the old trick doesn’t result in police busting down a 98 year-old grandmother’s door, shooting her, and planting drugs on her
Rich reconsiders his drug legalization stance. Like most social issues, it’s a complex one. And the one thing I can sure of is I don’t want the government involved in it.
October 6th, 2011 at 2:50 pm
It’s not complex. “Leave us alone– it’s none of your business” is a pretty simple concept.
October 6th, 2011 at 2:51 pm
Communists hide behind “complexity”. We don’t have to play their game.
October 6th, 2011 at 3:34 pm
For some problems, there isn’t a nice tidy solution. Self destructive people will always be self destructive, and drugs feel good. There will always be a sub-set of society that will do them regardless. The correlary to that is that there will always be a sub-set of society who are scum-bags who will peddle that shit to a younger and younger audience. It creates DEMAND and DEMAND = MONEY. You really want to fix things? Start killing those mother fuckers, and don’t stop killing them until society is completely terrified of being even remotely associated with drugs. Then take a deep breath and kill them some more (because there will always be more). Yes, I know, not a workable solution.
Legalization would at least bring the problem into the light rather than force it into the dark. The drug war only serves to create an artifical scarcity which makes a bunch of violent criminals extremely rich. Legalization would open the supply chain and reduce the profit margin thereby reducing the incentive to protect the illegal supply chain. Which would have a chilling effect on the violence.
Once that is done, social pressure could be applied. Not by the stupid government (who just wants to take away anything that is fun) but by friends and neighbors. People who care. It’s not an instant solution, and it will never stamp out drugs 100% (because nothing ever could) but it would vastly reduce the number of scum-bags pushing pills down at the gradeschool, and that is where the real victory is anyway.
s
October 6th, 2011 at 3:49 pm
Wow,kill all the weed smokers and growers for growing a plant that can grow just about anywhere, and has a ton of uses. The only reason it’s illegal is the same reason alcohol was illegal: people not minding their own damn business.
October 6th, 2011 at 5:00 pm
The problem with “somebody needs to do something” is that the government get involved and we have an endless stream of unintended consequences. We have been trying to interrupt the supply since about 1914, anybody see any success yet?
We can look at the current situation and see where all of the efforts and all of the money has gotten us. Some people cannot be saved from themselves, the point is not whether intoxicants have bad effects on a significant portion of the population, young and old. The point is whether we can prevent people from engaging in self destructive behavior at any reasonable cost in dollars and liberty. We have spent the last 100 years or so proving that we can’t.
I too have relatives that were/are addicts to one substance or another. BTW the worst ones were/are the alcoholics. One thing I am certain of is that they were going to get their substance of choice no matter what because they were willing or driven to make getting that substance the focus of everything they could possibly do.
Prisons have a thriving drug trade, if you can’t keep drugs out of a prison, where can you keep them out?
October 6th, 2011 at 5:27 pm
Top-down doesn’t work in most cases, culture is grown from the bottom-up in a super-large petri dish, and only then does the scum rise to the top.
People have been making beer since the Egyptians, but the whole notion of Sobriety and abstemiousness is a fairly recent, 19th Century purity movement – it’s a progressive invention and a cultural fad with some high-brow/high-profile proponents that hasn’t shown or proven itself to be evolutionarily valid or appropriate.
October 6th, 2011 at 8:43 pm
My apologies to all, don’t read this if you don’t like strong language.
My neighbor is a pill-head.
I retired from the USAF about six years ago, moved back where I grew up to be close to my parents.
The house I bought, well, has a neighbor who is a pill-head. He’s a nice guy, but he does drugs. Lots of drugs. Over the years I’ve tried to help him out, when he was broke, I’d pay him a bit to do some weed-eating or to help out. He’d take that money and buy pills.
His wife is sick, deathly sick. He’s all she has to take care of her, and he’s not really able to.
Last December just before Christmas he got busted for public intox and I bailed him out. On his court date, he went, came back and said everything was done and all was good.
For the last five months or so his wife has been in the hospital and he’s been there with her. In this time the court sent me a notice that he’s not made his court dates and he and I need to come in and justify his absences or *I* am on the hook for $20,000. The court issued a bench warrant for his arrest.
By luck he showed up at his house and I called the Sheriff’s department so they could come arrest him. They did nothing. Called the State police and they did nothing. Got in touch with the Constable and he came and arrested the guy.
As he’s being arrested my neighbor’s like “But if I go to jail I’ll miss my ride on Tuesday.”
Wasn’t contrite a bit that he was going to cost me $20,000. Wasn’t contrite a bit that he’s a liar, a pill-head, or is just a low life fucking sucmbag.
I’ve had some experience with drug users and addicts in the last six or so years.
You can’t help someone until they want to help themselves.
Until they come to the conclusion that they want help and are willing to change–Fuck Them.
They lie. They cheat. They steal. They will do anything to support their habit and they don’t care about or for anyone else. So Fuck Them.
Really, I’ve lost all compassion for them. You can’t decide for them, they have to decide for themselves. Until they decide to clean up–Fuck Them. Hard.
If they have children, take them away. They can’t and won’t take care of the kids.
Drug users have no shame, so you can’t shame them into behaving or cleaning up. They are only out for themselves and the high so Fuck Them.
October 7th, 2011 at 8:26 am
ATLien: In my defence, I was just pointing out the only way America (or anywhere for that matter) could even have a chance of actually “stamping out the drug problem”.
Personally, I say legalize it and let those who want to destroy themselves with drugs do so. If someone wants to “help the poor helpless druggies”, they can do so on their own dime. That’s what charitable organizations are for; not what governmnent is for.
s
October 7th, 2011 at 9:00 am
Oh, and I agree about “weed”. The industreal uses for that plant STAGGER THE IMAGINATION Fuel, clothing, building materials, paper, probably plastics (not sure), medicine (but that one is obvious), and a nearly endless list other uses, from just one plant. A plant that will grow practically ANYWHERE. The uses for the weed plant exceed even soy beans and we use soy beans for EVERYTHING. It even converts CO2 to Oxygen more efficiently than soy beans so it might even be the answer to oMg TeH GlOwBaLl WaRmInGs (ok, not sure about this one either, I read it somewhere and can’t remember where).
BUT… since it is “The Devil’s Plant” we aren’t allowed to utilize it; all because someone MIGHT accidently smoke a little.
To give an idea of just how much opposition to legalizing even weed is; my grandfather equated the legalization of weed to the legalization of murder in what would have been one of the most rediculous examples of hyperbole that I have ever seen, except that he was dead serious.
s
October 8th, 2011 at 3:57 am
Rich’s grasp of the moral basis of liberty was nonexistent to begin with, given how flimsy is the argument that lightly wafted him off of it.
Life is full of opportunities for one-and-done mistakes, as any gun owner or car driver knows… and taken as a whole, most drugs can be quit (the trick is that quitting can be much harder for some).
What Rich doesn’t get is that basic causality underlies the priciple of liberty. The point is that you don’t get between a man and the consequences of his actions. If those consequences are wealth, he gets them by right. If the consequences are sickness, disease and death — exact same thing for the exact same reasons!
Interfering with causality to separate a man from his proper consequences has many names; theft, in the first example, enablement for the second. Nothing but bad things come from either. Habituating people to not getting their just desserts just demoralizes the producer of value while emboldening the Eliot Spitzers among us.
If a man chooses destruction, there comes a time when all there is for the rest of us to do, is to carefully keep ourselves and others out of the blast radius until reality collects its due.
Rest assured , we are all in line to be tested on these principles soon. Better make sure you are on better moral ground then that loose talus that easily gave way under Rich.
October 10th, 2011 at 12:41 pm
Legalize them all, then allow employers to drug test at will. (No one wants an intoxicated driver on the road, but how about an air traffic controller, or doctor, or nurse, or dentist, etc.?) Drug tests are cheap now, and make on the job intoxication reason for firing.
Tax them like we tax alcohol, with the specific purpose of taking care of the medical issues and treatment issues of those who want to come clean.
Follow Portugal’s example, it seems to work, unlike anything we’ve tried!