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Hacker Barnaby Jack Died of Drug Overdose
DrDevil writes "Barnaby Jack, the computer security expert who died mysteriously a few days before he was due to give a presentation on hacking pacemakers at last year's Black Hat, died of a drug overdose. The coroner initially withheld the report, which led to much speculation given the timing of his death. Mr. Jack appears to have taken a cocktail of drugs (PDF) and was found dead by his girlfriend. His girlfriend stated that he had used drugs regularly."
and this just proves it.
Slashdot is really letting itself go, when posts describing the mundane reality take precedence over a good conspiracy story.
Or could it be that the coroner was bought by the peacemaker manufacturing lobby to give that statement? Hmm...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
From the Top Secret coroner's report on 007's death:
Witnesses report that the decedent ingested a cocktail of drugs just prior to death. When they tried to revive him, he was shaken, but not stirred.
Legal drugs aren't made in jungles or unsanitary conditions regardless of any intoxicating property. This is actually one of the arguments for legalizing recreational drugs, e.g. people buying weed in Colorado are far less likely to buy weed that has been sprayed with toxic chemicals like pesticides.
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If you do drugs, the CIA will definitely use an overdose to assassinate you.
Actually medications are very rarely banned - what usually happens is doctors just stick to prescribing the safer drugs unless they prove ineffective, in which case they switch to the riskier ones. You know, that whole "Do no harm" oath they take.
As for the recreational stuff - the point of legalization is not necessarily to voice approval, its an acknowledgement that prohibition doesn't actually work and never has, no matter how draconian the punishments (remember that story about a couple people in a garden and an apple? Or maybe the one about Al Capone?). And that most of the evils associated with the drug trade are due to it's illegal nature, not the drug itself. Since it can't be stopped we may as well legalize it so we can deprive the really horrible, violent people who control the black market of the massive revenue stream that provides most of their funding. Not to mention bringing production into a safer more regulated environment and stopping the militarization of the police force and the erosion of civil liberties. And of course improving the security of the borders - do you really thing a foreign terrorist would try to smuggle his dirty bomb through customs when he can just buy a ticket on a well-established drug run instead? Oh, and reducing human trafficking - slavery is more profitable when you can piggyback on established drug routes instead of having to do everything yourself.
Besides which, the only recreational drug currently getting any traction towards legalization in the US is marijuana, which is far safer than alcohol by any measure you care to name. And most of the really nasty synthetic stuff was explicitly created as a cheaper or legal alternative to something illegal. If you could buy medical grade cocaine at the corner store with only the usual commercial markup, how many people do you suppose would choose black-market heroin instead?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Illegal narcotics are made in garages and jungles in unregulated conditions BECAUSE they can't be made legally. One of the main reasons they cause so much harm to people is BECAUSE of these poor manufacturing conditions and how they're cut. We should legalize them simply to allow us to create and distribute them in a safer manner that we can regulate and monitor.
Besides, people die many times more from prescription drug abuse than illegal drug abuse.
And alien races likely avoid us because of or proclivity for violence over diplomacy, greed over innovation, and utter lack of common sense. If anything, legalizing narcotics and spending the money treating addicts instead of just tossing them in jail would make it MORE likely that aliens would see us as sensible motherfuckers and contact us.
So... let's legalize drugs so we can meet some hot green Orion women already!
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