Posted on 04/12/2006 10:58:22 AM PDT by tpaine
How the hell did we get into this mess?'"
The War on Drugs is nothing more than alcohol Prohibition dressed up for the 1990s.
It certainly can't stop people from making, selling, or using drugs, any more than the Volstead Act ever stopped them from making, selling, or using alcohol, but it has succeeded in boosting the price of drugs from mere pennies a pound to hundreds of dollars an ounce -- which anyone who knows anything about economics will immediately recognize enormously increases the incentive to enter the illegal drug market.
It's driven the weakest competition out of the market and created not just a livelihood where there wasn't one before, but a monopoly for the most violent and ruthless criminals in the world today -- and, not incidentally, for millions of bureaucrats, politicians, judges, lawyers, and cops, honest and otherwise. It's corrupted every American institution at every conceivable level.
Worst of all, it's given the bureaucrats and politicians another excuse -- an excuse that appears acceptable to the media and the public -- to raise taxes exponentially and stamp CANCELLED across the Bill of Rights, especially the Second Amendment.
Never mind that what you do to your body is your business or you haven't any rights at all.
Never mind that the one and only way to protect your children from drugs is simply the long, hard, grownup task of bringing them up right; let's start by abolishing public schools, which concentrate and distribute self-destructive behavior the way public hospitals concentrate and distribute disease.
Never mind that before the turn of the century, addictive drugs were freely available everywhere and nobody showed much interest in them.
Never mind that there wasn't any drug problem -- I repeat, there wasn't any drug problem -- until your fellow voters, the bureaucrats, and the politicians created a drug problem.
From the original classic Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine through Babylon 5, TekWar, Time Trax, and Wild Palms, to the late, unlamented Space Rangers, the message we get from most science fiction is the same: the historically and politically unique civilization that was born at Concord Bridge -- and specifically constituted to prevent travesties like alcohol Prohibition, business Prohibition, drug Prohibition, or weapon Prohibition -- is headed nowhere now but toward an increasingly oppressive police state that has already nullified everything the Founding Fathers, and the Bill of Rights they left us, once stood for.
Unless you do something to stop it. And wishing will not make it so.
There's more to the fight for a better future than simply wishing the badguys would go away. We hand them a bludgeon -- in the form of a contradiction -- every time we agree to any kind of Prohibition at all, and it's childish of us to expect them not to use it to bash our metaphorical -- and literal -- heads in.
Wishing can't accomplish anything. We'll keep losing our liberties, one by one, until we get our logical and ethical ducks in a row.
The only answer is to enforce the Bill of Rights.
Sure, there are parts of it that liberals don't care for. There are parts of it conservatives don't like. I'm a libertarian -- just like the Founding Fathers before me -- and every word of it is music to my ears.
But the Bill of Rights isn't a menu, it's the Ten Commandments of American political behavior and if you blow one -- even one you don't like -- you blow them all. Unlike a lot of Utopian proposals being bruited about Right, Left, and Center these days, enforcing the Bill of Rights doesn't require the passage of another amendment, another statute, another resolution, another ordinance, or another regulation. Enforcing the Bill of Rights doesn't require a policeman stationed on every street corner. Enforcing the Bill of Rights doesn't require a basic change in human nature. Enforcing the Bill of Rights doesn't require the Millenium to arrive. The Bill of Rights is what we've got already.
The Bill of Rights is what we all agreed on -- especially the bureaucrats and the politicians who took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution "against all enemies foreign and domestic".
The Bill of Rights is the law. Let us determine here and now, to put the civility back into civilization, through stringent enforcement of the Bill of Rights.
L. Neil Smith
If you're not too busy on a South Park thread, I'd expect to see you over here touting your legalization, drugs for everyone rants!
Q: What is a Libertarian?
A: A Republican who smokes pot.
Careful, you are about to be mobbed by a legion of failed war on some drug zealots who will give up anything to prevent one person from getting high.
"and stamp CANCELLED across the Bill of Rights, especially the Second Amendment"
Change that to the 4th and he gets it right. A "reasonable" search is now just about any search, as long as "drugs" are somehow involved.
Where's the joke in supporting our Bill of Rights?
Move to the Netherlands...better yet quit your griping.
"through stringent enforcement of the Bill of Rights."
Ja Herr comandante! Ve shall harshly enforce these rights! Or else!
What a loser Nazi/Commie Libertarian.
Like, it was just a joke man, relaxxxx, take another toke and don't take everything so seriously dude... it's all, groooooovvvvvyyyyyy....
Dang. What have you been smoking?
Yep, people get sick & die.
Most of us learn to live with that fact. Drug warriors see it as an opportunity to control society. -- Which is a form of sickness. So it goes.
One "extreme makeover" coming right up!
I call for support for our Constitution; you call me a nazi...
How weird.
Yeah... that was my original thought as well. Such cogent argumentation. Such command of the English language and logically structured arguments you presented to refute Mr. Smith's points.
Surely there is a Nodel Prize in your future...
See post #8 for a joke..
LOL - coming from you. Most people are not so stupid as to not recognize the differences. Congrats.
LOL, makes no sense. Anyway, you're supposed to call us loserdopians.
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