Drug Legalization

[Wingnut]

There's no completely wrong or completely right ... PTO .... all I'm saying is that the glowing reports about Holland have a not-so-hidden agenda .... just like the glowing reports of how wonderfully well off the hookers in Nevada are. And I do agree that SOME of the laws in the US are a little overboard on pot. But then I think the laws in the US about killing someone while behind the wheel (drunk, stoned, stupid, poor driver or inattention) are way underboard. So I guess that makes us "even"?
By the way, the attitude of "whatever pops your weasel" in Holland has nothing whatsoever to do with morality. It has everything to do with commerce and making money. As it has for many hundreds of years (check out who owned the ships that transported African slaves this way).
If you want to meet a true abuser, I'll see if my sister is available to chat .... /w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif. Not that we talk to each other at all ...., /w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif
Don't need to drag on the peace pipe ... I never thought we left the arena of "discussion" and you're certainly entitled to believe that pot is a nothing.
Oops, wife's hollaring that supper is ready ... y'all have a great weekend!

 

[Ozarker]

Yes. I bite.

The real issue is a simple one in my opinion. Does a government really have the power to prevent someone from consuming anything he chooses? I say they do not and I certainly see no such power in the Constitution of the United States.

As to the harm that might happen, mankind managed to survive on this earth for a few hundred thousand years without SWAT teams kicking down doors and shooting people for possessing a weed that grows wild in most of the world. I suspect mankind would continue to survive if Ward and the Beaver toked a joint every now and again.

I hear that the real difference between a drunk driver and one that is high on weed is that the drunk driver will blast through a stop sign at 80MPH and the high driver will sit there and contemplate how the stop sign relates to life for about an hour.

 

[Chuck52]

Ozarker, I think we agree on this one! It might be because I met a moonshiner in my impressionable youth, an incredibele old guy named Bass Dockery who might have been the last person to homestead east of the Mississippi, but it always bothered me that I couldn't legally make my own booze but I could sure buy all the over-priced and taxed stuff I wanted. Even Washington got that one wrong.

Chuck

 

[knucklehead]

Hee Hee.

We actually agree on this one, Ozarker, wrt the dad-blamed Gummint. As one who has formerly contemplated many things, I would laugh about that, then mention reaction times. It's nice to consider grass, but we all know it's just a toe in the door for other more potent drugs being legalized. As libertarian as I'd like to be, I can't see our society functioning in any freer fashion as we increase the arm of government to fight crime and support addicts. So it comes down to whether we spend tax dollars trying to cut off supplies, or fight increasing crime (by decreasing personal freedom, as our gummint always does) while supporting an ever-growing population of lay-abouts.

I'll take things like they are, thank-you.

 

[Ozarker]

There is a lot more to it than what money we may spend fighting drugs vs. fighting addiction. We currently are fighting both plus the crime associated with drugs. Decriminalizing drugs will eliminate that associated crime saving billions, It will also virtually empty our prisons saving billions more.

There are no Liquor Gangs. They were eliminated when prohibition ended.

There is no such thing as a "gateway drug". If there were such a thing it would be beer and wine, not weed. But there is a "gateway behavior". The bank robber starts out as a petty thief, not a bank depositor.

Smoking weed is the first illegal drug used, not the first drug. Once you do the illegal drug and don't get caught, doing the next illegal drug gets easier. One goes to the next drug for the better high.

The drinker also wants a better high but doesn't cross that line to the illegal drug for it. He drinks progressively more of the legal drug instead.

Eliminate the crime and you eliminate the criminal behavior associated with that crime. Addicts don't rob people because they like to rob people. They do it to feed the high cost of a drug habit. A cost that is artificially high because of the risk associated with providing the product. Eliminate that risk and the price will drop to a point where criminals acts are no longer necessary to support the habit.

Then, ALL we have to deal with is the habit. Just like alcohol.

We might even eliminate Rap since they will have little to snivel about then.

 

[Chuck52]

<font color=blue>We might even eliminate Rap since they will have little to snivel about then. </font color=blue>

A worthy goal in and of itself. I don't deliberately listen to rap or hip-hop or whatever it is currently called, but I think it must be the dominant force behind the bass speakers in cars and trucks that cause my minivan to vibrate from 50 feet away.

I once heard a story about how Hearst, the newspaper tychoon, campaigned against hemp because it could be used to make paper more cheaply than with wood pulp, and he had massive timber interests. Don't know the facts....might be a good Snopes story.

Chuck

 

[Ozarker]

I'm not sure about the cost factor but it certainly makes more sense to make paper from hemp than from trees. I can grow a lot more hemp in a shorter period of time than I can grow trees. And harvesting hemp and moving it to the processing plant is a lot easier than trees.

Not sure how many hemp plants it takes to equal the pulp in one tree however.

Hemp paper seems to last a long time. All the founding documents are on hemp paper and it wouldn't surprise me to discover that the founders might have rolled a joint or two in their time.

 

[knucklehead]

Papermaking, now that's something I can get into. As one might expect, there's quite a lot of hemp in the paper mills, right now.

/w3tcompact/icons/grin.gif

 

[hosejockey2002]

Yeah, what he said!!!

 

[Chuck52]

Ozarker,

My youngest is attending a university not too far from you. I mentioned in the "recycling" thread that he and a couple of other students spent last Saturday cleaning up trash along a local river. Interesting story: He said that after they had collected 20 bags of trash in an area that would fit in our house, an older guy (in his thirties....that hurt) came up to them and said they looked like pot smokers and they deserved some after all that work, and then offered them a joint. They politely refused, and the fellow left. I now wonder if that guy might have been an agent. There was a recent Missouri Outdoors show that was about law enforcement along the popular floating rivers. They stopped some kids who they had spotted smoking a joint. They gave them some kind of summons, though it wasn't clear they had recovered any actual evidence. They also, more reasonably to my mind, stopped and fined people who had littered the river with their beer cans. Used joints are at least bio-degradeable! Now, I don't worry much about my boy smoking weed, because he, like his old man, knows the human lung wasn't designed to be intentionally exposed to high concentrations of particulate matter. However, if one of the other boys had taken the joint, he might have been picked up too. Of course, the guy might just have been a friendly, though lazy, pot-smoking environmentalist.

Chuck