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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Mabye.
Wait a minute. My desire to see that boozers can't aim high powered cars at my wife and grandchildren on the road doesn't translate to trying to forbid them from getting sloshing drunk in their own garage or family room. Drunk drivers kill.
Take their keys away and then help the gene pool let them drink all they want.
Secondly, to claim that a California medical marijuana club that provides mj to California residents constitutes interstate commerce is ludicrous.
Yes they do, but 0.08 BAC is hardly drunk. It's an arbitrarily low number designed to cast the law enforcement net as wide as possible, just like the 55 mph speed limit. Brought to you courtesy of the modern-day Carrie Nations at MADD and revenue-hungry municipalities nationwide.
The criterion being "turning users into walking culture labs for superinfections"?
Yes, that's a member of Congress: a senator or a representative.
I said in my context which broke out the senate and congress.
What you should have broken out is the Senate and the House.
I use no drugs, including the deadly addictive drugs alcohol and tobacco.
Not really. The prohibitionists were after something permanent.
"An amendment to the Constitution obviously appealed to temperance reformers more than a federal statute banning liquor. A simple congressional majority could adopt a statute but, with the shift of a relatively few votes, could likewise topple one. Drys feared that an ordinary law would be in constant danger of being overturned owing to pressure from liquor industry interests or the growing population of liquor-using immigrants. A constitutional amendment, on the other hand, though more difficult to achieve, would be impervious to change. Their reform would not only have been adopted, the Anti-Saloon League reasoned, but would be protected from future human weakness and backsliding."
Also, Congress did prohibit and regulate alcohol prior to the 18th Amendment (ratified January 16, 1919):
"The Lever Food and Fuel Control Act of August 1917 banned the production of distilled spirits for the duration of the war. The War Prohibition Act of November 1918 forbade the manufacture and sale of all intoxicating beverages of more than 2.75 percent alcohol content, beer and wine as well as hard liquor, until demobilization was completed."
The above information was obtained from The Schaffer Library of Drug Policy.
Words mean things. With decriminalization, drugs remain illegal. Nothing changes except the penalty.
When a state decriminalizes say, marijuana, they set an amount (usually one ounce) under which mere possession is "decriminalized" to a misdemeanor rather than a felony. In some cases, this misdemeanor can later be expunged from one's record.
So, do you mean decriminalization or legalization?
Rolling on the floor in agony because spectral chains prohibit you from doing something you don't do and would never do?
Grow up. Or go get drunk, or stoned. Or don't. Just quit whining.
Oops! I tried to "control" you just now. O what pain! O the humanity!
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