Rocky Mountain High and Unintended Consequences

Americanthinker.com ^ | 4/29/2014 | Brian C Joondeph

[fr_freak]

If you tried hard enough, I think you could find more nuance in the conservative position than that.

You feel like enlightening me? Because so far, I have only seen blind knee-jerk reactions, and constant references to "liberdopians" and the like. In fact, I would go as far as to say that I haven't really seen a single truly logical argument for outlawing marijuana in particular posted on FR. Most of what I've seen consists of something along the lines of "I don't want to have to drive on highways full of dopers or fly in a plane piloted by a stoner!!"

[demshateGod]

Colorado is going to prove Jefferson right.

God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.
- Thomas Jefferson

[D Rider]

That is what the pot is for. Drive fast and stoned and 45 min disappears as a blink of the eye.Then you have found the elusive Tx- Co border.

[Sheapdog]

The plant is an idol to many serious smokers much like Golem’s attitude to the ring. I’ve seen it when a friend of mine gets inebriated and goes off extolling every aspect of his buds. It’s like a sickening worship of a plant - truly adolescent and twisted.

[demshateGod]

I don’t have the persuasive skills necessary to enlighten you if you’ve already determined that those who oppose legalization are stupid. Just curious, because I can’t figure out why otherwise sharp people have a hard time with this, do you smoke pot? Have you been around many pot smokers?

[AEMILIUS PAULUS]

Any argument to get that drug. That is how powerful it is.
There is no waste in spending money to prevent a drug damaged culture. The corrupt politicians want people spending their time in a stupor. It was not stopped due to politicians wanting the money. Aerial spraying of the farms, more severe penalties for possession would have further reduced the use. The President of Columbia offered to allow the U.S. to send helicopters to spray the fields it was stopped. The Taliban stopped the poppy production and we went to war against them. The U.S. marines were destroying the poppy fields in Afghanistan and they were ordered to stop. We are now treated to pictures of Marines walking through the poppy fields filled with blooming heroin poppy’s. There has never been a real war on drugs. Don’t give me the phony argument a war on drugs does not work. It could be stopped in six months with a real attack on production of supply and severe penalties for the demand side. There has been a “Media Boom” advocating Marijuana use over the last few years. The problem is political and social and needs addressing.

One can never totally eliminate vice one can only prevent its spread to the healthy portions of society.

[SpeakerToAnimals]

God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God.

It is my position, and that of the Founders, that our system of government is for a moral and religious people, and is unsuitable for the governance of any other.

Drug abuse, including alcohol and prescription drugs, are spiritual problems. America kicked God out and drug abuse is but one symptom.

What percentage of Americans can quote the Ten Commandments? Of that small number, how many even make the attempt to obey God's Law?

[SpeakerToAnimals]

There has never been a real war on drugs.

You argue like a gun grabber. Like a gun grabber, you place blame on a thing, not on behavior of people. Your policies put millions of non violent people in prison. Your beloved SWAT teams kick in about one hundred doors a day in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Pot is cheaper, more readily available, and more potent than before your stupid war on a plant began. If you so dislike what Colorado did, feel free to not visit.

[AEMILIUS PAULUS]

Are you hooked?

[fr_freak]

I don’t have the persuasive skills necessary to enlighten you if you’ve already determined that those who oppose legalization are stupid. Just curious, because I can’t figure out why otherwise sharp people have a hard time with this, do you smoke pot? Have you been around many pot smokers?

I don't believe that people who oppose legalization are stupid, necessarily. I said that the arguments have been irrational. Smart people are quite capable of being irrational when topics with emotional associations are discussed. For example, I think that, for many people of the Boomer generation and older, pot smoking is associated strongly with the counter-culture hippie idiots of the 1960s and 1970s, and so the idea of societal acceptance of what they see as a symbol of that group is intolerable to them, and that repulsion seems to be so great that they will accept gross government violations as long as that symbol remains illegal.

The fact is that I have known people who were regular pot smokers all my life. I have smoked it myself, but never liked the stuff too much when I was a teenager and young adult, so I didn't get too involved with that back then. However, I have had enough experience and exposure to both users and the effect of the drug to know that most of the wild claims of reefer madness made by people on this site and in general are ridiculous. I know a number of professional, responsible, middle-aged people who have been pot users (but not abusers) for most of their lives. Additionally, I blow some minds when I tell people that half the GIs I knew when I was a grunt in the Army were just waiting for their ETS so they could light up. It's not just for hippies anymore.

Worthless people who are stoners would have been worthless without marijuana. They would (and do) find other ways to be worthless if marijuana didn't exist. Meanwhile, the WoD has become a cure (not even that - a treatment) that is worse than the disease. I suspect that one of the reasons that our government pushes the anti-marijuana angle so hard is because they love the convenient excuse it gives them for increasing the breadth and scope of their power. Local police departments would never have gotten armored vehicles, nor, perhaps, militarized SWAT teams, without the WoD.

[The Great RJ]

I fail to understand that states that are banning tobacco smoking in any public place and even private businesses, spending millions to stop people from smoking tobacco and taxing tobacco heavily ostensibly so people do not smoke are now embracing pot smoking. We know that inhaling tobacco smoke has serious health effects and health nannies are telling us that second hand and even third hand smoke is deadly, but the the health care community seems to be absent from this pot smoking debate. I can’t believe that inhaling pot smoke is any less a health hazard than tobacco.

[rktman]

Apparently you just won’t give a crap....dude. :>}

[Responsibility2nd]

Colorado just proves the point:

If you want to know what surrendering on the WOD looks like - look at Colorado.

If you want to know the liberal leftist results of waiving the white flag on the WOD looks like - look at Colorado.

And this article points out only the obvious beginning. Wait a year or two and revisit the increase in crimes and welfare recipients.

You complain about SWAT teams now? Hoo boy. Wait till dope is even more prevalent due to libertarian hippies and OWS supporters and watch and see how the State reacts.

It won’t be pretty.

[tips up]

The government in NYC can regulate soda size but the government in Colo can’t regulate marijuana safely?

[AEMILIUS PAULUS]

FOX reported that 4th grade children were caught selling marijuana. The druggies are so befuddled by their drug ingestion that they do not care what the consequences are. All they want is unrestricted access to their favorite substance. You see the druggies on this forum; they viciously attack any person who protests against their addiction and the resulting unrestricted purchase and sale of an addictive, harmful substance. The politicians are so consumed with a lust for tax revenues they don’t care either. Colorado is gone as a nice place to raise ones family; the government of Colorado protects sex perverts and druggies.

[Steamburg]

I agree we can put up with the collateral damage of death on the highway, suicides, drug induced mental damage, drug induced sloth. “WOW! Like Man!” (Sarcasm)

---

Coloradans knowingly voted for those things, but I never saw any full disclosure on who stood to profit from “taking the industry out of the shadows”. Any similar hot topic come to mind?

[AEMILIUS PAULUS]

It is funny that Coloradan's knowingly voted for a drug induced stupor with accompanying death, degradation and social damage to the point of destruction, and yet government does nothing!

Californian's voted that marriage is between one man and one woman, yet a Sodomite judge struck down that amendment to the California Constitution, allowing so called Sodomite "marriages."

I guess as long as vice is approved government does nothing. If a law promotes virtuous self control it is disapproved.

In whose interest is it that we have a vice ridden society?

[Steamburg]

Follow the MONEY!