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Internet Drug Game Could Save Lives and Money
It could be a wonderful game, with shoot-em-up segments, sim-style strategy, morbid scenes of decayed inner-city neighborhoods, jut-jawed cops and Federal agents, droopy-drawered street drug vendors, and plenty of other colorful characters. Add in politicians, TV preachers, Colombian kingpins, middle-aged parents trying to keep their kids on the straight and narrow plus a bunch of furtive teenage drug experimenters, and you'd have roles in this MUD-variant for everyone who is interested in the drug war -- from either side.
Some players' roles would be predetermined. The U.S. government's drug policy chief would obviously get the Drug Czar role. George W. Bush would play the President. Congressmen, Senators, and agency heads could also mirror their real-life selves. A few taxpayers might whine about these officials getting paid to play games, but isn't the drug war nothing but a silly game anyway? And if it must be played, shouldn't it be played in a virtual environment where keeping a non-violent drug offender in prison doesn't cost taxpayers $20,000 or more per year, and lives aren't ruined or lost?
You can even argue that this game would be the most effective anti-drug policy the government could possibly have. If, indeed, video games have the potential to turn young people into killers, then hollow-faced, chronically sick game avatar junkies constantly searching for a high "by any means necessary" should steer plenty of kids onto the straight and narrow.
There are other drug-dealing games out there, but they don't have the scope, power, and visual ingenuity it will take to wean government drug warriors (not to mention people on the lucrative "dark side" of the fight) away from the non-virtual version. "Drug Czar" needs to be truly overwhelming, a game so vast that only the government can afford to produce it and make it freely available to players all over the world.
How much would all this cost to design and set up? $10 million? $20 million? Even a billion dollars would be a trifle compared to the cost of the offline version. And if it was an Open Source project (I'm sure SourceForge would be happy to host it, especially if the government kicked in a little pocket change to help with server maintenance), I'll bet volunteers from all over the world would help with development.
But remember, U.S.government is of the people, by the people, and for the people, so this isn't going to happen unless you write your elected representatives to tell them that you understand how much fun they are having with their war on drugs, and that you don't want want to take that pleasure away from them but would like them to stop playing it in real life and move it onto the Internet, where it would be less dangerous and more fun than the current version -- and probably at least as effective.
I agreed with most of your post, except for one thing that a lot of anti-drug-war supports seem to forget... these people *ARE* evil drug dealers. I think one of the key seperations that people have to make is between "drugs" being bad and "the drug trade" being bad.
There is an incredibly lucrative profit margin to be made in the drug trade, and organized crime is definately involved. My city used to have a fairly innocent drug trade until the biker gangs started moving in.. then "independent" dealers started to get hurt.. and now there aren't any dealers/runners who aren't gang affiliated.
Even when our scene was "innocent" of a lot of the violence, it was only because people were going to other cities to buy shipments from the organizations.
One of the unfortunately aspects of the illegalization of drugs is that if you choose to use them you are most likely indirectly supporting organizations that perpetuate violence, prostitution, etc and many other things that are against the ecstasy/PLUR attitude.
Is this the drugs fault? Hell no, it is an inanimate object. If anything, most of the "bad" shit that has to do with drugs is because of the criminal aspect that is caused by the governments decision to make it illegal. If you could pick up a few hits at the local store, then a lot of the criminal elements involved wouldn't make any money, and would go away.
Next times someone whines about how drugs destroyed their lives, question where it was the drugs, the crime, or the addictive personality. I'm sure guns, cigarettes, alcohol, and cars all cause more deaths per capital than illegal drug-related deaths. But they are legal with restrictions, perhaps other things should be as well in order to get rid of the criminal aspect.
Here we don't have a war on drugs. I wouldn't even know how to get arrestet for smoking pot (I don't). But so what. Even without a war on drugs our drug related problems are no bigger than yours.
I don't know if you guys in the US realice this. But over here your justice system is the subject of ridicule, not respect.
Isn't it more interesting that we agree so deeply on the nature of the WoD: that it's hideously expensive yet entirely futile to the point where it's just a game.
Slashdot is made up of people who understand the nature of systems. Programmers, developers, enthusiasts, adminstrators, scientists, math geeks. People who understand that, for example, adding a layer of control can only harm something like the internet, where laws are hopefully made mostly by nature (i.e., physics, the speed of light, the nature of silicon) and what we hope are good, inviolate protocols that allow natural evolution. We show, technically, how a road is beneficial infrastructure but how a gate is only limiting.
For /. then to agree on the destructive, insane nature of the WoD is really saying something. To find that 90% of intelligent people agree is fairly remarkable. To find that they understand that they agree to the point where they would prefer another Perl vs Python article. And yet, we also agree ending or even changing the WoD is politically impossible - to the point where we find it irritating to even bring up the subject.
If they can spend so much money, expend so much effort, imprison so many people, ruin so many lives, and even take on expendable casualties with "friendly fire", while the intelligentsia disagrees so strongly, what else can they do? And isn't this disconnect between the politicians and the intelligentsia incredibly dangerous?
Well, I think this is in some ways a war of apathy. It's pointless to try to change the system and we, as sensible actors, are not going to waste our time trying. Fight 2/3rds of the population? Too hard for too little gain. At what point does that gain become enough for working more actively against the WoD to become sensible? As /.ers, we have all of the elements to demand political change: a community, the tools of the infrastructure, the power to wield them. When do we as a community have so much concern that we work to change things? What parts of the political brew that are not present now will cause this pot to boil over?
Just a few thoughts on a Monday morning...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A442 63-2001Apr20.html
With all the other things that need addressing in Congress, *why* are the Republican "leaders" so concerned about interfering with the right of a local municipality (in this case Arlington County VA) to decide what the name of a train station should be?
At least he's not Jon Katz.
Just FYI.
You know, a couple of my friends took X one night and now they're dead... after being hit by a drunk driver. A tragedy that could have been averted, although probably not by a War on Drugs.
And then there's my grandparents, who started smoking cigarettes after the ads on TV in the 50's and 60's told them that "Doctors say... it's okay!". Since the drugs they used were legal, they don't count, right? That's just bad luck?
Of course, it also doesn't count when someone stacks up their car after having 'one for the road' because liquor companies are Doing The Right Thing and would never stoop to the ethically dubious lows of target-marketing to underage or high-risk ethnic market segments. The drugs you buy in the pretty glass bottles are okay. The nice men on TV tell you so.
We send the wrong message, alright. We tell people that a couple of missionaries on a humanitarian flight are a small price to pay for American self-righteousness, and we tell the rest of the world that we can't even see past the end of our own nose when it comes to reconciling foreign policy with domestic 'issues'.
Now, if we legalized and taxed the hell out of marijuana (in spite of the thousands and thousands of people that undoubtedly die of the munchies each year!), it could fund a hell of a lot of rehab clinics for monstrous problems like heroin addiction and alcoholism. There'd be a lot more money in the budget to fund stings on crackhouses and meth labs, reducing those problems (while methamphetamine, or dextro-amphetamine -- close enough for most addicts -- is legally available, meth heads are some of the most violently psychotic people I've ever come into contact with; legalization is not, by itself, an 'answer' to their behaviors). And hell, maybe some of it could get routed into the public schools (HA! Buy bigger guns for the War on Drugs!). But that would send the wrong message -- it might seem like America had become some bleeding-heart socialist hellhole like Holland or Canada. God knows, we wouldn't want their problems! (lower crime, better medical coverage, etc. etc.)
And it's an all or nothing prospect, you know -- we can't just have a few legal drugs (nicotine, alcohol, prescription painkillers and tranquilizers) and make others illegal, can we? Marijuana, for example, was only criminalized after Prohibition's spectacular failure (hmmm, no lessons about human nature in *that* debacle), and then only due to bigots like Henry Anslinger decrying its tendency to cause upstanding white women to consort with Negroes. (Really.)
I've seen plenty of people destroyed by drugs, most notably heroin and cocaine. My godfather was a physician with a coke habit -- he's dead now. I've taken plenty of drugs in my day, but I got bored when I realized that I was no longer experiencing anything particularly novel. I don't regret either starting or stopping my experimentations. And no, I don't like to smoke marijuana. But I'd love to see those who do help pay for remedies to some huge, pressing social problems, the same way that gas guzzlers do in Europe. Nothing personal, guys...
And I do feel like puritanical fervor misses the point of maintaining a healthy society, something that the War on Drugs has failed utterly to contribute to. If you feel that stepping back from a 'whatever it takes' mentality to evaluate the human cost of this war is Wrong, then perhaps you should ask yourself how you'd feel if *your* wife and child had been caught in the crossfire of this little War. Dogma is not particularly useful in shaping effective social policies.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
The drug war is only necessary to those who are profiting from it. What makes you think that mainstream drug use is any worse than mainstream alcohol use? If it's done responsibly, it's not a problem. Millions of people smoke pot and do other drugs in moderation and manage to hold down a job and have a normal family life. Sure, you hear about drug-related deaths and such all the time. The same goes for alcohol. We hear about alcohol-related deaths pretty much every day as well. In the end it is up to you whether you want to ingest the drugs. It shouldn't be the government's decision. I'd rather we use the billions we spend every year on the drug war for treatment (which would cost less and accomplish a LOT more) rather than to further errode our rights in this country. In 20 years, we haven't made a dent in the amount of drugs coming into this country, despite the untold billions we've given our government to do so. I think there are really only 2 possibilities. Either the government doesn't want to win the drug war, or it can't. Either way, it's time to try something new instead of continuing to toss our money down this black hole.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I want to be free to raise my children without having to have them exposed to drugs. Simple as that.
So, if your son or daughter in the midst of plans to go to a good college, having maintained good grades through school makes a mistake and tries pot, you believe the best response is:
Lock them up for 3 to 5 years in one of the most violent places in the U.S. today, treat them like little more than animals for that time, then release them with little or no prospects for getting a decent job or a good education (due to that felony conviction thing).
THINK ABOUT THAT! Not the kid down the street, not those kids in L.A., YOUR kid!
Perhaps you think the death penelty would be in order? (You did advocate much harsher laws, like Singapore).
Before you say they won't get in that situation, think back. I'll bet you (like most of us) committed a youthful indiscretion or two. How would you enjoy having a felony prison record and massive stigma following you around as a result?
Now, consider the number of high school students who are willing to admit to an adult that they tried some drug or another (seems to be 10 - 50% depending on the drug). Now make a guess (non-zero) on the percentage who have tried drugs but won't tell an adult about it.
Now, remember, posession can be a wide ranging sort of thing. If a joint is found in your child's car, it doesn't matter that it fell out of someone else's pocket. It doesn't matter that your child didn't even know his/her friend used drugs. All that matters is that it was in YOUR CHILD's car, and YOUR CHILD is going to jail.
Sound good?
That's one of the problems with the war on drugs. It's too easy for one mis-adventure to turn one of "US" into one of "THEM".
Point me to some studies showing the medical benefits of drugs if you can. And not ones conducted by fronts for organisations like NORML which advocate making drugs available to everyone.
Marijuana is of known value for glaucoma, and the severe nausia that chemotherapy can cause. It may also help with some forms of anorexia. When medical use of mrijuana was legalized in Ca. a number of doctors prescribed it for their patients. That is to say, that in their professional medical opinion, it was the best drug for their patients. Then, various people in the federal government who have no medical training whatsoever began hounding doctor and patient alike. Effectively, they practised medicine without a license and got away with it in the name of the war on drugs.
I don't have any studies handy. They are somewhat scarce since the federal government considers fighting the war on drugs more important than scientifically determining if there is anything to fight about or not.
You can't believe everything an pro-drug organization tells you. It would be very rare, almost impossible, to get three years for a first time pot bust, even dealing where it should be first shot go to jail.
Perhaps not. On the other hand, manditory sentencing is getting more severe every year, and the post I responded to advocated more severity still. Other factors would include proximity to election time, and socio-economic status.
Also keep in mind that with the funny new math used by prosecutors and law enforcement, anything to do with drugs at all tends to somehow add up to dealing.
As others on this thread have pointed out, things like tobacco, alcohol, and skydiving all fit the category that you have described.
As with anything, drugs *in moderation* can be a socially acceptable thing.
I am sure that drugs have torn many a family apart, but I am also just as sure that alcohol has torn even more apart.
Legalize, tax, and regulate.
Make it illegal to do stupid things while under the influence.
There are examples out there of how legalized drugs can work.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
www.edrugtrader.com
Damn the cost. We need freedom, and we need it now. If that freedom destroys society, destroys the economy, or even destroys us it's a small price to pay!
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-- Slashdot sucks.
What makes you think that the War on Drugs is nothing more than a silly game?
Because it is.
Yes, the War on Drugs is expensive, but that's because drugs are so addictive that people can't seem to stop taking them.
That certainly is the definition of an "addict," isn't it? How strange it is that these addicts are arrested for possession and go to jail where they can continue using drugs and then be released where they can continue using drugs. What's more, I, as a taxpayer, had to pay for their little prison sojurn and the salaries of those who had to bust and babysit them. I would much rather see my money go toward busting a violent predator rather than some drug user, wouldn't you?
It takes a firm commitment on the part of the US for us to make any progress, and indeed progress has been made over the last few years, with the rates of drug use amongst high schoolers dropping each year.
Are you so sure? The rate of ecstacy usage has been skyrocketing among teens, and the rates have alcohol consumption have also been going up. Oh, wait, alcohol is an "good" drug. The evidence that the Drug War is a complete failure could not be stronger.
Suggesting that this is is a waste of time is tantamount to saying that these children should be taking drugs!
This is the "For the children!" argument. It's getting pretty old. No, I don't think children should be using drugs, including tobacco and alcohol. But tobacco and alcohol are legal for adults. Why can't other drugs be legal for adults as well? The War on Drugs really is the War on Some Drugs. It is legal to sell morphine in the United States... if your government papers are in order.
If we let up in any way, the rampant use of drugs will be seen to be accepted, and children, always willing to try new things, will invariably become addicted to the filthy wares peddled by the drugmongers outside schools and playgrounds.
It's a good thing that their parents are there to guide and educate them about the dangers of drugs. Why is it that right-wingers bleat and cry for "freedom" and then want big nanny government to take care of them when the subject of drugs is raised?
And if you think this would never happen in your lovely suberb, think again. Already the latest drug to hit our youth, ecstacy, is striking hardest in white, middle class areas where drug addiction and the downwards spiral was previously unknown.
This despite the billions upon billions of dollars wasted in the War on Some Drugs. Education works. Incarceration and persecution fails. The only effect of the War on Some Drugs has been to erode our 4th amendment rights and waste our hard-earned tax dollars.
The only danger is sending out the wrong message. Drugs kill, and anyone advocating their use is little better than a killer.
It is the job of parents, not the government, to send messages to children. And let me counter your idiotic "drugs kill" message with these:
Automobiles kill, and anyone advocating their use is little better than a killer. Airplanes kill, and anyone advocating their use is little better than a killer.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Nice attempt at emotional manipulation.
I'm probably in one of those families you consider to have been "torn apart by drugs." My stepbrother was an addict for over half a decade. However, as far as I can tell, the problems we've had with him has been due to drugs being illegal. He's been pulled into a scene of criminals, have been chasing after fast money, and have been drugged out of his mind - as a feedback loop from the stress of that scene.
With drugs legal, he might still have taken them, and still have taken them to excess - but he would have done it without trying to earn money off drug deals, without having people after him to crush his kneecaps because he owed them money, without threaths to his family - and would be likely to have had a much better chance of being eased back into society, instead of having to almost die from it before ending up in a rehabilitation program.
As an interesting case in point, suicides in the Netherlands is the lowest in Europe - considered to be due to people that are desperate smoking themselves out of the world for a period, instead of dying.
And aspirin kills more people annually than cocaine, while alcohol-related deaths in the US is at 10 times the number of deaths related to illegal drugs (approx 150,000 vs 15,000 if you use the same way of counting - I just looked it up.)
Yes, the drugs that are presently illegal often waste parts of people's lives. By keeping them illegal, they waste larger parts of the lives, and in more extreme ways - for a possible reduction in the number of people that try them. Useful, isn't it?
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
This, uh, "editorial" took me back, oh, all of two days ago as I watched crowds of dirty, disorganized hippies play drums while the powerful forces of capitalism and western politics gathered to insure that as the Global Economy proceeded, Nice Guys would continue to finish last.
Keep in mind, Western Capitalism made it possible for us to have life so good, we have time to worry about people getting high! (Or time to go from protest to protest...)
Instead of protesting the best thing the US has given to the world, maybe those kids should protest the worst thing the US has given to the world, the War on Drugs. I'd join them, and so would many Americans, judging from recent polls.
Infact, it is the War on Drugs that has kept a stanglehold on the Mexican economy. It has done so by totally corrupting government at all levels. Capitalism can't work with corrupt governments (infact, many economists argue that governments that support uniform and effective enforcement of property and contract law is more necessary than free trade for economic improvement in developing countries.)
Elsewhere in Latin Ameria, the War on Drugs supports the last serious guerilla war there by keeping the FARC in business. Drug money is replacing US/USSR covert military support.
FREE TRADE should include FREE TRADE OF DRUGS.
Why don't you do some damn research before you open your mouth. I'm tired of people who watch dateline and eat that sh*t for breakfast.
Be your own scholar.
-M-
"Life is all about strategy, mathematics and psychological perceptiveness."
What on Earth have you been smoking Roblimo? What makes you think that the War on Drugs is nothing more than a silly game? For the millions of people whose families have been torn apart through the destructive nature of drugs, trivializing their plight is hardly sensitive is it?
Yes, the War on Drugs is expensive, but that's because drugs are so addictive that people can't seem to stop taking them. It takes a firm commitment on the part of the US for us to make any progress, and indeed progress has been made over the last few years, with the rates of drug use amongst high schoolers dropping each year. Suggesting that this is is a waste of time is tantamount to saying that these children should be taking drugs!
If we let up in any way, the rampant use of drugs will be seen to be accepted, and children, always willing to try new things, will invariably become addicted to the filthy wares peddled by the drugmongers outside schools and playgrounds. And if you think this would never happen in your lovely suberb, think again. Already the latest drug to hit our youth, ecstacy, is striking hardest in white, middle class areas where drug addiction and the downwards spiral was previously unknown.
The only danger is sending out the wrong message. Drugs kill, and anyone advocating their use is little better than a killer.
Recent NIDA studies have shown the immense addictive potential of marijuana, as well as the long-term health risks through the highly carcinogenic makeup of marijuana. Studies showing damage to the serotinogenic systems in the brain have been carried out several times, and recent evidence links MDMA usage with long-term memory impairment. And these are what you call the softer drugs!
On the other hand, alcohol and cigarettes which are legal are amongst the leading causes of death in the U.S. either directly (lung and liver related diseases) or indirectly (drunk driving and second hand smoke).
True, but a) Prohibition didn't work, we tried it before and b) alcohol certainly has medical benefits if consumed in moderation. Drugs don't. I will admit that tobacco is evil however, but it is a necessary evil to many farmers.
Point me to some studies showing the medical benefits of drugs if you can. And not ones conducted by fronts for organisations like NORML which advocate making drugs available to everyone.
No, the war on drugs is expensive because there's money to be made off of it by our nations politicians and their croneys. This nation has a habit of declaring "war" on the most mindless shit in order to drum up public support. Since drugs are an emotionaly charged topic they get draged up around election time every year.
Are you really this paranoid about your Government? Whilst the X-Files was fairly enjoyable to watch, it has to be remembered that it was a work of fiction, and not a documentary on the secret workings of those in power.
Drugs are an emotionally charged subject because they kill people. It's as simple as that. Guns are also an emotionally charged subject because they kill people.
Fundamentaly the Drug problem represents a choice that this country must make. The people clamor for the government to "protect" them from this menace, but how?
Quite simply by ensuring that sentances are tough enough to make people think twice. People like Rockerfeller tried, but various liberals have been attempting to thwart such valiant efforts, making the penalties disproportional to the crime.
Singapore doesn't have hardly any drug use after all. So much for those that say harsh punishments don't work.
In short, you must choose between your freedom as it currently exists, or a drug free society.
I want to be free to raise my children without having to have them exposed to drugs. Simple as that.
in an online gaming environment
pr0paganda is supposedly releasing this with their site debut.
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this story is almost offensive. maybe instead of making fun of america's "war on drugs" as a journalist you should take the time to educate your readers. if the kids who are here are told the truth and given facts about drug use, then they will grow up and elect officials who will pass fair legislation. by the way, here's a really interesting letter by john gilmore (of the EFF) on the "emergency re-sentencing of ecstasy" called for in february: http://www.toad.com/gnu/ecstacy-sentencing.html
this is NO way to stop the drug war in the US (or anywhere).
I honestly believe that the best way to tackle the drug war would be to legalize it.. Put strict taxes on all drugs (except Marijuana) and sell them OTC.
The fairy tale that if it were legalized everyone would do it is false. People are going to do it one way or the other, just b/c it would be decrimilized does not mean it will be used more often!
I truly believe that a good majority of drug use is harmless. I really believe that if we were to put it under govt control a lot of the gangs, violence, etc would diminish..
DISCLAIMER:
If you don't agree w/me, please do not reply to this message. I know that plenty of people do not share my opinion on this subject, and I don't share yours, so don't bother.
Let's hope for a better America.
I'm sorry but that is just false.
just b/c the media portrays REAL LIFE (even if you don't like to believe it) does NOT mean it will impact the rest of the population.
Did people in the 60s take drugs b/c they watched movies or TV shows about it? NO!
I did not start smoking pot b/c I watched someone else do it, or b/c I was pressured by my peers. I did it b/c I wanted to try it and see what it was like.
Plus, I could name tons of movies and tons of video games that have absolutely nothing to do w/drugs, does it matter? NO!
I don't agree that the "war on drugs" created gangs, but it is a DEFINITE fact that prohibition of alcohol did.
in fact I just did a research project on the affects of prohibition and crime (much time went into researching Lucas County, OH). I assumed that crime would have gone down with prohibition (assault, etc). This was not the case.
In fact, after the first year of prohibition (in which crime did see a minimal decrease) crime rates rose steadily. Most of the crime was alcohol related (possession, transportation, etc) but it was a known fact that the men were spending more time at home w/their families and violent crimes against them were rising fast..
If we were to drop the anti-drug legislation I am sure the same effect would happen...
lucas county jail records, Toledo City Journal from the years leading up to, during, and after prohibition.
I did it for a research paper on a specific reform movement (prohibition) and I had to look at the gender aspect.
Turns out that women weren't arrested really for much (in Toledo) other than prostitution (doing it or running a house w/it) and possession of alcohol (usually in conjunction w/the prostitution arrest).
"Fully seventy percent of convicted hard drug abusers (by "hard", I mean "harder than cannabis") are admitted Republicans or Libertarians. Therefore, conservatives have in essence declared war on themselves."
You make this sound like it's a bad thing!
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
excuse me though,
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.. though, since it's belgium, what do you do legally anyway :))
You can -not- get pot legally in Belgium
You cannot even use it legally
(well
Freaker / TuC
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Part of the dilemma is that the govt will not use any extra revenue from drug taxes on inner-city education. They will blow it on $6000 toilet seats and other appropriations-committee-crack-smoking.
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the jury is still out if legalization of illegal drugs would result in a similar situation
It was tried - Alcohol Prohibition was a Failure and currently, canabis prohibition IS a failure. No matter how you look at it, the current stigma and treatment of people who like to cut off flowers and smoke them is a crime again humanity and nature. Period. Consider what prohibition gets you: an ounce of pot is worth more than an ounce of GOLD!!! If that isn't an invitation to for criminal element to step in I don't know what is.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
There was a /lot/ of culture around canabis - problem is a catch-22, any expression of it gets one ostracised, persecuted, shunned - and for no real good reason! It's a self perpetuating myth - you can't dispell all the falsehoods surrounding canabis because it's been make illegal for false reasons! Like, did you know that once upon a time, tomatoes or 'love apples' were considered poisonious to eat? It took someone to make a dramatic show out of eating one to convince people that it can be a valuable garden vegetable. This is even worse, not only do people constantly spread untruths about something they know nothing about (such as your referances to 'excess use of canabis' - too much alcohol can kill a person (and it's legal remember) but 'too much dope' has no such effect) but you can't demonstrate it's harmlessness cuz of the damn stupid persecution! I can remember a time when "Wildwood Weed" was played on the radio, but the former Rep. Gov. of California during the 60's put an end to all that hippy stuff. I also think when the US banned canabis they were not only giving Dupont artificial fibers a political/financial windfall, but were waging a culture war on the 'lazy Mexican' Marijuana image!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Your bitches sometimes get killed if a cop or another drug dealer attacks you, before you get a chance to run away.
Can you provide references to deaths caused by LSD?
While you do not use nearly as much marijuana it has been proven that even the 'good' stuff is over 40 times more carcinogenic than cigarettes. All a bong does is waste less, it will not reduce the cancer causing effects.
AFAIK, this is very debatable.
People will be shot over drugs whether they are legal or not.
The value of drugs (causing it not to be worth being shot over), and its assocation with crime will drop considerably once it's legal.
'Medical' marijuana does nothing more than treat the pain, something that is better done with real approved pain killers. It is not approved because it has never been proven effective.
Marijuana helps treat nausea and vomiting induced by chemotherapy. Legal pain killers cannot do that.
The ones who end up in a jail are repeate offenders
Who is it that they're offending, that makes them deserve being put in jail? Themselves?
Is this new for nerds? Stuff that matters? Is it in any way new? If anything I think this article will only illustrate the ENORMOUS divide in techie culture between the pro-drug and strictly businesss geeks. See flaming replies to this for more details . . .
News for nerds may be dubious, but stuff that matters is definite. When free speech is curbed in the name of the Drug War, when privacy is being eroded in the name of the drug war, and when your stuff can be taken, without due process, in the name of the Drug War, it becomes Stuff that Matters.
Yours truly,
Mr. X
...bah...
I'm sorry, I guess I must have halucinated all those Nancy Reagan commercials where she had some slogan or other like just "Just say 'no' to drugs. Yeah, It couldn't possibly have started during the Reagan/Bush administration in response to the dramatic increase in Coke traffic during the eighties. The first drug czar couldn't possibly have been appointed before Clinton took office. And a politician must be on drugs, and/or liberal to support the policies in place when they took office if the majority of the public supports them, for good or for ill.
Next time you use a word like Bias, look up the definition first.
The Reagan-era commercials were annoying as hell, but the "War on Drugs" started with Nixon's re?-election campaign. Drugs were actually getting a lot of societal acceptance, but Nixon was able to strike some fear into the soccer Mom set and get elected.
The boondoggle has spiraled out of control under all subsequent administrations, regardless of party.
Yours truly,
Mr. X
...and they wonder why I'm a Libertarian...
We know our sources are better because:
I won't deny that the journalists are better at finding sources than we are - that's their specialty, after all. But, once that source has been found, they're not as good at evaluating the source as an expert on the subject would be. The expert can tell the difference between incomprehensible babble and high-level brilliance. To most journalists, though, they're both incomprehensible.
And that's assuming that all journalists are concerned purely with identifying and reporting The Truth. There are those who suspect that, in the real world, many (perhaps even most) journalists are more concerned with ratings than with facts and will routinely choose the most sensational version of a story regardless of its credibility...
As for psychological addictions, let's see...cocaine...was widely accepted (despite some really major real dangers like the complete unpredictability of the effect of the same dose on the same person at the same purity on two different days; hey look, real medical facts!) for some time. But then we got cheap cocaine in the form of crack. There is NO chemical difference between crack and powder cocaine; crack is simply a concentrated form (you know, like those little frozen orange juice containers?). So in order to make it seem like it was SO MUCH WORSE the drug warriors started babbling about how addictive it was--in fact, cocaine is not addictive in the normal sense of alcohol & heroin, where you physically have to have it just to function "normally" once addicted, and crack is no more addictive than powder. Hence "psychological addiction" being used to justify the much more severe penalties for something that was the same drug.
As far as alcohol being "psychologically addictive", you obviously don't know what you're talking about, because alcohol is "physically addictive" not psychologically addictive. Your body comes to crave it and need it, and if it's withdrawn once your addiction is set, you have physical sickness (aka DT's etc) because of this.
I've read more about this topic, including the previous recommendations and medical and legal reviews of the facts than you seem to have bothered with.
You might note that I did not contradict you and claim that X doesn't destroy brain cells. Perhaps if you read something besides drug war propaganda (we return to the "lies, damn lies, and drug war statistics" comments) you'd be able to recognize when the medical journals are being influenced by hysteria instead of science. Here's another book for you: "Marihuana Reconsidered" by Dr. Lester Grinspoon, a respected Harvard Medical Researcher who set out to prove how bad pot was, and then found out it wasn't so bad after all. Hm, I wonder if we could do real unbiased research on X we might find that it's not so horrible either (even though it kills brain cells just like aging does)? Nah, that's just a pipe dream.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
damn, I just need to change society and I can cure cancer!
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Doctors like the guy I knew in college (he was out) who counselled drug abusers and smoked dope in his free time?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
So I'm not a juvenile idiot (as evidenced by the fact that despite having "experimented" pretty liberally with pot and LSD at certain times in my life, I am not dead and not in jail), why should my toys be taken away? Just because Johnny Dumbass might be jealous that I still have my toys?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Furthermore, it's worth noting whether I *personally* am telling the truth or not, the fact that there are people who are not juvenile idiots who do find drugs fun was what I was trying to get at.
If you want to say that "use == abuse" and "all users are juvenile by definition" then get it over with so we don't waste time responding to you.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
So on December 4, 1933 it was abuse to drink a beer, but the next day it wasn't (for the record, the 5th was the day the 21st amendment repealing prohibition was ratified)? What *rational* difference was there between the beer and the chemical and behavioral reactions it caused in the person drinking it between the two days? Oh wait, "illegal". Sorry, I've been using the terms "use" and "abuse" by their common meanings, not their ultra-hyper-legalized meanings. In my world use means taking the drug, and abuse means taking the drug to excess and/or in a way that endangers others.
If the veracity of your personal account is irrelevent, then why did you use it as an example?
Because it is the example I am most able to explain. Just because you don't seem to believe me (and in fact go on to define it as irrelevant to you) doesn't mean it's not useful to hang the discussion on.
repeatedly inducing himself into a hallucinogenic stupor...
You obviously have made up your mind on the issue, why are you bothering to discuss it with anyone who disagrees with you? You also have little or limited experience with the range of people who enjoy these substances if you think everyone is "in a stupor" or seeking a stupor. And I presume from your attitude that you're just as disapproving of alcohol use (I gotta say alcohol leads to a lot more stupor than I've ever seen in anyone taking acid, as one example), but somehow it doesn't seem like you're arguing that we should return to alcohol prohibition. What exactly is your point then? That you're comfortable with the hypocrisy of saying "use == abuse" just because a group of old white guys in Washington define it that way?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Cops killing and destroying the lives of innocent people (aka "asset forfeiture", see http://www.november.org/essay1.html for some more along these lines), drug dealers killing each other and other innocent people, insane amounts of money corrupting government and law enforcement, is all justifiable "collateral damage" to prevent a relative handful of abusers from killing themselves?
Oh, wait, I forgot. Since our justice system is so overburdened that it can't provide justice (and actually punish people who hurt/maim/kill other people, drunk drivers for example), we have to assume that it never would work even with the source of the overburden (nonviolent crimes being prosecuted with higher priority than typical murder and assault cases) removed.
I really suspect this is a Troll, too bad it's moderated up as "insightful", given that it's SO un-insightful.
All you have to do is look at our attempt to prohibit alcohol consumption for a beautiful example of what is wrong with "the War on Drugs". Deaths due to poisoned product and gang war, as well as corruption of all kinds, escalated amazingly during prohibition, and most of those factors faded out after re-legalization of alcohol. People who just wanted to provide a product and make money became legitimate businessmen, in a regulated industry. Deaths still occur due to alcohol, but they are a significantly smaller percentage of the population than during prohibition, and reforms to have mandatory sentencing for things like alcoholic manslaughter would do a lot more to keep us safe than mandatory sentencing for a pot smoker caught in his own home.
The primary thing that was left over after the end of prohibition, unfortunately, was the money and corruption, and if you don't think that money helped buy prohibitions of other things to keep the money flowing to the mob and such, you're the one smoking something you shouldn't.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Hell, families are torn apart because Daddy's doing the college-age babysitter, but that doesn't mean we're going to make sex illegal any time soon.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Also, it's worth noting that "psychological addiction" is a ridiculous bogeyman brought forward to justify draconian measures against drugs that couldn't otherwise be demonized very effectively. Hell, I'm "psychologically addicted" to chocolate, and it certainly doesn't do my health much good to scarf down a whole pint of Godiva Belgian Dark Chocolate ice cream in one sitting, but I haven't heard anyone screaming for the prohibition of that.
Please get some clues (there are a number of excellent books on these topics, in particular "Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do" by Peter McWilliams and "The Case for Legalizing Drugs" by Richard Lawrence Miller) before continuing to demonstrate your ignorance.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I'm curious about your definition of "prove", and what specific statistics you're talking about. I'm sure your familiar with the quote about "lies, damn lies, and statistics". Given that the data I've seen indicate that drug consumption overall (including ALL drugs like alcohol etc) is pretty independant of drug war efforts, I'm skeptical about your "statistics" that claim to "prove" anything.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Of course I can filter pot just like people filter tobacco, and suddently it's not so cancerous. Or I can bake pot into brownies and other interesting food, and not take any smoke into my lungs at all. THC is not cancer causing.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
That's a societal issue, not a medical one. What's your point?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I keep seeing this. Are *drugs* really the problem, or is the combination of drugs and the American eternally juvenile sensibility the problem? Drugs in combination with the drug war, perhaps?
I would like one person to actually articulate, without being insulting, without assuming that because a particular person is stupid and can't control his/her intake or know their limits that NONE of the rest of us can, what the "problem" is.
My experience is that alcohol is significantly harder to manage sensibly than marijuana or LSD. My personal research indicates that heroin and cocaine have risks associated that I will not tolerate, but they aren't as bad (in the ways commonly described) as the scare-mongers would have us believe--the risks in particular that I can't abide are ones that aren't commonly discussed.
Nonetheless, there were times in history where all these things were legal, and we have data to show that people were able to deal with their effects or can be left to pay the price for not dealing with them, so I don't see where the problem is.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
So *that's* why we have such magnificently mature entertainments as "Married with Children", "Survivor", and the Howard Stern Show: the libertarians are in control of everything! How silly of me to not notice that the constitution was actually being honored to the letter.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
It's worth noting that there are plenty of people who have the opportunity to make informed (or not) decisions about things that can impact you today--cars are probably one of the best examples; nothing stops other people with cars from harming you pretty seriously, aside from responsibility, either enforced through licensure or through penalties for being irresponsible.
All of that said, I don't think that providing assistance to people who request help breaking addictions necessarily qualifies as the government bailing them out, unless they request it repeatedly (at which point, again, rights to participate in the activity that leads to their problem need to be curtailed).
I think that this does the least to curtail any given person's freedom while they are able to exercise their freedom responsibly, and allows for means to deal appropriately with those who show they cannot exercise their freedom responsibly.
There is no way that you can a priori force anyone to behave responsibly or in an informed way, and making substances illegal only guarantees that those who use them are LESS likely to be responsible people. If your friends want to break their nicotine addictions, then there should be means to assist them with that, but if they choose to start smoking again after that, then it's their problem to deal with. And if that addiction were significantly dangerous to others around them, then there should be a means to make certain they can't get back off the wagon or harm people while off the wagon (licensing to purchase controlled substances or licensing to do whatever that dangerous activity is; in the case of drunk driving licensing to drive is the easy and in-place means).
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
The point? The way to use anything is with full disclosure of all the known risks and what can be done to mitigate them. If you find the benefits (which can be completely intangible) worth the risk, and you made an informed choice to take that risk, then you should be allowed to make the choice. (It's also worth noting that you then take the responsibility for dealing with said risks, and shouldn't come whining to Daddy Government to help you if you get bitten).
That said, the comparison to tobacco isn't very relevant, since the corporate powers that be have gone far out of their way to hide the risks. Any legalization effort should be made with the understanding that FULL information be provided about the substance in question, not just marketing crap.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I knew a friend of Jonathon Swift. A friend of Jonathon Swift was a friend of mine. Streetlawyer, you're no friend of Jonathon Swift.
That's a victim right there.
It is a crime for some meth head to get aggressive and assault me. And I'm a victim because you obviously have never had a physical altercation with someone on meth have you?
Give you a hint: you can hit some guys while coked out of their head with a bat in the face and it wont phase them.
I'm all for recreational use of pot, I'm not a smoker myself but at least with pot you just sit there and stare at a wall instead of try to kill some guy because you think his dog is staring at you the wrong way.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Tell that to an old friend of mine who was born without molars because her mouth was deformed as hell from her moms crack addiction that caused physical deformities.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Well, tobacco, alcohol, sex, skydiving, and driving too fast can kill you too - are all proponents of those things "killers"? It's a little simplistic to say "Drugs are bad, you shouldn't do drugs, mmmmkay?". Like any other choice in your life, drugs can have bad or good consequences.
I agree that kids shouldn't be doing drugs, but that's because
But I really don't care at all if the adults next door choose to partake in drugs in the privacy of their own home. Now if they're mugging people to support their habits, then that mugging should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, but that's a separate issue. It's true that families are torn apart by drugs, but on the other hand many of those families are torn apart because Daddy's in prison on drug charges, not because of any real breakdown of the family. If there were sufficient education and support services for drug addicts in the U.S., most of those broken families wouldn't have to be broken. The quickest way to decrease demand in the U.S. would be to spend half of the "war on drugs" money on treatment rather than prisons, police property seizures (oh wait, that's revenue not an expense :), and shooting down missionaries in Peru.
Children won't automatically get addicted to drugs any more than they automatically get addicted to alcohol, cigarettes, or sex. The rampant use of alcohol is widely accepted in our society, but people still don't let kids drink, do they? (OK, some do, but we've already got laws about that.)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Although, as an interesting side note, in some states possession of tobacco by children is legal. So you can't buy it, but if Dad gives you some you can possess it (not sure about actually smoking). Makes you wonder what the legislature was on, doesn't it?
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
That's fine, but unfortunately those programs make it hard for adults to get drugs, and adults should be allowed to make their own decisions as long as they're not hurting anyone. So, if you can "save the children" without infringing on my civil liberties, go right ahead.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I believe that X is not physically addictive, but it can be psychologically addictive. It's very physically harmful, at least if you consider having the neurons in your brain destroyed to be harmful, which I would think and hope most people at Slashdot would.
Cheers,
What does alcohol have anything to do with it? The earlier poster said that he thought X was neither addictive nor physically harmful, and I corrected him on both counts.
X destroys the neurons in the brain. You trying to whitewash this fact by bringing up alcohol or "most other illegal drugs" is just you avoiding the point.
You're completely wrong about psychological addictions. Where is this used to justify draconian measures? Know what the most harmful psychological addiction is, despite its also having physically addictive properties? Alcohol. Where are all these draconian laws against it, hmm? If you really think that alcoholism compares to your chocolate craving, you're stupid.
Thanks for the reading list, snarf that from such unbiased sources as the "High Times 5th Anniversary Special Edition"? Now, instead of posting about stupid political books, why don't you actually examine the medical research? Laws and politics have nothing to do with the fact that X destroys your brain cells.
Cheers,
Sure, falling into a vat of acid hurts, so does stubbing your toe. C'mon, I know you're aware that things occur in varying degrees of severity, right?
Yes, X does lower serotonin levels, but I thought that argument was a bit esoteric. I thought that mentioning that it destroys brain cells would have a greater effect on a self-selected group of people who consider themselves to be smarter than average.
Cheers,
Dope Wars: The ultimate drug game. Buy and sell, make a profit. Nobody has to die (you can run from the police rather than shooting), and you can even play it on a Palm Pilot.
Jethro
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Please explain this amazing leap of logic. If only I could believe this, I would be in favor of the drug war. But it's ridiculous, which is why I'm against it. Tolerance != Advocacy.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Oh, and for the record, I do have a daughter, so I can speak from experience.
You didn't state whether or not you had a daughter, but I'm going to emphatically state, that in my opinion, if a parent has a child, it is incumbent on them to make sure their child knows how to make a decision. And yes, they CAN make right decisions on their own, if they're taught to do so, and aren't laboring under constant oversight of someone who doesn't believe they can exercise judgement. I know that from experience too.
I also disagree with Rob's idea, but not because the WoD is good idea; far from it. We need to immediately legalize weed, as it's far less destructive than alcohol or tobacco, and start working on serious education programs to kill the demand for hard drugs. Unless we do that, the supply will always be there, no matter how hard you fight.
Believe nothing, not even if I say it, if it violates your sense of reason -- Buddha
Reminds me of the Star Trek episode where two planets are fighting a virtual war, and the "casualties" have to report to places to be neatly killed. Would this be the same idea? Would people killed in the game have to die?
Reality has a liberal bias
Really good implimentation of SlashCode, and really good stories about the drug war at SmokeDot
Reality has a liberal bias
Nice Troll... I'll bite.
The only thing I've been doing longer than going to AA & NA meetings is UNIX. After 10 years of watching people with various rates of success deal with addiction, I can honestly say that the war on drugs is the biggest piece of BS plaguing this country today.
No amount of laws will stop addiction, no amount of police will change peoples behaviors. First of all, an addict doesn't care about the consequences too terribly much. Yeah, they don't want to go to jail, but that's more of a not getting caught issue, not doing drugs is not an option.
One of the things that you first learn when dealing with addiction is that it is a disease and the drugs and alcohol are just a symtom of the problem. This disease is a spiritual, mental and physical one, which means you can't just take an antibiotic and be better, most people wind up addicted because of underlying emotional and mental issues which they haven't dealt with, most don't even know these issues exist. Recovering from addiction is more of a path of self discovery than simply keeping off the stuff.
You essentially have to figure out how to replace the high of whatever your brand of poison was with something that is productive, be it a zen like balance in your life, your family and friends or a new hobby. Getting into a state of mind where these things are as good as drugs in your mind is really hard.
Everyone I know who doesn't completely abstain from drugs b/c of addiction does drugs every now and then. My wife would rather smoke pot than drink a beer, as would most of our friends. The idea that more people will become addicted based on the availability of drugs is absurd, unless this country is full of people who are so unbalanced, emotionally and mentally that the second they try any drug they will become a bunch of junkies.
The real problems in this country are the lack of strong social structures. You probably know everyone on Friends better than your neighbors, and that goes doubly so for their kids. Kids are expected to act like little adults (Zero tolerence and all), even though the essence of being a teenager is being able to make mistakes and fall back to a safe environment to learn from them.
And why is it that we treat everyone like this? Cause we're all so busy chasing those short term goals, like the quarterly numbers, or we're working too damn hard cause our boss is chasing them. This society breeds addicts. It sets people up with the emotional and mental problems that will cause them to fall down that path.
This country needs to look at long term goals. Think about the GDP in 10 years, what happens when our children are falling apart and dysfunctional cause we've instilled this whacked out sense of priorities and values. Even if you teach your kids differently, this is what society is putting in they're little minds.
We need to treat addiction like a disease, rather than a character flaw. Ask anyone with experience in the area, professionally or otherwise (other than law enforcement maybe) will tell you that the issue needs to be treated as a disease not as criminal activity.
Give the drug interdiction budget to the ATF. Regulate drugs like alcohol and tabacco are. After all these are drugs that are more addictive and physically damaging than most that are illegal. Provide for treatment centers and prevention programs for kids with the proceeds from sin taxes on the drugs. Americans are used to paying a lot for drugs, so the sin taxes could bring in enough cash to allow us to reduce taxes on other things.
Continue with educating children about drugs, including alcohol and tobacco. Not that they will turn them into a bunch of addicts, but how they really affect people and how to deal with problems instead of covering them up with addiction.
I don't know how we might change this country to make it less obsessed with short term productivity and more interested in long term goals, such as raising a generation who will not allow this country to fall in the manner Rome did. Otherwise we're teaching a generation to welcome the bread and circuses.
We have to move from the self sufficient frontier attitude to that of a community, a society. Understand that in order to progress we must comprimise and cooperate, not banter around arguing why everyone should follow our holier than thou principles.
Anyway... enough rambling... I don't have all the answers, but I must say that where this country is headed now is completely insane.... and I've dealt with my share of insanity. We must do something to stop this now... perhaps moving away from the war on drugs will make people less likely to give up freedom for security and get away from the us vs. them mentality that says only bad guys need to worry about laws that invade privacy.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
Hey guy, the 'war on drugs' is big business for everybody involved. The drug manufactureres, traffickers, and dealers get higher prices. The 'law enforcement' agencies get bigger, federally backed, budgets, and really good kickbacks (graft, bribes, (whatever you want to call it)). Take a look at local anti-drug operations. They alway, and I mean ALWAYS, happen right before the budget comes up for renewal. If you dig enough you'll find a bunch of local rich people that actually run the local drug business. It's not economical for 'law enforcement' agencies to actually 'win' the 'war on drugs' since if that happened their budgets would be slashed heavily, and for the same reason, drugs will never be decriminalized. In the mean time miscellaneous people get caught in the crossfire when money begins to matter.
The drug industry wins.
Law enforcement wins.
The rest of the people lose.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
april 1st was 22 days ago matey.
If it's serious then, it's even more sad. What a waste of front page space.
BilldaCat
This isn't even funny. Work on it.
BilldaCat
It's funny that there have been so many replies to my post spelling out the evils of the drug war, and the benefits of drugs, and how I'm stupid for what I said.
I'll say it again though, so people can understand: Rob's post shouldn't be a slashdot story. It certainly isn't 'news for nerds', it's editorializing at best, and isn't even a new idea at that (see the 'Cyberdiversion Movement' at Heat.net).
I'm not going to jump into the holy war justifying or debunking the drug war or US policy narcotics, as so many here are eager to do. I will spell out what I think makes a good slashdot story though, and I don't think "Rob coming up with a nifty, half-joking idea" cuts it.
Kevin Fox
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Kevin Fox
This is based on the premise that, given access to the information, people will gather that information and make an informed decision. I don't think that premise is accurate. I don't believe that it's valid to equate the availability of information with acquisition and understanding of that information, and I don't believe that the 'informed decision' model stands up to more complex issues like narcotic, neurological addiction. I have enough friends who state time and time again that they would like this cigarette to be their last, but they fail at quitting time and time again, and it's crap to say they fail because they're making an "informed decision."
More to the point though (and to forestall the flames about totalitarian governments deciding what's best for the populace) my primary concern is when someone else is given the opportunity to make an informed decision about something that can impact me.
They know that guns kill, and they buy them,though that gun can kill me. They know that driving drunk is dangerous, but they do it, even though they might hit me.
Where's my informed decision-making ability?
Kevin Fox
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Kevin Fox
If that post were in a moderated environment it would be modded to -1 for troll. It's hardly worthy of a Slashdot story.
If anything needs revamping it's the US Durg Schedules stating 'how bad' each drug is. This is a political document, fueling most of the problems in the drug war.
While I'd agree that several items on the list need to be examined (marijuana for one) and several not on the list (tobacco) should be considered in an environment not tainted by politics or economics, I'm under no illusion that drugs like cocaine, heroin, and PCP are extremely dangerous, and should be kept out of the hands of children.
Also, to everyone who's saying "Drugs kill? Funny, I'm still alive." Well, those that have died can't very well speak out, can they? It's the same game that big tobacco plays so well.
Kevin Fox
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Kevin Fox
You're surrendering to who? To the mafia? Once legalized, they wouldn't have any source of income anymore. To the drug users? They don't fight, they're just victims here.
As long as drugs are very well available on the black market, do you think anyone is protecting your childs? I don't. Only when the market those things are available on is controllable, we can try to protect our children. That's not possible on the black market.
In Holland, cannabis products are available for sale, and free to use. They have about 2.5% cannabis users. In America, you can get a life sentence for dealing with cannabis -- still, 5% of all americans are regularily using cannabis.
http://www.frw.uva.nl/cedro/bookstore/20.html
http://www.csdp.org/research/us_euro.pdf
And if you want to have facts about america alone -- during the prohibition of alcohol, the use of alcohol *rose*. The effects of the prohibition are well-known. Gangsters fighting on open streets, corrupt policemen, etc. The alcohol consumed was bad self-made stuff, instead of good wine or beer. Only after the prohibition, the use of alcohol began to decline again. I think this is a pretty good evidence that prohibition is not the ultimate answer to problems.
At least for Cannabis, here you are: http://books.nap.edu/html/marimed/
Just a few excerpts: "... few marijuana users develop dependence ...",
"There is no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana
are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs.", etc.
Please also note the following reports, only available on paper:
Almost all major reports issued by governments all over the world come to the conclusion that cannabis is one of the most harmless drugs available. The war on drugs and the whole illegalization causes a lot more harm, death and destroyed lifes and families than cannabis ever could.
The most negative thing that comes from drugs is the total devotion to ideals, even if they're proved wrong.
"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither"
-- Thomas Jefferson
Greetings,
-- Jorgen
At the same time, it's pretty close to impossible to engage in any sort of reasonable debate about
government-hyped causes. I've seen the type of debate on slashdot whenever drugs come up - you've got the D.A.R.E. parrots who've never done drugs, quoting 20/20 about deadly narcotics like THC, and the outraged pothead reaction to the aforementioned birds.
The drug war is so ludicrous, and at the same time, so in the financial interests of the powers that be, that there's nothing left to do but mock it. I can't imagine any major news outlet publishing a balanced story about it.
So when something disturbing occurs, like the latest random civilian death caused by the drug war, what do you do? If you don't have the money of a major lobbyist on your side, or greater military power than the US government, you vent a little.
It's not going to change anybody's attitudes or policies, but it helps relieve some of the anger and frustration at our government's actions.
I think some police officer in Sydney got in big trouble for saying that perhaps one of the reasons there was so little violence on New Years 2000, was that so many people were taking ecstacy rather than alcohol, and were therefore a lot less aggressive.
And even in Queensland, a senior officer recently said that the "war on drugs" isn't working. It's basically a simple economic case of supply and demand. Drug busts simply put pressure on the supply side of things (and don't seem to be terribly effective at that). That might up the price on the street, (forcing more drug related crime to pay for it), but it won't solve the problem. His suggestion was that the only way to get rid of the drug trade is to change the social conditions that create the demand.
Basically all these people who are supposedly fighting the war against drugs are saying that the way it's currently being fought doesn't work, and "getting tough on drugs" won't help. One choice is to try different tactics. There's currently a big campaign on at the moment to educate children about drugs. Another option is to change goals. Rather than stop drug usage, stop the some of the harmful effects to society that surround it. Decriminalisation or legalisation (however you wish to name or describe it) would take control of the trade away from the criminal rings, and put an end to many of the drug related crimes. 'Twould also make it possible to make the drugs much safer, by being assured of the dosages and purity.
A game is fine, but after webcams in real drug-dealing areas start getting fed into sims the next step would be to have gun-toting waldoes with "DEA" painted across their torso running around in real life.
Will I be allowed to sell my BFG on eBay?
What's wrong with selfish and uncaring? I should have the right to be selfish and uncaring if I so desire, as long as I don't actively infringe on the rights of others. You want to give money to poor people? Go for it, it's your money. You want to help a junkie get off smack? More power to you. But don't require me to do anything. What's mine is mine. That includes my body. If I want to fuck up my life with drugs (not saying that I do), that's my choice to make.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Your position is barely thought out, and you ignore one key fact: there is a serious drug problem in the United States and around the world. Okay great, you make a game. At best, this will distract people from the real problem at hand.
Now, I disagree with how this "war" on drugs is being fought, but that doesn't mean that I don't think it has a noble, worthwhile end. Drugs are a problem. It's a simple as that. This game idea trivializes that fact into Cyberdemons being a problem on Phobos. Give me a break.
Umm, no.I don't think this position has any credence whatsoever. This position has been shown in a multitude of movies and other video games. <sarcasm>Haven't you noticed how most video game zombies appear to be high on something?</sarcasm> People know that drugs are bad for them. Ask anyone who smokes cigarettes, "Yeah, it's bad for me, but . .
I could rant on, and I have much more to say, but I think I've made my main point, so I'll stop and let this sink in.
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"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
GODDAMMIT! I just spent 2 hours today responding to these. You're good at this.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
You forgot an added bonues. If drugs were legal they can be taxed. Think of all the money that could then be poured into inner city schools if drugs were taxed.
I think the phrase "squeezing blood from a turnip" applies here. You mean, we should fund local school systems with additional local taxes on a poor community?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
It's no coincidence that the Left always resorts to personal attacks, smear tactics, and "digging up dirt" on their political adversaries. They can't win any other way.
Three words: conservative talk radio.
<sarcasm>
I'm sure that such respectful, well-known conservative members of the media, such as Rush Limbaugh, have never stooped to character assassination. Why, it would be ridiculous to insinuate that their entire media empires are based off of namecalling and pigeonholing people into a nebulous, evil group known as "liberals" who can have their views safely dismissed as irrelevant for belonging to this group. They're just the nicest people who always stick to the issues and argue their points elloquently without rhetoric and blustering. In fact, they'd never stoop so low as to run comedy segments with people impersonating well-known Democrats and making fools of them.
</sarcasm>
Oh, and how about Attorney General John Ashcroft's character assassination attempts?
You know, it's surprising to hear a conservative willing to call GWB's drug experimentation in 1972 "alleged" when it's clearly on record and to dismiss it as unimportant since it happened so long ago. Where was all this sympathy for experimentation when Bill Clinton admitted to trying pot in the height of the hippie era? You didn't see much sympathy from Democrats about Bill Clinton's sexual misconduct, about the Whitewater affair, or about his pot comment. Republicans were howling for blood. Oh, but now that a Republican is in office, they seem pretty quiet about his lying under oath, his stock fraud, and his excessive seizure of private property for real estate profitteering.
What? You haven't heard about all this? Maybe the Left Wing just isn't as serious about muckraking as you say they are.
There's a difference between personal attacks and revealing that a person has a history of corruption and bad leadership. Facts are facts. His record clearly shows that he is not the man to be leading the war on drugs. This info's all out there. It took me only about 15 minutes with Altavista to find this information. If this is all so clearly out there, why isn't the vast "Left Wing Mudslinging Conspiracy" promoting it more, like the Republicans did with Clinton's shady record?
Your argument is false. Republican's have been far more prone to the use of lies and character assassination than Democrats for as far back as I can remember (the Reagan years).
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I'd rather have someone informed, who has a better view of how things are (one beyond just their little circle of friends and family) making the important decisions that I can't trust my neighbors to make correctly. Thank you, but I'll keep drinking my local water thanks to the efforts of those who seek to keep people from deciding to dump poison in our rivers instead of choosing for themselves to save money.
Liberatarianism is founded on one of two beliefs: (a) people are inherently good, sensible, and when given the opportunity will choose not harm one another; (b) let me do what I want and fuck everyone else. The first kind of people tend to grow up when they get in the real world and become Republicans or Democrats, depending on which issues of freedom are more important. The second kind of people are why we need lawmakers to protect the public with their own money.
Anarchy/liberatarianism is counterproductive to the survival of the species. Get informed on global warming. That alone should be reason enough to see why letting people do what they want is a suicidal prospect for humanity and civilization. If you're in category B, then go live in the woods. Our collective needs are greater than yours.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Pro-drug sentiment has been highest among liberals, such as the Democrat, the Natrual Order, and the Green parties, and more centrist anti-government parties, such as the Liberatarians. Conservative parties, such as the Republican and Reform parties, and ultra-conservative parties, such as the (still living) Temperance party have very strong anti-drug statements.
Conservatives are people who wish to preserve traditional values. These include pro-life stances, anti-drug stances, censorship of "indecent" material, "zero tolerance" crime policies, expanded law enforcement powers, etc. Some of these can be construed to be liberty constraining. Listen, I don't usually advocate this kind of thing because I disagree with their views, but I think you really need to look into the Liberatarian Party. They seem much more in line with your beliefs on freedom at all costs then the Republicans. That's untrue. Not everything is either Black or White. Haven't you ever heard of shades of grey? If this person can believe simultaneously in a restrictive view of one policy issue and and a freedom-loving view of another policy issue, then who are you to tell them that they can't?
I'm very pro-government when it comes to environmental issues, but very anti-government when it comes to copyright legislation. I'm pro-life yet I don't have a problem with cloning research/genetic manipulation and would like government to stay out of it. These are alternating views of desiring the government to place restrictions and desiring them not to place restrictions. It's not a matter of one or the other, black or white. I'm free to hold these views, and they are self-consistent. I am neither an anarchist nor a facist. I am, like 99% of America, somewhere in between.
The problem is that you are missing the basic fact that Conservatism is not 100% pro-Freedom. The strong involvement of the Christian Coallition in the Republican party means that certain religious "hot-button" issues will continue to dominate their politics.
Freedom is a glorious thing, but too much freedom is dangerous when taken to the extreme. Should people be free to murder someone who is inconvenient to them? Should people be free to take what they want and only pay for it if they feel like it? Should people be free to drive on whatever side of the road they want and under the influence of whatever drugs they want to take? Should people be free to dump toxic waste in a stream to avoid the cost of safely processing it? Should people be free to sexually molest children and sell images of it to other people, encouraging them to do the same?
Our founding fathers certainly disagreed with some of these, and probably would disagree with the others (pollution and drunk driving) if they were an issue in their day and time. The Constitution grants the government the right to levy taxes, regulate interstate commerce, and draft soldiers for war -- all of which are freedom-restricting powers. I think you yourself need to do some critical thinking about the nature of freedom, the views of your adopted party, and the facts involved in each case. You can dismiss things which are a matter of public record and thump your chest about "thinking for yourself" all you want, but all you're really doing is deluding yourself to justify your chosen viewpoint. At some point, you have to accept what someone else says about something you've never proven to yourself, or you can't get anywhere in life. (Certainly, you couldn't get anywhere in physics and chemistry classes if you had to reprove everything yourself!) You seem to ignore the facts about the heavy involvement of conservatives in the War on Drugs that others place forward to continue your attack on liberals. In terms of mathematical proofs, you are changing the postulates to justify your theorem.
Incidentally, a liberal arts major typically includes philosophy, literature, and psychology/sociology -- all of which requires one to research and critically analyze the actions, words, and minds of others. They also typically try to teach you to be open-minded to the beliefs of others and to not dismiss them as "soft-headed." You really should've gotten a better-rounded education if this is honestly your opinion of those classes. I know that they've been an enjoyable change of pace from the heavy math and programming curriculum that I'm taking.
(Of course, this is all assuming that this isn't all some beautifully crafted and tenacious trolling. If so, you got me. Look at how much I typed!)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The Bush Administration has the will, the moral committment, and the popular support necessary to put an end to the "War on Drugs". You'll see this in action within a year.
Actually, the War on Drugs is pretty popular with the public, particularly the blue-collar rural populace, which is a strong Republican voting block. Years of Reagan activity against drug use has taken root in the heart of conservative voters. Bush can't and won't end the War on Drugs. If he felt that it needed to be curtailed, he would do it quietly, like he has done for environmental programs under the EPA and Department of Interior in his new budget proposal. There's a lot of research, investigation, and enforcement programs that got cut that the public doesn't know about.
(I spent about an hour watching CSPAN when they had a conference one day on all the environmental budget cuts. I found it ironic that he said that the restrictions on arsenic in drinking water needs more scientific research while cutting several departments responsible for that kind of research and the departments that would've tested the drinking water for toxin if the research did pan out.)
Anyway, if he wanted to cut drug enforcement, he'd do it quietly. However, the Bush administration is taking a tough stance on "renewing" the War on Drugs. You can also note that the Republican-lead Congress last year approved more than $1.3 billion to fight drug trade.
Irrelevant. This Administration is not corrupt.
I believe that have adequately responded to this in another post. If you wish to close your eyes to the truth, that is your problem. George W. Bush has committed perjury and stock fraud. He has been responsible to the condemning of personal property that was later given over as lucrative real estate to the owner of the Texas Rangers. He has been rewarding Oil and Mining companies by rolling back government programs intended to protect our people from pollution and to protect our land for future generations. He has opposed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform measure, the best means of reducing corporate/union purchases of politicians, and supported another bill which institutionalizes soft money in a manner that allows wealthy individuals (Republican backers) to contribute millions while restricting unions (Democratic Party backers). He is attempting a huge tax cut intended to profit the richest 1% of our nation, and he has used previous existing tax holes to get out of millions in property taxes in Texas. Hah! People think this is the "moral" candidate.
Bush comes from the same stock as the man who was up his neck in the Iran-Contra affair, who was responsible for the S&L scandals, and who has an even higher body count surrounding him than Bill Clinton. He and his brothers have gotten their power through illicit business deals and use of the Bush family name. They were born into wealth and have ridden a train of Bush family supporters into power. Certainly, if he wasn't a Bush, the Harken oil fiasco would've taken care of him a long time ago, and we'd never be hearing about him now.
Open your eyes! The Bush administration promises to be the most corrupt in years. It's Teapot Dome all over again, with government kickbacks for oil all the way. The Bush budget cut is rife with budget slashes for everything that Oil, Gas, and Mining didn't like. Bush's past business dealing, and his dealing as a Texas governor shows that he will be more than willing to do what it takes to preserve his own interests and keep his family wealthy.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Yes, I'd say that our draconian drug policies are way out of proportion to the actual crime. ...oh wait, you think they should be harsher??? Let's see, you'd rather lock a pot smoker or drug abuser away for longer than the guy that just raped your sister? And, you'd rather lock him up in a place where he gets no help for his addiction -- and likely his addiction will become worse, so that when he finally is released, he's worse off than ever before and more likely to turn to drugs and crime? Makes sense to me.
By the way, Singapore has pretty rampant drug use, contrary to the popular propaganda you might hear. This report explains how prevalent drug use actually is.
Don't forget that to get such a handle on drug use requires a much more authoritarian governement than you're used to living in. We've made the bill of rights a bunch of toilet paper in the war on drugs, but to achieve Singaporean "control", you might as well toss it out the window.
The main problem with punishing consentual crimes, is that to be effective, crime must be punished quickly, consistently, and proportional to the crime. Everyone speeds, why? Because usually people don't feel they are doing anything truly wrong -- though it's against the law, and they will get away with it most of the time. Even when they get caught, many times the officer will let them off with a warning or a simple verbal repremand. The punsihment is usually proportional, but if people were going to jail for years for speeding, you'd have a lot of civil disobedience and uproar going on.
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I'd like to think that one of our legal drugs in particular -- tobacco, is steadily declining in useage.
It's more addictive than many illegal drugs, and certainly much more harmful, and yet, people seem to be putting down their cigarettes and walking away from it droves. I remember a time when the smoking section in a restaurant was HUGE, and had the best tables the best views, etc, and the non-smokers were literally pushed back into a closet in the back. Now, many of those non-smoking areas are the smoking area, and in some places you can't even find a place to smoke.
Also, keep in mind, that just because the homeless guy down on 6th street is laying in the gutter with a bottle of alcohol does not mean that everyone's going to end up like he is.
Education and treatment are the cure, not locking people up and trampling the bill of rights.
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If the LP wants to get recruits, the first thing it needs to do is find a more able spokesman. Every time I see Harry Browne in a television appearance, his eyes are so severely glazed over and he is so obviously stoned that I cannot in good faith support such a man, or the party to which he belongs. I cannot fathom how such a mindset would be at all beneficial to our country.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Anybody who is interested in freedoms, rights or just the ability to make thier own decisions has fled from the left long ago.
This is nothing but sheer, unadulterated poppycock. Your much-lauded "right" would not even allow women to make basic decisions about their own bodies, and yet you claim that the "right" is the philosophy for those who want the freedom to "make thier [sic] own decisions?" My bellowing peals of laughter are negatively impacting productivity in a five city-block radius. Your credibility is completely shot.
It's the so-called 'democratic' left that takes OVER HALF of what I make to support their little social experiments.
What you need to realize is that the majority of decent, moral people do not support the "final solution" that Harry Browne and his libertarian ilk have in mind for the poor and the sick. Yes, in the ideal Libertarian world, poor people do not exist. We do not live in that world. In the ideal Libertarian world, the financially challenged would either murder themselves in street fights or starve to death in a Darwinian fashion. We do not live in that world. In the ideal Libertarian world, people of color would be forced into jobs of pure servitude, and would be treated horribly by their employers. We do not live in that world.
The reason we don't live in this world is because of the "social experiments" that you so despise. Were it not for these programs and the progressives that instituted them, our nation would likely look like the world of "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome." That would be an ugly world indeed, wouldn't it? A world that is consumed by hatred of people less fortunate than us is not a world that I would want to live in. Luckily, because of the progressive movement, it's not a world we have to live in.
'Compassionate message of the democratic left'?? BULLSHIT.
Is that so? Let's compare the messages of the left and the right:
Left: You lost your job today, eh? Here's a helping hand for you and your family.
Right: You lost your job today, eh? Take your family, curl up in a gutter, and croak.
Only a mouth-frothing, beslubbering Dittohead could even claim (with a straight face) that the latter is more compassionate than the former. But since they live in a world where the poor and downtrodden are considered to be subhuman creatures anyway, perhaps this attitude can at least be understood, if not condoned.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Oh
- The "Drug War" is (and always has been) a conservative movement. It is being brought to you by the same fuddy-duddies that outlawed alcohol in the 1920s, that outlawed dancing in small Southern towns in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and that, and that seek to outlaw birth control today.
- Fully seventy percent of convicted hard drug abusers (by "hard", I mean "harder than cannabis") are admitted Republicans or Libertarians. Therefore, conservatives have in essence declared war on themselves.
- There is no greater threat to liberty and civil rights than conservatism. Look at the movements that are present in today's society. It is the conservatives that want to ban certain books they don't like (i.e., Harry Potter). It is the conservatives that want to make attendance at Christian churches compulsory for all United States citizens. It is the conservatives that are calling for the criminalization of abortion, feminism, Catholicism, etc.
- It is therefore perfectly clear that the only way to ensure the liberty that so many of our descendents have given their lives to protect is to support those with strong, progressive social agendas. Beware of the so-called "moderate Democrats"; the "Democratic Leadership Council" is nothing of the kind. These people are nothing more than conservatives in sheep's clothing, and their hateful message is to be eschewed in favor of the more compassionate message of the Democratic Left.
Your arguments have been completely decimated. Have a nice day.We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
At most, they give us a quick, half hearted chuckle between deep analysis of more lurid texts on the same subject. So, in essence, they break beneficial arguments and derail the thought process with the only benefit of making the moderates who think the whole thing is a bit silly feel even more assured in their own superiority, and therefore less likel to consider a truly modest solution to the matter at hand.
Brah-VO, my good man. I wholeheartedly concur and applaud your clarity in expressing something I too have felt for a long time. The attitudes you describe seem to have come to a head during the 1980's with hack comics ridiculing anything and everything they could get there hands on, and the subsequent assimilation of those attitudes into the population as a whole. Don't like Christians? Make fun of them! Don't like evolution? Make fun of it! Don't like Clinton? Make endless jokes about cigars or "it depends on what your definition of 'is' is." And on and on and on. To me, it seems like simple mental laziness: it is very easy to ridicule those ideas which you oppose. It's harder to research them and come up with supporting or contradicting data.
*This* is why I get irritated with Saturday Night Live, MadTV, and Letterman Leno & Maher. They feign criticism, but the only "solution" offered is along the lines of "that's fucking stupid." As true as that statement might be at times, it doesn't solve any problems in and of itself. It's mental masturbation, nothing more.
- Rev.Only difference is that the amount of smoke consumed by tobacco growers is typically much higher than that consumed by marijuana smokers. Tobacco smoke and pot smoke are -- despite popular opinion to the contrary -- mostly analogous insofar as the respective concentration of carcinogens (but not active ingredients) are concerned. Cigarette smokers, however, typically ingest much higher amounts over their lifetime than do pot smokers.
Of course, if you smoke tobacco *and* pot, your chances of something bad happening are higher.
Moral of the story? If you're going to smoke something, smoke pot, not tobacco.
- Rev.Assuming this isn't a troll...
Roblimo, think, if you had a daughter, and we stopped the war on drugs, as you would like to see happen. Now they are everywhere. Easy to get.
Let me spell this out for you, in bold so that hopefully it will have more impact:
No one - not NORML, not the Lindesmith Center, not the November Coalition, NO ONE - is proposing making crack available to schoolchildren. Just because it's legal for adults doesn't mean that it's legal to be bought or sold by people under the age of 18! It's illegal to sell tobacco to kids! You really think that if pot is legalized that we would start selling it in cafeterias? No! Of course not!
Geez man, use some common sense. It's easier for kids to get pot than it is for them to get beer. Which of those substances is currently illegal?
OH, and by the way: I do have kids. Two of them. Thank you.
- Rev.I suppose I should change my sig, since enough people have gotten it.
Each number is equal to p1*p2 where p1 and p2 are both prime and abs(p1-p2)<sqrt(p1*p2)Alcohol has several problems as a recreational drug that make users (or those who do not use it) want to seek other vehicles: 1) it tends to promote violent behavior 2) in large doses, it induces vomiting 3) it supresses the ability to self-judge (you may have heard "pot heads" use the phrase "but, I *know* I'm **cked up").
Yes, we have the one "grandfathered" recreational drug (not counting nicotine because, while it's addictive as all get-out, the "recreational" part is almost unnoticable). We allow its use, and note that the one time we did not was the origin of organized crime in the US.
According to a friend who just got back from Europe, Belgium had just removed all laws pertaining to less than a certain (relatively large for personal use) ammount of the plant-based "soft drugs" (marajuanna and psychoactive mushrooms). It's still not legal to sell it or use it publicly, true, but there are nearby countries where these things are easy enough to get. Please correct me if he is wrong.
My point was that if the US would do 3 things, we'd see a dramatic drop in violence related to drugs:
1. Remove all laws pertaining to possesion of less than "commercial quantities" (e.g. enough for 1 month of moderate usage for 2 people).
2. Free everyone in prison who has committed no other crime (before or during prison) than the possesion of scheduled drugs.
3. Place restrictions on drug sales such that licensing and taxation were possible (taxation to go to important things like FDA funding and medical/psycological application testing). Things high on my list of limitations: age restrictions, large volumes, no sales to DUI convicts.
Imagine a world were no one overdoses because their strung-out dealer thought grams were milligrams. Imagine a world were we did not train the next generation of criminals by putting drug users in prison with violent criminals. Imagine a world where people on chemotherapy would not be thrown in jail for growing herbal remedies that work better than any available medication (nothing calms nausea, increases appetite and dulls pain like marajuanna without serious side effects). Imagine a world with truely renewable sources of paper and particle-board that did not require deforestation.
All the cries of "but, our children" won't help either. Children have easy access to illegal drugs (even more so than alcohol in my high school days) because there's a thriving black-market. We will never be able to stop a determined child from getting access to these chemicals. However, we can do a much better job of controling access by regulating, not eliminating, recreational access for responsible adults.
Regulation is the key. You don't dam a river by stopping the water flow. You control the water flow. Same thing with the drug trade.
This is, as you point out, a bad situation. History shows us that prohibiting access to alcohol simply makes the problem worse.
Drugs that cause problems cause more problems when they are illegal. Sad but true.
Yes, the War on Drugs is expensive, but that's because drugs are so addictive that people can't seem to stop taking them.
The only danger is sending out the wrong message. Drugs kill, and anyone advocating their use is little better than a killer.
Let's just get this clear: drugs kill. Drugs like alcohol kill every day. We don't make alcohol illegal (thus forcing the creation of a shadowy underworld and black market), we punish those who use it irresponsibly. Is alcohol addictive? Oh yeah! Just ask anyone who's gone through alcohol DTs....
Now, what would happen if we implemented restrictions on drugs (turning your back and saying, "you can never do this" is hardly an effective restriction)? Well, look at the Netherlands. Look at Belgium.
These are countries with a crime rate that make most 4-person midwest towns seem like downtown L.A. Why? Are these deeply moral people who cannot be tempted by the evils of marajuana and psychadelic mushrooms? Nope. They are simply, creating a legal vehicle for recreational drug use. What a shock. It turns out that the Netherlands (which has allowed Marajuana in "coffee shops" since the 70s) actually has a lower cocain and heroin addiction rate than the rest of Europe as well. After all, if you can get some recreational drugs legally, why would you go off and use something that makes you a criminal?
The "advocating their use is little better than a killer" line is just a little too over-the-top. Advocating the use of ANY substance without appropriate warnings is irresponsible, but certainly not "little better than a killer".
A friend of mine once suggested (not offered) that I try raw opium. He told me the risks, and I opted out. I think he's a heck of a lot better than a killer.
all of the statistics prove that the government's legal crack down on drugs has reduced drug consumption.
Possibly, but the side effects are that those who do make use of drugs are more likely to abuse and binge on them, and those in the supply business are more likely to be thugs with machine guns.
It's not as if the negative effects of prohibition aren't very well known.
The way the WoD goes on, drugs are a huge scourge on the face of humanity, but the last time I looked, even the most evil of drugs (crack) killed only a few thousand people in the entire USA
Crack is also the sort of drug which you'd expect a prohibition enviroment to produce, i.e. the most concentrated form possible...
When you make a substance illegal, you affectively place all control of that substance into the hands of the black market. You introduce aldulterants, you raise the prices to levels which require stealing to afford.
Also the people in the supply business are most likely to be those who don't care about any laws.
You also make drug users feel alienated and so less likely to care if they violate societal mores.
If supply is likely to be restricted you also encourage binge usage.
We need to immediately legalize weed, as it's far less destructive than alcohol or tobacco, and start working on serious education programs to kill the demand for hard drugs.
You probably can't kill demand any more than you can uninvent something. The best you can do is reduce demand and encourage more responsible usage. Also note that tobacco should really be considered a "hard" drug.
Anyway: my main point.
One objective way to define the "safety" of a drug is to take the ratio of the minimum effective dose to the toxic dose (usually the LD50, the dosage level that causes 50% of lab rats to die). It is not unusual for a drug that is sold without prescription to have a toxic dose of 10-15 times the recommended dose. This is an acceptable margin of safety for our society, it seems.
LSD is much safer than MDMA, or just about any other drug (recreational or otherwise) that is in use today. The effective does is on the order of 100 micrograms. The toxic dose is on the order of 100 milligrams (0.1 grams). That is a saftey margin of 10000 doses. There was one famous case where a few people snorted ~1 gram each of pure LSD tartrate (apparently thinking it was coke). They all survived the experience (although I belive they were hospitalized for some time for ergot posioning).
The doseage level for MDMA where neurotoxixity has been observed in rats is about twice the typical recrational doseage level for people. Of course, rat brains are not a very good model of the human brain... And the rats didn't show any behavior changes... YMMV.
That said, I'd much rather have a child of mine choose to party with the help of MDMA than with any other drug except pot (and I wouldn't want them to smoke it, since smoking any plant material is harmful). I find it disgusting to live in a society where the date-rape drug alcohol is advertised heavily in the media and E users are persecuted.
--
Will Dyson
Will Dyson
"We can't stop here
I suggest you read the original that Rob refer to in the 'from' section. It was by the Jonathan Swift, who also wrote Gulliver's Travels, equally as savage a social satire in the day. It wasn't a kid's book then, it was a savaging of the social strata.
At any rate you can read A Modest Proposal here.
For those that cannot spare the time, the essay concerns his suggestion that, in 1729, when famine, overpopulation and poverty were in staggering proportion in Ireland, that the Irish eat their own children. The point being that the Irish had to do something about their problems, because the BRITISH certainly weren't going to help...
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Brazil has decided you're cute.
The fact that this is showing up as "(Score:4, Interesting)" rather than "(Score:-1, Troll)" suggests that the drug problem is worse that we thought.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Nobody has ever published (that I know of) any statistics on the number of people killed as a direct result of WoD enforcement (Cops, Dealers, your mistaken guy on the freeway, the bad raids, etc), and indirectly (the pothead that gets stabbed doing his time) relative to the actual number of people that die because of drug consumption. The way the WoD goes on, drugs are a huge scourge on the face of humanity, but the last time I looked, even the most evil of drugs (crack) killed only a few thousand people in the entire USA (Pop ~ 300e6). (Pot has killed nobody, ever) (Deaths from driving under the influence excluded, alcohol IS legal, so this is indirectly condoned by the state). Cigarette deaths number in the hundreds of thousands.
My point is this: Why is this such a international incident when I suspect this is a much more common occurance than you might expect?
Freedom isn't without responisbility. That means responsibility for your own actions - in a truely free society, you should be allowed to destroy your own life just as you should be allowed to better it. If you want the state to run your life, then be up front with it rather than beating around the bush like the USA is doing - I'm sure you could more efficiently manage a prison or police state if you're up front about it.
(for the sarcasm impared, you should have on your peril-sensitive sunglasses)
..don't panic
This is one of those things where the people on the net have so lost touch with reality that they babble. Whoever came up with this idea seriously needs to go outside their nice insulated little hole and take a look around. Life doesnt work in the cold vaccum of irc. It happens in the real world, or some facimile of it. Get a grip.
The only danger is sending out the wrong message. Drugs kill, and anyone advocating their use is little better than a killer.
Now that you have that off your chest, maybe you can lean back in your chair, look at some facts, and think about things a little.
The truth is that illegal recreational drugs, by and large, don't kill. The respected British newsmagazine The Economist estimates that a commercial airline flight is more likely to kill you than a hit of Ectasy is. The same goes for the most popular illegal recreational drug, marijuana. (Don't believe me? Get an almanac and compare drug usage statistics with drug death statistics.)
Admittedly, some people do die from some street drugs. But many of them don't die from the drugs themselves; they die from poor-quality drugs or accidental overdosing, both mainly effects of the fact that the production is unregulated. The same thing regularly happens with alcohol in countries where it is illegal; some back-room brewer makes a mistake and fifty people are blind or dead. The solution isn't to ban alcohol; it's to regulate its production to make sure it's safe.
And what about all the other drugs out there, the legal ones? It's a bit hypocritical to be telling kids "drugs are bad" when schools make money selling them caffeine and chocolate and the teachers are getting their nicotine fix in the staff lounge, right next to the government-provided coffee.
Think these drugs aren't dangerous or addictive? Think again. Unlike marijuana and ecstacy, caffeine and nicotine both cause physical dependency and withdrawl symptoms when you try to quit. A quick MEDLINE search will show you far more emergency room incidents for caffeine overdoses than marijuana overdoses. And don't get me started on mouth, throat, and lung cancer rates.
This, of course, says nothing about alcohol, which the majority of Americans use on a regular basis,and for which the body count, both direct and indirect, is orders of magnitude more than illegal recreational drugs. (Don't believe me? Again, take a look at your almanac.) Should we outlaw this too? We tried outlawing it before, and gave up because it didn't work. All it did was turn a lot of respectable, productive citizens into nominal criminals and channel vast sums of money into organized crime, who used it to build criminal empires and terrorize innocents. Gosh, doesn't that sound familiar?
So if you wanna save lives, bravo. But spending billions of dollars to save the small number of people killed each year by street drugs? And "saving" them by putting them in prison for twenty-to-life? That's just silly. If saving lives is your goal, the time and money are better spent elsewhere.
This was a Star Trek episode. :)
I skimmed it quickly and my brain must have automatically filled in the word Jon Katz for the author slot. I must have forgotten to disble the paperclip.
rant() {
You have travelled down the slippery slope to reach the conclusion that "the drug war is a waste of time" equals "children should be taking drugs".
I for one, think that the war against drugs has been incredibly ineffective at its stated purpose (keeping people from using drugs) and incredibly effective at killing lots of people and generally being an economic drain. Billions of dollars are spent on the drug war, and the result is artifially raising the price of illegal drugs, and therefore creating periphery crime! (drug users/sellers commiting other crimes). I'd rather see a greater emphasis (more money spent) on educating people about the dangers of drugs and helping people who are addicted (rather then criminalizing them) then stopping drugs at the source. Even if the government could spend all its revenue collected from taxes on the drug war it would just have the effect of making it that much more profitable for the drug manufacturers/dealers and that much more desirable for rebellious individuals
"The only danger is sending out the wrong message." I argue that people aren't getting the message now. My friends that use drugs truly aren't aware of the dangers. The immediate effects of using a drug like ecstasy aren't visible thus they don't seem to realize the consequences. The drug war has misfocused its efforts on keeping these drugs out of their hands and not at making these drugs undesirable.
The problem is not "the drug war" but the way it is being waged.
}
Spyky
...but how is this news?
This is little more than a tirade, neither "News for Nerds" nor "Stuff that matters". Yes, drugs are a problem and yes, the war on drugs does suck large amounts of money for little perceived benefit. So what's the article about? Making a game of the whole situation?
And how would that help? It's not as if something constructive was posted, or any real facts or figures were quoted. No nod was given to the strides that have been made in this 'war', including money spent and even lives lost. It's not that much of a game that it can be reduced so simply.
I don't know if this was a personal article or based on some real news item, but I guess I assumed the main stories on Slashdot were a little more relevant as the byline "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." attests. This article makes me wonder if we'll start seeing stories like "Humans should eat food to survive", "Driving over the speed limit is dangerous and illegal" or "Lying is bad".
Yeah, I'm over-generalizing, but I figured the article deserved it. Nothing against Roblimo (believe me), but there's a difference between news and musing opinions.
StarTrek, original series: A Private Little War
...Traffic, didn't you?
It's all a game and the gov't is losing.
Personally I think we should be treating addicts, not locking them up.
just take a look at who relies on character assassination in the pursuit of political goals, and who doesn't
So, you're saying that the Clinton impeachment circus wasn't a GOP attempt at character assasination? Gimme a break - neither major party plays nice. If the GOP hadn't blown that issue WAY out of proportion, we wouldn't have spent the last 94 days finding out how much more conservative Dubya is than his handlers led us to believe last year.
I write trance music.
Ok... appearently, an innocent bystander in the war on drugs was your sense of humor...
I was making a (appearently lame) joke refering to the previous columbine/video game/movie post by Rob.
You can watch all the violence you want, but if you have high regard for life, you're not going to take a life. If you DON'T have a high-regard for life, then taking a life will be easy.
When I was in high school, there was a big witch-hunt on for kids that played Dungeons and Dragons, because a few kids got killed in the tunnels of MSU. I played D&D quite a bit, and never was I compelled to kill someone in a tunnel.
No game or movie will teach you a regard for life, because by the time you are old enough to watch them, values and morals should already have a strong foundation...
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
Appearently, we need to create a video games and a movies about people NOT taking drugs, and we'll be all set.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
And then you said: Excuse me? No check? Have you had your vehicle taken apart lately crossing the border just because they heard a report of a vehicle similar to yours that could have possibly been trafficing drugs? Do you cross a border patrol checkpoint on a daily basis where they check every car for... guess what? Drugs! (and illegal aliens). I don't know where you live, but I live less than a half an hour away from the US/Mexican Border. I see firsthand this "virtually no check".
Perhaps if you had bothered to actually read the comment in question before firing off a kneejerk response, you'd realize that there are, in fact, no border patrol checkpoints in the INTERIOR of the US--those being at the border, of all places. If you read his comment again, perhaps you will find it to be quite insightful.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
On the other hand, they might be able to sell far greater quantities and benefit from economies of scale. Still profitable I'd suspect -- most people don't have the time, knowledge or resources to produce their own heroin or cocaine, say. And still possibly profitable enough to kill for.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
While am ethically in favor of legalization under the principle that it's my right to do what I wish with my own body, all of the statistics prove that the government's legal crack down on drugs has reduced drug consumption. In otherwords, while it is no solution, the war on drugs does appear to be reducing the roles of drug users.
Someone you trust is one of us.
You're right.
I meant street gangs.
It's really the same thing though, isn't it . . .
-Peter
That's a really, really good point.
The fact is that at that time, many people were not treated as full citizens by society as a whole.
Fortunately, we don't tolerate that sort of discrimination anymore as a society. Unfortunately, it still goes on in many places in spite of strides we have made.
That is another (very interesting) discussion.
OTOH, I think it is too bad that we accept our rights being trampled on, as long as it is done EQUALLY.
So, as I say, it is a good point, but I don't think it in anyway mitigates my point.
-Peter
Did I say the majority find the police abusive, or did I say that the police abuse everyone equally? I'll have to check.
I don't understand the continued race-baiting. What I am saying applies to all Americans equally.
My point is that our governments are doing things that fly in the face of the Constitution, and very few people seem to care. These things are being done largely in the prosecution of the ?war on drugs.? (Admittedly a lot of it is in the name of ?safety.? None of this exists in isolation though.)
Where is the amendment that says "The 4th amendment stands, except on public highways and airports?"
I think that the standard ?of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects? has been greatly diminished in the last several decades.
I have two words in reaction to your first paragraph. Drive by.
I don't have any illusions that depressed inner city neighborhoods were lovely gardens before "the drug war." They weren't war zones, though. Ultra-violent behavior, like drive by shootings, is about territory. That territory is largely guarded for drug distribution.
It is true that members of minority groups were often not treated as full citizens in the past. I don't see how this justifies a general loss of rights. As I said in response to a similar post in this thread, why is it bad to infringe on the freedoms of minorities, but fine to do it EQUALLY?
Let's have none of this false dichotomy nonsense. Law enforcement has never been so ABUSIVE to the general public, the majority.
Please don't take the above as a dismissal of past (or even present) racism, but I simply will not lay down and surrender my rights because of past failures or because someone plays the race card.
Let me also say that it is easy to sit here and judge past generations? mistakes, by today's standards. But let's face it, the "war on drugs" wouldn't seem so insurmountable if it weren't for single motherhood and divorce. And Communism was very seriously considered to be a threat to the American way of life. Remember that we were locked in a life-and-death struggle. Again, why should past failures to uphold freedoms justify abandoning them today?
Some elements of the past were better, and some were worse. Should we take the existence of those that were worse as evidence that we should abandon those that were better?
So you are saying that the courts nullified the warrant element of the fourth amendment?
Now, I am assuming that you are actually a cop, and not some subtle troll.
I believe that you mean what you are saying, and that you are sincere in your work.
Let me ask you, what to you do when people say no? If you are like the majority of your peers, you ask again. Most people say yes either because a. they think that you are going to hassle them more if they say no. or b. (and this is big) they don?t really think they can say no.
When a cop asks ?Can I look in your car/house/bag/etc.? people often think the he is being POLITE by phrasing it as a question instead of a command. To illustrate, if you said ?Could you please put your hands behind you back?? and I said no, could (I said could, not would) I be charged with resisting? I think so. So, if you say ?Can I please come in your house?? how am I to know that saying no isn?t a crime too?
Face it, it isn?t really okay with ANYONE if you throw all of their stuff out of their car on the side of the road. Let me put it to you a different way. Have you ever had someone stop you and ask you to sift through all of his personal belongings?
I took some police training a while back. On of the lessons was on the escalation of force. The instructor defined the first level of force as ?presence.? He said, be in shape, in a clean, pressed uniform, with a shiny badge and shoes. Use a commanding voice, and you will rarely have to go to chemical irritants (level 2).
Even if you make it very clear that it is okay to say no (which would put you in a disappearingly small minority.) you are probably saying something quite different with your body language.
Let me frame this in a different light. If I was a person in authority and/or carrying a gun, and I asked your daughter to perform a sex act, and she said yes, how can that be wrong? ?Hey, you can say no, baby.?
Both scenarios sound equally hollow to me.
Anyway, if you pull me over and search my car, a judge is going to be involved. Before or after, it?s up to you. If after, be ready to defend you PC.
Of course the difference is that murder has a victim.
You seem to believe (as I do) that a secondary effect of drug use is crime (that is, crime with victims, like burglary.)
My question to you is: when has legislation EVER been effective at controlling secondary effects? EVER!?
I would speculate that prohibition on drugs has caused as much secondary crime as legalization ever could. The "war on drugs" basically created gangs. It turned safe (if depressed) housing projects into battlefields.
Money currently spent on interdiction, incarceration, and prosecution could be spent on treatment and education.
What we have to face, if we ever want to improve this problem, is that the only way to make a difference is ON THE DEMAND SIDE. We can?t stop EVERY drug sale. EVERY smuggler. In the end laws and law enforcement is a waste of effort. The drug war can only be won in the hearts and minds of potential drug users.
Now that I have said all of that, let me tell you how this affects me.
I don?t use any illegal drugs. I never have. I don?t have any reason to lie about this.
The reason that I care about this is freedom. Not the freedom to use drugs (which I think we have the right to, but as I said, this is not a right I choose to exercise) but more fundamental freedoms.
Before the ?war on drugs? the police didn?t kick the doors of private citizens? doors in on a DAILY basis. There weren?t places (like airports) where simply by being there your gave up your freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. It wasn?t okay for law enforcement agencies to confiscate your property, liquidate it, and add that money to their treasuries WITHOUT DUE PROCESS.
Ask your grandparents if, when they were your age, a police officer or sheriff?s deputy could pull you over, throw all your possessions in the street and still have his job the next day if he didn?t find anything.
We are going down the road of trading freedom for safety. It seems we might end up with neither. Do you think the streets are safer than they were forty years ago?
-Peter
I like this idea... for the same reason I hate clean needle programs. People that use these drugs shouldn't get any help from the taxpayer to deal with all the bad things that can happen. I say fuck'em.
--
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
Deaths from the War On Drugs:
- Gunshots - Some high fraction of the 30000 US gunshot deaths are from the War On Drugs and Drug-War-funded gang activity.
- Heterosexual AIDS - almost entirely transmitted through needle sharing or sex with partners who share needles. ~100-200K/year, entirely because the War On Drugs prevents most junkies from buying clean needles at the drugstore. (It's been shown that junkies with diabetes don't get AIDS - because they can use clean needles.) Some fraction of the homosexual AIDS epidemic is also drug-related, and enough heterosexuals have AIDS at this point that the drug can spread epidemically even without the needle-sharing that catalyzed it.
- Bad/Variable Quality Street Drugs - as noted, this is a high fraction of the drug deaths.
- Latin America murders and civil war deaths, from drug cartels, drug-funded rebel armies, and US-drug-war-funded government armies.
- Lack of medical marijuana for cancer and other diseases where appetite is a problem.
- Inadequate quantities of painkillers and substitution of inadequate or more dangerous painkillers for opiates, primarily morphine but sometimes also heroin. This is primarily a quality-of-life issue rather than a death-causing issue, but it's a serious problem for many elderly people, cancer patients, and people with other serious injuries or diseases. It's partially driven by medical concerns about avoiding addiction, but primarily by the political correctness enforced by government and medical standards bodies against the use of opiates.
- Lives wasted in prison. Being in prison isn't as bad as being dead, but it's still slavery - and if you lose 10 years of your 70-80 behind bars, that's a major loss, affecting your family as well as you. Some US states do have the death penalty for selling large enough quantities of drugs (even marijuana), and some other countries like Singapore are much more enthusiastic about killing you for it. (The US Prison Growth Industry would rather have you as one of their customers than dead.)
Deaths from legalizationThen there's all the scary "but if drugs were legal, more people would use them and die" crap. If you look at government figures on death rates and numbers of users, it's 4-5 times safer to be a heroin user than a tobacco user, and about equally dangerous to be a heroin addict as a tobacco addict (the difference between the two figures is that most heroin and cocaine users are not addicts, just occasional users, while 95% of tobacco users are addicts.) Some people who aren't junkies or potheads would waste their lives that way if it were convenient and legal, just as some waste their lives as drunkards. On the other hand, most people would treat marijuana as an occasional drug to use, just as most people consume small quantities of alcohol but aren't frequent drunks. There would be some increased deaths from car accidents - the right way to deal with that is increased enforcement of driving-under-the-influence laws, and it's balanced by the reduction in shootings, drive-by and otherwise.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I) We've already experimented with prohibition and it not only didn't work, it made the problem worse.
1) Criminal activity supported by drug money that rivals that of the Pentagon vanishes and crime rates drop.
2) Serious addicts no longer have to resort to petty theft as their drug of choice falls in price to equal current legal drugs like cigarettes and alcohol.
3) All the money formally funneled through the black market is now legitimized and taxable, increasing government coffers.
4) Money is no longer wasted on arresting people for victemless crimes, thereby saving taxpayers money.
5) Half the US prison population is released, increasing economic activity and saving money.
B) Making consensual acts illegal goes against the very root of why this country was founded. Drug war is unconstitutional:
3) "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" -Declaration of Independence
4) "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" -First Amendment, US Constitution
5) "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized" -Fourth Amendment, US Constitution
6) "...nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." -Fifth Amendment, US Constitution
II) Drug War is racially biased against minorities
B) Minorities are unjustly singled out by law enforcement for searches.
III) Treating addiction as a crime instead of a disease only makes the problem worse.
B) Scarce resources are put towards treatment
C) Analogy: we don't lock people up who cut themselves because they have a psychological problem.
IV) Medical and Environmental benefits of illegal drugs is wasted.
B) Cannabis would drastically cut down the number of trees felled.
Nah, better if it showed up at 4:20 pm last Friday, 4/20.
:-)
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
"Sending messages" your government has killed hundreds of thousands of people either directly or indirectly.
In Europe, we give heroin and speed users clean needles so they won't catch an ultimately deadly infection.
In Europe, we don't have prison industry.
Many countries are already separating hard and soft drugs and decriminalising use-related crimes, so that addicts dare to seek medical care before rather than after their lives have already been destroyed.
In Holland and Switzerland, at least, even clean heroin is provided to addicts, so that their addiction turns into a treatable chronic illness - treated with heroin, but under medical attention.
Holland has less hard drug users than the US, and the young people try drugs far less than in your country (I assume you're a proud fscing american).
See for yourself,
http://www.dea.gov/stats/overview.htm
and http://www.emcdda.org/publications/publications_a
We are even starting to get rid of the crappy drug education that turns people into murderous morons (who sound just like you).
NOSPAM@REMOVETHIS.NO.SPAM - you'll find the real address somewhere
Drugs do cost lives
Yeah, like the 15,000 people who died from aspirin in 1999. 15,000 more than died from cannabis.
More People die from prescription drugs than all illegal ones combined.
Don't blame everything on politicians.
Come on, I thought 'THE BUCK STOPS HERE' with the president and his responsibility to the American people and the Constitution.
NO where in the Constitution is the Government given permission to dictate what you may consume.
Just think about what you support: Putting United States adult citizens in prison because of what vegetable they wish to consume. Sounds pretty dumb, right.
NO, everything can have an ill effect on your life.
You can smoke tobacco, sky dive, swim in the ocean, drink turpentine, eat Holly berries, snort Cheese-Wiz. All perfectly legal, all could have a serious effect on your life. Does that mean we start stripping the land of all plants and animals or forbid ocean activity because you could do something harmful with it?
You can be killed, injured, maimed, disfigured, paralyzed, blinded, dismembered, etc.., by many of the things you do every day.
Should you be a criminal because you do things that could be, or are, harmful?
Do you deserve to go to prison, or loose your job, or home?
The Government has every right to tell me when, where, and how I can sell it, but when was the Government ever given permission to tell us what vegetables we can consume?
The point of the drug war is not to do anything with drugs. It is the largest bit of pork spending, ever. It is, at best, white trash wellfare, dumping jobs into the laps of american's under-educated white population, at the expense of a huge percentage (Nearly 50%.) of our black males.
Here is a short list of companies/people profiting from the drug war:
-All of the cops out there who are just worthless scum that like having a badge and a gun. Review the LAPD Rampart scandal for a good look. Also review the last 40 years of the Philadelphia police.
- Gun manufacturers.
- Ammunition manufacturers.
- American car companies, who provide the police with vehicles.
- Uniform companies (Police and prisoner.) and the textile/dye manufacturers that make the fabric for the uniforms.
- Construction firms. Someone builds prisons.
- Prison management firms. Very few prisons are run by the states anymore.
- Prison guards, and the firms that contract them to the prisons.
- Defense contractors, who sell items to the US armed forces to use attacking drug manufacturers in other nations.
- Lawyers, mostly defense, as prosecution offices in the US are mostly so understaffed that even without drug cases they would still have more cases than they could handle.
- The people who came up with DARE.
The list goes on and on. Name an industry, they have a hand in the drug war. And like all companies, they have a list of politicians they have bought off. No politician would take much serious action against the drug war at a federal level, because he would likely not recieve further campaign funds from many of the companies that put him in office.
If you really want to fight against the drug war, call your legislators and have them support campaign finance reform. Get the money out of the game, and there is no longer a need for the drug war.
How many families and lives are ruined by alcoholism? Millions. Should that that take away my right to enjoy a glass of wine with dinner?
Prohibition DOES NOT WORK. If we want to end drug abuse, we need to do it by giving people better things to do. We need to give people better educations, and better jobs, so that they are less likely to be seduced into the shady world of cheap street drugs. We need to break down this culture of media and money addicts, seeking out designer drugs and cocaine as new forms of instant gratification.
The drug war has been going on for decades. Drugs have come and gone, popularity rises and wanes, but prohibition does not, and has never worked. It did not work for alcohol, or pot, or crack. The only way to keep people off of drugs is to show them that there is a wonderful, caring society out there willing to help and embrace them, to employ them and enjoy them. Not to simply exploit them as resources in for our great corporations, bastions of capitalism, and then throw them away into prisons that make no attempt at rehabilitation.
The drug war is a sick joke. It will never work.
"In short, you must choose between your freedom as it currently exists, or a drug free society.
"Of course, we could try something like really implementing some serious social welfare programs to help raise some of these poorer kids out of the squalid neighborhoods that we always identify with the drug problem. Hell, we could siphon the money off of the rich white families in upper class suburbs whos kids are into the exact same stuff."
And thus, move towards a communist structure, therefore forcing you to "choose between your freedom as it currently exists, or a drug free society." The simple fact is that a nanny-state and freedom are mutually exclusive.
I'll take freedom, thank you.
"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." --Voltaire
projection
Psychology.
a. The attribution of one's own attitudes, feelings, or suppositions to others: "Even trained anthropologists have been guilty of unconscious projection of clothing the subjects of their research in theories brought with them into the field" (Alex Shoumatoff).
b. The attribution of one's own attitudes, feelings, or desires to someone or something as a naive or unconscious defense against anxiety or guilt.
Just because you would've turned into a crackhead if you had access to crack doesn't mean everyone else would. I, for one, grew up around alcohol. My parents drank on special occasions, always had a very well-stocked liquor cabinet (top shelf -- you can afford the good stuff when you never use it), and offered me a sip the first time I showed curiosity, and thereafter whenever I asked. Consequently, I knew alcohol tasted like death, and my parents demistified it enough for me that I never felt the urge to go get blitzed at my friends' parties. Marijuana was a similar story. When I expressed interest, my parents told me what they knew of the drug (both had experimented in their late-'60s-college-days), let me know what would happen to me if they ever found any in my posession, and I was content to hold of experimenting until I got off to college myself. No sweat.
Your problems are your own -- stop trying to project them upon everyone else.
"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." --Voltaire
We tried this game in the twenties with the force of a Constitutional amendment behind it.
Did people stop drinking or did the mob start providing their now-dangerous booze?
Now beauracracies like the FDA can get slipped a mint to make GHB (for example) and suchly class one controlled substances. What about FHB? Who knows?
We know it's bad for us, we're adults, stop insulting our intelligence. If we want to, we should be able to: we're not (directly) hurting anyone. Except for the children in South America who are dying because the poison we unleashed to kill their perfectly legitimate crops has entered the water table and is killing more than just the cocoa plant. Whoops!
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
Hey Rob,
The leaset you could have done is titled your editorial "A Modest Proposal", in light of it being as silly as Swift's solution to poverty in Ireland.
For those of you who haven't read it, check out: A Modest Proposal For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being Aburden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public
Lets start with this one... "People like Rockerfeller tried, but various liberals have been attempting to thwart such valiant efforts, making the penalties disproportional to the crime." Saying Rockerfeller as you called him is something other than a liberal is insane. "I want to be free to raise my children without having to have them exposed to drugs. Simple as that." Than move to Singapore...they have very little freedom you would fit right in. and as far as the root post goes... You want more social welfare programs to help the poor ...gee what about the 5 trillion!!!! dollars we have spent already.
Those same people already get that DRUG.
What people need is to wake up in their communities and lift them self's out...Some have already started. (Not out of their communities out of the plight)
I don't pretend to have all the answers but ...Give me liberty or give me death.
Excellent point, and one that isn't widely known and cannot be stressed enough. It essentially comes down to this: we're drugging kids because they're not behaving the way we want them to. Does that sound right to you?
-----
"Goose... Geese... Moose... MOOSE!?!?!"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Especially on the softer drugs such as marijuana, which make up a large percentage of drug use, or Ecstacy, which the only "overdoses" reported so far are from heat exhaustion/dehydration from dancing too long or from other chemicals that purported to be Ecstacy
Actually, here in the UK where E has been a major part of life for over 10 years now, there have been cases of death due to consumption. Not many mind, my guess would be less than 50. Not bad considering that it's estimated something like 500,000 people take it in the UK each weekend. Although most deaths are due to dehydration as you mention, there seem to be a minority of people who are made up in such a way that one tab can kill them within minutes. And of course the only way to find out is to try it...no thanks
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Where is the sense in this?
This is like saying that stricter gun laws is going to get guns out of the hands of criminals. By definition, a criminal is one that BREAKS the law. And it's not like Joe criminal hangs out, picks up a law book, reads through it and decides which law to break today. They have no regard for law and do what they please, like illegally owning a weapon and using it on someone.
If I were a drug dealer, why on earth would I participate in a computer game that adds to my chance of getting caught. I want to stay as anonymous as possible. I also wouldn't CARE if someone was getting hurt or if the war on drugs was costing taxpayers millions of dollars, because I am a criminal and am not paying taxes on my lucrative drug sales.
Sorry...alternative solutions to problems are always great, but how about something that would actually catch a bad guy and get them off the street.
The only danger is sending out the wrong message. Drugs kill, and anyone advocating their use is little better than a killer.
Yet another person who is venomously opposed to drugs without getting the facts. I don't know about LSD but I know for a fact that after decades of study the health risks of marijuana are still debatable and there are few if any documented fatalities related to marijuana abuse.
The same goes for MDMA which is the primary ingredient of Ecstacy which has practically no ill after effects either in the short term or in the long term. Ecstacy is one place where regulation can help because the major problem with it is that most sellers cut it with harmful drugs to either enhance its effects or to short change buyers. Pure MDMA is thus hard to find so the Ecstacy consumed by most of the raver culture is actually more harmful than it has to be.
On the other hand, alcohol and cigarettes which are legal are amongst the leading causes of death in the U.S. either directly (lung and liver related diseases) or indirectly (drunk driving and second hand smoke).
Anyway, the War On Drugs is an acknowledged failure. As large a percentage of the U.S. population uses drugs as those in countries where the usage of certain drugs is not as frowned upon. The only successful thing about the war on drugs is that it has enabled the government to pass laws abridging due process (various seizure laws) and circumvent the 4th Ammendment.
This response is paraphrased from an earlier response on kuro5hin.
PS: If you want to read insightful discussion on the War On Drugs, I suggest reading one of the following articles and a few of the comments posted, Why Drugs Should Be Illegal or More Cluelessness In The War On Drugs.
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Interesting arguments. You realize that the Prohibition is exactly like the War on Drugs with regards to the minor drugs like Ecstacy and Marijuana. Here are some articles about the war on drugs.
I'll just mention the major similarities
- Increased consumption of substance (currently a third of Americans have used Marijuana)
- Expenditure on substance increases because a.) demand for it is inelastic and b.) it becomes more scarce.
- Violent gang wars over illicit profits.
- People criminalized for activity that harmed no one but themselves.
Point me to some studies showing the medical benefits of drugs if you can. And not ones conducted by fronts for organisations like NORML which advocate making drugs available to everyoneI didn't argue that drugs are medicinal. I just said they aren't as harmful as the government propaganda has lead people to believe and there are a few that are not as harmful as some of the stuff that is available legally.
--
I'll have you know that in our staff "lounge" (they're now called "workrooms"), the teachers have to step out the back door to get their nicotine fix, and we have to bring our own coffee.
--
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
Pain releivers kill, and anyone advocating their use is little better than a killer.
Automobiles kill, and anyone advocating their use is little better than a killer.
Electricity kills, and anyone advocating it's use is little better than a killer.
Life kills, and anyone advocating it is little better than a killer.
Yup, no matter how you apply that argument it is dirt fucking stupid.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
A modest proposal? Well, I suppose that both are satire. But Roblimo's proposal doesn't have nearly enough bite to it. (ouch).
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
some people start dealing "snow-crash".
Don't say you haven't been warned.
Is this another apri's fool joke? huh
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
Hello Roblimo,
Today is April 23, 2001. This article should have appeared on April 1, 2001. Please change the timestamp.
Doh!
Anyway, I had a strange, paranoid thought the other day while reading Brave New World. If drugs are legalized, how long would it take before they're actually endorsed and promoted by the government as a way of subduing the population? Obviously this hasn't happened in The Netherlands or other countries, and it's not likely to happen anywhere anytime soon. Nevertheless, I can see how it would remain possible. Take, for instance, the use of Ritalin in the schools. For certain people with specific cases, it's a good drug. However, I think almost everyone would agree that it is overused, and it's especially dangerous when you get into situations where a kid is not allowed to attend school unless he's properly medicated.
Similarly, the drugs like Prozac and Paxil, etc... Again, I don't have a problem with legitimate medical use of these drugs, but for those who simply use them as a method of avoiding or ignoring problems rather than dealing with them, are they any worse than "illegal" drugs?
I suppose what I'm concerned about is a dystopian future in which a person is not allowed to work or go to school unless they're taking the proper combination of mood altering drugs, and one in which we go on "Soma" holidays rather than actually make good use of our free time.
All that being said, I'm looking forward to a shot of rum later tonight to wind down. ;) But at least that's a personal choice, and not one that has been forced on me by an outside entity.
Random Musings at Rum Smuggler
Thank you, Fearsome Badgers, all of you, however many there are, for posting the Greatest Slashdot Troll Ever In A Non-Computer Category.
You are correct, consenual crimes are a contradiction in terms that the 'freedom loving' Republicans should be able to notice and should work to rectify. The fact that they do not do so, simply shows them to be as control obsessed as their opponents, and therefore hypocrites who are willing to trample rights and lives in order to get votes. Your brilliant satirical attack has both revealed their folly and triggered a wave of retaliation, furthering revealing the Republican complicity in the War on Drugs. Bravo.
I mean you couldn't really be serious about GWB's (alleged with no supporting references) views on decriminalization unless you were totally ignorant of the history of the War on Drugs, could you? The fact that you made no mention of Nixon starting it, and Reagan/Bush pushing it to the forefront both by the 'Just Say No' campaign and the creation of a 'Drug Czar', as well as creating the asset forfeiture laws that not only presume guilt, but also make money doing so, just shows how good a satirist you are.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
GWB's 'mistakes' might have been 'youthful' so we should forgive them, I mean Gore admitted to smoking pot, and it wasn't a big deal in the last election right? Well, FB, I'd be willing to overlook them except that if you were arrested in TX for using coke (and your daddy wasn't a big oilman/politician/Director of Central Intelligence/all of the above, of course), you might still be in prison, finding out how Big John got his nickname. But let's say you only got a small possession felony conviction, and did say 8 years or so, giving you your freedom in the early '80s. Can you go hunting with your buddies and try to get business investments from them that you can blow on failing to drill oil? No - you're an ex-con and even in Texas, they won't let you own or use a gun. Can you use your family name to get a sweetheart deal on owning the Rangers for a couple of years, then turn around and sell it for big moolah? Doubtful, MLB might be willing to let a drug addict/felon (which is how some people would portray you) be an minority owner since it would give you some common experiences with the players, but would that out of state group of investors want you to be their good ol' boy who talks to the press? I think not. Could you run for office? Well, you couldn't even vote so what do you think?
You see, FB, the real problem isn't Bush's past as much as it is his hypocrisy about it. He talks family values, honor to the office, law and order, but basically, he's had his whole life handed to him on a platter, used his name and connections to get into Ivy League schools and the Air National Guard and business deals and elected office,and has weaseled out of even answering tough questions about his past, much less answering them honestly. Hmm, that last trait sure got Clinton in a lot of trouble from the Republicans didn't it?
Look, if you like GWB that's fine, everybody's got the right to be wrong, but don't turn him into some kind of free-thinking, go-against-the-grain libertarian. He's a big government political machine, just like every other prez since who knows when, the only differences are what they spend money on.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
One can't be both totalitarian and pro-freedom at the same time. It's one or the other.
Although it is almost required that a government wants to be totalitarian should act as if it were really pro-freedom. It is also entirely possible that someone might create laws that are in fact totalitarian in nature, while thinking that they are simply preserving order to allow freedom.
Of course, that would mean that politicians are liars and/or stupid.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
Of course, you don't even have to be corrupt to profit from the Drug War. You can sell at home drug tests and DARE paraphenalia, you can boost your agency budget by confiscating houses, boats, cars, guns or whatever else you can get your paws on, you can get more employees, higher wages and better benefits for yourself and everyone in your agency by scare-mongering, etc., etc. Everyone knows wars are good for the economy, after all WWII 'ended the Depression'. Of course, if you are on the losing side(Germans and Japanese), or even if you win but not by much (Soviets and French), you've got problems. Is there a lesson here? Well, probably not one that FB will get...
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
The presumption of innocence is there so that the prosecution (governement) cannot punish citizens without proof that they have done something wrong. The Big, Bad Government must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that on April 22, 2001, Fearsome Badgers did sell narcotics to an undercover DEA agent, blah, blah, blah, before we send you to prison or execute you. However, asset forfeiture laws work this way: The Big, Bad Government says Fearsome Badgers sold foo to bar, arrests you, takes your house, car and gun collection, sells what they don't want, and then tries you. If you are acquited, you get your freedom, but you have no car to drive home in, but that's okay because you have no house to live in.
FB, as a free-market, small government fan, don't you find it odd to be saying, in essence, that government is too big and powerful, but they should be able to take things from private citizens without proof? Do you see why that makes you look like a hypocrite?
As an opponent of big government, FB, you should know that the one thing government agencies want more than anything else is more $$$ for their budgets. Is there anyone who doubts this? Do you think that there is any possibility that once the Big, Bad Government realizes that they can give themselves raises by kicking down your door, stealing your stuff, throwing you into jail, and having a garage sale - they won't? If so, please explain why you assume that all government employees are perfect, but are still so bad that they are at best a necessary evil?
If the 'public nickel' doesn't pay salaries for public officials who will? The sponsors of the bill? IIRC, the sponsors of a bill are the Congresscritters involved. Are you for private citizens and corporations paying directly for the laws that affect them? Well, I suppose it would stop all those under the table payoffs and the like, but still can you see any possible side effects of this?
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
Thank you, I stand corrected. Actually, we both are sort of right - LBJ did ask for more 'Federal drug and narcotics control officials', but per the DEA Museum section on their website (http://www.dea.gov/deamuseum/home.htm - it's in frames under 'More on DEA' - right below the gift shop:)) 'On July 1, 1973, President Richard Nixon created the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)' by combining a few federal TLAs into the DEA.
So, here's my updated version (I know you're waiting with baited breath:):
I mean you couldn't really be serious about GWB's (alleged with no supporting references) views on decriminalization unless you were totally ignorant of the history of the War on Drugs, could you? The fact that you made no mention of Nixon starting the DEA by merging its predecessor agency, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) with various law enforcement and intelligence gathering agencies, and Reagan/Bush pushing it to the forefront both by the 'Just Say No' campaign and the creation of a 'Drug Czar', as well as creating the asset forfeiture laws that not only presume guilt, but also make money doing so, just shows how good a satirist you are.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
The police can justly dispense with irrelevant formalities because they know who's guilty. Of all the perpetrators "unjustly" clobbered by Giuliani's police force, has even a single one turned out, in retrospect, to be white? No. Not a single one, ever. City and local police do their job well. It's the federal stormtroopers who murder innocents in rural places like Idaho and Texas. That is the abuse of government power which concerns us.
FB, you are truly a gem. Thank you, you have kept me entertained. I do have a question for you though, how can someone turn out to be white in retrospect? You've got to be better and sounding like the master race when you're playing the race card...
I favor proportional representation, with the franchise scaled according to the ability of an individual to exercise it responsibly. Naturally, those smart and ethical enough to amass fortunes are correspondingly more competent to decide what laws we should have...
In other words, Britney Spears votes should count more than yours since she made more money than you this year. How about all those guys who become NFL players this weekend? How many more votes than you will they have? IIRC, minimum wage in the NFL for a rookie is about $150K for the season, but those early 1st round picks will get 10 to 100 times that as a signing bonus. But I'm sure you'd be happy to let someone who bailed out of college after 3 years of barely going to class vote a few thousand times more than you...
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
And thank you, sir.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
Not less drugs, more drugs. It'll kill the stupid people off.
A virtual war against frugs would be just as useless as the real one. I Have lived a great part of my life in Europe, and now I live in Canada, so I have had an experience with the way both continents are dealing with the "drug problem". And it would seem that the American way is fighting a loosing battle. That is not to say that the European way is much better, at least in most countries back there. I have also used drugs (a very, very small amount, that's true), so I can at least look at both sides of drug use. I'm not using any drugs atm (last ounce of weed I had, has been sitting in a drawer somewhere for the past year or so, and I haven't touched any other drugs since).
From all I've seen (on TV and even personal experience) or read in books and newspapers (William Burrough's Junky is an awsome book on the drug addiction problem), whenever the government tries to force control over drugs it fails. Miserably even. No matter how hard any police force is trying to stop trafficants from bringing drugs into a country, the harder the criminals are trying to achieve their purpose. The result is very simple, in my opinion at least: the government spends a LOT of money, people on both sides get killed (and even innocent bystanders), but the drugs still get into the hands of the consumer, the addict. The only difference is that they cost a lot more than they would if the drugs were not fought so hard. By cost I don't mean only money, but lives mostly. If you don't believe this point I'm making, just open look around on the news. For every drug bust they show, I'm 100% certain that a 1000 go uncaught.
For me, the only solution, the only realistic one that would work is to make drugs legal, while maintaining a tight control over their use. By that I mean if someone wants to try drugs, they should identify themselves, be offered counceling, rehab, etc if they want to stop using drugs, or otherwise they should be allowed to fry their brains all they want. Now I know this sounds ridiculous to a lot of people (if not most people), but just the fact that the number of drug addicts has stayed pretty much constant before and after the drug was in the US has started should tell a lot. The one place where this example has showed results is, of course, Amsterdam.
While the drug use in that city is likely highest in the world, that is primarily because it is the _only_ city that does not have strict laws against drugs. So all the addicts from everywhere crowd there. But that would not be the case if the anti-drug laws were dropped, or at least weakened, that would not be the case anymore. And over there the crime rate is not higher than in any other place on this planet. It is even lower (just compare it to the poor neighbourhoods in any US city, and you'll see what I mean).
And the whole ideea that if you let people use drugs freely everybody will become an addict, that is pure bullshit. I've had access to them, tried them, didn't like them, so I've stopped. And I'm really not likely to use them ever again.
So drop the drug laws (or weaken them at least), stop spending so much money on the drug wars, and forget about virtual ones which would achieve absolutely nothing.
It's been generally accepted that Needle Park was a failure...
"What makes you think that the War on Drugs is nothing more than a silly game? "
Common sense.
563/100,000 people were the victims of violent crime in the US in 1999 (see: the FBI's Statistics)
570/100,000 people were victims of violent crime in the Netherlands in 1999, just about the same as the US! (see: the Netherlands Ministry of Justice)
From an economic point of view, even the DEA's own statistics clearly state (if you wade around for a while) that the Drug war is just about an economic null-op. i.e. the money we "save" by having these "criminals" off the streets is about the same as the amount of money we spend to put them in prison. So, what the hell? Why are we doing this again?
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If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going.
That's right. It's as easy to get as candy, and even goes by the street name "skittles". And there's no nasty underground or illegal connotations to go along with it. For $1 to $5, you get the tablet, crush it up, and snort away.
School Nurses across the country trot from class to class, handing this stuff out like an afternoon snack. It's closely related to Methamphetamines, and has an almost identical list of side effects and warnings.
In addition, it is interesting to note that Ciba Geigy (now part of Novartis), which manufactures the stuff, has done a wonderfully covert job of marketing this stuff at parents across the country, by funnelling about a million dollars through the supposedly "grass roots" organization CHADD, which aims to "educate" the public about ADD. In much the same way that the manufacturers of Listerine "educated" the populus about a "disease" called halcytosis. AKA bad breath, about a hundred years ago.
So pop a few tablets in your kids, cure them of their impulsivity, and creativity. Drop them in front of the nearest Cathode Ray Tube, and voila! Parenting can be done even by idiots. And so it is (not that they were prevented from doing it before mind you...)
It's soma. Pure and simple. Brave new world, here we come...
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If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going.
Actually, that's not really the choice either, because regardless of how the drug war is escalated, it still is not going to create a drug free society. The real choice is between having your freedom, or giving up your freedom for the warm and fuzzy feeling that you are "doing something" to stop illegal drugs.
I'll take my freedom, thank you.
I won't say here whether or not any of these shows achieve this goal, but that's not really the point.
And don't do anything silly while in Singapore either, like chewing gum. That's illegal there too, you know.
ceci n'est pas un 'sig'
I'm sorry, I guess I must have halucinated all those Nancy Reagan commercials where she had some slogan or other like just "Just say 'no' to drugs. Yeah, It couldn't possibly have started during the Reagan/Bush administration in response to the dramatic increase in Coke traffic during the eighties. The first drug czar couldn't possibly have been appointed before Clinton took office. And a politician must be on drugs, and/or liberal to support the policies in place when they took office if the majority of the public supports them, for good or for ill. Next time you use a word like Bias, look up the definition first. -Andonyx www.andonyx.com
Andonyx www.andonyx.com
Okay captain critical thinking, let's take a look at the "evidence" here. I replied to a post regarding BIAS on slashdot. My comments ponted out how the fact that the drug war was not started with the Clinton administration shows that the post to which I responded were just as BIASED if not more so than the slashdot article to begin with. You may also have noticed, had you not been so busy patting youself on the back for your bulbous temporal lobe, that I did not attack or defend a democratic, or replubican policy either way. You assumed (with no evidence) that I am somehow anti reagan/bush because I disagreed with the erroneous post above me. By the way, I'm an engineer, and the liberal arts degree comment shows a bias I couldn't make look more absurd than you already have. And really, with all your ivory tower academic praising of the logical deduction, where was your reasoning and evidence anyway? Or did you have nothing better to contribute than some personal crusade against theatre majors? Nice job Einstein. -Andony www.andonyx.com
Andonyx www.andonyx.com
It was the game that crashed and wiped my memory right before that big Calc test. Ahhh, memories.
What, me worry?
Poor example, I'm afraid. The "crack baby" scare is little more than a myth. A number of studies, most prominently one from last year out of the U. of Toronto, have found that "crack babies" are, in terms of intellect, statistically indistinguishable from other individuals in the same population. I have also read studies indicating that, while they start out distractable etc., they seem to grow out of it just fine when they hit adolescence.
The best set of references on this that I have offhand is the bibliography off of this set of slides. Some browsers don't like it, though.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
I offer this humble (not original) proposal for deciding when it is OK to make something a crime. Find a victim. Oh, and the perpetrator and victim may not be the same person.
Before you start to point at the children of addicts as victims, be ready to answer exactly how possessing or using drugs victimizes them directly. If your answer that it causes neglect or abuse, note that child neglect and abuse are already crimes. Also be ready to answer why it should be a crime for people with no children to use drugs.
Disclaimer (and a little bit of a troll): I don't have this opinion because I want to be a pothead or junkie. My drug of choice is an occasional Guinness.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
When I saw the headline "Internet Drug Game Could Save Lives and Money," I thought to myself: How is Everquest gonna save anyone's life?
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share and enjoy
Well, I guess I'm just an anomaly then, like so many other people I know. Or maybe computer science isn't engineering, I don't know.
Let me just get straight what you're saying. Libertarianism is the One True Philosophy, because it constantly claims to be more logical and intellectual than other philosophies. Also, the Blessed People, engineers, are more likely to follow the One True Philosophy, because of their more enlightened nature.
I guess I can't argue against that, since I don't subscribe to libertarianism and therefore suffer from a reduced capacity for critical thought.
On a side note, why is it that Ayn Rand's opposition to religion never seemed to eliminate religion's more slavish qualities in her ardent followers?
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share and enjoy
Look, I didn't say that ecstasy immediately destroyed a person's mind and gave them chronic depression. Initial studies indicate ecstasy has a neurotoxic effect, and some people have observed long-term psychological damage (esp depression) resulting from heavy use. Even the most drug-happy source will at least mention this.
I think if some of you anti-drug mouthpieces just tried taking some drugs a few times, you'd realize how much bullshit you're spouting, and why people who have actual firsthand experience with drugs and drug users laugh at your ignorance.
Huh? I'm an anti-drug mouthpiece? I think the drug war is just another aspect of the class war, and that drug use should be decriminalized, and drug manufacture regulated. It wouldn't solve all our problems, but it might solve a couple of them.
Every drug that you take into your body, whether legal or illegal, is going to have its positive effects and its side effects. Drug users may laugh about studies of drugs that show potential harmful side effects, but only because their experience is limited, and of an informal basis. It's hardly the same as conducting a rigorous scientific study of a drug. I drink, but I don't go around claiming that heavy alcohol use doesn't damage the liver, just because neither I nor my friends have ever experienced that.
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share and enjoy
Actually, the negative experiences with ecstasy come when after enough exposure to it, the body's regulation of its seratonin levels becomes disrupted. This results in profound depressions and other psychological disturbances. Oh, but one guy did some drugs once and wasn't negatively affected in any way he could discern. That must mean that anyone should be able to do drugs without any negative consequences, right? I'm sure any doctor who treats drug-related illnesses would be able to give you far more information. Oh, but that's just "propaganda."
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share and enjoy
Don't worry, he'll get better at it with practice.
My poetry site welcomes the unusual.
One little difference, drug use doen't have a non-consenting victim.
It doesn't matter whether that gang member is car-jacking me for money to buy dope from the street dealer or for money to buy dope from the neighborhood pharmacy--people under the influence of drugs are dangerous and stupid.
So are people under the influence of alcohol. People get addicted to that stuff too. Have you ever been carjacked for money to buy alcohol or tobacco? No. It's so cheap and widely available that it would make more sense to simply beg/buy some at the store.
God made the plants, the birds and the bees, the funny shaped fern and the coca leaf, and my hot cocoa and my green tea
All I know about life is that it appears to be the sum of my experiences, and I would rather not choose to deliberately insulate myself from the world of experiences that my lord has given me. But then, Coyote is is a pretty damn fucked up diety.
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Damn, I think the dude who wrote this artitical is either a)stoned b)bummed out cause his dealer is in jail. Its a good idea for a game anyway. It won't win the war on drugs which is as usless as the prohibition. The war on drugs won't be won because there is too much money involved. Making a game out of it with all major factors included, sounds fun though. yeah and make it a bit funny too. make dealers a bit dopey, the cops fat bastards...etc...etc
Roblimo's game metaphor adequately describes many of the absurdities of the drug war. But let's reflect for a moment. If the war on drugs is a game, who are the winners?
- Short-sighted legislators who willingly swap constitutional liberties for "hard on crime" rhetorical jingoes such as "zero tolerance" and "mandatory minimums."
- The increasingly privatized and profitable prison industry. In some states, new prisons are welcomed with open arms as "growth industries" requiring lucrative construction contracts and hundreds of jobs for correctional staff and support personnel.
- The tabloid media, including such glossy shitrags as TIME magazine and superficial "in-depth" reporting shows like 20/20. Just think about how many hysterical articles/broadcasts these paragons of journalistic objectivity have devoted to perils of Ecstacy tainting the purity of our nation's red-blooded youth.
Sincerely,
Vergil
Vergil Bushnell
Insects and Grafitti Photos
What's up, punkazz? You wanna be l33t by selling shrooms online to other crackers (and -heads)? eDrugTrader is the way to go (They'll also p1mp your mom)
peace
"What we elect to call imagination is mere combination of things not heretofore combined." - Frank Norris
And you want to make scenes like this common by making it easy for kids to get drugs? I hate you.
What you don't seem to understand is that although you were a lot smarter than most when you were in middle school, there are manny, manny kids that age who are much less intelligent. Young kids can NOT make the right decisions on their own. Thats why their parents need to keep them away from situations that could be bad for them by doing things like funding programs that make it hard for kids to get drugs.
Someday, when you have middle school age kids who aren't as smart as you were at that age, you will look back on what you wrote and realize how short-sighted you were.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I know Jonathan Swift. Jonathan Swift was a friend of mine. Roblimo, you're no Jonathan Swift.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
But really, you're the one who is short-sighted. You see that if you make it legal, you support using them, and you want to make them readily available to everyone. Now THAT is short-sighted. It is really quite the opposite, as all the other posters have shown you. But just that is hardly even the issue. Should drugs be distributed with no regulations on quality or buying age? Should recreational drug users, and people with real drug addictions be incarcerated for long periods of time with other drug addicts? Should drugs provide gangs and violent criminals with a large source of income? You would have thought the country would have learned its lesson with alchohol.
What if it was YOUR kid that decided to use marijuana responsibly in her own home, and a police officer catches her with it?! She would be thrown on the ground, put in hand cuffs and taken away. Would prison time and fines really help? What was she doing wrong to begin with? Who committed the crime?
This is such an excellent post. Who would think that something posted on Slashdot would be worth reading? :)
This reminds me of a concept I have recently discovered for myself. It's the event of having the pleasant feeling you get when you play a video game, watch a sitcom on TV, or eat a candy bar. I don't know what to call it, though. My best candidates are "short-term pleasure" (STP) and "brain sugar".
The idea is that STP or "brain sugar" is the pleasure you get from something that doesn't really accomplish anything. I.e., you get a bit of euphoria and then it's over. I don't mean to imply that that it is over quickly; it could last for hours, but in the end you have nothing to show for it. "Brain sugar" can be a movie, a song, or a set of nudie JPEGs. Also (to keep this post on topic), drugs can certainly serve as "brain sugar". A theory of mine is that "brain sugar" is why the Internet has such an MTV-ish feel to it. In many cases the only real cost of "brain sugar" is time, but it has a very masturbatory nature to it.
The problem, I believe, is that we have so much "brain sugar" available to us, that it is easy to not feel the need to do anything constructive and truly rewarding. E.g., we can just play video games or watch TV and never feel the need to do anything else. Another theory of mine is that this is the basis for addictions that don't (directly) involve a chemical dependency, like an addiction to video games; it is so pleasurable that the addict spends too much time on it, often neglecting such things as sleep and personal maintenance.
My personal experience with "brain sugar" was when I was a co-op (intern) a couple of years ago. After work every night I would do nothing but play several hours of Quakeworld. It was so fun for me that I just couldn't get enough of it. It felt like I could do it for the rest of my life and not get tired of it, and I didn't feel I needed to play any other games. I then realized that if I did nothing else but play Quakeworld for the rest of my life, I would die nothing more than a Quakeworld zombie. Even then it took time to break the habit. The problem was, if I got plenty of pleasure from it, even if I did it forever, then why quit (Exercise left to the reader)?
Of course it is not true that "brain sugar" is bad in every case. For example, it can serve as excellent stress relief. However, as always, "moderation is key"; too much "sugar" is not good for you.
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Obviousness is always the enemy of correctness. -- Bertrand Russell
The magic of a game is believing in it, so we'd better make it a convincing and stressful experience for them. Maybe some LSD before the sesssion to make them abit more impressionable ?
And why not have some random character flipping so the people in power could experience some of the reality of a columbian citizen or inner-city school teacher? I'm sure that would be enlightening for all concerned.
Not sure where to attribute this (or if it's accurately reproduced...)
"The government could take away all the drugs in the world and people would spin around on their lawns until they fell down and saw God.
"
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Thank you! This is the realization most people don't make: drugs are not bad, the drug trade is bad. I don't have any problems with smoking a little pot with my friends, but I do feel bad for supporting all the crime and violence that is associated with it. When I'm toking up with my friends it's almost impossible to believe that all this fuss could be over what amounts to some dried out leaves.
-antipop
So the only way to make this work is to make Gaming mandatory. You will put in 4 hours per day gaming. Maybe we could do it as doctors orders.
Doctor: "Here's your prescription for 4 hours of Doom per day. Later on, we'll move you up to Quake"
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Killing the Coca plants is silly and just as deranged as the 'war on drugs'. It's as deluded as when the Americans drop paraquat on harmless pot plants. Methamphetimine and Methcathinone would just jump in to fill the void that the dead coca plants left behind.
sic semper tyrranis
re: "The "Drug War" is a creature of the Democratic Party, and always was, so let's skip the propaganda for once. "
That is so deluded.. how old are you?
During the Reagan/Bush Sr. years all you ever heard of was the war on drugs.. "Just say no" was brought to you by Nancy.. and as for the dumbass war on drugs - thank Richard M Nixon.. Jesus, I'm Canadian and know more about American Politics than you.. how typical. You are right about one thing though.. Conservatives are supposed to support personal choice/freedom... they just don't believe this applies to drugs/sex/abortion because they're usually really dumb people. Also, since Clinton admitted he used pot.. he should have either done his time or done something about the law.. Same goes for cokehead GWBjr
sic semper tyrannis
Whatever idiots mod'd you up should check their brains into a repair depot.
All drugs should be legalized!
*Note! I did not say anything about childern taking drugs!
Are you insane? Alcohol is legal! It is a drug!
Do you see a lot of daycare workers giving it to children?
sic semper tyrranis!
Yeah, I guess that was your point.... sorry. ;)
Don't know how you got pointing that out mod'd up though
btw antioffline.com rules, g1
Bullshit! I see teenagers smoking tobacco! not children.
As for legality being an issue! Every teenager knows it's easier to score pot than alcohol! Why, because alcohol is legal and controlled!
Will no one rid me of these Anonymous morons?
Good idea! Unfortunately, if you make a game called "war on drugs" you will probably be sued for promoting violent, murderous, and plain damn stupid behavior.
-- look, cheese ahoy!
Despite you shouting it, it isn't so simple. A few drugs are physically addictive at high regular doses (Heroin, Cocain, Nicotine, Alcohol ). Most drugs, including pot as well as all halucinogens are not addictive. Even the addictive drugs are not going to get you hooked unless you have an addictive predisposition, which only a tiny percentage of people have. I drink alcohol a few times a week for many years and I got drunk only once in my life by mistake. Most people don't enjoy the high level of consumption that leads to physical addiction. ( the only exception is the completely legal nicotine.)
There were reasons for outlawing certain drugs.
I am not completely versed in the history of drug laws, but I heard/read that the "reasons" most drugs were outlawed in the first place was their associations with particular ethnic groups.
I am not saying that there is never reason to outlaw certain drugs ( hint: I am not a libertarian). But most of the national drug talk is purely irrational and based on crackpot science. I believe that putting millions in jail, spending billions of dollars, and totally wrecking quite a few neighboring nations ( with millions of deaths involved), on the basis of a mix of prejudice, political pandering and hysteria is a crime against humanity in a completely unmetaphorical sense.
-- look, cheese ahoy!
No, the war on drugs DOESN'T make sense.
Instead of investing billions of dollars tracking down all those "illegal" druggies, let's do something a bit more creative with out money.
Legalize drugs. Every stinkin' one of them. Categorize, classify them (Which the government is good at, no?) Get together a convention of UNBIASED scientists and rate them all. Find out how much at what intervals is safe.
THEN start ladling it out. Make it so that you have to be a registered druggie. That way, you get your weekly fix, and if you start to abuse it, or if you start to fuck up because of the use, the already know where you are! Bob Q. Public, 714 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield, USA: Hasn't shown up for work in three days. Registered coke user. Hmm, we have his address, we know he's a licensed drug user, he hasn't shown up for work in three days! Let's go find him, and if he's OD'd or something, he gets a restriction on his license, or gets it suspended until he's gone through rehab.
Sound familiar? Kinda like driving. And I know from personal experience that a bad driver is just as, if not more, dangerous than a bad drug user!
And surely, for the bean counters out there, this couldn't cost much more than the war on drugs?
Now if only we could get over our ingrained predjucises about these bad, BAD drugs.
Akardam Out
I do not support the legalization of drugs as a whole. I laugh at the people who want to legalize marijauna on the basis hemp can be useful for other things. I don't laugh at medical research on the use of cannabis for pain relief and nausea relief. I do support the decriminalization of drugs though. We need to create a society that allows this problem to be dealt with straight on, with users able to come forward for help if they want it.
We as a society are paying for this drug war in increased costs of running prisons, increased cost in emergency room visits by people taking poison instead of "USDA" certified drugs.
I have to kind of agree with those conspiracy theorists who say that if we really wanted to end rampant drug use in this country we could, but it is politically beneficial to have a universal ethnic enemy (i.e. Drug Lords, crack dealers). I'm not that simple that I think it is completely a race issue, but I can't help wonder if tobacco was grown by Columbians instead of wealthy white Southern gentlemen, that that part of history would be different.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Beermat Software make a windows version of this game called Dope Wars that features a World ranking ladder for all you aspiring drug dealers.
You can even join or create your own drug cartel (free registration req.)
IIRC each game score generates a unique number key, that when submitted to their site, is translated back to your score and entered into the ranking table. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Still, I prefer the older non-ranking dos versions or for some added depth try Pimp Wyld
*** I am the real stylewagon
I mostly agree with you, but I couldn't let this one pass. If alcohol gets to the point where it is killing people (drunk driving, domestic abuse, etc.), then it is breaking families apart. It is so obvious that it is no longer fashionable to make movies or T.V. shows on the issue, but they are made occasionaly, from the real pulpit and the media pulpit (The Apostle and Affliction come to mind).
People don't think of smoking as tearing families apart, but it is a wedge. My father smokes, but keeps it a "secret" from us kids, never smoking in the house, or smoking around the side, where there are no windows. Some relatives do smoke in the house, and it is hard for non-smokers to spend any time in the house. My wife seriously offended her parents as a girl when she got the anti-smoking education, and tried (as many kids do) to save her parents from cigarretes. They have both quit, though.
I drink, and my wife will bum a cigarette off a friend if she's in a smoking bar (she says you are almost smoking, anyway). They key is, we are doing it in a social situation, where there are norms, where people have a good idea where the line is between use and abuse. Alcohol and nicotine can be addictive, and many Americans are addicted, but there are treatment programs, and addiction is considered a weakness that people should avoid.
I think the jury is still out if legalization of illegal drugs would result in a similar situation, or if legalization in other countries is a good indication of how legalization would work in the U.S. I do think that we should start working on this question, rather than consistantly ignore it. We should have more scientific studies on Schedule A drugs and their long-term effects, so that we can make decisions based on facts rather than politics and prejudices.
....if you have a problem with the war on drugs, then don't bitch about it, do something about it. Show the politicos that you don't want their civil war & vote them out of office. Vote Libertarian. The LP wants to bring the Guv'ment back down to the size it is supposed to be, as stated by the Constitution. They want to decriminalize drugs. They want to reduce prison overcrowding by releasing non-violent convicts (read: drug-users), you know the one's the Gov. is keeping in the prisons while they let the rapists & robbers out on early parole.
http:/www.lp/org
http://www.harrybrowne2000.org
But don't listen to me, see for yourself
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Show me a URl to a concrete study that says "X destroys neurons in your brain". Of course repeated _constant_ use is supposed to be bad for you, but not casual, every once in a while use....why don't you go to ecstacy.org and get some facts.....
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Sorry. That was tasteless
Seriously, it would be great if we could devote all our drug war resources to some sort of complex game, but we still couldn't eliminate the big drug problem.
Demand.
Until there are no customers for drugs, we will keep on spending billions on keeping the drugs away..
Give them a game like this, and the President will see start applying daft like this policies in real life.
Where have YOU been the last 8 years?.. Jeez man.. talk about blind to the facts.. you scare me.. kill any abortion doctors lately?
I thought someone said there was going to be free beer!
So you are saying that just because the GOP is right wing don't give up hope, there may be some sane right wingers out there? :).. My point was that the original poster was obviously an idiot (your term), to accuse the left wingers of smear tatics after the craziness of the right wing over the past 8 years, well.. you would have to be a blind fool to make that claim.. or at least a troll.. :)
I thought someone said there was going to be free beer!
I couldn't do it if it weren't for the drugs.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
lmao
Don't mind me, I'm just over here tee-heeing over a mental picture of McCain finding out he's a personal friend and respected colleague of Duhbya.
I suppose it's ALSO a huge coincidence that Duhbya didn't push for campaign finance reform at ALL in his campaign - it was Gore that picked up the cause.
Of course, you are just practicing a little "Troll and Flamebait 101" for shits and giggles and already know that --- or it's the $3 crack.
Just a thought, I'm not saying it's the way to go, because ethically it'd be pretty stupid.
You could always legalize it but that introduces a new host of problems, which North America isn't ready to handle. The drug situation is in a position where legalizing drugs would be a smooth transition. It would be hell.
Sort of a damned either way type situation.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
Can I play the Peruvian air force pilot who gets to shoot down missionaries, when I mistake their plane for a smuggler's???
Just remember kids, you're ALL POW's in the war on drugs... Irregardless of innocence or guilt...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
"Then why does the government continue to strike hardest at poor, minority neighborhoods?"
Because they put them there in the first place... When I was 12, I lived on welfare, and when my mom got off welfare, we lived in the Bronx... Just a mere 3-4 weeks after the Contra cocaine scandal during the Reagan years, crack cocaine appeared in the area...
I'm pretty much surprised that the miscellaneous black leaderships took so long (almost 15 years) to figure it out in the first place... What did they think the CIA was doing with all that coke? Supplying it to Dubbya's personal stash?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Those swine were askin' for it - trafficking the opiate of the masses n'all. Think I'll go push the DA to file against, oh every church, synegogue, mosque, and any other religous type organization under RICO, of course. If I can't have my delusion which rests in a fictionless plant, they certainly can't use this "cop in the sky" bit to weasel out of property taxes...
STOP. You're being farmed.
if this piece is meant to be sarcastic or if Roblimo really just has no clue. Yeah.. a video game about drug trafficing is going to make a difference / help anyone / being enjoyable HOW?
Was it a really slow news day for Slashdot or what?
Geez,guy jsut litle reactioanry aren't you? It sounds like you took this speech straight from the former drug Czar Barry McCafrey.
Anyway, have you ever thought about why they call the Drug czar the Drug czar? Czar makes it sound like we are in a totalitarian state, hmm.., maybe we are...
Who cares who started it, both paries have supported it throughout the years.
Do you think GWB is going to end it? If you think that he is, you are seriously delusional.
It really isn't an issue based on the liberal/conservative, left/right, republican/democrat dichotomy. The issue really is those who wish to control the behavior and dictate the moral's of others vs. those who love freedom and cherish the responsibility that accompanies liberty.
Hopefully we will win. ( Lovers of freedom that is)
The liberal/conservative dichotomy is just a distraction.
I have had the fortune of dealing with it. I thought it was funny.
So what is your problem with it?
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
That's called surrender. You don't win like that. Also the attendant social problems.
It isn't surrender, its realizing your fighting the fight is causing much more damage than not fighting it. And exactly what are these "attendant social problems"? You talk a lot about them, but you never say what they are, and how drug use causes them.
"The fairy tale that if it were legalized everyone would do it is false."
Since we don't have a nice statistical correlate for American behaviour and we don't have a nice contemporary example I can't believe this. I am a serious person after all.
Why require a "nice statistical corrolary" to American behaviour, when you have American behaviour itself. Take the example of alcohol use. It was at one time illegal. Removing prohibition did not significantly increase the consumption of alcohol. This was in part because neither consumption or possession of alcohol were ever in fact illegal, only production and sale. However, this still correlates to contemporary drug use. Most convictions for drug use and possession get a $300-$500 fine and 1-5 days of either jail time or community service (defendants choice). Its only the possession of quantities sufficent for intent to sell that nets you large jail times.
I don't buy the neo-hippism that seems to think that drugs are a "mind expanding" experience. The only thing that drugs do at best is cause a negative feedback loop with endorphins and seritonin causing some nasty dependency issues.
You don't have to buy the "mind exapanding" stuff. I don't either. I do think that certain drugs that I have tried are a rather enjoyable experience. As for dependancy issues, many illegal drugs are not physically addictive, such as marijuana, LSD, or shrooms. And the ones that are addictive, like heroin, or crack, they are about as addictive as nicotine, and that isn't illegal.
Ok let's pose this question. Exactly how does creating something that psychologists call pseudoligica fanastasia really help anyone.
How does drug use (and only drug use, not drug-related violence that is caused by drugs being illegal) harm anyone other than the user?
How about this why don't we start to create an empire of learning where everyone can learn effectively. Oh I forget. Assuming that everyone has access to easily explained information then the whole tech empire would come crashing down and there would be not have and have nots right?.
This is a non-sequiter.
Also let me say this. America was not founded on the principle that people could ruin thier lives and then perpetuate this onward. That's more of a Roman trait and we all know where that got them.
America was based in part on J.S.Mills philosophy of utilitarianism, which states that any activity that is not inherently harmful to the society or to other people should not be restricted.
In summary, you spoke a lot about these "attendant social problems" but never described them, or explained how they come from drug use. You never explained how the use of currently illegal drugs is any worse on society than the use of currently legal drugs. In short, you never gave any reason at all why drugs should be illegal at all.
You seem to have ignored the point I made in my previoius post that many illegal drugs are not physically addictive, and there are also many that don't cause brain damage. As for the health problems, many of them cause health problems comparable to alcohol use. Tobacco cuases far mor health problems than marijuana, and yet it is legal.
The statistical corrorlary is necessary because there is little that can be proven with a rigorous statistical analysis.
My point was that you don't have to find another country where its population acts sufficently like the American population in order to do studies on how the American population would react to legalization, when you can do studies on the American population itself.
Where are these facts comming from? Having a rap sheet is not something a respectible citizen should value.
These facts are coming from experience with being arrested and friends being arrested, and research into typical and allowable sentences for misdemeanor possesion, and felony sale and trafficking. As for not wanting to have a rap sheet, tell that to Henry David Thorough, or Walt Whitman, or Abbie Hoffman, or any other person who broke a law that they though was unjust.
Well I can think that if you smoke things (like tobacco) you can harm others in the regard that they will unwhittingly be absorbing your chemicals.
It also harms people to have a large percentage of their population indesposed as addicts to something that is not very kind on the person.
There is a reason why smoking cigarettes in certain public places is illegal, what makes you think it would be any different for marijuana? As I have siad many times before, marijuana is not phyiscally addictive, and it is hardly any worse on your body than alcohol.
Little Janey is in 4th grade and decides to get ahold of some pot. She then gets addicted and decides to start smoking it every day. In a while she may decide that because that didn't kill her she may start using cocaine and then to maybe heroin. It's a snowball effect.
For that last time, marijuana is not physically addictive! And the whole bit about it being a "gateway drug" is a lie too. The vast majority of marijuana users do not ever go on to harder drugs.
Successful Lawyer Bob never did drugs in his life but because they were illegal he wouldn't even think twice. But recently his practice has been down a little so he thinks that maybe now that illegal drugs are now legal he can maybe use them to make his life better. A year later he is living on the street talking to garbage cans at 3am.
Replace "illegal drugs" with "beer" and then see how likely it is. Marijuana is about as harmful, and less addicting, than alcohol.
This is half the problem, honestly -- the stereotype used as sarcasm at the beginning of this paragraph shows the true nature of the "War on Drugs." There is no war against Drugs. There is, however, a War on Class. A very large percentage of my current social group uses or abuses some form of drug... and all of us are middle-class white Americans. Sure, some live in the ghetto... college kids live where rent is cheap. Others, like myself, live in the higher-rent suburbs, because we have good, solid, and most importantly well-paying tech jobs. None of us waited until we were established in these settings to start using... the easiest place in this town to get drugs, by the way, is one of the local private universities, where - not surprisingly - the majority of students come from middle or upper class backgrounds.
So what am I ranting about? These aren't the people who get arrested. The people who are arrested en masse are the dealers and users of the slums, those who exist as a portion of the lower class, or even the Underclass -- those who exist off the public dole or completely off the public record. To see this, as well, look at the average jail terms and demographics for two drugs in particular: cocaine, and crack. Cocaine is more pure, more expensive, and generally a drug-of-choice to the upper classes... it's generally too expensive for members of the underclass. However, crack, a cocaine derivative, is dirt cheap -- which makes it attractive as a commodity to sell in the low-income areas of our cities. The last time I checked, the ratio between average jail terms for possession of crack and possession of cocaine was close to 5:1.
Maybe it's left-wing radical propaganda... but maybe it's worth investigation, too. Please don't just believe me. Do the research on your own. My facts might not be exacting... I've not watched this for a while now.
MCH/VO S* W- N+++++ PEC+++ D(s++/r) A a+>+++ C* G++(++++) Q+ 666 Y
...Oops. We already have a simulaation of democracy installed and running. Never mind.
Eris Caffee
Apparently, you could use with a quick lesson on 'sarcasm'. Here's the defintion:
Main Entry: sarcasm
Pronunciation: 'sär-"ka-z&m
Function: noun
Etymology: French or Late Latin; French sarcasme, from Late Latin sarcasmos, from Greek sarkasmos, from sarkazein to tear flesh, bite the lips in rage, sneer, from sark-, sarx flesh; probably akin to Avestan thwar&s- to cut
Date: 1550
1 : a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain
2 a : a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual b : the use or language of sarcasm
Drugs kill
Damn. I didn't know that. I should be dead by now.
Here's a link to the national Libertarian party's position on the drug war and legalization:
http://www.lp.org/issues/relegalize.html
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
The United States and thousands of miles of coast line, most of which is totaly undefended. Substances move through our interior with virtualy no check on them.
Excuse me? No check? Have you had your vehicle taken apart lately crossing the border just because they heard a report of a vehicle similar to yours that could have possibly been trafficing drugs? Do you cross a border patrol checkpoint on a daily basis where they check every car for... guess what? Drugs! (and illegal aliens). I don't know where you live, but I live less than a half an hour away from the US/Mexican Border. I see firsthand this "virtually no check".
you'd realize that there are, in fact, no border patrol checkpoints in the INTERIOR of the US--those being at the border, of all places
Yes, there are border patrol checkpoints that AREN'T at the border. In Arizona, that I know of, Northbound traffic on SR 90, SR 80 and SR 82 all cars have to pass through the U.S. Border Patrol Checkpoints set up at their designated spots on those highways. The reason that those checkpoints are there, is because in the desert where there are no walls or fences or any immediate way of preventing drugs or illegals from crossing, people cross and vans come by to pick them up. The 3 highways listed are the only way to get from this part of the county here in AZ to northern arizona and on to freedom or business (whichever is being transported at the time). These internal border patrol checkpoints have been extremely useful in catching drug shipments and illegals. If you ever come to this part of the country you'll see exactly what I am talking about.
and according to my sister (quite the 15 year old drug addict), drugs such as X and LSD are much easier to get than ciggarettes.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
I think they said it best, Lock them away in the Fletcher Memorial and they could appear to themselves on closed circuit tv.
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
Do you honestly believe that? Would you care to wager on that? No politician or political party in their right mind would put an end to the War on Drugs. If they tried, they would be asassinated. The drug wars make a lot of people extremely happy and extremely rich. This is our substitute for large military conflicts.
Not to mention the whole family-values plan, and not wanting to appear soft on crime, etc, etc.
This doesn't even dignify a reply. Your responses are so blatantly biased and naive, that I can think of nothing to say that will change your mind. Regardless, I shall check Slashdot in a year to see the big headline about the War on Drugs coming to an end....
I'm no longer up on popular drug culture, mind you, but AFAIK there are actually 2 drugs marketed as Ecstacy. One being MDMA, one being MDEA. Basically, the folk wisdom goes, MDMA is the good one (I may have that mixed up...I don't actually take it, so I don't care all that much) and is the actual Ecstacy. MDEA is also marketed as Ecstacy, however, because it's similar, and is cheaper/easier to produce, but it can cause deaths, and doesn't give the same high associated with MDMA.
How were these families "torn apart"? Is it because their loved one went to jail (a pretty common occurrence, considering half of the US's prisoners are in for drug-related charges)?
Is it because they were killed in a drug-related crime (once again, all too common. Everything from robbing a store to get money for drugs, innocent bystander shootings, or gang rivalries could fall into here)?
Or is it because they overdosed (surprisingly, not all that common relatively speaking. Especially on the softer drugs such as marijuana, which make up a large percentage of drug use, or Ecstacy, which the only "overdoses" reported so far are from heat exhaustion/dehydration from dancing too long or from other chemicals that purported to be Ecstacy. The harder drugs also cause less deaths than alcohol or tobacco, both of which are legal and noone complains about tearing families apart.)?
Drugs, in most cases, do not kill. Our nation's policies on drugs, however, do kill and cause side effects that leads to killings.
And, best of all, no one would get hurt.
Unless you had an adequate form of force-feedback!
That's about the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Most popular art and literature was influenced by drugs. Same goes for many movies, TV shows, and stand-up comedy. The notion of the Personal Computer was conceived under the influence of drugs. I've done drugs with a Fortune 100 Executive who will not be named.
You are the victim of another popular misconception, too. You ranted about having to pay the cost of a lifetime of drug abuse. The top three killers in America and probably any other country not at war are: heart disease, lung disease, and cancer. There is no close fourth. According to the AMA, 80% of these cases are directly related to lifestyle--overconsumption of meat and dairy products, lack of exercise, dependence on alcohol, consumption of junk food. So, we all have to pay for Mr. Fatass' heart attack, etc... It all gets figured into the cost of your health insurance premium and our taxes.
Since these other lifestyle choices are much more noxious than the lifestyle choice of using Some drugs, would you like to see any of the following:
SWAT teams raiding your McDonald's and shooting someone because "it looked like he had a gun"?
Nazi Germany-style rallies in your school stadium where administrators rant about the evils of dairy products?
pre-employment poop tests so the employer will know if you don't get enough fiber?
cops coming around the classroom holding a hamburger and innocently asking kids "Do you ever see your parents with one of these?" so they can separate the families to protect the children?
Posters on the walls at your school titled "How to tell if someone you know is on hamburgers"?
You try to explain to someone that it's okay to eat a hamburger now and then. You are ostracized or reported to the police.
Truth is the first casualty of war. We should all mourn its demise.
Ewige Blumenkraft!
Ewige Blumenkraft!
Check out this link, which points to a story on Project Censored's list of under-reported stories of 2000. Yes, THC impaired tumor growth in most cases and actually cured the tumors in a few. Similar results were found years before, but the Reagan/Bush administration asked researchers to destroy all marijuana-related research performed between 1966-1976.
This is prong #2 of The Man's two-pronged approach: suppression of truth.
Ewige Blumenkraft!
Ewige Blumenkraft!
I blame the media.
Virtually all anti-drug people I have ever had a conversation with will spout an endless litany of lies and half-truths. Most of this 'info' comes straight from the media and is parroted by its reporters/editors on a regular basis.
Case in point: Ecstacy. Last summer a group of four people was arrested here (Gainesville,FL) for selling Ecstacy. The DEA said that the group dealt about 10,000 doses in town over the previous year. We have about 60,000 students and as many regular folks. Every article on the bust and resulting court cases used the phrase "the deadly drug Ecstacy" over and over. Near the end of the saga, towards the bottom of one article, was the total number of deaths in Alachua county due to Ecstacy or imposters: 0. Yep, nobody has died here from Ecstacy. Many people have died in other cities, but due only to imposter drugs--which didn't exist until after Ecstacy was banned--and from intentially overdosing, which people have been known to do on alcohol or their own prescriptions.
Recently there were hearings in Washington on the "Ecstacy problem" (sounds like Germany early last century...). A couple of high-school kids gave patently false testimony about being caught in the grip and it being the worst drug, yada yada. What they said has nothing to do with reality. Sure, some people become psychologically addicted to the feeling, but these kids made it seem like crack, which the user has to score & use constantly. That is 100% impossible with Ecstacy. I've only done it twice, but have been in the company of people who, IMHO, abused the fuck out of it. Their experience was nothing even close to what the kids gave testimony to in Congress. For Congress to get a fair picture, they should have interviewed Dr. Alexander Shulgin, author of PIKHAL: A Chemical Love Story. Dr. Shulgin synthesized Ecstacy and hundreds of other drugs and tested them in his home with close friends--all with very few negative experiences. The negative experiences with any drug seem to happen when people don't respect the drug's power and fail to take account of their 'set' (mental state) and 'setting' (physical environment). Dr. Shulgin's essays on his life, his relationships, and his experiences are truly beautiful and, unlike the anti-drug propaganda, actually true!
You have been warned. The pols and the media are lying to you. Next time a bunch of thugs in body armor bust in to a home in your city armed with submachine guns and riot shotguns to bust the 'evil drug dealers', pay close attention. The cops always say that they have to out-arm the drug dealers, and the media concurs. Nevermind that the dealers are virtually always unarmed (except street-level crack dealers) and the media will report them as armed if any weapon is found, even locked up in the nightstand. When was the last time the cops got into a gun battle with dealers? Anywhere?
The sole purpose of the media is to write outrageous stories that sell newspapers (sorry Dr. Wilson...).
Ewige Blumenkraft!
Ewige Blumenkraft!
If you do them and render yourself useless, then die.
If you screw up, I don't want to hear about how you started taking drugs because your life was all messed up, or you were sad, or you were poor.
Your sentiments are quite illustrative of the typically selfish, uncaring, and infantile libertarian mentality so popular these days. Libertarian policies toward opiates reflect the fact that their entire world-view is but a incoherent pipe dream.
Note how the libertarian mind equates "If you do them and render yourself useless, then die." with "a desire for peaceful co-existence".
Infantile? The desire to be taken care of is infantile.
Yes, possibly. But the instinct to care for others is not.
What's wrong with selfish and uncaring? I should have the right to be selfish and uncaring if I so desire,
I'm not sure I follow you here. You already have the necessary freedoms to comport yourself with whatever sort of anti-social attitude you wish. People may object to your attitudes, though. What exactly do you mean by "right" in this instance? Do you mean the "right" to be uncaring and selfish, in the sense of an entrenched political or human right? What exactly would that involve?
as long as I don't actively infringe on the rights of others.
You have a peculiar notion of "rights." Would you say that people also have the "right" not to tolerate the uncaring and selfish?
But don't require me to do anything. What's mine is mine.
Obviously, though, Art_XIV is requiring us to do something. After all, he did present his 8-point platform as "a solution to the world's problems".
My anarcho-libertarian drug policy:
This is not a perfect solution to the world's problems, but it does involve much less herding and violence.
The only thing that we learn from history is that nobody learns anything from history.
I think it's an interesting idea that can be used as a theme for a new strategy / role / shootem' game, but I particularly don't think that the main idea of the game (drug = enemy) will prevail over the idea that you as a player have to win or conquer or kill, bomb, etc. Perhaps as a subliminal message...
C'mon! And since CounterStrike is out nobody practices real terrorism anymore?
After all these years I think I have the conspiracy backwords. I used to think the CIA and George H.W. Bush used cocaine smuggled into America and money laundered by B.C.C.I. to fund the Contras and other Ronald Reagan Third-World Genocide projects.
Given all the evidence available on the internet today I now think the Third-World Genocide & the Contras were a useful cover so George H.W. Bush could rake in the money by having cocaine smuggled into America and sold to American children. This money has funded almost all of the Far Right causes for the past 25 years. Knowing that George H.W. Bush's father made money selling steel to the Nazis in World War I & II, and George H.W. Bush being a persistent bigot this seems to make the most obvious sense now.
It explains the "War on Drugs" and how many DEA agents were betrayed and murdered from a insane treasonous duo of Presidents.
It also explains why cocaine traffic increased constantly during the Reagan/Bush treason years and why Far Right causes suddenly had billions in money to burn.
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
this is the stupidest shit i have ever seen. im considering leaving slashdot for stupid fucking retarded posts like this. that, and the fact that according to slashdot "amd great intel bad, linux great microsoft bad" skewing on every single article is extremely frustrated. to have such dumb and ignorant staff to post something of this caliber is an embarrassment.
A lot of them are _NOT_ addictive (marijuanna, LSD, ecstasy). The _MOST_ risk comes from the fact, that they're illegal. The dealers add amphetamines and addictive parts to it, so the drug becomes addictive and even dangerous. So those dangers come from the drug war.
Anyway, here in Europe, we have more freedom, I think. We always could export cryptography. We can take some drugs, some are tolerated. In Netherlands, homosexuals can get married, there's a new eutanasia law. Our country (Slovak republic) wanted to accept the ,,Contract with Vatican'', so there would be no possibility for interruption in woman's pregancy.
What I see here is freedom. I mean, I'm not a homosexual, I don't have to be married with a male. I don't like interruption and eutanasia, so I won't take it. I know ecstasy is not secure for my liver, so I won't use it. The fun of all is, that I actually can, but it doesn't mean I have to do it. People who take drugs are everywhere, you won't stop them by some stupid laws. They're just not working. If you want to help them and make them safe, make it legal, so the stuff is clean and secure (because is made in a controlled environment). They will pay for the drug the same price (the actual cost of manufacturing is 5%, the 95% of the price would be tax for propagation). Isn't this better?
War on drugs is propaganda, it is not working.
Yes, the War on Drugs is expensive, but that's because drugs are so addictive that people can't seem to stop taking them
No, the war on drugs is expensive because there's money to be made off of it by our nations politicians and their croneys. This nation has a habit of declaring "war" on the most mindless shit in order to drum up public support. Since drugs are an emotionaly charged topic they get draged up around election time every year.
Fundamentaly the Drug problem represents a choice that this country must make. The people clamor for the government to "protect" them from this menace, but how? The United States and thousands of miles of coast line, most of which is totaly undefended. Substances move through our interior with virtualy no check on them. In order to stop the drug trade and "win" this so called "war." The US will have to secure her boarders tightly enough to stop the drug trade and police more stringently inside the boarders to stop internaly grown drugs from moving from place to place.
In short, you must choose between your freedom as it currently exists, or a drug free society.
Of course, we could try something like really implementing some serious social welfare programs to help raise some of these poorer kids out of the squalid neighborhoods that we always identify with the drug problem. Hell, we could siphon the money off of the rich white families in upper class suburbs whos kids are into the exact same stuff. Perhaps elimating the rediculously privilaged and the rediculously underprivilaed would contribute to removing this problem. But then, there's no defence contracts or military bases in that plan to make the politicians popular, rich, and powerfull.
This has been another useless post from....
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
The war on drugs, which has been operating under federal control for over seventy years and has been named a war for close to forty, is a serious problem. It has resulted in the strongest, most organized criminal conspiracies the world has ever known, it has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of completely innocent people (with what the mainstream media seems bent on erroneously referring to as a "plan crash" being the latest example), it has fostered massive corruption in political, civil and military forces worldwide, costs billions annually, pours billions of dollars into corrupt governments and into the pockets of the most vicious, amoral criminals on the planet, promotes a massive, global, illegal small-arms black market, and as its primary effect has created a world where there is a higher per-capita incidence of drug abuse than when powerful stimulants and opieates were available at the retail level essentially without control, and where drugs are in general cheaper, purer, and more available than ever before.
The answers to this problem are available for the asking but they are very difficult and politically loaded. They involve attacking the roots of drug dependency, such as poverty and depression. They involve making public funding available for treatment, under the understanding that in the final analysis this will be more cost-effective than punitive expenditures. They involve allowing doctors to prescribe drugs at maintenance doses for addicts who are unwilling or unable to quit cold turkey. And yes, they involve the selective legalization of drugs, especially drugs such as marijuana, for which the social and literal costs of prohibition so clearly exceed the costs of use.
Like many similar issues a handful of self-serving, self-righteous and bigoted hypocrites (plenty of uppers and tranqs in the medicine cabinets of congress, rest assured) are steering America down an unsustainable path in the war on drugs. The majority of people know that the war on drugs is a failure but they fail to vote for reform in this issue. One reason why is the poorly articulated and badly represented forces on the anti-prohibition movement. Do us all a favor and just keep it shut: you're only making it harder for people doing real work to reform drug laws.
Aw, but all this serious shit is just too boring to bother thinking about, ain't it? Now if you actually came out with a beta version of the game, that would be funny. I always though Superfly would make a great game - gunplay, car chases, kung-fu... and of course the "Superfly" theme song (Pusher Man). Workin' jive jobs for chump change, day after day...
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
I agree, they should make all illicit drugs free and ban resuscitation of users who OD. Natural Selection will do the rest.
I'm sick of surreal and ironic essays written in the vein of "A Modest Proposal." For one thing, they aren't funny as a general rule (definitely not funnier than the original), and since their impact is based in their humour, they're relatively low impact. They're often very smug and tongue in cheek, a type of platform that went out with Oscar Wilde back in the 19th Century. And they never add any true insight into the issue, never clarify arguments or solidify policies and they never solve our problems. At most, they give us a quick, half hearted chuckle between deep analysis of more lurid texts on the same subject. So, in essence, they break beneficial arguments and derail the thought process with the only benefit of making the moderates who think the whole thing is a bit silly feel even more assured in their own superiority, and therefore less likely to consider a truly modest solution to the matter at hand.
But of course, since nobody who matters reads anymore, "modest proposals" really don't have any affect anybody except that said group of odd moderates who think everything is silly anyway...especially Slashdot. Where Geeks Meet to Discuss Utopian Ethics, the Ellusive Freedom of Information, the Excesses of a Free Market Economy and Them Fly Anime Bitches.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Which costs more, the drugs themselves, or the war against them? Are the social costs of (illegal) drug use so high that we need to spend billions of dollars a year trying to eradicate them? Does all the effort really do anything more than drive up the eventual price and increase the amount of violence associated with their distribution? Oh, and why did it take a constitutional amendment to outlaw alcohol, but not other drugs?
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
The "Drug War" is a creature of the Democratic Party, and always was, so let's skip the propaganda for once.
Umm, Nixon is the one who started the 'drug war', and no president since has done a damn thing to stop it.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Interesting article in today's Salon.com pointing out Bush's hypocracy:
When then-candidate George W. Bush answered questions during the presidential campaign about whether he had ever used illegal drugs, he refused to give a yes or no answer, claiming that his past was irrelevant. "I am asking people to judge me for who I am today," he said in a September 1999 interview. "I hope it doesn't cost me the election. I hope people understand." That nonanswer was good enough to get Bush into the White House, but it wouldn't be good enough to get him a student loan under his administration's higher education policy. On Tuesday, the Department of Education announced that it would enforce a law that would deny financial aid to students who answer "yes" -- or refuse to answer at all -- to one simple question: "Have you ever been convicted of selling or possessing drugs?"
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
The deaths in Chicago were caused by PMA, a chemical that was being substituted for MDMA. The only deaths that have been attributed to MDMA are caused by people having heat stroke and water poisoning, not because of the action of the dug itself.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Unlike methamphetamine, X does not destroy neurons. It is thought to damage axon terminals. Sometimes this damage corrects itself, sometimes it doesn't. Either way, no actual longterm effects have been conclusively observed.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
The doseage level for MDMA where neurotoxixity has been observed in rats is about twice the typical recrational doseage level for people.
You kind of shifted gears there. First you were talking about LD50 values, and then the level at which some brain changes occur. Not that your information is wrong, but comparing apples and oranges is a bit misleading.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
They'd claim it inspires people to follow the actions of drug dealers, it sends out the wrong messages to kids, etc.
Aside from that Dopewars is somewhat a base for this game, and it was recently on the news out here in NY.
Well its not like the gov is really doing much via their "War on drugs" think about that for a second. War on drugs? We can send people to the moon, rockets across mega distances, the feds can track down the people who bombed the USS Cole, but they can't win this so called "war"?
What about a pesticide to flat out kill coca leaves for the cocaine problem? Or is it because this so called war is a paper game used around election time, where most drug busts are made?
War on Drugs is a slap in the face for those who can see the underlying bs attached to it.
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360 degrees of Karma
You've missed the basis of this post, if drugs were such an issue they could eradicate drugs.
360 degrees of Karma
But it's entirely legal, and it simply proves the point that stupid people will find a way to fuck themselves up (in every sense) no matter how many laws you pass.
Then why does the government continue to strike hardest at poor, minority neighborhoods?
The end of the war on drugs will come when the gov't puts enough of a cramp in white, middle class voters lives that it triggers a significant backlash. Then it'll go the way of the prohibition. Most governments know this, so they do everything they can to tone down enforcement among that group (crack laws vs. cocaine laws, for instance.) Since supply-side restrictions appear to be a disaster, those middle class kids will continue to buy Ecstacy and others will continue to die for it.
best of all, no one would get hurt.
Does that mean the Peruvians no longer get to shoot down purveyors of "the opiate of the masses?"
Guilty as charged - next cretin please.
BTW - the workd I wrote was 'gauntlet', and the workd I meant was 'gauntlet'. If had meant the workd 'fist', I would have wrote the workd 'fist'.
The war on drugs kills too...
r u_americanplane_2_010423.html
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/pe
Is because their is no money to be made in a virtual drug war
However, cocaine is a 30+ billion a dollar industry, which congress cannot help getting their paws on that money.
Congress gets to look like heros as they siphon many billions of dollars from us(theft), getting some 30k per head of cattle(locking up small time dealers, leaving revolving door for violent offenders), while the kingpin and his banker friend have a very lucrative money laundering scheme going.. giving money to congress to keep the status quo.If possession of cocaine wasn't so *highly illegal* and usa_south_america's drug policy(shooting down christain missionaries in the sky) wasn't designed to limit the supply on the market.. thus driving up the price so countries like peru have an income(their only one worth noting) and the drug trade keeps on flowing.
The last thing the prescription drug market wants is a deregulated/decriminalized drug market. The last thing a king pin wants is commodity pricing on their drugs. Congress prohibtion is mainely designed to keep the profit in the drug trade going, and it's a conspiricy from both the left and the right. gw senior had pardoned a heroin dealer and clinton pardoned a cocaine dealer.
Is this a sign of compassionatism? or a sign of dealings with the criminal eliment?
The War on Drugs of the United States is identical to the War on Terrorist's in Terry Gilliam's movie: Brazil.
--
fifth sigma, inc.
An output-focused population is.
Drugs that reduce a person's ability to make widgets, are an economic threat. Drugs that enhance a person's ability to make widgets are an economic booster. Hence, ritalin, et al. Do you think that the WoD is being waged because some people OD and kill themselves?
The WoD is being waged because certain drugs have effects that do not promote qualities that are conducive to economic output. The whole argument about the relative danger of drug x vs. drug y is moot. The point of the WoD is that if you are not contributing to the economy, you are a criminal, and the government has the right to rob you of everything you own, including time. This is why alcohol was banned (and still is, in some parts of the US), pot will not be legalized, and why anarchists and the pretentious will still think it's 'cool' to smoke it.
And the 'drug required to go to school' is probably more of a dystopian present than a dystopian future. How many ritkids are "making A's" now that they have a drug to shoehorn them into surviving a school?
The American Dream went to hell in a handbasket when someone decided that "The Customer" was King, and the customer beli
You're right, drugs *are* dangerous..especially when you're irresponsible. Every report I've seen of Exstacy deaths, this seemed to be the case. The person took the pill, got out on the dance floor.. and stayed there. E raises your body temperature and pulse, and dehydrates you. If you don't rest and get plenty of water, you're asking to (at least) get sick.
~j
Hmm... I can see it now.
Just to prove that we are doomed to repeat history we are doing it all again, but this time the gang wars are killing our children.
There are only two winners with making drugs illegal. Law enforcement get much bigger budgets and criminal get way, way better profits.
Who loses? We lose, I lose and you lose, addicts also lose. We lose by having the social problems of illegal drugs - crime, poverty, broken homes and communities. Addicts lose by being made into criminals and by having the focus continuily turned away from preventatitve education and sensible treatment to ineffective punishment solutions.
The War on Drugs has utterly failed, that is plain and unarguable. The fact that hard drugs are cheaper and more available now than in any time in history defines that failure. The reasons the war failed are not very important, in fact almost academic. What is important is that we start finding new ways to deal with drugs. Ways that help us and our society not ways that increase criminal profits and body counts of our children.
Grouping conservatives (or even right-to-lifers generally) to those who bomb abortion clinics is tantamount to grouping Greenpeace with Ted Kaczynski. There are nutjobs in every movement; just because a cause has some idiots that support it doesn't per se invalidate that cause.
I can't speak for the poster, but I'll say that it wasn't an attempt at character assasination. It was an attempt to preserve the integrity of our court system. In a system where testimony under oath is the principal mechanism for resolving legal disputes, perjury is a very serious offense.
I won't revisit the whole spectacle again except to say that when I was in law school (yes, IAAL) I wrote a paper on the topic. It's on my web page if you're interested.
Actually, the poster did not make a mistake. A gauntlet can, in fact, go inside a glove (albeit a very large glove). He was clearly referring to a draconian policy (the "iron gauntlet") wrapped in a feel-good, doesn't-look-harmful justification (the "velvet glove).
Clinton's testimony was given in a deposition under oath. Deposition testimony is just as subject to the perjury statute as testimony in open court. In fact, in my paper I dealt with this specific issue; see footnotes 12-15 and related text. (Again, it is available on my web site under "Law School Outlines.")
So, far from being "hallucinatory," my view is based on the facts and the law, something you clearly haven't bothered to investigate.
Further, I'd argue that the bulk of the smearing over the past 8 years has indeed been coming from the left. Even if we accept as a given that the impeachment move was a "smear" (it wasn't, it was a justifiable response to perjury), there are a bevy of folks in the Blumenthal-Carville-Flynt wing of the Democratic party that sought to tear down a number of conservatives. I doubt you'll find similar numbers on the conservative side.
The mere fact that there were already ongoing independent counsel investigations is largely irrelevant to the issue of the Clinton impeachment. Furthermore, each such investigation was approved by a three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit of Appeals and were based on credible evidence of possible wrongdoing. Whitewater, to name one such investigation, landed former Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker in prison, as well as many other Clinton associates. That hardly sounds like a fishing trip to me.
You claim that the independent counsel investigations of Clinton amount to evidence that Republicans use "smear tactics." Well, if the mere presence of an independent counsel purusing a political figure is a "smear tactic," then Democrats are just as guilty; consider IC Lawrence Walsh indicting Caspar Weinberger three days before the 1992 presidential election for an example of what I'm talking about.
But all of this is neither here nor there. The specific point I was making was that the impeachment inquiry was a valid one based on the law of perjury. Again, the paper at my web site lays out this case in substantial detail. By ignoring a credible allegation of felony wrongdoing, you are the one being disingenuous.
You accuse me of avoiding the issue. But unless you only consider a "response" to be parroting your opinion of "yessir, those Republicans sure are a nasty bunch," your accusation is patently false. I have defended the legal substance of the impeachment charge, and that, at the end of the day, is what is crucial.
Oh, and as to your final point -- do you really expect me to call my own profession "evil"? Such a blanket statement would assuredly be false. Lawyers are like every other profession; it has its good and bad apples. I like to think I fall in the former category.
If I ever had kids, I'd like to be free to raise them without being exposed to xtianity. Heck, I'd personally like to live my life without any further exposure to it. But I realize that I can't. The best that I can do is to educate myself and anyone I care about, about the dangers of the xtian meme, and trust in myself, and others to make informed decisions. But unlike drugs, xtainity is usually forced upon children when they are too young to say no. This is more of a danger to our society than drugs are, IMHO.
But, I accept that my opinion is not necessarily what is "right" ... who knows what is right or not? The best thing, I think, is to try and just mind my own business. I'll make my own choices, and so long as xtians don't burn or stone (with rocks) me they can do what they want. Similarly, so long as a drug user or abuser (there is a difference) isn't robbing me to get money to get a fix (caused mainly be inflated prices brought by the war on drugs) why should I care what they choose in life.
I couldn't agree more ;-)
And the problem with this would be???
If we legalize drugs, a lot more people would probably try them once or twice. It's doubtful addiction would rise, and even if it did, treatment would be much easier.
I recently spoke with a doctor who runs a methodone clinic, he talked about all the hoops that one has to jump through just to help people get off opiates. Some people drive an hour out of their way every morning just to break the habit and stay off heroin. How is this helping anyone?
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
> How much would all this cost to design and set up? $10 million? $20 million?
well, add in an extra $5 billion just in case one of the drug dealers goes off on a killing spree after playing the game and some angry parents decide to sue the game company...
teenage, teenage volleybawlers
Looks to me like it dignified a response.
"that you understand how much fun they are having with their war on drugs"
I agree that "war on drugs" is not very likely to be ever won but there is nothing funny about it.
Drugs do cost lives and for all people like you there are even greater numbers of people who do actually support this war.
Don't blame everything on politicians.
The only way liberals win national elections is by pretending they're not liberals.
Of course real-life drug dealers will want to take part in this. And the Palestinians and Israelis will play a game of Laser Tag for the Western Wall.
Funny, but the Clinton Administration conducted the "Drug War" fast and furious for eight long years -- yet Slashdot only gets around to complaining about it now that there's a conservative in office.
Gee, go figure.
The truth is, the Bush Administration is conservative -- meaning that they support individual rights and freedoms. They've got a lot of messes to clean up right now, but when they have time, it's quite obvious that they'll put an end to the "Drug War". How could they not? The "Drug War" is in violation of all their principles of freedom and individual responsibility.
The "Drug War" is a creature of the Democratic Party, and always was, so let's skip the propaganda for once.
--
Dear Slashdot: Why, yes, I would like fries with that.
And there it is, ladies and gentlemen. The "War on Drugs" has been a Democrat-inspired, Democrat-controlled crime spree from day one. They've attempted to conceal that fact with their relentless partisan mentality, but of course that's all that we've come to expect from Democrats.
Those of you with your heads still in the sand may now admit your error.
--
Dear Slashdot: Why, yes, I would like fries with that.
Ahh, "freedom" -- "for the children", no doubt.
Of course, you and Mr. Freedman don't mind people losing their freedom to the slavery of drug addiction. Nor do you mind the loss of freedom felt by those who are imprisoned in neighborhoods ruled by violent drug dealers. No, those losses of freedom don't bother you at all, do they? Of course not.
The true agenda of the Liberals is always laughably obvious.
Let's face it: Opposition to the war on drugs is entirely a matter of blind hysteria, media hype, and fudged or fictitious "facts". It's a boondoggle.
--
Dear Slashdot: Why, yes, I would like fries with that.
naive or naïve (nä-v) also naif or naïf (nä-f) adj. Lacking worldliness and sophistication; artless. Simple and credulous as a child; ingenuous. Lacking critical ability or analytical insight; not subtle or learned: "this extravagance of metaphors, with its naive bombast" (H.L. Mencken).
hypocrisy (h-pkr-s) n., pl. hypocrisies. The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness.
ad hominem (d hm-nm, -nm) adj. Appealing to personal considerations rather than to logic or reason: Debaters should avoid ad hominem arguments that question their opponents' motives.
liberal arts (lbr-l ärts) pl.n. Academic disciplines, such as languages, literature, history, philosophy, mathematics, and science, that provide information of general cultural concern: "The term 'liberal arts' connotes a certain elevation above utilitarian concerns. Yet liberal education is intensely useful" (George F. Will).