Libertine is Dangerous.

[ladajo]

Agreed. It is a can of worms.

"What is choice?" and the plethora of supporting mechansim deabtes that follow, eventually ending in, "Does God exist?".

No answer required.

[ladajo]

Ladajo,

I appreciate you taking the further effort to investigate. I agree, wikipedia is generally not an ideal source, but they do cite within the links I provided the actual research papers with data. It's hard not to use a source that cites all relevant text to the subject at hand and a waste of time to re-write others' research. As for the addiction arguments, I did note there are physiological effects, but that the addiction itself stems more from a psychological mechanism than physical.

I appreciate that you are remaining open-minded to the research. Some on this board would prefer to link to political blogs making their case instead of the hard research. While I can understand the fear of illicit drug use, we've been indoctrinated to believe all these horrible things will happen with no evidence. The fear is just a manifestation of racial tensions from the 1910s on up. I find it confounding and disturbing that the 1914 Act literally was pushed through by fabricated stories of rape and murder of white women by African-American men.

Scott,
I a cursory poke around, I thought you may find this Supreme Court Decision informative as to the current take on the hisotry of drug laws. Section II of the Court's Opinion in particular. I recommend you give the whole thing a read though.

The Harrison Act sought to exert control over the possession and sale of narcotics, specifically cocaine and opiates, by requiring producers, distributors, and purchasers to register with the Federal Government, by assessing taxes against parties so registered, and by regulating the issuance of prescriptions.13

Marijuana itself was not significantly regulated by the Federal Government until 1937 when accounts of marijuana's addictive qualities and physiological effects, paired with dissatisfaction with enforcement efforts at state and local levels, prompted Congress to pass the Marihuana Tax Act, Pub. L. 75-238, 50 Stat. 551 (repealed 1970).

You may find that as you (and others) read it, that we have been down the 'controlled access' road, and it did not go particularly well...

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/g ... ol=03-1454

There are other decisions, but I found this one in particular interesting as it is current and descriptive.

[ladajo]

You may also find these as interesting reads:

http://www.cedro-uva.org/lib/harrison.cannabis.05.html

and of course, you would be remiss not to read King's Essay from back in the day...

http://www.druglibrary.org/special/king/king1.htm

This is a good public access reference listing of Court Cases:

http://druglibrary.net/schaffer/legal/legal1910.htm