Posted on 07/05/2005 9:30:27 AM PDT by Sensei Ern
For many years, I have been a strong opponent of legalizing drugs. As you read this, remember that I am still against drug legalization, but I have more sympathy for the opposing argument.
The reason I have been opposed to drug legalization is to protect children. I grew up in a home that was one step up from a crack house..at least we had heat and food. I know first hand what can happen when a child lives in those conditions.
As a counter, I have always felt that use of tobacco and alcohol should be legal for those of a responsible age.
The reason I am considering a change is because of the pain I went through this last month. Four weeks ago, I had a root canal done on a tooth...it was Friday. Once the Novocain wore off, I was in serious pain because the doctor was inexperienced and left a partial root. I experienced pain worse than listening to Rosanne Barr sing the National Anthem. He forgot to write a prescription.
I called the emergency number only to be told I could see the doctor on Monday. TWO WHOLE DAYS IN EXTREME PAIN! I had some 800mg Ibuprofen in the medicine cabinet. That only took away enough pain to convince myself to not commit suicide to stop the pain.
On Monday, I was given a prescription of Tylenol 3 with Codeine and an antibiotic. That took away the pain. Until it ran out. Again, extreme pain. Another dentist did another root canal...and again did not get the whole root. I made sure he gave me a prescription for the pain, before I left the office.
Finally, when that ran out, and another dentist completed the root canal, the pain has subsided.
To be in the kind of debilitating pain I was in, cannot be described. Bill Cosby once talked about taking your bottom lip and pulling it over your head...that comes close.
I have always been an advocate of personal responsibility. That conflicted with knowing that some of the drugs offered today are so dangerous that they needed to be regulated. Then, I thought back about how things were a hundred years ago. The doctor prescribed a treatment, and you either made it yourself, or went to the pharmacist, who mixed up the more potential drugs.
Back then, the only regulation was, could you afford the cost? Drugs were available, and the pharmacist would determine whether you were abusing. If you OD'd on a drug from abuse, you died and life went on for others. But, you could get drugs if they were needed, and you did not have to wait until Monday. You didn't need to wait for approval from anyone to use a drug.
That is enough about that for the moment.
If drugs were to be legalized, they should be regulated like alcohol and cigarettes...have a legal purchasing age. Also, if you do harm to another while under the influence of anything, you should be held personally responsible...to the fullest extent, especially capital punishment for causing a death. If you are taking drugs to get high, strap yourself into a chair and sleep it off.
If drugs were immediately legalized, we could expect some immediate effects. For one, the drug addicts would run out and by everything, and we would have a rash of overdosing for about a month. The rest of us could then go on with our lives, only mourning the loss of a relative, instead of daily living with the horror of a drug addict in our lives.
Currently, I believe law enforcement should be stronger. But, I could be moved to undecided if I heard good arguments for the opposite.
--Pray for our troops --Pray they have wisdom to do the right thing --Pray they remain courageous --Pray they know we love and support them --Pray they get the equipment they need to do the job --Pray for their safe return home to a hero’s welcome
No, I'm not, I never said, we we were only going after the street dealer. I think the effort of going after the street supplier should be more focused towards the root cause. Sending out undercovers, with a team of 8, all the equipment, and everything they had in that show was a waste for a 10 dollar deal. If they are going to film drug deals, maybe to get the public on board, is not how they stopped a 10 dollar deal, but perhaps, showing the big busts at the airports or shipping containers or however they smuggled it in. The resources to track up the chain starting at the 10 dollar deal is incredible. Maybe they do succeed at that level at times, but getting to the root cause, will in the end, have more effect at the lowest levels than busting a small timer for 10 dollars.
The problem is that there are several groups that oppose ending the WOD, all for their own reasons. The first group is the people who sell the drugs and make a HUGE amount of money on it. The second are politicians who can scare the sheeple into giving them more money and power. The third is the various LE agencies who fund a large part of their operations with the money they can steal from the people, who then use their activities to make their little kindgoms bigger so they can steal even MORE money from the people. The last are the most pathetic. They are the people who have totally swallowed the belief that we are better off with tens of thousands of cops snooping through our cars with drug sniffing dogs than allow some hippie to smoke dope in his living room.
Sure it would, it shows they were in bed with terrorists a long time ago..... :)
P.S. I forgot the most loathsome group of all that opposes ending the WOD: the politicians who are on the take.
The desire to "get the next high"? Marijuana is not physically addictive, unlike alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine. I've hung out with my share of potheads myself, and I've never seen anybody jonesing for a hit the way I've seen smokers jonesing for a cigarette. Or the way I've seen a caffeine addict stumble around bleary-eyed and uselessly until he's gotten that first cup of coffee in the morning.
I also know that when pot is not available, if they are offered something else, they often will accept it.
Ah yes, the ol' "gateway" argument. To whatever extent the gateway argument is true, it's true because to get marijuana, users must deal with criminals, who have good business incentive to introduce their clientele to more expensive, more addictive product.
There are no recorded cases of marijuana overdose. I don't even know if it is possible. It is far, far easier to kill yourself by drinking too much water.
Also, stupid laws breed contempt for the law.
When people discover they've been lied to about the deadly evils of marijuana, they may think that warnings against meth are also just 'crying wolf'.
Oh, believe me, there are dozens of reasons why the War on Drugs is unbelievably stupid that we haven't even touched on in this thread yet, and this is one of them. The War on Drugs is the most misguided, anti-freedom, damaging, and idiotic domestic policy since slavery.
A hippie smoking dope in his living room, while watching beevis and butthead isn't a threat to anyone. It's the same as the football warrior on sunday afternoon drinking a sixpack during the game. I agree with your post. I earlier mentioned, at first I thought the WODs was a good cause. I've been reading these threads for the last couple years. I honestly think, this is the first thread I felt confident enough to join in. I don't do illegal drugs, I don't consider myself a liberatarian, I lean more towards the conservative party. I believe the constitution says what it says and the government has erroded our rights slowing, like cooking a lobster. Start out slowly, and no one will notice. But after that show the other night, I couldn't believe it. The undercover cop spent a hour putting on his costume. He's been doing this for 30 years, and is considered one of the best in the business, yet, he only managed to take a 10 and 20 dollar bust.
You are inflating my position, then attacking it. This is what is known as a Strawman Argument. I clearly wrote "drug abusers" not "drug users". By definition, an abuser is not a responsible drug user.
So I own my body, unless I want to do something with my property that you disapprove of.
No, unless you do something with it that adversely effects other's rights. Like the right to expect you to fulfill your freely taken obligations, those legal (such as employment contracts), familial (such as the financial support of your family), and societal (such as the safe use of public ways). You have the right to speech, but not to libel and slander. You have the right to religion, but not to human sacrifice. You have the right to travel, but not into my house. You have the right to your actions, but not when you've obligated them elsewhere.
Just like we do with alcohol.
We do a damn poor job of it with alcohol. If the punishments for alcohol and drug abuse were commensurate to the damage and/or averted damage potential, (catching the smashed driver before the accident) I'd be more inclined to support decriminalization. But given our coddling of drunks, I'm disinclined to allow legal meth heads.
Either you have to place drug users out of the protection of society, or society has the right to defend itself from the behaviors of the drug users.
Or you have to arrest those who commit criminal acts while under the influence of drugs, and leave the vast, vast majority of drug users, who harm nobody, the hell alone.
Which is my second option: society defending itself from those who damage it by their use of drugs.
And "collectivism" is a code word for socialism, communism, et al.
The drugs being made illegal came in at the same time as the new deal. To me its just another example in a long list of leftist social engineering experiments. Of government knows best.
You've been doing the same to me. See: fences robbing my house.
Not only that, but the federal laws against drug prohibition flout the Constitution in at least one other way.
I strongly disapprove of alcohol prohibition, as do just about all sane people (a group in which I do not include MEGoody), but at least the alcohol prohibiters did it right: they amended the Constitution. Given that the Constitution contains no authority for the federal government to ban drugs, and given that we have the precedent of a Constitutional amendment being necessary to ban a particular drug, how can anyone find room in the Constitution as it is today to allow the government to ban illegal drugs?
Which, by the way, is why Gonzales v. Raich cost Justice Scalia my respect. We have one and only one Justice who respects the Constitution, and his name is Clarence Thomas.
Not if you listen to the MSM, then it would be Abu Graib and Gitmo.
Did you? Let's check the record:
Either you have to place drug users out of the protection of society, or society has the right to defend itself from the behaviors of the drug users.
Your position in this thread seems to indicate quite clearly that you do not believe there is such a thing as responsible drug use. If that impression is mistaken, please clarify.
No, unless you do something with it that adversely effects other's rights. Like the right to expect you to fulfill your freely taken obligations, those legal (such as employment contracts), familial (such as the financial support of your family), and societal (such as the safe use of public ways).
If I fail to live up to my employment contract, my employer has the right to take action against me. It doesn't matter if my failure was due to being stoned out of my gourd, drunk as a skunk, or just plain lazy. If I fail to live up to my familial obligations, my family has the right to divorce me. It doesn't matter if I got zonked on heroin or had an affair. If I fail to live up to my societal obligations, society has the right to arrest me. Sitting in the privacy of my own home and consuming the substance of my choice does not constitute failure to live up to societal obligations.
We do a damn poor job of it with alcohol.
We did a damn poorer job when we tried to fight the problem of alcohol with prohibition.
Which is my second option: society defending itself from those who damage it by their use of drugs.
How does using drugs constitute prima facie damage to society? What societal obligation does a nonviolent drug offender break? When formulating your answer, try to come up with something that doesn't equally apply to someone who just sits at home perfectly sober in front of the TV doing nothing, because we don't arrest people for that.
You are mistaken. In a Constitutional Republic, society collectively makes its decisions through elections of people to represent us.
The People (i.e. the collective society) elect representatives. The reps create laws, each of which abates unfettered action in some way. The judiciary tries citizens according to these laws. That is due process.
There is no delegated government power to prohibit in our Constitution.
And is therefore reserved to the States: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." So any State can prohibit a drug or alcohol in accordance to its laws. Further, if any drug is transported across state lines for commercial purpose, it would Constitutionally fall under the Commerce Clause, and the power of Congress to regulate.
Our governments are empowered to 'reasonably regulate' such objects, within the Constitutional bounds that protect individual rights, privileges and immunities.
I cannot find the phrase "reasonably regulate" anywhere in the Constitution or the Amendments. Whom or what do you quote?
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