as trying to run EVERYONE's life like the lefties.
Well why not control a MAJORITY activity that greatly hamrs society. Alcohol.
But you are correct about Drug Prohibition being purposed against minorities.
Cocaine was outlawed because of fears that superhuman "Negro Cocaine Fiends" or "Cocainized Niggers" (actual terms used by newspapers in the early 1900's) take large amounts of cocaine which would make them go on a violent sexual rampage and rape white women. There is little evidence that any black men actually did this, if only because it would have been certain death.
Gun control and drug control are usually associated with opposite ends of the political spectrum. Presidents Reagan and Bush were eager to pursue the war on drugs but generally wary of gun control. President Clinton has made gun control a major goal, while his drug strategy is almost invisible. But these two policies have much in common at both a philosophical and a practical level. Both blame inanimate objects for complex social problems, promising to control crime and disorder by controlling their symbols. And both are ultimately harmful, for many of the same reasons.
<snip>
As Richard Lawrence Miller reports in his book The Case for Legalizing Drugs, cocaine began to be associated with blacks in the public mind early in this century. In 1903, the American Pharmaceutical Association said of the cocaine habit: "The negroes, the lower and criminal classes, are naturally most readily influenced." In 1910 the House Ways and Means Committee heard that "the colored people seem to have a weakness for [cocaine]....They would just as leave rape a woman as anything else, and a great many of the southern rape cases have been traced to cocaine." Stories began to circulate about "cocainized negroes" with superhuman strength who were unfazed by police bullets-- stories that resemble more-recent descriptions of criminals under the influence of PCP.
And just as competition from Chinese immigrants led to a crackdown on opium dens in California, cheap Mexican labor during the Great Depression fed agitation about marijuana in the Southwest. In fact, the drug was then known as "Mexican opium." In 1937, the year that Congress passed the federal ban on marijuana, a Colorado newspaper editor wrote to the Bureau of Narcotics: "I wish I could show you what a small marijuana cigaret can do to one of our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents. That's why our problem is so great; the greatest percentage of our population is composed of Spanish-speaking persons." Like opium and cocaine, marijuana was tied to the rape or seduction of white women.
For most of American history, marijuana has been legal. But in the 1930s, the federal government began growing to an unprecedented size; ambitious government men searched for ways to convince Congress to give those men more power. One man who found a way was Harry Anslinger, U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics. Almost single-handedly, he convinced Congress to enact the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937.
One of Anslinger’s main weapons was inciting fear of Mexicans.
With respect to marijuana that small minority we are being protected from has turned into 58% opposing cannabis prohibition. A jump of 6% to 8% in the last year. And the numbers are still rising.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
