Using Marijuana May Not Raise the Risk of Using Harder Drugs (but look at alternative explanation)

Or to read your question another way, we are morally committed to be hungry for wisdom and knowledge, and discern in humility rather than pride. (Rich man' "objectivism.")

One doesn't need to worry about acheiving an altered state of total objectivity, before acting. That is like religious mysticism. Instead we are to be subject to the truth, as we may ascertain it. (All truth is God's truth.)

You are saying you prefer the concept of 4,500 amendments to the constitution,

Of course I don't want 4,500 amendments. What I want is a government that understands that there are things they may not do.

The whole idea of our founders, an idea that I thought was the basis of conservative thought, is that the people set up a government for certain limited purposes and wanted to make sure that the government, with access to force to achieve its ends, never exceeded those limits. This is necessary to prevent tyranny.

Even our elected officials must be limited by this highest law, which is very hard to amend-on purpose, or we will have a tyranny of the majority.

Otherwise, we might have some temporary majority of people who make less than some arbitrary definition of "rich" deciding to take all or most of the money of that minority who make over that number, the "evil rich". The constitution was supposed to protect the minority from that.

Or maybe the white majority decides to put the black or Arab minority in camps (for their protection, of course) or all sorts of horrible things that you could imagine.

There are plenty of unconstitutional things going on right now, including the War on Drugs, all manner of social programs, civil forfeiture without due process, no-knock searches, gun control, etc that would not happen if the constitution was obeyed. I would not be happy if each of these was an amendment, but at least they would have had to sell each individually through all the obstacles provided for amendment and this would have slowed down our decent into tryanny, if not stopped it altogether.

Most that are for illegal drug use are void of morals or ethics as conservatives know them here at FR. The way that is addressed by these pro-addiction folks is that they try to redefine morals and ethics DOWN by giving both of those words little value in their limited vocabulary.

Actually the libertarian view is intensely moral. We have a first principle that we summarize as "no initiation of force" that is our moral guidepost. This is just a grown up version of the lesson you were taught on the playground by your parents when you were about 3 years old. If two kids got into a fight, the adults broke it up and wanted to know who started it. The starter was punished and the defender was comforted.

Using that principle, we see a drug user as a person not initiating force but minding his own business. We see the government that wants to punish him for that as the initiator of force and the criminal. On the other hand, if a person assaults another, then the government arrests him, it is applying either defensive or retaliatory force and is doing right. This is where we come up with the phrase "victimless crime". If no one was hurt or stolen from, against whom was force initiated?

So I am not impressed by your moral statements because I do not see their basis as moral at all. A drug user is morally correct. A drug warrior is a vicious criminal. For this purpose drug warrior includes every step in the process of punishing drug users: The congressmen, the judges, the prosecutors, the police, the prison guards, and the politically active people who support this evil.

A drug user who commits other, real crimes to facilitate his drug use is guilty but the drug warriors who created the situation and made the drugs so expensive are accomplices to those crimes and equally guilty.

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.