Posted on 08/27/2008 2:26:50 PM PDT by april15Bendovr
Soros behind Mass. effort to decriminalize pot By STEVE LeBLANC – 1 hour ago
BOSTON (AP) — A measure that would decriminalize minor marijuana-possession cases is on the ballot in Massachusetts largely because of one man: billionaire financier and liberal activist George Soros.
Of the $429,000 collected last year by the group advancing the measure, $400,000 came from Soros, who has championed similar efforts in several states and spent $24 million to fight President Bush's 2004 re-election bid. The Committee for Sensible Marijuana Policy needed about $315,000 of that just to collect the more than 100,000 signatures that secured a spot on the ballot, according to campaign finance reports reviewed by The Associated Press.
"All of us owe George Soros a great deal of gratitude," said Keith Stroup, founder of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
(Excerpt) Read more at ap.google.com ...
All the government is going to do is replace a prison you can leave if you have the will to do so with one you can't.
Good point. Don’t know which one is worse.
A situation were we don’t have any control over our lives or a situation where we don’t have any control over our lives.
Thats why I love the quote
“Reality can be hell when you’re only visiting”
Never heard that quote before. That is really good!
Well, you apparently had some experience with it when you were younger, how did you manage to escape from your prison?
My friend and brother were perfect examples of why doing drugs is really bad!
Plus I grew up. I grew beyond the need to get high.
I was lucky and timing was in my favor. I had already given it up when life got tough and important life decisions had to be made.
If they couldn’t have gotten their hands on pot do you think they would have turned out substantially different? Did they tend to abuse alcohol or other drugs if they didn’t have any pot?
So now you're resorting to anthropomorphism to make a logical point? How utterly shameless.
Drugs are inanimate objects, wholly incapable of exercising free will.
People make choices. Those who don't own up to their own failings, and blame, instead, inanimate objects, are cowards. Weaklings. And restricting the freedom of adults because of those who cannot own up to their failings is hardly in keeping with conservative ideology.
How positively shameful that an issue like marijuana decriminalization can turn supposed conservatives into liberals. Perhaps those so swayed were never conservative in the first place? That's my bet.
Maybe it wasn't very good. Maybe you didn’t inhale. If you smoked decent stuff and inhaled you probably would have felt it. It didn’t affect me the first time either, but none of us had ever smoked before and we just smoked some leaves from an immature plant that we dried in the oven. The next time was with someone who knew what he was doing and he had really good seedless buds. I felt it that time in a big way. That was back in the late seventies and back then at least while there was some really good stuff out there it was not uncommon to come across some really worthless weed if you didn’t know what you were doing.
“Whatever it did to my brain was permanent.”
I doubt anything horrible happened to your brain because you smoked pot a few times. If it did that about half of all adults under sixty or so would be in big trouble.
“As I said in another thread, illegal drugs enable a person’s weakness.”
I think maybe that's a little true. Marijuana can certainly enable one to procrastinate, but if anything is enabling, it's that legal drug, alcohol. I don't know that there is anything that can lower inhibitions more than alcohol. You won't convince me that marijuana is worse in that regard.
“And they enable the enabling of someone weakness.”
Not sure what to make of that.
“Just hope that ‘mother’s little helper’ isn’t there when you are at your most vulnerable.”
“Mother's little helper,” whatever the heck that means, is always there. I'm sure I could get it whenever I wanted it. I live in the town where I grew up and have a few old friends that still do it. It just doesn't appeal to me that much and it's the last thing I'd want to do in a “vulnerable state.” When I'd smoke that stuff while really down or stressed I'd just sit there and overthink about how miserable things were. No thanks. I'd rather get drunk and wake up with a pounding headache. I don’t do that either though because it doesn’t really help. There are always better ways to deal with stress. I’m a busy lawyer. I’m always dealing with stress. That’s just part of life.
“Unfortunately, kids will be exposed to it more if it were legalized (IMO).”
That's probably true to some extent, but in most places they are already exposed to it anyway at a fairly young age. I first smoked it when I was thirteen years old. It was everywhere in my town growing up. It was much easier to get than beer. Somebody had to be 21 or look old enough to get by using a fake ID. You didn't have to be 21 or have a fake ID to buy pot. All you needed was a little money. No one was going to check your ID.
In most places marijuana is already easily available. If legal I bet we'd still have places that were “dry,” like we have dry counties in may state where alcohol is not sold, but most places where it is already prevalent would have some sort of “pot stores.” Kids will end up getting it from these pot shops like they get booze from the store today, by having older siblings or friends buy it, or by using fake identification. We don't want kids to have pot, but it would be much better for them to get it that way than having them get it from drug dealers that also sell other far more dangerous drugs.
You talked about the stigma associated with marijuana. I think it will always have a certain amount of stigma. It's never going to be something everyone wants to do. Where in the world has pot ever been something the majority of the people use? Fewer than here smoke it even in a place like the Netherlands where they actually allow retail sales of marijuana. Everywhere in the in the world it seems to be viewed by most as the stoner/slacker drug, what the losers at the party sitting on the couch staring at the TV with the sound turned of are into. It's not a great social lubricant by any means. It’s not nearly as “good” as alcohol in that respect. Being high causes at least a little anxiety for most people in social settings. It's certainly not what you want to do before you go try to chat up the ladies. The smoke smells bad, as does your breath if you've been smoking it. It's smoking and smoking is viewed with more and more disdain in this country and elsewhere. Smoking marijuana is just not for everyone and it never will be.
More than half of all young Americans have tried marijuana though. Most of them do it once or a few times and decide it's not for them. Probably a few more of all ages would do it if it was legal, but I would really be surprised if we saw just a huge jump in the percentage who smoke. I am convinced that most people who really want to use it are already using it. Use numbers fluctuate some but on a per capita basis Americans are more likely to use marijuana than just about any other peoples in the world. Our marijuana laws are far more punitive than those in most Western nations yet in most years since the seventies when nations around the world really started collecting this data we've been “number one” in the per capita number of users department. And when we weren’t “number one,” we weren’t far from it. If the slight chance of getting caught and getting into a little trouble really deterred many who want to smoke pot, a much lower percentage of Americans would smoke it.
I think there must be a natural limit to the percentage of people who will want to smoke pot. If not, surely we'd have seen a jump to maybe seventy or eighty percent in one of these countries where they've made it practically legal. Instead they don't use it any more than we do and in many cases per capita use is lower where they don't really bother pot smokers. Are we just really weak? Is that why we can't handle the freedom? Why is it people think we are so much weaker than the Dutch or the Swiss or the people in any of these other countries where to varying degrees they've decriminalized marijuana use and made it at least practically legal? The Dutch sell it from highly visible storefronts where the main thing on the menu is cannabis in all the various preparations. Why aren't they just going crazy over there, all of them walking around with five burning joints hanging out of their mouths? The reality is that a lower percentage of Dutch smoke it than Americans. A smaller percentage of their children smoke it too, even though adults can just pick it up at the store whenever they want it there. The Dutch and others in countries where marijuana is basically allowed may have cultures a little different than ours, but I just cannot believe that we Americans are so weak that we cannot handle freedom with respect to marijuana at least almost as good as they can. Use would probably go up some at first at least until the novelty wore off, but I can’t see us just going crazy and having per capita use go up to several times that of any other nation in the world. I think what is more likely is that it would go up some at first and then it would fluctuate with popular culture, being high sometimes when it is in vogue and going down when it starts losing favor in popular culture, about like we’ve seen here in the past.
One thing about marijuana is that it really isn’t super addictive and it’s generally not super harmful either. It’s nothing like drugs like heroin or meth in those respects, and in some ways it’s probably a little better than alcohol in those respects. It would be a catastrophe to see use of drugs like meth tripling or quadrupling because so many would end up with lifelong addictions that would remain after people wised up and the fad subsided. I don’t think use could go up so much with marijuana because already so many have tried it compared to the percentage who have messed with the hard stuff and only a small percentage liked it enough to continue using it over the long haul. If marijuana use did go up considerably for a time most of the excess in users wouldn’t have any trouble stopping when the fad was over. Marijuana smoking was all the rage in the 70’s and by the end of that decade we had a lot more smoking it than today, but the fad waned in the 80’s and most who were smoking it in the 70’s grew out of that phase in their lives in time. Crack users of the 80’s weren’t so fortunate. A lot of them now in their 40’s and 50’s are still struggling with their addictions. People rarely just grow out of powerful addictions like that. I wouldn’t say marijuana has no potential for addiction, but most people don’t get addicted and whatever addiction people do experience is not nearly as powerful as it is for the hard stuff, and it’s probably not as powerful as that for alcohol or cigarettes. In my personal experience leaving cigarettes alone was infinitely more difficult than leaving marijuana alone. There will always be a few who just can’t quit, but of course there are plenty who can’t stay away from freerepublic.com when they have other things they need to be doing, or they can’t stop gambling or shopping or whatever. We can’t protect everyone from their weaknesses.
Marijuana doesn’t cause a lot of crime, except of course that which is related to the fact that it is an illegal black market drug. It generally causes little or no harm to people who use it. It’s not extremely addictive. It’s bad, but not bad enough to justify all the trouble we go through and all the harm we cause trying in vain to make it go away. We have to pick our battles, and this is one instance where the battle is not worth fighting. We don’t have to declare that it’s good for people and give up on trying to discourage kids and even adults from using it, but so many people do it despite our best efforts to make it go away, the market for it is just massive and unstoppable, and marijuana is just not so bad that it makes sense to continue trying to enforce the ban. I think we’d probably have more control over if we regulated it than we have now. Now we just have a multibillion dollar industry with no government controls whatsoever and the huge profits are in many cases going to bad people that do bad things, people that sell the hard stuff too who are more than happy to have minors buying their products. The marijuana industry is funding Mexican organized crime to the tune of billions of dollars a year. I don’t know about you, but since that money is going to be made by somebody anyway I’d rather see it go to law abiding tax paying Americans.
I think in that sometime in the not so distant future we’ll probably start regulating marijuana similar to the way we regulate alcohol. That will cause a lot of anxiety for a lot of people at first, but the sky isn’t going to fall in and eventually most people we be wondering why we didn’t just go ahead and legalize it a long time ago.
Pot allowed them to avoid facing life. It allowed them to crawl into a hole and hibernate.
You have been using too long. Yup. Too many drugs.
- I doubt that it was bad pot. And yes, I inhaled. I have heard that this is common. And it makes sense considering the way drugs affect the brain.
- Yes, unfortunately most people have tried it. Interesting that there are more incidents of ADHD these days. There may be many cause unrelated to drug usage. However, maybe it is more than just a coincidence?
- Yes, we drank as kids. However, I didn't know of anyone who was as dramatically affected by alcohol as pot. Should note that pot usage lead to other nastier drugs.
- Mother's Little Helper (reference to a Stones song). Specifically, pills. But the point is the same.
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/r/rolling+stones/mothers+little+helper_20117873.html
- “And they enable the enabling of someone’s weakness.” This is meant to imply a spiral. Your problems will probably get worse if you don't face them and drive you to “hide” even more. Pot may not be addictive but it creates a dependency.
- “Marijuana doesn’t cause a lot of crime” Agreed in one respect. It “pacifies.” However, it is reasonable to assume that it increases poverty levels. And increased poverty levels mean increased crime. Don't know which one wins — “too lazy to steal.” :)
Interestingly, this is reason why some of us think that Soros likes legalization — because it pacifies.
Not many doctors believed in it in the past and now it is way over-diagnosed. I'm going to be best man at a wedding tomorrow for a neurologist who is one who still thinks ADHD is a made up disorder.
“Yes, we drank as kids. However, I didn't know of anyone who was as dramatically affected by alcohol as pot.”
You and I had different experiences. Alcohol has killed friends of mine. I've seen it cause a lot of problems and I still see it cause lots of problems. I'm in court all the time seeing cases where alcohol has caused serious problems, like domestic batteries and all sorts of other stupid conduct that ends up hurting people. I have never once had a woman tell me her husband is a great guy except when he smokes pot and gets mean and beats on her. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that or something similar about alcohol.
“Should note that pot usage lead to other nastier drugs.”
Alcohol use and cigarettes do to, or at least several times as many people who drink and smoke will use a drug like cocaine than those who do not drink or smoke. These are all “gateway drugs.” I do not think that drinking or smoking necessarily makes one want to use a drug like cocaine, but the fact that one drinks and smokes indicates that he is more likely to be the kind of person who would try cocaine than one who does not drink and smoke. There is no reason why marijuana would be anymore of a gateway drug than alcohol if it was legal. Illegal drugs tend to travel through the same channels. As it is when people buy pot they are buying from people who in many cases will sell the other drugs. Not only that, but since marijuana is illegal it doesn’t seem like a big deal to break out other illegal drugs in front of a marijuana user. What's he going to do, tell? He's breaking the law too. Make it legal and people won't be buying it from dealers who sell other drugs and they won't automatically be safe to do other illegal drugs in front of. They won't be part of the club, so they won't be as likely to be offered other drugs.
We put have put a lot of crap in our bodies recently. Including prescription drugs, pollution, food preservatives, etc. What is this crap doing to our DNA?
At a simpler level, it is possible that reproductive organs are directly affected by the many drugs. Wonder if any studies have been done? Especially, a woman's eggs.
Alcohol — We definitely lived different lives.
I and all of my friends killed lots of brain cells drinking alcohol. We were really stupid and took a lot of risks.
No one I know of directly or indirectly died from alcohol. We were lucky!
We also smoked pot. No one died from it either. Some just hibernated for years.
BTW, we were underage.
Actually, pot would be the preferred mind control drug vs alcohol if pacification is desired. Maybe why Soros likes it.
Gateway drugs — disagree about alcohol — bit of a stretch to claim that alcohol is a gateway drug. However agree about distribution because the same person who sells you pot, will be more than happy to hook you on something else nastier.
There has been a pretty vocal percentage of people here defending pot (or at least arguing that keeping it illegal is idiotic) for over 8 years now, so the “sad” day has been going on for many days.
Getting a bag was difficult? You didn’t go to the school I went to, in both California and Colorado. Getting a bag of weed was ridiculously easy. Sometimes it was easier to get than booze, mostly because if the pot dealer was around he’d sell it to you without any ID. However, both were really easy to get.
How is pot a gateway drug but alcohol isn’t?
You can disagree with it all you want, but the fact is that just about everyone who tried heroin/coke/etc. has tried both pot and booze. It would seem to make perfect sense that one would try a more mild drug before one went onto a more harder drug, much like most people have ridden merry go rounds before they tried to ride a roller coaster.
Sadly potheads want to ride on the coattails by pointing out the end of prohibition era of alcohol as if its the same thing.
There is education around the damage alcohol can do. The myth that marijuana is benign is a negligent proposal.
There is a reason Soros is funding this drug. The reason is it makes people stupid.
The reason it is equated is because one drug can be legally bought and is sold in hundreds of thousands of stores across the country for home use. People who really love the drug are able to make weaker versions of the drug in their home, and it is perfectly legal. That same drug is also sold in thousands of establishments across the country where people go for the specific reason of partaking in that drug. These people who use this drug don’t have to worry about going to jail if they are possessing said drug and typically don’t have to take urine tests to establish the presence of said drug to gain employment. They also pay a fairly reasonable price for their drug.
The other drug, however, has to be obtained thru the black market. They can’t go to any store to purchase it, or any establishment to partake in it. They pay an exorbitant price for their drug, and if they are caught with the drug many of them will go to jail. If they are caught growing the drug in most cases they will have a felony record.
These are some reasons why “potheads” want to equate marijuana with alcohol. Of course, it’s not an exact comparison. One of the drugs a person can actually overdose on to the point of death. And one of the drugs makes a certain percentage of its users violent if they indulge in it. That would be the legal drug.
And if there is education around the damage that alcohol can do, it’s not very effective. This country is loaded (no pun intended) with alcoholics and binge drinkers.
Clearly you've haven't read much about addiction, drug abuse, and that sort of thing. Those researchers who believe in the gateway theory pretty much universally agree that alcohol is a gateway drug. Read the Institute of Medicine studies. Shoot, go to the D.A.R.E. webpage or look at what the ONDCP has to say on the topic. A stretch? It's a stretch the majority who have studied the topic make.
And my gosh, there really aren't many if any drugs that lower inhibitions as much as alcohol. Nothing it seems can make really bad ideas seem like good ideas when you are under its’ spell than alcohol. How many people have woken up just kicking themselves for what they did in their drunken state the night before? If marijuana is legalized we may very well find out after time that alcohol is a worse gateway drug than pot.
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