Posted on 04/17/2003 1:03:26 AM PDT by WaterDragon
Americas 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 RWJFs 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 approachs 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.
Click HERE for the complete article.
You're hedging.
Drugs are dangerous. They pose a danger to those who use them and those around them. The danger can be soon. The danger can be later. Either you believe in proactive laws or you don't.
My "theoretical" solution is the current system we have in place.
(OHhhhhhhhhhhhh)
Sorry, I just couldn't pass that one up.
You like to think so. The questions you don't want to answer indicate you know better.
I'll be right back. I have to go lock up the coffee.
Perhaps. But the bottom line is that the WOD touches every single one of those issues in a negative way. That's probably why it seems that the LP focuses so much energy on opposing it -- because it is the most egregious example of deprivation of individual liberty and personal responsibility, bigger government, centralized federal power, etc.
Furthermore, and most importantly, legalizing drugs before we've reduced the size and scope of the federal government is pointless.
I disagree. Eliminating drug prohibition is just one of many steps needed in the overall reduction in size and scope of the federal government.
Notice the emphasis on "federal". Truthfully, I have much less of a problem with state laws - I believe that many states would liberalize their drug laws if the federal leviathan could be tamed. The California medipot issue (no matter what you may think about whether marijuana really is useful as medicine) is a stark example of the federal government overstepping its bounds in the pursuit of the Holy War on Drugs. And the hypocrisy of continuing to use the Interstate Commerce Clause to justify federal meddling in what is clearly an intra-state issue is breathtaking, despite the many "cut and pastes" of court decisions that drug war cheerleaders like Roscoe use to justify it.
IMO, ending the federal component of the WOD is one of the most essential steps towards reducing the size and scope of the federal government -- it can't be back-burnered.
Maybe He put that plant here to test us?
You know, like He gave us the ability to build the hydrogen bomb? The knowledge to perform abortions? To clone?
Kind of dangerous to assume that if God gave us something we're expected to use it.
Then there is a case to be made for controlling people's access to some drugs.
If by "some drugs" you mean antibiotics.
Welcome to the party
love,
Marijuana Smokers
You find me an amendment that says, "The right to keep and ingest drugs shall not be infringed" and we'll talk.
"Prior to its criminalization based on fabrications and lies, how did marijuana use threaten the status quo?"
Re-phrase without the propaganda and I'll answer.
Reasonable people can disagree on what "clear" is; I'd probably go with .10 rather than .08. What of it?
You're hedging.
Not at all.
Drugs [...] pose a danger to those who use them
Yes---a danger that is none of government's business.
and those around them.
False; any harm they later cause is harm they chose to cause---and that choice, not the drug use, is where the buck stops.
No, but spelling it with a "w" is.
When you make a statement like this, you give people the impression that federal "inter-state" drug regulation and prohibition would be just fine with you. It's that pesky "intra-state" that bothers you. Is that the case?
That would be "reckless". "Wreckless" indicates driving without having a wreck, which did kind of strike me as humorous.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.