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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The Congress comprises the Senate and the House of Representatives. How ironic that you were accusing another FReeper of ignorance of our government.
Do you have a beef with pro-WODders that ally with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and its gun grabbing agenda?
A plant? A harmless plant? Which plant is that? Are you talking about tulips? Roses?
Maybe you can be a little more specific.
Well, bassmaner did a pretty good impression of one in post #241.
A pretty good impression of which?
How about a compromise then? Let's make some drugs legal, but make it where you have to be 21 to purchase them. Then, make some drugs legal, but only available by prescription. The remaining drugs we'll keep illegal.
Is that OK with you? A good compromise between making all drugs legal and making all drugs illegal?
What? You're not happy with that?
"Although marijuana smoke delivers THC and other cannabinoids to the body, it also delivers harmful substances, including most of those found in tobacco smoke. In addition, plants contain a variable mixture of biologically active compounds and cannot be expected to provide a precisely defined drug effect. For those reasons there is little future in smoked marijuana as a medically approved medication. If there is any future in cannabinoid drugs, it lies with agents of more certain, not less certain, composition."
--Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base (1999), Institute of Medicine
We wouldn't want people to think that the IOM approves smoking marijuana, would we?
Oh pick one, MrLeRoy. You asked for one I gave you one. Move on or get to the point. If you even have a point.
The future can take care of itself---sick people are suffering today.
What a petulant, childish reply.
Live for today -- screw tomorrow. Now there's responsible, mature thinking.
You gots to know? You can't go on without knowing? Fine, bassmaner did a good impression of both.
He's a big-L Libertarian with a link to the Libertarian website on his homepage (not even you have this). His post #130 is the Party line.
In post #139 and 161, he starts to temper his position about minors and drugs. In post #187, he's down to small-l libertarian.
Finally, in #241, he emphasizes his support for drug legalization, except not for children. The LP platform makes no distinction.
Now, what of it? What's the point of this?
Who's "we"?
The same people in "Let's make some drugs legal".
Sound like a good compromise to you? Not all drugs legal or illegal, but a balance between the two extreme positions.
Sound like a good compromise to you? Not all drugs legal or illegal, but a balance between the two extreme positions.
Sound like a good compromise to you? Not all drugs legal or illegal, but a balance between the two extreme positions.
Live for today -- screw tomorrow. Now there's responsible, mature thinking.
Yeah, being sick and suffering is a real bacchanal.
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