Posted on 04/17/2003 1:03:26 AM PDT by WaterDragon
America’s anti-alcohol movement is composed of dozens of overlapping community groups, research institutions, and advocacy organizations, but they are brought together and given direction by one entity: the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Based in Princeton, New Jersey, the RWJF has spent more than $265 million between 1997 and 2002 to tax, vilify, and restrict access to alcoholic beverages. Nearly every study disparaging alcohol in the mass media, every legislative push to limit marketing or increase taxes, and every supposedly “grassroots” anti-alcohol movement was conceived and coordinated at the RWJF’s headquarters. Thanks to this one foundation, the U.S. anti-alcohol movement speaks with one voice.
For the RWJF, it is an article of faith that diminishing per capita consumption across the board can contain the social consequences of alcohol abuse. Therefore, it has engaged in a long-term war to reduce overall drinking by all Americans. The RWJF relentlessly audits its own programs, checking to see if each dollar spent is having the maximum impact on reducing per capita consumption. Over the past 10 years, this blueprint has been refined. Increased taxes, omnipresent roadblocks, and a near total elimination of alcohol marketing are just a few of the tactics the RWJF now employs in its so-called “environmental” approach.
The environmental approach seeks to shift blame from the alcohol abuser to society in general (and to alcohol providers in particular). So the RWJF has turned providers into public enemy number one, burdening them with restrictions and taxes to make their business as difficult and complex as possible. The environmental approach’s message to typical consumers, meanwhile, is that drinking is abnormal and unacceptable. The RWJF seeks to marginalize drinking by driving it underground, away from mainstream culture and public places.
The RWJF funds programs that focus on every conceivable target, at every level from local community groups to state and federal legislation. Every demographic group is targeted: women, children, the middle class, business managers, Hispanics, Blacks, Whites, Native Americans. Every legal means is used: taxation, regulation, litigation. Every PR tactic: grassroots advocacy, paid advertising, press warfare. Every conceivable location: college campuses, sporting events, restaurants, cultural activities, inner cities, residential neighborhoods, and even bars.
The RWJF scored a major victory in 2000 with a federal .08 BAC mandate, and can claim credit for restrictions on alcohol in localities all over the country. But its $265 million has accomplished much more: it has put in place all the elements required for more sweeping change. This includes a vast network of local community organizations, centers for technical support, a compliant press, and a growing body of academic literature critical of even moderate alcohol consumption. The next highly publicized study or angry local movement may now reach the “tipping point” where the RWJF-funded anti-alcohol agenda snowballs into the kind of orchestrated frenzy the tobacco industry knows well.
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MOST would realize in the context of my post Senate and Congress were to be considered separately.
What is "This". I have no idea what you are referring to in your false accusation.
Your profile is completely blank. It appears you have some beef with everyone but not with no one?
Commendations for making a logical argument instead of the ad hominems typical of anti-legalizers. I would submit that a critical issue you've overlooked is the civil liberties of all Americans, not just druggies. Because of the WOD, authorities can seize and keep your property without charging you with a crime, and require you to prove your innocence to get it back, and other protections of the 4th Amendment have greatly diminished as well (wiretaps, warrantless searches, no-knock warrants, highway checkpoints, etc).
So the benefit of "letting people get high" is that we don't have to spy on our own citizens to make sure they aren't getting high. Now I suspect one of our friends will make some inane response like "well why not just legalize murder and then we wouldn't have to worry about enforcing those laws either", thereby ignoring the fact that because murder has a *victim*, you don't need invasive methods to discover that a crime has occurred. Short version: if you need a police state to enforce a law, the law is wrong.
Exactly...and if someone is puffing on a marijuana cigarette in THE PRIVACY of his/her own HOME, how is that infringing on the rights of others?
I have no beef with Dubaya, JEB, Joe Scarborough. I have a beef with those that relentless blast the republican party just because they can't fix 70 years of democratic control overnight. I have a beef with those that relentlessly blast the republican party for being on the "wrong" side of the drug issue. I have a beef with libertarians that think it is one easy step to utopia and to hell with who gets killed by that one step. I have a beef with liberatarians that promote personal responsibility but show no reasonable path to their utopia. I have a beef with libertarians that ally with NORML/Soros and his gun grabbing agenda.
Pro-decriminalization? of minor amounts of mj or legalization of all drugs?
You know that is not the issue. THE ISSUE is whether or not to legalize ALL drugs. Are you saying that if you could smoke your toke in your own home you would go away happy?
As robertpaulsen pointed out, disregarding those issues, essentially creating a one sided debate, virtually insures that the prohibitionist argument will prevail. I just can't figure out how you can propose to limit the debate to those parameters, and still posit that there is one.
#2 I would be happy if my money weren't being used to force a way of life upon another American citizen.
Well...what would you think about making ALL drugs illegal?
Would you support having government stormtroopers lay seige to the house of a person who gets drunk (alcohol is a drug) and then falls asleep?
Would you support throwing people who smoke cigarettes (nicotine is a drug) into jail for ridiculously long jail terms?
Would you support tearing a mother away from her children because the mother took 1 more aspirin (aspirin is a drug) than she should because her headache really hurts?
Would you support having DEA snipers ring the house of someone who drank too much VICKS cough syrup (which contains alcohol which is a drug)?
Would you support the DEA stormtroopers running through school hallways dragging out and arresting the students in art class who sniff a little glue or rubber cement?
Well, it all started with MrLeroy and his false claims of medical marijuana .....
The Institute of Medicine is a Soros ally?
"there are patients with debilitating symptoms for whom smoked marijuana might provide relief. [...] Until a nonsmoked rapid-onset cannabinoid drug delivery system becomes available, we acknowledge that there is no clear alternative for people suffering from chronic conditions that might be relieved by smoking marijuana, such as pain or AIDS wasting." - Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base (1999), Institute of Medicine
But when they're caught in an unsupportable position, they become small-l libertarians.
And when association with that group becomes awkward, they become small-l libertarians "except for that issue".
Can you provide evidence of anyone initially proclaiming themself a big-L Libertarian but then changing their proclaimed status to small-l libertarians---or anyone saying they're a small-l libertarian "except for that issue"? Or is this just yet another baseless ad hominem?
No. When did this supposedly happen?
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