Child Killer Was a Pothead

Thanks for the invented facts.

Reagan was on talk radio long before Limbaugh and the new kids.
In August 1979, Reagan dedicated one program to marijuana. While he warned of the many health risks, he said,"If adults want to take such chances using marijuana that is their business."

"Of course Dad was for legalization. He wasn't crazy. He didn't want his kids in jail!"...Mike Reagan

He also opposed mandatory seatbelt and helmet laws. He opposed the Nanny State like all libertarians. What part of "Just Say No" don't you understand?

Maybe you should try a better source than Rolling Stone. You can buy the tape of the 1979 broadcast at Newsmax. It's only $19.95 and well worth the money.
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Do the crime, do the time. And dope's illegal.

McCain-Feingold and abortion rights are the law of the land too. Is that the end of those two arguments for you?

Yes...but you are equating smoking pot with murder.....and blaming pot for the childs murder....

Frankly...such an arguement is rather foolish..

And since you are taking tally of the illegalities....you'll note this clown wasnt "just" your average pot smoker...as you have tried to imply....he was a hard core druggie with a record as long as your arm...

He seems to have done many crimes...with little or no time...

Hemp is an herb....
___________________________________________________________
So are poison ivy, poison oak and nightshade. May I fill your pipe?

........................................................

God said "all of the green herbs of the earth are yours"

Go argue the point with him and spare me sarcasm.

...the Beatles were as much victims as villains.

I would agree they were unwitting dupes at first. When they matured enough to know better, they became seduced by the fabulous wealth and did not care. They actively became participants in such cultural decay.

I did like a lot of their music, but I did not like them personally. Such is the case with a lot of performing artists whose works are admirable. When showered with public adoration, most lose track of the fact they are nothing more than minstrels and are motivated by ego maniacal delusions.

Essential to tragedy in drama are mythical elements giving the reader or viewer an esoteric reference to the mechanics of a story. This dramatic device is effective, because regardless of the cultural background of the audience, the observer can reference the action of the characters, the plot and dialogue to personal experiences common in themes of religion and/or mythology. Mysteries surrounding human existence are a key to drawing interest from a contemplative mind and have been used to influence social interaction as well as to entertain.

Often, tragedy and other forms of drama use death, marriage, childbirth, ghosts, dreams, sorcery and religion because they are common experiences in the mysteries of human life. Birth, sex, and death are things that are universal to every human life - - they are inescapable.

Many elements found in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman show these various themes. It can be compared to other tragedies in literature and theater. There is dispute among critics as to whether this is really tragedy or not.

Death of a Salesman has some political elements to it. Is it Miller’s intention to give a Marxist view of American society - - the "victim" mentality of life not being fair, establishing a political necessity to artificially create social institutions that limit the individual freedom to choose your own destiny? Or was Miller’s intention just the opposite? Is Willy Loman a victim of an unfair world or the result of his own failings? Is Uncle Ben the evil capitalist, a devil, an angel or what Willy always wanted to be but lacked the courage to strive for? Many artists, playwrights and authors use their works to promote their political or religious ideology. Is Miller any different?

It can be shown that most art, music and literature (sacred or secular) have an intent to influence rather than just to entertain. Considering the personal views of the artist and conditions of the period of history they live in are factors in what they produce. Does life imitate art or is art just a reflection of human experience?

The elements of myth are always esoteric. The secular drama is a myth in and of itself, it is fiction. Myth is metaphorical, the use of such fiction is for escape from reality. Fiction conjures up phantasms, ghosts of the mind that are representative of an ideal or distasteful reality the author wants the audience to ponder and possibly come to a desired conclusion about.

Often the popular performers, athletes, television and movie actors, so used to being someone else living in a world of total fantasy, do not really know who they are anymore. Many have delusions of grandeur and insert themselves into political, social and scientific issues of which they have no expertise or experience. Some display psychotic public behavior, or are advocates of them. Think of how many end up on trial for all kinds of criminal offenses. Professional athletes, recording artists, and the screen actors always caught up in perpetual maelstroms of scandal. Coincidence?

Willy Loman’s fantasy world of delusion is the character’s attempt to escape from reality. Willy Loman is a phantasm for the observer as are the other characters in the play.

This idea is supported by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan:

Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlv. Of Demonology and other Relics of the Religion of the Gentiles.

[10] Another relic of Gentilism is the worship of images, neither instituted by Moses in the Old, nor by Christ in the New Testament; nor yet brought in from the Gentiles; but left amongst them, after they had given their names to Christ. Before our Saviour preached, it was the general religion of the Gentiles to worship for gods those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream. And this is the reason why St. Paul says, "We know that an idol is nothing": not that he thought that an image of metal, stone, or wood was nothing; but that the thing which they honored or feared in the image, and held for a god, was a mere figment, without place, habitation, motion, or existence, but in the motions of the brain. And the worship of these with divine honour is that which is in the Scripture called idolatry, and rebellion against God. For God being King of the Jews, and His lieutenant being first Moses, and afterward the high priest, if the people had been permitted to worship and pray to images (which are representations of their own fancies), they had had no further dependence on the true God, of whom there can be no similitude; nor on His prime ministers, Moses and the high priests; but every man had governed himself according to his own appetite, to the utter eversion of the Commonwealth, and their own destruction for want of union. And therefore the first law of God was: they should not take for gods, alienos deos, that is, the gods of other nations, but that only true God, who vouchsafed to commune with Moses, and by him to give them laws and directions for their peace, and for their salvation from their enemies. And the second was that they should not make to themselves any image to worship, of their own invention. For it is the same deposing of a king to submit to another king, whether he be set up by a neighbour nation or by ourselves.

[14] An image, in the most strict signification of the word, is the resemblance of something visible: in which sense the fantastical forms, apparitions, or seemings of visible bodies to the sight, are only images; such as are the show of a man or other thing in the water, by reflection or refraction; or of the sun or stars by direct vision in the air; which are nothing real in the things seen, nor in the place where they seem to be; nor are their magnitudes and figures the same with that of the object, but changeable, by the variation of the organs of sight, or by glasses; and are present oftentimes in our imagination, and in our dreams, when the object is absent; or changed into other colours, and shapes, as things that depend only upon the fancy. And these are the images which are originally and most properly called ideas and idols, and derived from the language of the Grecians, with whom the word eido signifieth to see. They are also called phantasms, which is in the same language, apparitions. And from these images it is that one of the faculties of man's nature is called the imagination. And from hence it is manifest that there neither is, nor can be, any image made of a thing invisible.

[15] It is also evident that there can be no image of a thing infinite: for all the images and phantasms that are made by the impression of things visible are figured. But figure is quantity every way determined, and therefore there can be no image of God, nor of the soul of man, nor of spirits; but only of bodies visible, that is, bodies that have light in themselves, or are by such enlightened.

[16] And whereas a man can fancy shapes he never saw, making up a figure out of the parts of divers creatures, as the poets make their centaurs, chimeras and other monsters never seen, so can he also give matter to those shapes, and make them in wood, clay or metal. And these are also called images, not for the resemblance of any corporeal thing, but for the resemblance of some phantastical inhabitants of the brain of the maker. But in these idols, as they are originally in the brain, and as they are painted, carved moulded or molten in matter, there is a similitude of one to the other, for which the material body made by art may be said to be the image of the fantastical idol made by nature. (Hobbes, p 444)

In Hobbes’ sense of fiction, myth is always esoteric regardless of aesthetic intent. Arthur Miller’s writing of this play seemed to be very careful in avoiding any overt reference to the esoteric. However, these elements do materialize much the same way as in Othello.

In the other tragedies written by Shakespeare, there is witchcraft, sorcery and ghosts. In Othello these are conspicuously absent. The magic is in Iago being an archetype of an esoteric devil or Satan. Is Uncle Ben like the ghost of Hamlet's father?

Arthur Miller’s writing is not immune from this use of such imagery although he goes to great lengths to deny it in Tragedy and the Common Man:

Now, if it is true that tragedy is the consequence of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly, his destruction in the attempt posits a wrong or an evil in his environment. And this is precisely the morality of tragedy and its lesson. The discovery of the moral law, which is what the enlightenment of tragedy consists of, is not the discovery of some abstract or metaphysical quantity.

continued in Part 2...

Part 2

The "morality of tragedy" is a curious term. ‘Morals’ or ‘morality’ are nothing more than a replacement for the ‘avoidance of sin.’ An atheist telling someone they are immoral is no different than a preacher or rabbi telling them they are a sinner. The idea of a "moral law" implies a "metaphysical quantity" in this sense. The denial of a "metaphysical quantity" in the above by Miller is also contradicted by himself later in the same essay:

The Greeks could probe the very heavenly origin of their ways and return to confirm the rightness of laws. And Job could face God in anger, demanding his right, and end in submission. But for a moment everything is in suspension, nothing is accepted, and in this stretching and tearing apart of the cosmos, in the very action of so doing, the character gains "size," the tragic stature which is spuriously attached to the royal or high born in our minds. The commonest of men may take on that stature to the extent of his willingness to throw all he has into the contest, the battle to secure his rightful place in the world.

The mention of the Biblical figure Job and the book of Job is an interesting thing to contemplate in reference to the role of the Enemy (or Satan), the Accuser (or Diabolus), the Destroyer (or Abaddon) in the book of Job. Many Judaic Biblical scholars will say that Satan does not exist at all as a single entity or angelic being. Malakhim Raoth.

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes, having been fluent in both Greek and Latin at a very early age, supports this in Leviathan and, in part, some of the previous claims I made concerning the conflict of pagan Egyptian cosmogony and the Judaic related to Othello:

Part III. Of a Christian Commonwealth.
Chap. xxxviii. Of Eternal Life, Hell, Salvation, and Redemption.

[12] And first, for the tormentors, we have their nature and properties exactly and properly delivered by the names of the Enemy (or Satan), the Accuser (or Diabolus), the Destroyer (or Abaddon). Which significant names (Satan, Devil, Abaddon) set not forth to us any individual person, as proper names do, but only an office or quality, and are therefore appellatives, which ought not to have been left untranslated (as they are in the Latin and modern Bibles), because thereby they seem to be the proper names of demons, and men are the more easily seduced to believe the doctrine of devils, which at that time was the religion of the Gentiles, and contrary to that of Moses, and of Christ.

[13] And because by the Enemy, the Accuser, and Destroyer, is meant the enemy of them that shall be in the kingdom of God, therefore if the kingdom of God after the resurrection be upon the earth (as in the former Chapter I have shewn by Scripture it seems to be), the Enemy and his kingdom must be on earth also. For so also was it in the time before the Jews had deposed God. For God's kingdom was in Israel, and the nations round about were the kingdoms of the Enemy; and consequently, by Satan is meant any earthly enemy of the Church. (Hobbes p 308)

Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlvii. Of the Benefit that proceedeth from such Darkness

[1] Besides these sovereign powers, divine and human, of which I have hitherto discoursed, there is mention in Scripture of another power, namely, that of "the rulers of the darkness of this world," [Ephesians, 6. 12] "the kingdom of Satan," [Matthew, 12. 26] and "the principality of Beelzebub over demons," [Ibid., 9. 34] that is to say, over phantasms that appear in the air: for which cause Satan is also called "the prince of the power of the air"; [Ephesians, 2. 2] and, because he ruleth in the darkness of this world, "the prince of this world" [John, 16. 11] and in consequence hereunto, they who are under his dominion, in opposition to the faithful, who are the "children of the light," are called the "children of darkness." For seeing Beelzebub is prince of phantasms, inhabitants of his dominion of air and darkness, the children of darkness, and these demons, phantasms, or spirits of illusion, signify allegorically the same thing. This considered, the kingdom of darkness, as it is set forth in these and other places of the Scripture, is nothing else but a confederacy of deceivers that, to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavour, by dark and erroneous doctrines, to extinguish in them the light, both of nature and of the gospel; and so to disprepare them for the kingdom of God to come. (Hobbes p 411)

Continued in part 3....

Part 3...

The fact that Miller is Jewish also refutes his claim: "The discovery of the moral law, which is what the enlightenment of tragedy consists of, is not the discovery of some abstract or metaphysical quantity." Judaism is a metaphysical quantity and does color the philosophical element portrayed by the author. The concept of "morals" are a deliberately deceptive substitute for the "avoidance of sin."

Another criticism of Miller’s expressed view in Tragedy and the Common Man can be found in Tragedy & Philosophy by Walter Kaufmann, formerly a professor of philosophy at Princeton:

Some writers stress that there must be moral conflict;¹ others, the importance of belief that failure is compatible with greatness, that greatness and the universe remain mysterious, and that failure must be final and inevitable.² It would be foolish to deny that some such views have been supported with great eloquence. Indeed, it is almost a commonplace that George Büchner’s Woyzeck and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman are not tragic because the heroes are "pathetic" or, as is sometimes said, anti-heroes. Nevertheless, our exploration of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy suggests that these very attractive views ought to be given up.

The claim that some suffering is merely pitiful and not truly tragic can be neither proved or disproved. But it can be shown to rest on an assumption that is false. This assumption is that both Greek and Shakespearean tragedy concentrated on the tragic and disdained the merely pathetic, and that the loss of this crucial distinction is a modern phenomenon. In fact, we have found that neither the Greeks or Shakespeare did make this distinction. (Kaufman, p 311-312)

1. E.g. Sidney Hook in "Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life" (1960), Max Scheler, 1915, and Hegel.
2. E.g. Walter Kaufmann, above all in The Faith of a Heretic (1961), ch. 11.

Taking into account both Kaufmann's and Hobbes’ observations in comparison to Miller’s Tragedy and the Common Man, one can see how pathos is an element in drama centered on an esoterically based ideal. The use of pathos relates to the idea of an eternal principle, a connection to the human condition of mortality and the human obsession with the eternal. Kaufmann’s understanding of this is based on his study of Aristotle (see Poetics and Rhetoric) and his translation of Friedrich Nietzche’s works. There is a genealogy of drama which is analogous to Nietzche’s idea of a ‘genealogy of morals.’

With the pagan Greeks, drama and theater are directly related to their gods. The traditions of literature also trace their beginnings from the same.

In the book of Job, there is a recurring conflict between the pagan and the Judaic. The "Adversary" (Satan) of Judaic theology figures most prominently in Job. Does Uncle Ben fit this model? Is Uncle Ben also like the ghost of Hamlet’s father?

Thomas Hobbes’ voluminous Leviathan is an undertaking all in itself. Hobbes takes great pains to examine elements of esoteric belief based upon the Judaic mythos and explores the etymological and semantic implications of the Christian and Judaic Bibles (they are not the same things) and how many of the translations are either inaccurate or deliberately misleading. (Hobbes was an expert in both Latin and Greek and was fluent in them at an early age.) Where Hobbes talks about "phantastical inhabitants of the brain," we can look at pathos in the same way (see also: The Secret to the Suicidal Liberal Mind by Dr. Jack Wheeler in the addendum). Similarly, the characters in drama or fiction are phantasms. Pathos is very much along the same lines of the despair Søren Kierkegaard describes all throughout The Sickness Unto Death, and the following excerpt is related to Hobbes’ previously mentioned description of fantasy or ‘image of the fantastical':

The fantastic is, of course, most closely related to the imagination (Phantasien), but the imagination is related in it’s turn to feeling, understanding, and will, so that a person’s feelings, understanding and will may be fantastic. Fantasy is, in general the medium of infinitization...

The fantastic is generally speaking what carries a person into the infinite in such a way that it only leads him away from himself and thus prevents him from coming back to himself. (Kierkegaard, p 60-61)

Miller attempts to conceal his erroneous personal interpretations of the Judaic philosophy behind a curtain of a seemingly secular drama. This was not necessary for the Greeks. They were pagans. With many gods of differing temperaments to choose from, the Greeks had no propagandist need for the underlying or overt esoteric conflicts between the pagan and Judaic to promote a particular outlook. In Tragedy and the Common Man, this is more apparent to the person with an awareness of how propaganda is applied in the arts than it is to the contemporary observer. Armed with certain knowledge, a person learns to see in a different spectrum.

Perhaps this is why Miller was called before the Senate Committee on Un-American Activities. Being a Marxist is not a crime, but it is the enemy of individual freedom and an esoteric philosophy or religion. A well-placed Marxist will not generally make the open, identifying proclamation, they are of an occult nature. Malakhim Raoth.

Whether Miller was a Marxist or not, is a whole different matter. It is the subject of some speculation(s). It would explain some of the terminology, especially his choice of a title for Tragedy and the Common Man. Marxism has it’s own dogma as religions do, along with many forms of idolatry.

The ‘genealogy of morals' and the ‘birth of tragedy' (borrowing from Nietzsche’s titles) is also alluded to by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences:

An ancient tradition passed out of Egypt into Greece, that some god, who was an enemy to the repose of mankind, was the inventor of the sciences.³ What must the Egyptians, among whom the sciences first arose, have thought of them? And they beheld, near at hand, the sources from which they sprang. In fact, whether we turn to the annals of the world, or eke out with philosophical investigations the uncertain chronicles of history, we shall not find for human knowledge an origin answering to the idea we are pleased to entertain of it at present. Astronomy was born of superstition, eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; all, even moral philosophy, of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices; we should be less doubtful of their advantages, if they had sprung from our virtues. (Rousseau, p 15)

3. It is easy to see the allegory in the fable of Prometheus: and it does not appear that the Greeks, who chained him to the Caucasus, had a better opinion of him than the Egyptians had of their god Thetus. The Satyr, says an ancient fable, the first time he saw a fire, was going to kiss and embrace it; but Prometheus cried out to him to forbear, or his beard would rue it. It burns, says he, everything that touches it.

The philosophies of Rousseau and Hobbes are not generally considered analogous, although Rousseau does agree morals were born of human pride ['all, even moral philosophy, (was born) of human pride.'] Rousseau is actually very hostile to Hobbes, calling him ‘pernicious’ in A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences:

...Paganism, though given over to all the extravagances of human reason, has left nothing to compare with the shameful monuments which have been prepared by the art of printing⁴, during the reign of the gospel. The impious writings of Leucippus and Diagoras perished with their authors. The world, in their days, was ignorant of the art of immortalizing the errors and extravagances of the human mind. But thanks to the art of printing and the use we make of it, the pernicious reflections of Hobbes and Spinoza will last forever. Go, famous writings, of which the ignorance and rusticity of our forefathers would have been incapable. Go to our descendants, along with those still more pernicious works which reek of the corrupted manners the present age! Let them together convey to posterity a faithful history of the progress and advantages of our arts and sciences. If they are read, they will not leave a doubt about the question we are now discussing, and unless mankind should then be still more foolish than we, they will lift up their hands to Heaven and exclaim in bitterness of heart: ‘Almighty God! Thou who holdest in Thy hand the minds of men, deliver us from the fatal arts and sciences of our forefathers; give us back the ignorance, innocence, and poverty, which alone can make us happy and are precious in Thy sight. (Rousseau, p 26-27)

4. If we consider the frightful disorder which printing has already caused in Europe, and judge of the future by the progress of its evils from day to day, it is easy to foresee that sovereigns will hereafter take as much pains to banish this dreadful art from their dominions, as they ever took to encourage it. The Sultan Achmet, yielding to the opportunities of certain pretenders to taste, consented to have a press erected at Constantinople; but it was hardly set to work before they were obliged to destroy it, and throw the plant into a well.

It is related that the Caliph Omar, being asked what should be done with the Library at Alexandria, answered in these words: ‘If the books in the library contain anything contrary to the Alcoran, they are evil and ought to be burnt; if they contain only what the Alcoran teaches, they are superflous.’ This reasoning has been cited by our men of letters as the height of absurdity; but if Gregory the Great had been in place of Omar and the Gospel in the place of the Alcoran, the library would still have been burnt, and it would have been perhaps the finest action of his life.

Hobbes, and later John Locke, are philosophers who established philosophical ideals that are the basis for Modern Western Civilization. Rousseau, it is argued, establishes a philosophical basis for Marxism - - something Miller appears to emulate with Death of a Salesman.

The rhetoric of Marxists in politics often use the idea of a social contract (which is stolen from Rousseau) and the term itself to promote the quasi-religious ideals they worship. Marxists, in a sense, worship the ideals of a dead Karl Marx like some Christians worship the image of a dead Jesus. The political Left often holds to the view of Rousseau, cited above. They eschew the advancement of science and of the arts. It is no wonder that in their pursuit to dominate academia, that the decline of education in the West has been a victim of the political Left. Is it any wonder that the modern Left opposes U.S. military action in the war against terrorism, hates the Jews and Israel, as well as supports the Palestinians and terrorism? "Palestine" is a creation of pagan Rome, used to specifically disenfranchise the Jews from Israel and from Jerusalem. (The Romans were more successful than the Greeks or Egyptians.)

What may clue someone into this theme is an analysis presented by Raymond Williams in Modern Tragedy:

The mainstream tragedy has gone elsewhere: into the self-enclosed guilty and isolated world of the breakdown of liberalism. We shall need to trace this through its complicated particular phases. But, with Ibsen in mind, it is worth looking briefly at the plays of Arthur Miller, who represents, essentially, a late revival of liberal tragedy, on the edge (but only on the edge) of its transformation into socialism. (Williams p 103)

Professor Williams gives some insightful commentary throughout the book in regard to the philosophy and religion of Marxism and how it relates to the mechanics of certain pieces in modern drama.

David Lenson in Achilles' Choice, goes through a tedious analysis of tragedy, references many philosophical works and offers discussion on mythology and ritualized action as it is related to drama. Of particular interest is the qualification of tragedy in regard to Death of a Salesman:

The debate about Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman centered on questions of action and social elevation of the protagonist, but the true shortcoming of the play as a tragedy — although not necessarily as a drama — lay in it’s lack of transpersonal reference. Although we might generalize from Willy Loman to all those who suffer from similar social illusions, there was no emotional necessity to do so arising from the construction of the play itself. The distance between the aspirations of the hero and the domestic alternatives to it was slight. The weakness of individualization did not serve to reinforce emotional generalization, but instead made a compromise which is quite alien to tragedy. It is as if Achilles found a middle-ground. Another way of putting it would be to say that the play lacks extremes of any kind. (Lenson, p 134-135)

A common theme throughout much of the criticisms in drama are based upon ethereal and esoteric ideals, any of which can be easily construed to take on religious connotations, either because of overt reference by the authors to spirituality, or attempts to disassociate their personal bias from any concealed religious/cultural influence.

The stage is not unlike the altar. Drama is most often scripted and performed much the same way as any religious ritual. Although absent from drama are the devices of esoteric rites, many of the same imageries, psychology, and intent of the writers are indeed present. The use of visual images, lighting, characters, music and dialogue all play their parts in creating the myth. After all, esoteric rites are psychodramas.

Conservatives, including Ronald Reagan, have always opposed marijuana prohibition.

Lying about Reagan. Tsk.

He several times vetoed legislation to reduce marijuana possession to a misdemeanor, and signed legislation sharply increasing penalties for drug dealers
Thus, Reagan’s record, while generally conservative, is not particularly libertarian.

Reason Magazine, July 1975

McCain-Feingold and abortion rights are the law of the land too.

Freedom of speech equals drugs? Drug use is "responsible"? If abortion were made illegal, abortionist should be above the law?

you are equating smoking pot with murder.....

By criticizing Soros?

You have no grasp on context. So...

I'll leave you with a great quote from Jefferson - A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.

Being in the majority doesn't make you morally superior, just more powerful.

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.

Which is why we have representation government, not mob rule.

"The equal rights of man, and the happiness of every individual, are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government. Modern times have the signal advantage, too, of having discovered the only device by which these rights can be secured, to wit: government by the people, acting not in person, but by representatives chosen by themselves, that is to say, by every man of ripe years and sane mind, who contributes either by his purse or person to the support of his country."
--Thomas Jefferson

Yes, we are a republic. Good catch. However, the meaning of the quote still applies. Using government, one group can take away the rights of another.

And my main point still stands. Thomas Jefferson would not be on your side.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

Good wine is a necessity of life for me.

Using government, one group can take away the rights of another.

The "right" of criminals to get a load on before seeking out victims?

"And where else will this degenerate son of science [Hume], this traitor to his fellow men, find the origin of just powers, if not in the majority of the society? Will it be in the minority? Or in an individual of that minority?" --Thomas Jefferson to John Cartwright, 1824.
"Where the law of the majority ceases to be acknowledged, there government ends; the law of the strongest takes its place, and life and property are his who can take them." --Thomas Jefferson to Annapolis Citizens, 1809.

Why does marijuana get your dander up so?

The current problems with the drug war are not unlike those of Prohibition; it erodes respect for the law; creates black markets, crime lords and a nonviolent criminal underclass that's completely unequipped to survive in such rough company; puts medical evaluations in the hands of law enforcement; allows government virtually uncontrolled interference in the lives of citizens; etc.

A powerful argument. I believe that our leaders are moving toward "Decriminalization" (rather than "Legalization) of Marijuana. To me, this leaves the authorities with powers I do not particularly wish them to have.

Thanks for your # 76. Excellent post.

oh... so ALL pot smoker are child killers.. then... So I suppose ALL people who drink are drunk drivers and wife beaters....

I dont use it- but I am for legalization. I DID use it for 10 years- it is totally harmless- can't say the same for alchohol