Posted on 04/10/2006 9:50:54 AM PDT by freepatriot32
Edited on 04/10/2006 9:53:26 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
I got this in my email this morning showing how [snip] stupid nanny staters can be over the last couple of centurys. I wonder how many of these "highly intelligent" people went on to get cushy government jobs? Pay very close attention to the comic books qoute. Why anyone ever listens to people like this is a mystery but im sure there will be people right on this board agreeing with almost everything here and calling for big governemnt solutions to solve these societal ills.
Novels
"The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?" - Reverend Enos Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, 1790
The Waltz
"The indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced ... at the English Court on Friday last ... It is quite sufficient to cast one's eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs, and close compressure of the bodies ... to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is ... forced on the respectable classes of society by the evil example of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion." - The Times of London, 1816
Movies
"This new form of entertainment has gone far to blast maidenhood ... Depraved adults with candies and pennies beguile children with the inevitable result. The Society has prosecuted many for leading girls astray through these picture shows, but GOD alone knows how many are leading dissolute lives begun at the 'moving pictures.'" - The Annual Report of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 1909
The Telephone
"Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy? Does [it] break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends?" - Survey conducted by the Knights of Columbus Adult Education Committee, San Francisco Bay Area, 1926
Comic Books
"Many adults think that the crimes described in comic books are so far removed from the child's life that for children they are merely something imaginative or fantastic. But we have found this to be a great error. Comic books and life are connected. A bank robbery is easily translated into the rifling of a candy store. Delinquencies formerly restricted to adults are increasingly committed by young people and children ... All child drug addicts, and all children drawn into the narcotics traffic as messengers, with whom we have had contact, were inveterate comic-book readers This kind of thing is not good mental nourishment for children!" - Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 1954
Rock and Roll
"The effect of rock and roll on young people, is to turn them into devil worshippers; to stimulate self-expression through sex; to provoke lawlessness; impair nervous stability and destroy the sanctity of marriage. It is an evil influence on the youth of our country." - Minister Albert Carter, 1956
Videogames
"The disturbing material in Grand Theft Auto and other games like it is stealing the innocence of our children and it's making the difficult job of being a parent even harder ... I believe that the ability of our children to access pornographic and outrageously violent material on video games rated for adults is spiraling out of control." - US senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2005
My money says most started with beer or wine, mostly with beer.
Cheap, plentiful and readily available.
When I was in eighth grade there were a bunch of kids who went drinking beer every weekend. The legal drinking was 21 and they never had a problem getting beer.
ROFLMAO! UCI=9.
Perhaps, but there is probably no causation.
The British government studied this subject and issued a report(pdf) which said,
It is dangerous to read too much into the empirical association between early soft drug use and subsequent hard drug use. It may well be that most hard drug addicts started off as soft drug users, but one cannot conclude from that fact that hard drug use is caused by previous experience of soft drugs. There may be many confounding social and psychological factors which are hard to observe and measure, and which simultaneously contribute to the drive towards both soft and hard drugs. Once an attempt is made to correct statistical estimates for the likely effects of these confounding factors, the implied gateway effects become much smaller.And the Institute of Medicine's report on medical marijuana states that,...
Even if it is true that soft drug use increases the risk of later involvement in hard drugs and crime, this does not automatically justify the adoption of a strict policy on soft drugs. By linking soft and hard drugs under the same banner of illegality, a strict policy stance may have the perverse effect of amplifying the gateway effect and increasing the prevalence of hard drugs in the long run. Before translating empirical findings on the size of gateway effects into policy prescriptions, one must have a clear idea of how the gateway effect arises. In any case, gateway effects are probably too small to be a major factor in the design of anti-drug policy.
In the sense that marijuana use typically precedes rather than follows initiation into the use of other illicit drugs, it is indeed a gateway drug. However, it does not appear to be a gateway drug to the extent that it is the cause or even that it is the most significant predictor of serious drug abuse; that is, care must be taken not to attribute cause to association.
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I'm curious what the original cause was that started us down the road to - giving up our national rights to make decisions concerning our own bodies and minds.
If there be another patriot that might expand upon the point I am trying to make - please feel welcome.
Good stuff, my friend.
Women can kill their unborn child "because its their body".
But you can't smoke a joint, which can't harm you. Marijuana has never killed anyone in the history of the world. It is perhaps the most non-toxic substance on the planet.
The powers that be want it that way. And people who believe government propaganda that marijuana is dangerous and bad want it that way.
Go figure!
I'll see your grass and raise you cigarettes, booze, beer, and milk.
For the love of Mike, man, I hope this was intentional.
Ge, dum peple are soo stewpit theigh shud be more like me!
These same criminals probably used guns too.
Based on your logic you could draw the same conclusion about guns.
Perhaps the problem isn't everything the criminal uses and/or abuses, perhaps it is simply the criminal.
Might you mean the temperance movement that took hold of this country in the 1900s or so? Is that what you mean?
"Comic Books
"Many adults think that the crimes described in comic books are so far removed from the child's life that for children they are merely something imaginative or fantastic. But we have found this to be a great error. Comic books and life are connected. A bank robbery is easily translated into the rifling of a candy store. Delinquencies formerly restricted to adults are increasingly committed by young people and children ... All child drug addicts, and all children drawn into the narcotics traffic as messengers, with whom we have had contact, were inveterate comic-book readers This kind of thing is not good mental nourishment for children!" - Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 1954 "
As a former comic book collector I actually have a 1954 copy of this book (although not the very most valuable edition). Wertham might have used some exaggeration or hyperbole, but I don't think there's any question he believed that comic books were going to destroy our children.
I'd venture that 100% of those who are addicted to heroin were once milk junkies.
That could be it - and - it didn't work on alcohol.
After the hundreds of billions spent on other trying and failing to stop other mind altering substance use - I'd say prohibition is a waste of money.
I've got to head out to work. I'll talk to you again in about 9 hours.
--- "Illicit Drugs" Are a Government Creation ---
Since only the government has the power to define "illicit," drugs, the resultant drug market and the criminal industry which supplies it are entirely government creations.
This is an important point to grasp, since almost all prohibitionist rhetoric is delivered with the implication that "illicit drugs" are an unavoidable fact of life. In the rare instances when they attempt to justify drug prohibition as policy, they begin with the assumption that banning "illicit drugs" is an implicit part of the social contract.
Ingenuously failing to recognize that their shopworn "drug scare" propaganda actually advertises "illicit drugs" and promotes their use, the prohibition lobby usually attempts to blame continued demand for them on an uneducated hedonistic public or, more vaguely, on the drugs themselves.
When reminded that the illegal market, with its attendant evils was created by the government, they resort to the fatuous defense that "legalization would send the wrong message" and declare that a "moral condemnation" of certain agents is essential.
This logic ignores the fact that a legal pornography industry, not promoted by the government, manages to exist within a regulatory framework which simply condones it.
It also ignores the fact the thrust of the agreement between the state Attorneys General and "Big Tobacco" is preservation of a legal, tax-paying industry despite its marketing of a dangerous, addictive product.
Claims that an overwhelming wave of drug addiction would follow "legalization" of "illicit drugs" ignores the reality that there has been a steady decline in per-capita alcohol consumption for over two decades and a steep reduction in drunken driving over the past decade in a climate of "legalization" and effective education.
The annual government response to the inevitable failure of its attempted suppression the drug market is to request an ever bigger budget. Even though many drug war items are hidden in the budgets of other agencies, admitted expenditure this year is sixteen billion, an all time record. This does not include mandated state spending, which in the aggregate, exceeds federal costs. Given the level of failure of our prohibition policy, for a President to brazenly announce within his budget message, as Clinton did, that all efforts at "legalization" would be resisted to the extent possible is a profound betrayal of the public trust.
However, until the public understands the nature of prohibition and how the prohibition lobby perpetrates its monstrous fraud, Clinton and our other political leaders will never be held accountable for leading America down this long road of folly.
Tom O'Connell
http://www.drugsense.org/html/modules.php?name=Oldsite&page=probreg.htm
Prohibition vs. Regulation
Address:http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1612542/posts
"...And eating lots of twinkies..."
And cold Pizza too!
Mmmmmmmmmmm
Munchies.......
"I wonder how many started with cigarettes? or booze!"
Excellent question!
"Marijuana has never killed anyone in the history of the world. It is perhaps the most non-toxic substance on the planet."
Preceisly.
Compare the # of Alcohol (Legal substance) related deaths (either annual or total) to Marijuana (Illegal substance) related deaths.
It's all BS.
Control it like booze.
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