John Kerry (right)and a friend take a break from studies at Yale.
Posted on 06/30/2005 2:51:57 PM PDT by CHARLITE
Rhode Island Governor Donald L. Carcieri has vetoed a "medical marijuana" bill, saying it would encourage marijuana use and criminal activity. His veto comes as an anti-drug group has released dramatic video footage of a marijuana activist declaring that he uses dope for a health problem that he doesn't really have. The bottom line for this activist, Ed Rosenthal, is that "I like to get high. Marijuana is fun." The video has the potential of dealing a major blow to the "medical marijuana" movement, largely funded by billionaire George Soros.
The video footage, posted at the website http://www.sorosmonitor.com, gives the lie to the claim that we often see in the media that smoking marijuana is a legitimate medical treatment for people with diseases. Rosenthal, who was associated with High Times magazine for many years, is shown speaking to dozens of marijuana activists. "With all the talk about medical marijuana, I have to tell you that I also use marijuana medically (laughter)," he says. "I have a latent glaucoma, which has never been diagnosed (more laughter). And the reason why it has never been diagnosed is because I've been treating it (laughter)…But there is a reason why I do use it. And that is because I like to get high. (cheers, applause). Marijuana is fun."
The video proves that "medical marijuana" is a joke to those on the inside of the pro-pot movement who realize that getting the public and the media to accept the notion that smoking marijuana alleviates health problems is a major step down the road to complete legalization of dope.
(Excerpt) Read more at aim.org ...
If the pharm companies could manufacture MJ, and it couldn't be grown by anybody with time and a few feet of dirt (or a big planter) it'd be legal and everyone'd smoke it.
Just like so many take prozak.
Kids don't determine national policy, I understand that some of them are rebellious, but so what? I've never seen a policeman exaggerate what marijuana does, and I was in one of those classrooms where they came and made their presentations against drugs. I'm sure that there has been some exaggeration in the past, but now the exaggeration is made in the other direction.
You could get weed in college and I could get it in junior high. The issue is whether it should be legal and whether it is constitutional to outlaw it. It is constitutional to outlaw it, but I'm ambivalent as to whether it should or shouldn't be outlawed. I just can't get to the point to where you are, that we should sanction dealers.
John Kerry (right)and a friend take a break from studies at Yale.
I believe the skyrocketing was attributed to the Civil War: "Many soldiers on both sides of the Civil War who were given morphine for their wounds became addicted to it,"
In any event, addiction declined until 1900 [my comments in brackets]:
Legalization has been tried before, and failed miserably. [really?]
It's clear from history that periods of lax controls are accompanied by more drug abuse and that periods of tight controls are accompanied by less drug abuse.
In 1880, many drugs, including opium and cocaine, were legal — and, like some drugs today, seen as benign medicine not requiring a doctor's care and oversight. Addiction skyrocketed. There were over 400,000 [50,000,000 census in 1880 =0.8% addiction rate] opium addicts in the U.S. That is twice as many per capita as there are today.
By 1900, about one American in 200 [=0.5%] was either a cocaine or opium addict. [that is a 37.5% DECLINE. The declne would be even greater if cocaine addicts were not included in the 1900 figure]
http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/demand/speakout/06so.htm
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Now on to 2000:
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"There were an estimated 980,000 hardcore heroin addicts in the United States in 1999, 50 percent more than the estimated 630,000 hardcore addicts in 1992."
--www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs07/794/heroin.htm
"The demand for both powdered and crack cocaine in the United States is high. Among those using cocaine in the United States during 2000, 3.6 million were hardcore users who spent more than $36 billion on the drug in that year."
--http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs07/794/cocaine.htm
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Using figures from the USDOJ, and a population of 280,000,000, the rate of addiction to either cocaine or heroin in 2000 is about 1.6%, or just over 3X the 0.5% rate in 1900. And as you can see from recent USDOJ figures, the WOD is failing to reduce addiction
Nope, I remember reading some report a few years back & the % has always been about the same. I don't recall where it was....but I will try to find that info.
So with Soros funding the illegal drug movement daily, the users that are with him are conservative huh???
You should go sell public bridges.
Dude. He said it when he was campaigning in Seattle. But now that he's the president, he's completely flip-flopped. The natural assumption is that he was lying to get votes. Pretty shady. But then, this is the adminstration that had an opinion columnist on the payroll, right? The one that pays ad firms to market the Kennedy education plan to the masses? Yeah, Che Guevera's a legitimate threat. Way to keep yer eye on the ball, sluggo.
Here's a conservative thought, 
If you would look past the official propaganda you would see that it is the prohibition itself that causes the drug trade - just as the alcohol abolitionists found out about organized crime.
Unless you're totally pure and have no vices at all - in which case you'd be so different from the average guy as to be unqualified on that basis alone to make policy from your personal preferences - supporting a drug prohibition is a complete double standard, unless you also advocate alcohol prohibition. There is no consistent principle upon you can stand - not tradition, not history, and not societal impact - upon which you can advocate one and not the other.
Drunk driving alone kills 50,000 people every single year - just one of the ways alcohol can kill. Many also drink themselves to death. Society has determined that that level of impact is more than acceptable - and also that to eliminate alcohol requires a Constitutional amendment. It is entirely outside the bounds of logic or legitimate law to say that others who prefer their intoxication from a different substance are criminal for doing so. Every attempt to attach some harm to the act only further emphasizes that it is the prohibition itself - not the use - which creates the harm.
Drug dealers in the neighborhood? (I mean besides the Kwikie-Mart selling beer and cigs?) Put them in the pharmacies or the wine and cigar shops instead, and they're off the streets, and you can enforce a minimum-age law, gain taxes, and so on. Kids doing drugs? It's easier to teach them not to when they don't know with complete certainty that the people who are saying not to aren't lying. Got junkies? Use the excise tax money to rehabilitate (instead of hitting me, the taxpayer, up yet again for money). In exchange, not only do we get a tax windfall and extra jobs (no different in kind than a brewer's, or a farmer's), but we clean up the streets and eliminate channels for other, far more dangerous criminal activity.
Just like organized crime expanded far beyond alcohol trafficking, the organized crime that arose to defeat the current prohibition has done the same. I have no confidence that they would not participate in nuclear trafficking, knowingly or unknowingly. (The border issue also factors heavily into the security question.) Thus these Puritan instincts might ironically and tragically facilitate nuclear terror on our own soil. It's also spurred the invention of nasty chemicals like crack and meth - replacements for the prohibited.
Would you rather someone smoke pot, or do meth? Snort cocaine, or smoke crack? Which one is less harm, less societal impact?
See, people aren't the willing slaves of the government, and it's not a crime not to want to be one, and to make one's own decisions - for better or for worse - about oneself. It's human nature to want to do so - that yearning for freedom that is in every human being's breast, whether they have ever known it or not.
Certainly the record of governments in making decisions is no better than that of the average man.
Current events seem to have at least quieted some of the usual dogmatic pronouncements on what the men in black robes have declared.
There's nothing at all conservative about the thought of a police state wrapped in totalitarian jingoism, paid for by our freedom.
Some of my high school friends haven't quit using beer. Darn alcholics!
The Dutch have about half the rate of heroin addiction as the US.
"The number of addicts in the Netherlands has been stable - at 25,000 - for many years."
[using a population of 16,000,000. that's about 0.15%. See my prior post, the US had 980,000 heroin addicts in 1999, or about a 0.34% addiction rate]
Source: Netherlands Ministry of Justice, Fact Sheet: Dutch Drugs Policy, (Utrecht: Trimbos Institute, Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction, 1999), from the Netherlands Justice Ministry website at
http://www.minjust.nl:8080/a_beleid/fact/cfact7.htm.
The abortion rate in the US is about 3X the rate in the Netherlands:
"In 2002, the general abortion rate (number of abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years) for New Zealand was 20.0 per 1,000. The Netherlands (7.4)... United States (22.2)"
http://www2.stats.govt.nz/domino/external/pasfull/pasfull.nsf/0/4c2567ef00247c6acc256d4900159b9f?OpenDocument
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Remember, our enemey is the government, which is at the root of just about every ill in society today.
If George Soros is funding something to help decrease the power of government in a specific area: more power to him.
I just wish he wouldn't be in favor of expanding government in other areas.
Agree.
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