Everyone Who Wants to Smoke Pot Is Already Smoking Pot

[MSimon]

That people are smuggling and not being arrested mostly, because of who they are associate with, or flight schools that aren't flight schools, or perhaps the sheer scale of the whole operation, all in broad daylight, or just the whole cast of characters and connections to each other. Even if what's expounded is 25% true that's enough to take down a sizeable chunk of the upper echelon of US society.

The upper echelons have ALWAYS used prohibitions to their advantage. Money and power:

http://www.ctrl.org/boodleboys/boddlesboys2.html

[MSimon]

We have spent billions (if not trillions) to defend the nation. It occasionally causes death to ours and others. Why do we persist in this foolish behavior when it obviously isn't working because we're still having to spend so much time and money to defend ourselves.

It is possible to defend the nation from attacks.

How can you defend a free country against individual choice?

Not even Jesus could do that. What was his advice to his emissaries? If the message is not well received move on.

[MSimon]

Diogenes:

Must something which is immoral also be illegal?

Some would answer yes. So many said yes that alcohol prohibition was introduced to the country. It lasted 13 years. Drug prohibition as originally instituted only affected a small minority; so until a large enough fraction was introduced to the evils of prohibition majorities favored it. We are now at the stage where enough understand the issues from direct experience that support is falling like a rock.

I expect the fall of drug prohibition will be quite spectacular in its effect on the country.

I see two positive effects coming out of the fall.

1. The discrediting of government
2. The discrediting of socons

What is my fondest hope? As a famous Republican once said: "a new birth of freedom".

The saddest thing is the discrediting of socons. They are correct about many things. However, every time they fall for the progressive line (and the Drug War was instituted by a coalition of Socons with Progressives) they lose their way.

The problem of the Socons is the same as the problem of the Progressives. They are addicted to power and control. A much worse vice than any addiction to drugs could ever be. And yet their so called master ("so called" because they do not take him to heart) never spoke in favor of temporal power. In fact his career was a fight against it. The original separator of church and state.

[MSimon]

At what age would children be allowed to purchase legalized drugs, and wouldn't making them legal provide that much more access for kids.

Beer - which is legal - is harder for kids to get than illegal drugs. If you are sincere about reducing the access kids have to drugs legalization is the way to go.

Evidently you have never studied the matter.

[TallDave]

Your wrong diagnosis site has this disclaimer|:
Extrapolation of Prevalence Rate of Drug abuse to Countries and Regions:WARNING! EXTRAPOLATION ONLY! NOT BASED ON COUNTRY-SPECIFIC DATA SOURCES. The following table attempts to extrapolate the above prevalence rate for Drug abuse to the populations of various countries and regions. These prevalence extrapolations for Drug abuse are only estimates, based on applying the prevalence rates from the US (or a similar country) to the population of other countries, and therefore may have very limited relevance to the actual prevalence of Drug abuse in any region:

Yes, this is a problem for a lot of statistics, such as perinatal/infant mortality, because there aren't clear international standards for how things are measured. If you have a better, or even just different, source I'd be interested.

The dangers of tobacco were not widely know until after WW2, and even then not until the Tobacco lobby propaganda was overcome, at that point the addiction rate was at least 35%. Addiction to tobacco products is slowly declining, but not without opposition from the pushers. Are you suggesting that one third of the population suffer from trauma, or could the usage by parents not be a larger factor.

It's not clear what % of tobacco users should be considered "recreational" vs "addicted." Generally addiction connotes some kind of associated dysfunction. This is usually easier to identify in "hard" drug users. But it is known that tobacco eases the symptoms of schizoprenia.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/early ... 812_08.pdf

Even if what's expounded is 25% true that's enough to take down a sizeable chunk of the upper echelon of US society.

Heh, I'm not sure you understand how big our country is. But I agree it's a problem that doesn't need to exist.

[MSimon]

Congratulations. You just admitted to intentionally deluding yourself and others.

It is amusing that our friend who presents himself as the soul of morality admits to being a deceiver. Which according to his religion is the province of evil. There are other religions that do not take lies so seriously. Perhaps Mr. D it is time for a change?

I belong to the other side. I may well be in error (it happens often enough and in some cases doozies). I am determined to never ever intentionally deceive myself or others. Integrity is the soul of engineering.

[MSimon]

and...and...and...
when China had such a high level of Opium addiction obviously they had all that disposible income and stuff too! But that doesn't explain why you actually think you need it when you could survive without just like everybody else. At a minimum its very shrewd marketing that makes you buy, or just perhaps a deeper level of conditioning.

But that just sidesteps the issue of THE VENICE BEACH AIRPORT, FLORIDA, especially today. It's an issue nobody in your country is prepared to touch, not the FBI, probably not even the President.

You want to know about the opium wars? It is rather simple:

It was a British money making scheme. They got China to make opium illegal while keeping it legal in India. The perfidy of Albion is legendary.

The Opium Trade

"If the trade is ever legalized, it will cease to be profitable from that time. The more difficulties that attend it, the better for you and us."
-- Directors of Jardine-Matheson

http://www.ctrl.org/boodleboys/boddlesboys2.html

[MSimon]

and...and...and...
when China had such a high level of Opium addiction obviously they had all that disposible income and stuff too! But that doesn't explain why you actually think you need it when you could survive without just like everybody else. At a minimum its very shrewd marketing that makes you buy, or just perhaps a deeper level of conditioning.

But that just sidesteps the issue of THE VENICE BEACH AIRPORT, FLORIDA, especially today. It's an issue nobody in your country is prepared to touch, not the FBI, probably not even the President.

http://madcowprod.com/04162010.htm

[MSimon]

Alcohol consuption has been going on since the beginning of agriculture, wine and beer sit in the grey area between drugs and food.

The consumption of hemp as a drug has 5,000 years of recorded history.

Opiates have a similar history. In fact opiate use it America was so noncontoversial that it was a legal over the counter drug until the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914.

Thomas Jefferson had quite an opium garden.

http://www.alternet.org/drugs/145872/ho ... lic_memory

And hemp use?

Did the Founding Fathers of the United States of America smoke cannabis? Some researchers think so. Dr. Burke, president of the American Historical Reference Society and a consultant for the Smithsonian Institute, counted seven early presidents as cannabis smokers: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor and Franklin Pierce. 41 "Early letters from our founding fathers refer to the pleasures of hemp smoking," said Burke. Pierce, Taylor and Jackson, all military men, smoked it with their troops. Cannabis was twice as popular among American soldiers in the Mexican War as in Vietnam: Pierce wrote to his family that it was "about the only good thing" about that war.

http://www.marijuanalibrary.org/7_presidents.html

So it appears that Presidential Pot Heads didn't begin with Bill Clinton.

[TallDave]

And coca leaves have been chewed for millennia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca

Not to mention being the original basis for a certain very popular soft drink.

Ecstasy, meth, and the various forms of acid are the common drugs I can think of off the top of my head that require relatively modern chemistry.

[TallDave]

It's sort of ironic that the Progressive movement took us so far backwards in the first half of the 20th, given that the overall effect of progress has been to render unnecessary the proscriptions of the past (e.g., for most of history, when women had to have several children just to ensure one or two made it to reproductive age and needed a man to provide for them else face likely starvation, homosexuality and premarital sex were arguably things no society that wished to survive and grow could afford to openly tolerate).

[Diogenes]

I am curious why advocates of legalized drugs don't believe that one piece of burning wood will not catch another piece on fire. This is axiomatic. How can usage not spread and increase over time?

By this argument we should be a nation of cigarette-smoking alcoholics by now, but of course we aren't -- because more people understand the dangers, fewer overindulge. In fact, research suggests addiction is very strongly correlated to past trauma. In most cases, it's probably a form of PTSD.

My recollection is that smoking used to be quite ubiquitous but has declined greatly since the 1960s. Cigarettes used to be advertised on Television. Now that Television advertising is banned, and ongoing campaigns have been in swing for decades to make people aware of the dangers of smoking, it can be argued that such campaigns (the war on smoking) have had an impact. With the prices and social stigma continuously going up, smoking is becoming a more difficult habit. I suspect at some point it may very well be stigmatized and regulated to death, and if such a thing should happen it will prove one very important thing. That it's possible.

What, you believe in prohibition for people BELOW the age of 21?

The notion minors do not have right of consent is not a particularly controversial one. Where the line should be drawn is something reasonable people can disagree about.

"Controversial"? Why would Consensus trump a Principle? If you believe that you have a right to do whatever you want, then that is a principle, and if it is a "right" it is outside of consensus. What I am asking, is how one can take the hypocritical position that it is okay to impose prohibition on some people, but it is not okay to impose prohibition on others?
What happened to "Prohibition doesn't work"? Are we to believe that it DOES work and that it is Okay to apply it, just so long as it applies to others?

Note that Prohibition for everyone amounts to an assertion that everyone lacks right to consent; i.e. it infantilizes society.

Regarding certain drugs, it makes no difference if you are an adult or a minor, the effect will be the same. The adult has not greater ability to resist the effect of addiction than does a minor. They are both babes in the woods. They are ALL infants.

We can look to England as an example about how to organize the whole thing.

A better example would be how alcohol and cigarettes are managed. It seems to be working fine. The world is not going up in flames.

The effects of either are far less traumatic than the effects of the worse drugs. Nicotine does not make a person rob someone just to get their fix. Neither does Alcohol.

Why shouldn't they want the fruits of their monopoly? Everybody loves rent seeking.

Exactly! And it is in our power to end the monopoly, end the civil wars in South America, end the Taliban's power in Afghanistan, all just by letting people make their own choices.

They aren't making their own choices. They are being manipulated by the drugs into making the choice to do more drugs, because they are tampering with their fundamental processes.

It is like the parasite that infects the Ants and forces them to climb onto the end of a piece of grass and hang their till they die or are eaten by a herbivore. (There to complete the parasites life cycle) or the Other parasite that infects grasshoppers or crickets. It worms it's way into the insect brain and causes it to leap into water, there to be eaten by fish to complete THAT parasites life cycle.

Dangerous drugs are nothing but roach poison for people who don't know they will turn into roaches. ( Kafka's Metamorphosis? What a Metaphor!)

I argue that people CANNOT make such decisions because they CANNOT understand the consequences till it's too late.

[Diogenes]

Actually, my professor in Economics said the literature for the elasticity of the Marijuana market is about 0.42, which would indicate a significant drop in price would entice relatively little additional demand.

With the prices currently rather low anyway, the marijuana market is obviously not driven that much by price as much as it is by what people think they can get away with it versus those who might otherwise do it if they thought they could.

Make it legal, and I bet the demand would increase. And possibly, so would the price. (for the time it took while demand outstripped supply)

[Diogenes]

I am not implying, I am outright stating that this is exactly the argument of the Libertarians. (All drugs must be legalized.)

I will go one further. In 5 years or less pot will be legalized. We will then take a rational look at all the other drugs and come to the conclusion that people take pain relievers to relieve pain. Duh.

Opium, Heroin, Meth, Crack etc. while they may make you forget about pain, they are primarily PLEASURE stimulators. Your argument is as fallacious as suggesting a man wants a bj to relieve leg pain. Yeah, third leg pain!

Then we will probably go the route of the Swiss who TWICE voted in favor of heroin legalization.

We will look rationally at why people take drugs and let those who need them have them.

BTW heroin (except for its black market status) does less harm to people than alcohol. Less harmful than the most addictive substance known to man - tobacco.

Alcohol kills 75,000 people per year. Smoking kills 440,000 people per year. I couldn't find any readily available stats on heroin deaths nationwide, but i'm pretty sure it doesn't approach the numbers of Alcohol and Tobacco, mostly because there are not nearly so many users as there are of Alcohol and Tobacco. Why you would assert it doesn't do as much harm to the individual user is simply incomprehensible.

I have spent the last 40 years educating the youth. Why? Up until age 20 most humans are open to reason. Once I get them - the game is eventually over.

Sadly - the stupidity of prohibition drives all too many youth into the arms of the socialists. They use prohibition the way they used Jim Crow - we are right on this so it follows we are right on everything else.

Nice set of unintended consequences you have given us Mr. D.

Far better than the set of unintended consequences that you attempt to give us. As previously mentioned, I think the death ratio between your theory and mine is 10,000 to 1. I have the example of China to present. You have only bits and pieces from here and there, that don't really qualify as a nationwide social breakdown because they have been too brief and too restrictive.

So what do you want Mr. D? A small minority using drugs? Or a very large minority favoring socialism? Which is more destructive to society?

It is the same choice if you legalize drugs. I give you Mao Tse Tung as the real world example.

Pot use peaks in youth. About 1/2 try it. What does it do re: respect for the law to make 1/2 our youth potential felons? If alcohol prohibition is any guide it destroys respect for the law.

Nice set of unintended consequences you have given us Mr. D.

You are giving the rooster credit for the sunrise. The one thing has nothing to do with the other, and WE are not discussing pot. We are discussing Meth, Crack, Heroin and Opium. The only relation that pot has to this conversation is to serve as justification for opening other Pandora's boxes.

How about the corruption of those supposed to be guardians of society?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... l_headline

Nice set of unintended consequences you have given us Mr. D.

Why thank you! I didn't know I was so consequential! Now if I could only turn my powers to good...

All predictable had you studied alcohol prohibition. Which discredited socons for several generations. My mom will still not forgive them and she is over 90. What does that tell you - being wrong about things that affect youth will mold their political attitudes for generations.

Nice set of unintended consequences you have given us Mr. D.

Is this your latest mantra? What happened to "It's easier for kids to get illegal drugs than it is to get beer" ?

[Diogenes]

Your wrong diagnosis site has this disclaimer|:
Extrapolation of Prevalence Rate of Drug abuse to Countries and Regions:WARNING! EXTRAPOLATION ONLY! NOT BASED ON COUNTRY-SPECIFIC DATA SOURCES. The following table attempts to extrapolate the above prevalence rate for Drug abuse to the populations of various countries and regions. These prevalence extrapolations for Drug abuse are only estimates, based on applying the prevalence rates from the US (or a similar country) to the population of other countries, and therefore may have very limited relevance to the actual prevalence of Drug abuse in any region:

The prevalence of drug use is dependent on the stress level a particular society is under. That is why extrapolation is a fools errand. We see rising rates of heroin use in Iran and Russia. Societies under tremendous stress.

I would expect given current economic conditions that the rates of heroin use in America will be rising. Pot and all the other illegal drugs as well. Not to mention Oxycontin and all the legal medications.

And what would occur had no such substances ever been discovered? Why people would (GASP!) have to make decisions while in their right mind!