I had my radical phase awhile ago, but I eventually realized how stupid I was being and since then I've become more and more conservative. And I've noticed that, at least it seems that, among teens, there's a lot more liberals than conservatives. I don't know if this is true, so...help me out by answering the poll.

okay, okay...how do you make a poll...so just tell me what you are...

What is the meaning of "liberal" and "conservative"? I think they are labels for others, and alternatively a means to apathetically let others do your thinking for you on particular issues.

Icons and epithets are pacifiers for simple and closed minds.



After you start a thread, look at the lower right, and follow instructions. I'm sure you are good at following instructions.

My political view is an ecumenical one. I only do what I think is right, and don't neccesarily identify with any side of the spectrum. For obvious reasons, the most effective political bias is somewhere near the center of the present one. The people who "can't make up their minds" are usually right.

-Sitting on the fence might hurt your crotch, but it keeps you away from the dogs!

i admit, i am a bit of a conservative when it comes to politics.

You must be an American. Our people reduce everything to one dimension. Everyone must be either on the left end of a one-dimensional spectrum, a liberal, or on the right end, a conservative, or just somewhere in the middle. Everything important in politics reduced to one line.

Liberals generally believe that governments can solve all of the world's economic problems by redistributing our money. Taxes, welfare, subsidies, scholarships, affirmative action.

Conservatives generally believe that governments can solve all of the world's moral problems by regulating our behavior. Whom we can marry, what kind of risks we can take, what substances we can put into our bodies, what we can do in our bedrooms,

Yet we actually all know that this is not a duality. There are lots of people who believe both of those things. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, all of their followers. We have various names for them: totalitarian, despotic, statist. They're people who believe that governments can solve ALL of the world's problems by regulating EVERYTHING.

There are plenty of these people in America right now. So-called "liberals" who don't believe in free speech; who took drugs when they were young and now hold responsible jobs and raise families but don't want their own children to be able to follow that path; who think that we should all wear helmets and drive real slow "for our own good". And the so-called "conservatives" who don't believe in a free market; who enact zoning and licensing laws to prevent newcomers from starting businesses; who raise the price of energy -- not to subsidize public transport as in Europe, but to support poorly run corporations; who sell weapons to foreign governments that are downright fascist to protect their business interests; who have trampled over nearly every constitutional right that we once had by engineering artificial "crises" and frightening us into believing that it's OK to give up a little freedom for some safety, then conveniently forgetting to give us our freedom back when the "crisis" is over.

We've found three corners of a square, why don't we see the fourth? People who believe that PEOPLE can solve their own problems with just a LITTLE help from the government. Who believe that no one has the right to tell consenting adults what to do as long as they do no direct harm to others; that small communities are more responsive to the needs of their constituents than gigantic municipal governments trying to micromanage the lives of millions of residents, or even more powerful national governments who believe that "one size fits all" in education, transportation, entertainment, health care, life style or risk management.

These people are called "Libertarians." We've had our own political party for thirty years. One of us is in Congress, Ron Paul of Texas, but even he had to finally re-register as a Republican to keep his seat.

We remember that welfare was enacted during the Depression, it was never meant to train four generations of families to believe that they are entitled to a free ride. We remember that the income tax was enacted to support an army that could keep the Germans from taking over the world, we were never meant to have one fourth or more of our incomes dissipated in twenty different kinds of taxes just to give millions of people government jobs "administering" each other and looking for more rights to take away. We remember that the government had to wait for the people to pass a Constitutional amendment before they could make it illegal to drink alcohol, and with that amendment repealed they have no right to shut down medical marijuana clinics or fill our children's heads with deceitful propaganda while Coke and Pepsi get rich by filling their bellies with caffeine-spiked soft drinks. We remember that the National Guard righted a wrong so evil that we wept when the first black kids were escorted into all-white schools; and that the whole point was to END racial discrimination, not to turn it upside down and resume giving preference to people because of the color of their skin, just a different color this time.

We have more choices than "liberal" or "conservative." It's a measure of how many of our choices the government has already taken away, that most of us don't even know that!

Do you believe that people should be able to say whatever they want, as long as they're not inciting a riot or defrauding others? Do you believe that what you do in your own home with your own friends and family is strictly your own business, as long as you're not hatching a scheme to hurt or defraud people? Do you believe that Egypt and Israel should pay for their own defense instead of constantly going to war against each other using American weapons? Do you believe that the risk of a bad hair day is not in the same class as a bad prescription, so people who braid Afro hairstyles don't need to be licensed like pharmacists? Do you believe that cities should not be able to confiscate private land, donate it to a sports franchise that features players with multi-million dollar incomes, and then make the stadium exempt from property tax? Do you believe that 2/3 of the money collected to help poor people should not be spent on the salaries of bureacrats so stupid that they can't tell when they're being conned by applicants who aren't really poor? Do you believe that a school system with more teachers and less administrators could teach bright, curious, articulate youngsters like the ones who post on SciForums how to spell without taking up too much of their time? Do you believe, as Bob Marley did, that "the color of a man's skin is no more important than the color of his eyes"?

You may just be a Libertarian! Welcome to the fourth corner!

Maybe the Libertarians' star is rising in America- the Democrats are in shambles, the Republicans out of control. How refreshing it would be!

That got me reading up on them. Libertarian Party Platform:

http://www.lp.org/issues/platform/execsumm.html

Sounds good to me!

I too am a self-proclaimed Libertarian. I agree with their positions on most issues. Come next October i'm going to register Libertarian, i believe, despite my living in a totally Republican town. By not jumping on the Republican train it means i won't be able to get any job in my hometown or neigboring towns - but then again i never really wanted to work around here. Ah, tis the price of being a free mind eh? ;)

You live in one F***ed-up town, Nen.

Hm, sort of, yes. It's not as bad as it seems..not a police state or anything.. it just so happens that if you're n ot registered Republican..you don't get a job in this county. I'm not sure why it works like this, it just does :rolleyes:

Originally posted by NenarTronian
Come next October I'm going to register Libertarian, I believe, despite my living in a totally Republican town. By not jumping on the Republican train it means I won't be able to get any job in my hometown or neigboring towns - but then again i never really wanted to work around here. Ah, 'tis the price of being a free mind eh? ;) To work around there? How can you stand living around there? It's one thing to be a one-percenter or an outsider surrounded by people who are tolerant. Your situation sounds creepy! That's one of the reasons people like us end up in big cities. There's likely to be a community of us, and even if there isn't, city people are so used to diversity that they tolerate it better.

But don't be a martyr. Unless you live in a state where the party's ballot access is at stake and they need head count, all you really need to do to be true to yourself is to vote for the Libertarian candidate in the real election. Voting in the primary is not a big deal.

Fraggle,
Like i said it's really no big deal to me. It's something "grown ups" have to worry about, lol.

I'm a lefty.

Fraggle,
Like i said it's really no big deal to me. It's something "grown ups" have to worry about, lol.


yeah...of which you're going to be one some day...

question for the libertarians,

As I understand it libertarians don't believe in any regulations on business,
meaning no: environmental laws, minimum wage, child labor laws, protection for union members, etc...

Is that so?

Apparently.

http://www.lp.org/issues/platform/finacapi.html
http://www.lp.org/issues/platform/freeasso.html

Seems too radical for prime-time, but I'm still learning about it. I'll be interested to see some real libertarians weigh in.

I regret that we are scaring away the "conservatives". This thread was looking hopeful toward having some appear. I find them fascinating. How does one attract and feed them?

hypewaders,
I believe that in general they can be best attracted and fed with money, with some exceptions of course.

I too, ride the fence. I do not agree in totality with either party, as both go to far from common sense.

Not only that, but those offered up to be picked from for our national leaders has become a travisty. Our last set of choices were terrible and are not likely to get much better. Each candidate must sell their soul to the party that supports them for support. There is not much in the line of solutions when both sides are running as hard as they can for the opposite ends of the fence.

It is so bad that even the government operations are held hostage to this political free-for-all. All you have to do is look at the debacle and spectacle that is made out of approving the annual budget every year.

It is a sad situtation and it is not getting better as time goes by. I long for days of reasonable common sense in solving problems, which has been held hostage to party politics...

jps - Dam! I'll NEVER attract the little buggers!

wet1, I hear ya.

registered independent but mostly vote republican. wish the republicans didnt push the religion so much and i dont think it is any of my business if you want to get an aborsion. i like the libertarian idea of a freeze on hiring in the government. the government would slowly get smaller and smaller.

As I understand it libertarians don't believe in any regulations on business,

That's crazy. Just crazy. Never put that much faith in humanity. I thought Noam Chomsky--who is hella cool, btw--was a libertarian. Too bad for him I guess.

Noam Chomsky is not a libertarian.
He believes(as most leftists do) in personal liberties, but not the extreme right wing economic views of the libertarian party.

Originally posted by jps
As I understand it libertarians don't believe in any regulations on business, meaning no: environmental laws, minimum wage, child labor laws, protection for union members, etc... Is that so? Sounds like you got hold of a leftist treatise on "Why Libertarians are Wrong." If you'd got the conservative version it would have a totally different set of accusations. ("Libertarians want to abolish the drug laws, make churches pay their share of the taxes, and stop giving subsidies to corporate tobacco plantations.") Like every other philosophy, ours relies on balance. If you look at just one half of any principle it doesn't make sense.

Let's start with unions. Where did the union movement come from in the first place? Didn't we have free-market capitalism, à la Adam Smith? Isn't labor a commodity, which, like any other commodity, should level off at a fair market price through the "invisible hand," the enlightened self interest of providers and consumers of the commodity?

Adam Smith NEVER envisioned the concept of the corporation. A small group of businessmen raising capital, not the honorable way, by borrowing it and pledging their homes and horses and yachts as collateral, but by selling stock certificates that they NEVER have to pay off if they don't feel like it. Creating an "artificial person" (that's what corporations are actually called in some law books) that takes on a life of its own, with most of the rights of citizenship, few of the obligations and risks, and a whole new level of power that individuals could never achieve. Did the naughty corporation break a law? Well gee, there's no way to execute it or even throw it in jail, it's only an "artificial" person. So I guess all we can do is levy a fine... which it promptly passes on to its customers in the form of higher prices. Shall we get busy and pass some new laws to curb the power of corporations? Uh-oh, some corporations have more money and influence than the population of an entire city. We elect the legislators but the corporations provide the bulk of their income and therefore get to tell them what to do. Many of them exist in multiple countries at the same time, so you can't even get hold of a piece of it to negotiate with, much less punish.

But the "holding company," that's what's got Adam Smith turning in his grave. A corporation that exists solely for the purpose of -- not producing a product or a service for us peons -- but for the purpose of owning OTHER CORPORATIONS and skimming off their profits. Remember that you (or the nice friendly corporation across the table from you) only has to own 51% of the stock of another corporation in order to have complete control over it. Another corporation owns 51% of its stock, etc., etc. By the time you get to the top of the pyramid of holding companies, you've got some twerp with an M.B.A. in Organizational Theory or something vapid like that, who actually owns less than one percent of the stock of the company you work for, and incidentally doesn't even know what your company makes or sells, but he has complete control over its operations and its future. Oh, I've got a hot deal on a power company in Lithuania, I'll raise the cash by liquidating that little company I just bought in Indiana -- heck I don't even remember its name. You wake up the next day and not only do you not have a job but your entire town no longer has the company that employed 3/4 of its residents. And all the people who loved the llama fiber bicycle seats you made suddenly have to settle for naugahyde.

Is it any wonder workers formed unions? The corporation was invented by governments to take the place of the old aristocracies. They do all the dirty work so the voters don't notice that the government doesn't seem to represent their interests any more. They're above the law. And they have more money than God and almost as much power.

Hell, even customers got so fed up that they started trying to form their own unions. That's what Consumers' Union is, the people who publish Consumer Reports. It really was an attempt to build an organizaton like a union, made up of customers instead of employees, to fight back at the power of the corporations.

So yes, we Libertarians would like to live in a world in which workers didn't organize into giant unions that could shut down an entire industry while they quibble over extra holidays or two percent raises. But we realize the only way we can have that is to also live in a world where incorporated businesses are not larger than many nations and answer to nobody except still larger corporations.

Environmental laws? The biggest violators are corporations. Corporations hire biologists and economists who come back with heart-rending stories about the poor farmer whose back forty was declared a "wetland" by the government because it rained in May and there was a rare frog living in a ten-foot puddle. But while you're agonizing over the plight of the farmer and the frog, what the corp. is really trying to do (for example in my region) is clear-cut all the trees off a hillside using chain saws the size of a 747 and bulldozers even larger, and leave the town at the bottom of the hill under twenty feet of mud come next rainy season. (I didn't make that up, it's genuine news.) If the lumberjacks in that town and their families were up in the hills cutting their own timber, they'd make sure they left enough trees to stop erosion, provide a harvest next year, and still make room for Spotted Owl nests. And without a corporation or six taking their cut of the profits first, that little town would be a lot more prosperous.

Child labor? Again, the worst offenders are the corporations who have kids working in Third World sweatshops. We believe that parents should be given considerable latitude in exercising their own judgment about raising their children. In some countries, where everybody is poor (except the corporations of course), there's no sin in letting the kids help out on the farm or wash dishes in the family restaurant. This may shock you but there are places where Nintendo is not available and kids feel a sense of pride in helping their family earn enough money to send at least a couple of them to college.

Minimum wage? An attempt to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand. I can't afford to buy a McDonald's burger if it costs a buck and a half. And that's what they'll have to charge if they are forced to pay high school "graduates" eight bucks an hour to push the buttons on a POS terminal -- and still get both the order and the change wrong. So they find ways to automate more of the entry level jobs. Meanwhile there are more ambitious young people out there who grew up in cultures where the importance of work was understood who would be happy to do the job for four bucks an hour. They never get a chance to get an entry level job because it's been computerized, and then we all bitch because there are so many people who are "too lazy" to work.

In almost all occupations that have minimum wages and licensing requirements, it's the people already established in those jobs who lobby for the restrictions, not the people who would like to get jobs. Eight year old girls do fabulous manicures on themselves. But when they turn 19 and try to get a job as a manicurist, a bunch of 35 year old women who never learned to do any other kind of work make sure the kids need to go through a training and licensing process that's almost as difficult as the police academy. There are actual lobbying groups who want to license astrologers and palm readers! In California there was a movement to get TV wrestling classified as a real "sport" with a commission to adjudicate contracts!

Some of the 100% pure philosophical positions that derive from an academic libertarian point of view do seem like they might cause hardship or environmental damage, if only because the transitional period would be chaotic. Most of us in the movement are pragmatic enough to say let's leave that stuff for later, there are much more obvious win-win targets to work on now. Like abolishing the welfare bureacracy and letting groups like the Salvation Army give about 90% of the money they collect to genuinely poor people, instead of 65% to administrators and 20% to people who are lying about being poor. Like halting the War on Drugs, which causes more death, suffering, crime, corruption and economic loss than the drugs themselves. Like building a society that honestly does not even notice what color each other's skins are.

The next time one of your liberal friends hands you a pamphlet on the evils of libertariansim, go ask your conservative friend for a copy of his version. If you collate the two together you'll have a more balanced view of what we really believe in. And who knows, it might start to make sense!

So you're saying that you would take away the laws regulating corporations and wasteful environmental exploitation? Do Libertarians also want to take away civil rights laws?

I have to admit, your posts are very convincing, and I'll be looking into the Libertarian party. ;)

Political affilliations are a little like horoscopes.
4 billion people squeezed into a handfull of categories.
All being told what they want to hear...
Still it beats anarchy:)

Dee Cee (the last free thinker):D

Thanks, Fraggle, very interesting. Huge changes to make, though. Isn't there a milder intermediate step, like the Dictatorship of the Prolibertariat? :D

Seriously, though, you have me looking into Libertarianism more carefully than I have b4.

I had no idea libertarians wanted to do away with corporations.
I too will have to look into libertarianism more closely.

Thanks, Fraggle- food 4 thought.

Stop the war on drugs? Hell make it legal. I suppose that would be a great means of government funding, something else to tax, and with less employees, we'll really start tearin down the national debt... is that how it goes? I think I've heard of a few Columbians that share your philosophy.

First and foremost, their is a huge difference between most drugs and marijuana. I'm not about to tell you that prozac is the ideal drug, and I'm not sure that it shouldn't be made illegal, but what I am sure of is this. If i had to choose between giving my child prozoc and cocaine, I wouldn't have to think very long.

Maybe you need to read a few facts from sources other than lib weekly. As an Illegal substance 5000 more people experiment with cocaine every single day. Of those 5000 people, 75% become instantly addicted, and only 25% of those will ever be able to stop without severe assisstance. Every use raises the bodies temperature, its heartrate, and blood pressure to the extent that is very capable and very often causes heart palpitations or cardiac arrest.

Are you going to tell me that if D.A.R.E. or similar programs can help keep kids from trying cocaine the first time, even if it helps 1%, that its not a worthwhile cause? People that think like that are not called Libertarians, they're called pushers.

Originally posted by SelfRighteous
Stop the war on drugs? Hell make it legal. I suppose that would be a great means of government funding.There are quite a few people who see it that way. Bring drugs back into the free market and the government starts making money by taxing them instead of stealing our money in order to fill the skies with helicopters, terrifying our horses, looking for plantations that never have anybody around when they land, because one cop in every jurisdiction is on the take and warns them. But they're not libertarians because they still believe that we need a gigantic government staffed by people who couldn't earn an honest living if their lives depended on it, dissipating a huge chunk of our GDP.I think I've heard of a few Columbians that share your philosophy.I assume you meant Colombians. Although come to think of it the District of Columbia not too long ago elected a mayor who had been in jail for using Colombian drugs. I guess we know where the people who live closest to the halls of government stand on the drug issue! The Colombians you speak of believe in getting their way by intimidation and violence. One of the basic principles of the libertarian philosophy is that no person has the right to manipulate the behavior of another by using fraud or initiating violence. The U.S. government fails on both counts.If I had to choose between giving my child prozoc and cocaine, I wouldn't have to think very long.In that case you must be a supporter of decriminialization. It's a whole lot easier for your kid to get his hands on cocaine than, say, alcohol, because there isn't enough profit in alcohol to lure even desperately poor people into risking prison in order to supply it to him. The Drug War is such a perfect reenactment of Prohibition that it's amazing anybody falls for the government bullshit. Rival suppliers gunning each other down with automatic weapons. Mobsters becoming so much more prosperous than honest citizens that children were confused as to which was the more reasonable role model. Children being recruited as runners because the cops were likely to be easier on them than an adult runner. My mother cursed Prohibition because it made liquor so glamorous that women started going to bars for the first time in U.S. history. Drug prohibition has done the same thing to our children. Libertarians would very much like to help parents keep their children from having access to drugs, while giving adults the right to make the choice for themselves. Legalization serves both goals.Maybe you need to read a few facts from sources other than lib weekly.I've been reading sources going all the way back to the Consumers Union report, which has yet to be refuted on any major points. It's amusing to be lectured on drugs by somebody one third my age who thinks he knows it all. I suppose that's how my parents felt. As an Illegal substance 5000 more people experiment with cocaine every single day.I can tell you went to a government run school because you are "innumerate," meaning you can't tell whether a number is realistic. You're saying 1.5 million NEW people try coke every year. That is so crazy that it doesn't even square with the government's ridiculously inflated estimates.Of those 5000 people, 75% become instantly addicted, and only 25% of those will ever be able to stop without severe assisstance.Now you're starting to sound like a nark who was assigned to cover this board and lie to us. Your statements are utterly absurd! I've known hundreds of coke heads. (I used to live in L.A., remember?) All but a couple dozen of them are now holding down responsible jobs, raising their families, and paying off their mortgages. Coke users and even heroin users agree unanimously that the hardest drug they ever kicked was tobacco. The Synanon clinic in L.A. had a huge number of its voluntary patients walk out when they decided to stop giving them free cigarettes.Every use raises the bodies temperature, its heartrate, and blood pressure to the extent that is very capable and very often causes heart palpitations or cardiac arrest.This is such Baptist bullshit that I can't believe the moderator hasn't erased it. The overwhelming majority of "drug-related" deaths occur because people were also drunk. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Elvis, all the famous "drug deaths" were stone drunk. There are two real problems that affect coke users. For people that snort, it's usually diluted with amphetamine. Speed does kill, no argument there. (That's the drug that military doctors give our brave and heroic pilots to take three or four times during one of their all-day bombing runs. Aren't you glad the war is being run by such sober people with excellent judgment?) If cocaine were legal and sold in packages at the store, people would know what they were getting and wouldn't accidentally O.D. on speed. The other problem is that in order to make it easier to transport and sell on the black market, the dealers invented crack. It's cheap, potent, and has a fast ramp-up. People do get both hooked and dead on it. Another victory for the Drug War. Crack would not exist if cocaine were legal.Are you going to tell me that if D.A.R.E. or similar programs can help keep kids from trying cocaine the first time, even if it helps 1%, that its not a worthwhile cause?More Baptist bullshit. The D.A.R.E. propaganda has been demonstrated to be a sham so often that entire school districts have thrown the pigs out on their asses. It does the worst possible thing to children: teaches them that the people they look up to are capable of lying to them. Actually, I suppose that could be considered a good thing because maybe THESE kids won't be dumb enough to believe the campaign lies of the Democrats and Republicans.People that think like that are not called Libertarians, they're called pushers. And people who talk and write like you are, unfortunately, called typical, gullible Americans who made this country the way it is today. Either that, or like I said earlier, you're a damn cop. I'm beginning to doubt it because most cops are fairly intelligent and suspicious, and they don't fall for bogus statistics that are even more outrageous, inconsistent, and unbelievable than the ones they spout to our children.

Yo! SelfRighteous

I think your statistics may be in error. You see over the christmas holidays me and five mates clubbed together for two grams of sniff. It didn't last long but it was an interesting diversion. Point is none of us has bought any since but your statistics indicate that all five of my mates should be "instantly addicted". Perhaps you get better gear in the US, or maybe we were lucky. Well it's Sammo's birthday in six weeks and we're out to get another gramme and a few pills, if there's any about, so maybe you'll be proved right after all.

Let you know how we get on.
Dee Cee

Originally posted by DeeCee
Yo! SelfRighteous! I think your statistics may be in error. None of us has bought any since but your statistics indicate that all five of my mates should be "instantly addicted".The U.S. government's own widely published statistics said that in 1985, sixty million Americans were using illegal drugs. Ten years later, their statistics gave a figure of twenty million. (I may be off by a year or two on the date but the ten year interval is correct.) Gosh, what do you supposed happened to those forty million hopeless addicts?

We know they didn't die, because even the government's inflated statistics on "drug-related" deaths, which even include being shot to death by being caught in the crossfire of a gang war, never claimed four million per year. That would be about one fourth of the total annual U.S. death rate from all causes combined! More than the acknowledged leading causes of death: road accidents, cancer, and heart disease.

We know they didn't go into rehab. There aren't one tenth that many spots available in rehab clinics.

We know they're not in prison. Our prisons don't have anywhere near that capacity, and the cops do occasionally manage to catch a murderer or a rapist if the vice squad is having a slow day.

That means... My god, that means that they must have just made a conscious decision to stop taking drugs and STOPPED TAKING DRUGS! The same way the majority of people who are addicted to alcohol and tobacco manage to quit.

Hmm.... That means that the whole bit in the government propaganda about these drugs being hopelessly ADDICTIVE is pure bullshit! Gee, I wonder if anything else they are telling our children about drugs is also pure bullshit?

And you wonder why I think that the people responsible for the D.A.R.E. campaign should all be sent to Siberia? (I wonder where they send Siberian criminals...)

If you want to talk about drugs that are extremely psychoactive and extremely difficult to kick, let's talk about Valium, Prozac, Darvon and good old caffeine! I've got a friend who drinks a whole gallon of Coke (the dangerous kind with the capital C) every day. He shakes like a bobble-head doll in the rear window of a low-rider, he has a shorter temper than a pit bull, he drives like all the other cars are just moving pylons on an obstacle course, he complains that he can't fall asleep until 3 a.m., and he has several physical problems centered on his metabolism. I gently suggested that he might experiment with cutting back on the caffeine. He said he tried it once and after an entire week of cold turkey he still had killer headaches and mood swings of nearly psychotic proportions. The guy knew he was addicted, knew it was ruining his life, had a family and a boss that bent over backwards to help him quit, and still couldn't do it.

You see, caffeine is a "safe," "legal" drug that is approved for use by chlidren. There are no caffeine detox clinics because caffeine is not addictive and does no harm to the billions of happy humans who make Coke, Pepsi, and all those corporate coffee plantations filthy rich.

You wanna talk about which Colombians are the evil ones!

I agree with some of your numbers, American cocaine use has decreased, with much thanks to programs like D.A.R.E., however, my numbers are worldwide statistics. Also, isolated incidents, ie. "Me and my friends yaddayaddayadda" are completely irrelevant. The type of person who discuss political issues on sciforums does not represent all cocaine abusers.

It is third world countries, where these anti-drug programs are not in effect, where rehab is not an issue, and where people dont eventually settle down and start paying off the mortgage that the incredibly high statistics arrive.

-to address ur other primary issues.

cut government jobs not required by the constitution? Would u like to start with NASA or Orphanges? God knows we don't need anyone taking care of homeless kids.

If ur ideas were put into practice all research would come to a complete and utter stop. Our military would become outdated and under equipped and we would no longer be the power, the beacon of freedom, we are today.

Maybe we should review a few technological advantages given us by organizations you would like to disban.
NASA: Pacemakers (500,000 implanted every year, necessity)
Charged Coupled Devices (much safer alternative to biopsy on breast cancer patients)
"Cool" Laser surgery (alternative to heart bypass)
Digital Mammography (early detection of breast cancer)
And so many more I'm not gonna sit here and type them.
Boeing: X-45A UCAV (unmanned air combat vehicle, imagine the benefits of an airforce without the risk of human life)
Hercules ("Spy" planes that do neato stuff like tell us when russia is sending missiles to Cuba, remember that incident?"

This is rediculous, i could sit here all day and tell u medical and military benefits major government and private organizations have made, but you would still sit back, take another hit, and proceed to tell the world why you simply don't care. But I would like to hear exactly how Mom and Pops fried chicken is going to fund Rain Forest expeditions and flights to the moon.

p.s. I dont know where you grew up, but if it was easier to get cocaine than alcohol maybe thats the reason you have such a messed up view about life.

There is a reason your party is as influencial as it is, in comparison to the more legitimate reps and dems. - its b/c their are enough people in america to understand what benefits corporations can offer, enough people to know crack kills, enough people that know what bullshit smells like, and fraggle, you reek of it.

Originally posted by SelfRighteous
I agree with some of your numbers, American cocaine use has decreased, with much thanks to programs like D.A.R.E.You're repeating yourself without substantiation, which I've noticed is a common but invariably futile style of debate on this forum. Please explain to me how D.A.R.E has reduced drug use. The kids in our area walk home from school slapping their foreheads in disbelief after a D.A.R.E. propaganda session. They know from watching their big brothers and their families' black sheep that marijuana never hurt anybody and that a whole lot of people sniff cocaine three or four times a year at major holiday parties, and nobody has yet turned up addicted, crazy, or dead. So, quite reasonably, they want to know if ANY of the preposterous crap the cops told them was true. Their parents are useless, caught in a loop of cognitive dissonance. They gulped drugs like Fritos for ten years and then just stopped and grew up, but they're peer-pressured into telling their kids that the same drugs will turn them into neurotic derelicts. So they come looking for us old folks who were already grownups when the first wave of drug use took hold in the 1960s. We trot out our Consumer Reports book and give them some straight info. We also tell them that since they're not adults we don't believe they have the right to experiment with drugs and if we catch them doing it we'll tell their parents. And far worse, we'll stop giving them the odd jobs that earn the money to buy their fancy sneakers and stereos because we don't want a stoned teenager running a 12 horsepower lawnmower over hilly terrain.However, my numbers are worldwide statistics.Oh I bet those are real accurate! Even our countries with well networked government agencies have trouble getting reliable numbers on illicit activities because apparently you can't just go out in the street with a clipboard and start asking people what kind of drugs they take. You think the stats from Burkina Faso have a standard deviation of less than five or six hundred percent? This is beyond gullible!Also, isolated incidents, ie. "Me and my friends yaddayaddayadda" are completely irrelevant. The type of person who discuss political issues on sciforums does not represent all cocaine abusers.So what you're saying is that you reject the first-hand accounts this community is providing you because they are the wrong kind of drug users, i.e., not the ones who illustrate your point. Instead you derive your stats from documents produced by brain-dead civil servants at the Employer of Last Resort? Oh, I suppose you hang out in crack houses at night with a tape recorder and interview the real drug users. You're like the damn Nielsen company that ignores anybody who doesn't watch 300 hours of TV every week, and then Fox cancels Dark Angel because "Nielsen says nobody is watching." Your approach to statistics is clever but not difficult to see through.

Okay, so much for our Aussie friend and his/her five mates. But I notice you pretend that you missed my personal observations of coke users collected over forty years of living in L.A. Do you have an equally creative excuse for discounting those data? It seems you only collect data that support the hypothesis you're trying to prove. You should go hang out with the "Creation Scientists," who practice the same version of the scientific method.It is third world countries, where these anti-drug programs are not in effect, where rehab is not an issue, and where people don't eventually settle down and start paying off the mortgage that the incredibly high statistics arrive.Oh right, places where the annual income of people with jobs is three digits. They have a lot of money to spend on drugs. And a lot of incentive to stay sober, apparently. More than one sociologist has returned from a field trip to an American inner city saying, "If I had to live there, I'd take drugs too." I can imagine that life in some of the sad places you mention is far worse. Drugs are hardly their worst problem! Some of the women turn tricks and that's enough to jump-start a really scary world-wide AIDS epidemic, but drug use is not contagious. Even if every hooker is a junkie it still doesn't jive with your astronomical numbers.-to address ur other primary issues. Cut government jobs not required by the constitution?Are you seriously suggesting that it's JUST FINE to ignore the Constitution because in our infinite wisdom we know how to get along without it? That kind of reasoning is traditionally permitted during a dire crisis like a war or a Depression. But if we need to suspend the Law of the Land just to make normal social and scientific progress, somebody's been quietly stacking the deck! Would u like to start with NASA or Orphanges? God knows we don't need anyone taking care of homeless kids.Good grief, what cave have you been living in? The government has been doing an absolutely WRETCHED job of foster care for years! They have actually lost children and not even noticed. The criteria that childless couples have to meet in order to adopt a kid from the government are so absurd, that if they could somehow be applied to natural parenting the world population problem would be solved in one generation! Kids in government managed foster care get about the same kind of upbringing that they do in probation camps, and I've got first-hand accounts from both of those environments.

Americans have historically been one of the most generous people on earth with charity. Give us back our tax dollars and let US administer them and we'll do wonders. Every human services industry that Big Nanny sticks her nose into sooner or later turns into a mini-USSR. Education, health care, welfare, unemployment, foster care, retraining.... At least two thirds of the money goes into the pockets of incompetent government "administrators" who get job security, benefits and minimal workloads that the rest of us dream about. Half of what's left is given to applicants who know how to beat the system and write all the right answers on the forms. That leaves about fifteen cents on the dollar to actually pay for teachers, food stamps, training programs, doctors, etc. I don't know how much the stats have changed, but ten years ago if you took all the money the government budgeted for welfare and actually just GAVE IT TO THE POOR PEOPLE, every family of four on welfare would have a $40,000 annual income! Private human services are much more effective than bureaucracies. The Archdiocese of New York has a student body fully half the size of the NY public school system, yet they get by with only one tenth the number of "administrators." The Salvation Army actually refuses to give food and money to people who are obviously scamming them, something the government has somehow never figured out how to do.

You want to talk about NASA? Is your timing always this bad or are you just joking? The government has squandered tens of billions of dollars on the purely romantic notion that the space program is worthless unless we can leave human footprints out there. With the money we've wasted on those gigantic spacecraft with their collosal fuel tanks, delicate life support systems, heavy shielding for the soft organic beings inside, and their need to come back and send somebody else back up before they lose bone mass, we could by now have AI bases on all the inner planets, outposts on the moons of the outer planets, and drones halfway to Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. Oh, and a telescope one hell of a lot better than the Hubble.If ur ideas were put into practice all research would come to a complete and utter stop.And on what data are you basing that authoritative sounding statement? You're falling for the same fallacy with research that you are with charity. You think because nobody has enough money to fund it now, that we still won't fund it when we get back that trillion dollars the government rips off every year to spend on knocking down the dams they built a few decades ago. Much as I dislike corporations, they really like to invent things that the citizens will spend money for, whether it's the Segway or new medicine.Our military would become outdated and under equipped and we would no longer be the power, the beacon of freedom, we are today.Oh yes, we've certainly won the respect of the entire human race with our great feats of culture and diplomacy. They've only kicked over three of our biggest buildings so far. Now that something like 3/4 of our population want to close the borders to everybody except Canadians, I think that beacon just went out. You have to plumb the cesspools of history -- the USSR, South Africa under apartheid, the Mao Dynasty in China -- to find an incarceration rate even close to 21st Century America. Not exactly what most people think of when asked to define freedom.Maybe we should review a few technological advantages given us by organizations you would like to disband.If this stuff is so groovy and every American thinks we should be doing it, how come the government has to violate the Constitution to get it done? When they wanted to outlaw slavery and alcohol -- highly controversial actions -- they had no trouble getting the constitutional amendments and playing by the rules. Perhaps as a nation we have a hunch that everything you've listed could have been done better and cheaper by universities with private funding and entrepreneurs who wouldn't need to get a bloody zoning variance from a corrupt city council to install a kiln in their own damn house in order to experiment with high-tech ceramics.

Besides, we recognize the reality that every community discovers certain endeavors that seem to only be doable by governments and so using due process they authorize their government to do them. We're just missing that little tiny bit of due process, where the nice bureaucrats were supposed to run their plans for squandering our money by us, so we could decide whether we wanted to purchase that $600 toilet seat or to virtually give away water to farmers who think it's a sensible idea to grow cotton in the DESERT.This is rediculous, i could sit here all day and tell u medical and military benefits major government and private organizations have made, but you would still sit back, take another hit, and proceed to tell the world why you simply don't care.There's nothing quite like a good old all-American ad hominem attack against someone you don't even know to rally support to your side of an argument within a group of well educated young people who didn't sleep through Logic 101. I haven't had a "hit" of anything in so long I probably wouldn't recognize what people are passing around now. I even have a job that requires drug testing. And I do care. That's why I'm here. One of the things I care passionately about is the Constitution that defines this nation. And I don't take kindly to the traitorous insinuation that it's an irrelevant relic which we should just quietly forget about and put all our faith in politicians whose corruption is so unabashed that it's discovered while they're still in office.But I would like to hear exactly how Mom and Pops fried chicken is going to fund Rain Forest expeditions and flights to the moon.What exactly DO you read? They are doing precisely that and making a big difference. The Anatolian Guardian dog breeders are donating thousand-dollar dogs plus shipping to herdsmen in Africa to guard their livestock against lions and cheetahs. (It's true, they even mentioned it at Westminster.) The cattle live to be eaten by humans, the cats live to reproduce , and the environmentalists learn that the needs of humans and wildlife are not mutually exclusive and don't need government grants. Private charity works just as well on a global scale as national. All it needs is that trillion dollars in dissipated tax money to really make a difference. As for flights to the moon, how brave do you have to be to board a spacecraft engineered by the same civilization that created Windows?

"If you're not a liberal when you're 20, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative when you're 40, you have no brain"

-winston churchill

Going back to the older posts, Fraggle.



Your first post on Libertarians was very intriguing. Your second was damn confusing. And your third just sounded a little unbelievable. ;)

QUOTE]One of us must not be expressing himself clearly.[/QUOTE]

I was fishing, because I couldn't understand your second post. Too many allusions, but you never went right out and said you're going to do away with corporations. And I find that idea, well, crazy. I've never studied economy, but Industrial Revolution brought efficient, productive factory business, which brought big business and corporations, which brought big government to control the big business. Are you proposing that we just go back to the old days, when people hand-crafted their materials and sold them in their little shops?

Ever since we've had factories, the ability to produce a large amount of products with little manual labor has grown, until now a few men can govern a factory that produces huge amounts of products and gives them a leverage over consumers. But it's either that, or going back to no factories. Could you try and explain in layman's terms how this would work, or maybe a website? Are you going to prevent a successfull businessman from expanding his company? That's taking away capitalism! Besides, we have a demand for products that only our corporations can keep up with.

The environmental issue is more than just corporations. It's the human desire to expand and develop. Without government reserves, they would be all over our national parks. Wood is a resource, whether you're a corporation or not.

As far as the civil rights, they've become one of the biggest restrictions we've faced. People can hardly fire black employees without being called racist, and affirmative action is a mess. I think we might be to the point where we can frown on it but not make laws about, at least not to the extent we're going now.

What's Libertarian's plan on dealing with the drug war? Surely not legalizing all drugs?

You want to talk about NASA? Is your timing always this bad or are you just joking? The government has squandered tens of billions of dollars on the purely romantic notion that the space program is worthless unless we can leave human footprints out there. With the money we've wasted on those gigantic spacecraft with their collosal fuel tanks, delicate life support systems, heavy shielding for the soft organic beings inside, and their need to come back and send somebody else back up before they lose bone mass, we could by now have AI bases on all the inner planets, outposts on the moons of the outer planets, and drones halfway to Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. Oh, and a telescope one hell of a lot better than the Hubble.

Explain that one better?

This is gettin' outta hand...
Hey SelfRighteous What have you got against cocaine?
You seem happy to promote alcohol and that stuff kills people!
You see I'm just your average Joe I go out I do drugs, I have fun. Why is that such a problem for you?

You said..
"Me and my friends yaddayaddayadda" are completely irrelevant. The type of person who discuss political issues on sciforums does not represent all cocaine abusers."

Well now, You find my human experience irrelevant do you? Drugs are taken by people in a social context. If you can appreciate that you can see the limits of statistical analysis in this debate.

You said

"I agree with some of your numbers, American cocaine use has decreased, with much thanks to programs like D.A.R.E., however, my numbers are worldwide statistics."

What do worldwide statistics matter on a rainy Friday night in Hulme?

oh and I guess my cocaine "abusing" mates don't visit sci-forums 'cos they may, to be frank, find it a little unfriendly. and certainly dull. My friends like a bit of a buzz in their lives. As do I.
Regarding the legalisation debate, I can't understand why they're illegal in the first place. Who's body is it anyway?

Well rant over I guess.

Dee Cee

originally posted by Balder1Your first post on Libertarians was very intriguing. Your second was damn confusing. And your third just sounded a little unbelievable.The confusion is all mine, I’m sure. I counted about five! I’ll try to correlate my answers with the right questions.You never went right out and said you're going to do away with corporations. And I find that idea, well, crazy.Actually that’s not exactly a consensus of the movement or the party. I think a lot of libertarians were snared by the “artifical person” trap and are in a loop trying to reconcile corporate rights with civil rights. As far as I’m concerned corporations are not people and they are governed entirely by tort law and contract law. Anything more serious than that, e.g. a felony, and we simply MUST be able to hold the owners accountable for the consequences of their creations. Corporations do not have FREE WILL.I've never studied economy, but Industrial Revolution brought efficient, productive factory business, which brought big business and corporations, which brought big government to control the big business.I’m with you on the efficiency, productivity, factory, big business... but I don’t understand why that logically forces us to allow corporations to play in our sandbox. Perhaps it’s not precisely the concept of incorporation that is the flaw in the system. If people are brave enough to be last in line to get their money back in case of bankruptcy, as a libertarian I hardly have the right to tell them they can’t do that, it’s for their own good. But there is something rotten with the way corporations are treated by government that ruins the free market. Corporate big shots have become the neo-aristocrats and that is definitely not the way life is supposed to work in America. Rich is OK, but unaccountable is not. Saying that we can solve the problem by inventing big government to control business is like saying I’m worried about the pit bull in my neighbor’s yard so I’m going to get a pet alligator. EVERYTHING that the government goes ape over ALWAYS, with few exceptions, turns into a mini-USSR.Are you proposing that we just go back to the old days, when people hand-crafted their materials and sold them in their little shops?No I wasn’t, but Toffler and the rest of the futurists think that will happen naturally anyway. CAD/CAM and the Internet make it practical, possible, and cost-effective to manufacture ONE of anything and deliver it unto the hands of the ONE person who wants it. But I’m sure we’ll still need big businesses. I just want the people who run them and make all the money by doing so to be held accountable for what they’ve wrought. And I refuse to settle for a solution that requires Big Government, Big Labor, and a real Consumer’s Union like the one they were trying to create. Size begets power and power corrupts. If we haven’t learned that lesson over the past few years then we deserve whatever fate befalls us.Ever since we've had factories, the ability to produce a large amount of products with little manual labor has grown, until now a few men can govern a factory that produces huge amounts of products and gives them a leverage over consumers.You say that like it’s a good thing. Why should we deliberately create a system that leads to people naturally amassing that kind of power, when we’ve already learned that power invariably corrupts?But it's either that, or going back to no factories.I have studied economics and I have faith that those are not the only two choices. We’re just not trying hard enough. Could you try and explain in layman's terms how this would work, or maybe a website? Are you going to prevent a successfull businessman from expanding his company? That's taking away capitalism!No. But I would very much like to prevent a successful businessman from destroying the free market. I’d like a computer with a Mean Time Between Failures that’s measured in months instead of hours; but Bill Gates has a stranglehold on the market so there aren’t enough Macintoshes out there for people to bother creating business software to run on them. Besides, we have a demand for products that only our corporations can keep up with.I’m so glad you feel that Corporate America has enriched your life, but it sure doesn’t look that way from over here. I’d like a good old reliable Betamax VCR. I’d like a water heater that can burn the 600 gallons of diesel fuel we already have for our furnace. I’d like a real choice of programming on my FM dial, instead of the same boring twelve stations beamed down to every city by satellite. I’m one of the millions of people who loved “Dark Angel” until the ad agencies that have a stranglehold over TV told the corporate bureaucrat they could make more money by cancelling it and running more wrestling, millionaire wannabes, or families having fistfights on the Jerry Springer show.The environmental issue is more than just corporations. It's the human desire to expand and develop. Without government reserves, they would be all over our national parks. Wood is a resource, whether you're a corporation or not.I already conceded that issue, and I also said that the easement laws already on the books would take care of it very nicely if the legal system would simply use it. Maybe it won’t quite cover air pollution, so maybe that’s one more law we need the government for. I don’t object to laws categorically, just when there are so many that they overlap and contradict each other so they become a tool for selective enforcement against anybody who pisses off a bureaucrat. If a genie would grant me one wish, it would be a constitutional amendment enforcing a sunset of 20 years on every law, rule or regulation; 10 years if it involves helping themselves to our money. The income tax and welfare have far outlived the crises that spawned them. I doubt that they could win enough support to be enacted today. But since they’re already on the books they have too much intertia to ever by torn down.As far as the civil rights, they've become one of the biggest restrictions we've faced. People can hardly fire black employees without being called racist, and affirmative action is a mess. I think we might be to the point where we can frown on it but not make laws about, at least not to the extent we're going now.I don’t think that we have any disagreement on that score. We needed the official statement that good Americans don’t discriminate against each other because of race, color, religion, gender/preference, or age, and that was Equal Opportunity. Affirmative Action went ten steps too far and ended up being racial discrimination reborn with the colors reversed. Even the wackiest rednecks who joined the Libertarian Party solely because we promise to let them keep their guns and churches are willing to live with Equal Opportunity as long as it’s not taken to the extreme of forcing a Baptist church to hire a hooker as their cleaning lady.What's Libertarian's plan on dealing with the drug war? Surely not legalizing all drugs?You say that like it’s a bad thing. We already sell the two most deadly drugs on the planet in retail stores: alcohol and tobacco. In my 40 years in L.A. I saw a number of hopeless drunks discover that marijuana is the world’s best hangover remedy. So they ended up being potheads for a little while instead of drunks. Then the second thing they discovered is that marijuana is nowhere near as addictive as alcohol. We absolutely have to halt the War on Drugs because it’s destroying the country far faster than the drugs themselves could ever do. And yes, libertarians believe that the government has no right to tell consenting adults what they can and can’t do, as long as it causes no direct harm to others. People are now going to jump up and lecture me on indirect harm and I’m going to be a dutiful, well informed libertarian and patiently explain how every single example they set forth is a side effect of drug PROHIBITION, not the drugs themselves. From overdoses to gunfights to children having easy access to the invention of crack and meth, you can thank Uncle Sam for every one of those phenomena, not the otherwise responsible, unremarkable people who take drugs on their own time in the privacy of their own homes.Explain that one [NASA and manned space flight] better?We’ve got this fixation in our heads that the space program doesn’t count as an accomplishment unless those ships are full of people. Sure, 35 years ago nobody could imagine a totally computer-guided spacecraft. The technology wasn’t that good and therefore had to stay in contact with the base station for instructions by telemetry. One exchange of messages with the moon takes three seconds, making delicate course changes almost impossible. At Mars’s orbit it’s several minutes, the thing will crash into the meteor before it gets the command to change course and avoid it. But now we have more powerful computers and AI. It’s a piece of cake to send craft out with no human occupants. What a tremendous advantage. The entire payload weighs less than one crew member, so you use a lot less fuel. Without humans it doesn’t need as much shielding from radiation and meteorites, so the engineering is simpler, lighter, and more reliable. AI’s love a vacuum – there goes several hundred pounds of dead weight: oxygen and the machinery to pump it. Also to disperse the carbon dioxide and to collect the human waste. Extra bonus: explosions aren’t as common when you’re not hauling around huge tanks of oxygen. And the piece de resistance: AIs NEVER have to come home to avoid losing bone mass. They can stay out there forever. Meaning we can send them out to those other solar systems we keep discovering.

In other words, by letting the government control the space program, we're paying a fortune for it, risking lives, and not getting much to show for it. It is based on technology (humans inside the rockets pushing buttons) that has been obsolete since the invention of the microcomputer 25 years ago. Unmanned craft are smaller, lighter, simpler, less fragile, nimbler, more fuel-efficient, and, because they never have to come home for a fresh driver, they have a far longer range. Based on what I know about economics and physics, I'd estimate that we could get at least ten unmanned flights for the cost of one with people inside.

From overdoses to gunfights to children having easy access to the invention of crack and meth, you can thank Uncle Sam for every one of those phenomena, not the otherwise responsible, unremarkable people who take drugs on their own time in the privacy of their own homes.

Legalizing all drugs is a bad thing. Humans are not able to handle everything on our own, and as technology has increased, their have been a few things that have cropped up that, simply put, we weren't designed to handle or deal with. Nuclear weapons are one. Damn addicting video/computer games are another. Last, but not least, are addictive drugs like heroin. If you legalized heroin and crack, there'd be crack fiends and heroin addicts all over the place. That'd be scary. I've already debated trying heroin and addictive drugs, just to see how addictive they would be. If it was legalized, many people couldn't help themselves from trying it, and getting hooked. Have you ever tried heroin?

Besides that, the Libertarian party should run under something feasible. That is clearly not something that will get them elected, ever. I'm a free thinking person who would vote Libertarian, but even I wouldn't want this to happen. Think of the conservatives in this country. You honestly think you can get a President elected under that?

And tell me again: how is the Federal government responsible for people being addicted to heroin? Is it the government's responsibility to help these people kick their addiction?

We need more than two major political parties. We need more Jesse Ventura's. Whether you like him or the Libertarian party or not, people like him are good for politics. They distract/annoy both parties. This is fine by me. So much for my conservative input, even though it seems to me that most Libertarians are more conservative than liberal.

I am liberal and left for the most part.

It was tempting to just abandon this thread. You simply refuse to follow the rules of debate when somebody pushes your hot button, which in this case is drugs. Judging from the overall quality of your writing I'm sure you're an adult, but when you get on the subject of drugs, some of the 13-year-old prodigies that haunt this forum write with more discipline and logic than you do. Your assertions tend toward the Mister Mackie style: "Drugs are bad, m'kay?" You don't substantiate anything you say and when challenged you just ignore the other person's question and simply restate your original premise with only rhetorical changes. When I substantiate my assertions with personal observations you act like those lines were blacked out on your screen so you didn't see them. You don't engage, you don't debate. If you think any of the Mensa-caliber kids reading this stuff are being won over to your position because of your seductive style of presentation, I think you've misjudged them. As for the rest of us, we're old enough to know the truth from personal experience and observation.

One more time, I will lead by example and follow the rules.
Originally posted by Balder1
Legalizing all drugs is a bad thing.Right there you've glided right past one of my main points without comment. The most dangerous drugs on this planet by any measure are alcohol and tobacco. We have ALREADY legalized those and it has not brought down civilization. In fact the overwhelming majority of the users of those drugs are, as I have already said previously, otherwise responsible and unremarkable people who go to work and pay their taxes and take care of their children. PLEASE explain why you think that the decriminalization of drugs that are less popular and less dangerous would not similarly reintegrate the users of those drugs back into polite and productive society while also uncrowding our prisons and denying financial resources to the gangs who own our inner cities. Humans are not able to handle everything on our own, and as technology has increased, there have been a few things that have cropped up that, simply put, we weren't designed to handle or deal with.Ah yes, the mating call of the Nanny Bird. The mantra of the advocates of Big Fucking Government the world over:

"You peons who pay our salaries and whom we are supposedly sworn to serve do not have the judgment, wisdom, moral fiber, or strength of will to make decisions regarding the intimate details of your lives, such as which drugs you can consume safely. We, who have gravitated into mind-numbing jobs at the Employer of Last Resort; who have bungled every social issue we have ever approached, including education, health care, transportation, and poverty; who have proven consistently unable to master the concept of risk management, as evidenced by our failure to provide our intelligence agencies with sufficient Arabic language translators so that for all we know a complete plan for 9/11 may still be sitting in someone's 'In' box; who are so specifically inept at dealing with illegal drugs that they are readily available to prison inmates; yes, we are the only ones qualifed to make these decisions for you."Nuclear weapons are one.Sometimes it's hard to tell which side of an issue you're taking. If I remember correctly (I was only two at the time), nuclear weapons have actually been deployed in acts of war only twice, and that deployment was performed by the UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT against FOREIGN CIVILIANS. If you're suggesting that nuclear weapons are objects that only governments should possess because that will make life safer for civilians, history does not back you up. Damn addicting video/computer games are another.I just checked the definition of "addicting" in a medical dictionary and video games fail on at least one criterion: withdrawal sickness. If you're using the term more loosely then I'd suggest a more striking example would be the "addiction" of government bureaucrats to power. Until somebody comes up with a Twelve Step Program for that (I've got Step One: No back-filling of vacated government jobs until 2023), they would be a singularly poor choice to oversee the treatment of anyone else's "addictions." Last, but not least, are addictive drugs like heroin.Here we go again. You refuse to acknowledge any of my own remarks and observations about drugs, and you arrogantly dismiss the first-hand accounts of other forum members who have used drugs, but you expect us to treat your own words on the subject with respect. Who died and made you Drug Czar?If you legalized heroin and crack, there'd be crack fiends and heroin addicts all over the place.Opiates and cocaine were legal until about 100 years ago. Despite the lack of stigma they never became as popular as today's benzodiazepines or Our Nation's Drug Of Choice, Prozac. I wasn't there but judging by my grandparents' anecdotes their profile was quite similar to alcohol. People used them and still took care of business. Some really got a little too far into their heroin but in most cases it didn't interfere with their job performance. Nobody bothered to invent crack because cocaine powder was so easy to buy and store. That'd be scary.Our experience with these drugs does not make this scenario as scary as tens of thousands of drunk drivers.I've already debated trying heroin and addictive drugs, just to see how addictive they would be. If it was legalized, many people couldn't help themselves from trying it, and getting hooked.So you are the one in a million weak-willed risk taker who is actually dissuaded from trying out a new thrill because it's illegal. Sorry, but it's a poor exchange to save you at the expense of all the lives that have been ruined by the War on Drugs. Besides, you'd probably find like most people do, that unless you have some underlying psychological factor such as a hopeless life that makes being stoned a really attractive alternative (but the law stopped you? how improbable), or you're one of the unfortunate few whose body chemistry facilitates addiction (to the one drug you tried, what an lucky choice), you'd quit using it after a while just like the tens of millions of other Americans who stopped using marijuana, speed, cocaine, LSD, meth, amyl nitrate when they realized they needed to take their jobs and families more seriously.Have you ever tried heroin?Gee, no. And I've had plenty of opportunities to do so. Ever hear of this thing called FREE WILL? By the way, old-time heroin users are frequently quoted as saying that it ain't half as bad as crack and meth, which exist ONLY because of the stupid-shit government's perturbation of the drug market's priorities, away from: what gives the best high for the money, toward: what's easiest to get away with.
And tell me again: how is the Federal government responsible for people being addicted to heroin? Is it the government's responsibility to help these people kick their addiction?Yet again, you seem incapable of following the basic rules of debating. I didn't say they were responsible for heroin addiction. I said they were responsible for a number of things that are FAR WORSE. I listed them in my last post and, as usual, you pretend they weren't there. Either speak to the issues placed on the table or stop wasting this forum's disk space. But I'll be happy to tell you how the god-damned may-they-rot-in-hell feeders at the public trough ARE responsible for a general shift of public preference from marijuana, which is about as dangerous as caffeine, to a whole family of other drugs which are not as nice. It was simply by cracking down on the marijuana market starting about 20 years ago. It's bulky, it's smelly, and it shows up in a drug test weeks after you smoke it. (According to my friend Bob who lives in Spain.) A high risk for everyone who grows, delivers, wholesales, retails, or smokes it. Now remember that these people had been regularly told lies about marijuana by cops in D.A.R.E. propaganda sessions when they were kids, lies that they personally debunked when they got to college and were offered their first reefer. (Sorry, giving away my age again.) The natural question was, "Gee, do you suppose the pigs were lying about ALL those drugs? Let's find one that works as well as weed but isn't as likely to get us busted." So they don't get busted and they pass their drug test but meth labs are blowing up and black market drug profits are once again flowing to offshore poppy and coca farmers instead of red-blooded American marijuana gardeners.Besides that, the Libertarian party should run under something feasible. That is clearly not something that will get them elected, ever. I'm a free thinking person who would vote Libertarian, but even I wouldn't want this to happen. Think of the conservatives in this country. You honestly think you can get a President elected under that?Well it's nice to end on a note of accord. I think the Libertarian Party is in a sorry state. Twenty years ago when we could have gotten a good (Green-sized) chunk of the vote by having only one plank in our platform, "Legalize It," the Party was trying to win votes by pointing out that if Thomas Jefferson were alive today he'd be a Libertarian. Whoopee. Now that the Bore in the Big White House has got a third of the world's population toying with the idea of sneaking a bomb into the Mall of America, the Party is playing up it's ideal of no impediments to the migration of peaceful people. You'd think it was infiltrated by the FBI and deliberately derailed. Personally I agree with the faction who say we should be a movement rather than a party. The Sierra Club is far more effective; donations are tax deductible, they don't need a position on every conceivable issue, and they don't need to endure the enormous expense and embarrassment of election campaigns.

Okay Balder, I have once again treated you with respect that you have not earned because the standards of the forum must be maintained. I've responded to your specific points, presented chains of reasoning, examples, and counterarguments. Please do me the same courtesy next time or I'll go back to hanging with the ninth-graders who know how to carry on an intellectual discussion.

You don't substantiate anything you say and when challenged you just ignore the other person's question and simply restate your original premise with only rhetorical changes. When I substantiate my assertions with personal observations you act like those lines were blacked out on your screen so you didn't see them. You don't engage, you don't debate.

Hmm, I guess I'll try and work on this thing called debating. ;)
I'm a high schooler(17) taking Cross-ex debate, and I suppose I'm not "flowing" your arguments and observations through. That is because I agree with everything you've said, except for the last part, which I quoted and argued. I agree that marijuana is far less addictive than tobacco or alcohol, and so I don't try to refute it. I'm all for legalizing some drugs. Now I'll try my hand at the quoting method...

"simply restate your original premise with only rhetorical changes."

My last post was the only one where I said "drugs are bad." I had no original premise, other than that post which you just responded to. And you had no question on the post I responded to. I'm sorry if I offended, I think my last post was a bit spiteful. Didn't mean it to be.

And tell me again: how is the Federal government responsible for people being addicted to heroin? Is it the government's responsibility to help the addicts kick their addiction?

This was a cheap shot, I'll admit, and I shouldn't have said it. You said that the federal government is responsible for heroin overdose, so I took it one step back. I assert that heroin addiction is responsible for heroin overdose, not the government. The only way I can see heroin overdose being the fault of the government is that they weren't properly supervising these heroin addicts like they might be if it was legal. Or, you could say that the heroin on the black market is not clean, and that causes overdose? Is that what you would say?

The most dangerous drugs on this planet by any measure are alcohol and tobacco.

They are necessary, entrenched evils. Alcohol causes most of the domestic violence in homes, and a huge number of deaths from car crashes, but that is mostly because its use is so widespread and irresponsible.

Tobacco, if used occasionally, wouldn't be that harmful and I certainly wouldn't put it as one of the most dangerous drugs on the planet. If smoking crack was as prevalent as smoking cigarettes, crack would be a hell of a lot worse. As a disclaimer, I am not an expert in this subject, this is just my observation, which is shared by the majority of people in the United States.(as if that means anything, I know) I don't have the time to look up a website tailored to my statements right now.


PLEASE explain why you think that the decriminalization of drugs that are less popular and less dangerous would not similarly reintegrate the users of those drugs back into polite and productive society while also uncrowding our prisons and denying financial resources to the gangs who own our inner cities.

The only psychoactive drug that is legal is alcohol. Its effects are terrible, as you said, and it is widely popular. If another drug is legalized, why don't you think it has the chance to become popular, especially if it is addictive? I don't exactly see how you go from letting these users use freely to intregrating them into productive society. True, it would take away the underground black market, but I don't exactly see heroin users as productive society.

Sometimes it's hard to tell which side of an issue you're taking. If I remember correctly (I was only two at the time), nuclear weapons have actually been deployed in acts of war only twice, and that deployment was performed by the UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT against FOREIGN CIVILIANS.

I'm saying that it would be better if mankind did not have access to these weapons at all. We do not have the responsibility to deal with them, and it is entirely possible that we will destroy ourselves with them. I've never said that I don't want to make any changes in the government. The only issue that I disagreed with was legalizing all drugs.

Damn addicting computer/video games are another.

Just a little personal joke, because I have trouble pulling myself away from these games. Wonder what will happen to the world when a perfect virtual reality system is developed.


Ever hear of this thing called FREE WILL?

Free will is too unreliable in a world where all humans(yes, all) are sheep and can hardly be trusted to take care of themselves. I like this libertarian idea of fostering responsibility in everyone, but drug addicts can hardly help themselves.

"Heroin is a true addiction, with a recovery rate of 40-50%,” explains Giel van Brussel, who has been head of Amsterdam's addiction care department for many years. “With cocaine, the recovery rate is around 90%, so we don't see it as such an enormous problem.”

I'd have to agree with this guy. Heroin is the main thing I'm concerned about, and legalization would just encourage it. Decriminalization would be probably be fine, however.

it ain't half as bad as crack and meth

And yet you would consider legalizing these drugs?


Opiates and cocaine were legal until about 100 years ago. Despite the lack of stigma they never became as popular as today's benzodiazepines or Our Nation's Drug Of Choice, Prozac. I wasn't there but judging by my grandparents' anecdotes their profile was quite similar to alcohol. People used them and still took care of business. Some really got a little too far into their heroin but in most cases it didn't interfere with their job performance. Nobody bothered to invent crack because cocaine powder was so easy to buy and store.

Abusing drugs has become a part of our culture, and I doubt that we could really go back to those days. They were a lot more tolerant of people dying and developing diseases back then, when they put cocaine into Coke, everyone smoked, and the children worked at factories. I wouldn't want to go back to then, anyway. The days of the Industrial Revolution were pretty harsh. People didn't really care if the bums down the street were dying.


So you are the one in a million weak-willed risk taker who is actually dissuaded from trying out a new thrill because it's illegal.

No, I smoke marijuana every so often, have tried shrooms, and even popped a few prescription pain pills. I don't consider any of them addictive. I have some experience with drugs, and the black market that sells to kids. These days, the new thing is getting "fuzzy" on Oxycotin. We already have a huge problem with kids using drugs, and its just getting worse. I'm in high school, I see a lot of it.

Here's a test for feasibility: do you honestly think this will happen? If so, when? I highly doubt that the conservative US is going to do what no other country has done: legalize all drugs.

I'll admit, that probably is a better alternative to our present War on Drugs.

I would be more in favor of decrminilizing the drugs, but not legalizing them. Legalization gives me an image of advertising campaigns, legal crackhouses, and cycling users from using into large, expensive rehab facilities. Instead, make it a big crime to traffic the drugs, and a fine and rehab for just using them.

Wow... that was long. I prefer sticking to little snappy posts. ;)

Edit: Here is a link to a thread I started on the War on Drugs.
http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=16669

Conservative Libertarian..

You know what happens to the poor Libertarians? Like you see above they almost always get bogged down in that one stupid issue, drug legalization. ..sigh... I don't know if it's single issued dopers who can only speak of that subject or wether it's the two big parties that use it to "scare" Joe & Jill American.

Libertarians espouse considerably less government intrusion in your personal life. That includes dumping the lions share of social programs, slashing or eliminating the income tax and yes, it also means that if you want to smoke a hooter at home by the pool.. it's your business! In short; your personal quest for Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happyness is legal as long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of another. It may also be stated a little harshly as the belief that you are <FONT COLOR=BLACK><FONT SIZE=1><FONT FACE="TIMES NEW ROMAN"><B><I>not</B></I></FONT></FONT></FONT> your brothers keeper (at least the government can't force you to be). If you think running dope up your arm is the best thing since sliced bread, knock yourself out! Just don't expect the government to steal money from other citizens to help your trembling addicted ass when it all comes crashing down. Of all of these points why does the least important one draw all of the attention?

The libertarian party will replace the democrats in the not too distant future. Pesonally, I vote a mixed bag of Libertarian and republican.

Originally posted by Balder1
I'm a high schooler(17) taking Cross-ex debateOnce again I have been tricked into judging a person's age by his communication skill. That's meant as a compliment and I am humbled. Please forgive me for trying to hold you to the standards that these days even respected news reporters can't seem to grasp.I'm sorry if I offended, I think my last post was a bit spiteful. Didn't mean it to be.I've been a little flippant too. One thing I appreciate about this forum over many of the "professional adult" BBS's that my job forces me to cover is that here apologies are seen as signs of maturity and good character, rather than losing a leg-lifting contest to a bigger dog.This was a cheap shot, I'll admit, and I shouldn't have said it.Forget it. One apology per posting is far above the national average!You said that the federal government is responsible for heroin overdose, so I took it one step back. I assert that heroin addiction is responsible for heroin overdose, not the government. The only way I can see heroin overdose being the fault of the government is that they weren't properly supervising these heroin addicts like they might be if it was legal.No to supervising addicts, beyond the basic duty of protecting us from violence. However, virtually ALL "drug-related" violence is due to either the high price of drugs turning a high percentage of the relatively few genuine "addicts" into paupers, or the need to do business with criminals in order to obtain drugs. Yes we believe that people must take responsibility for their own actions, but that does not totally rule out the theory of contributory negligence. Considering the reality of what our actual government is eager to take credit for, by their own paradigm they must also take credit for creating the black market in drugs, turning addicts into burglars, and making war zones out of the inner cities.Or, you could say that the heroin on the black market is not clean, and that causes overdose?Yes. It's hard to pose that issue in a libertarian context. But in the context of reality, the American people have been lulled into instinctively believing that food and drugs magically appear on the shelves with adequate quality standards. Even those who can't even spell "FDA." So again, contributory negligence for the government to knowingly create a market in which QA is unreliable. I would also reiterate that Big Nanny fulfilled her own prophesy about marijuana being a "gateway drug" by making it so difficult and risky to buy and use. Some of those DARE-duped kids, looking for a high that won't get them busted or fired, will stumble onto heroin. Again, free will and individual responsibility, but also, again, contributory negligence.[Alcohol and tobacco] are necessary, entrenched evils.Say what? Cholesterol, traffic jams, high school -- those are necessary, entrenched evils. Booze and nicotine are optional and disentrenchable.Alcohol causes most of the domestic violence in homes, and a huge number of deaths from car crashes, but that is mostly because its use is so widespread and irresponsible.And as I mentioned earlier, marijuana has proven to be an effective treatment for alcoholism because it breaks the hangover cycle. Even if every incurable drunk became an incurable pothead, the net effect on society would be positive. The fact that potheads are rarely incurable makes it an even better deal. The War on Drugs is Big Nanny's contributory negligence to the highway death toll and battered spouses: she guides us into making alcohol our drug of choice.Tobacco, if used occasionally, wouldn't be that harmful and I certainly wouldn't put it as one of the most dangerous drugs on the planet.Not gonna happen. Even being forced to smoke outside in the snow next to the dumpster has not manipulated any smoker I know into cutting back, much less becoming an occasional user.If smoking crack was as prevalent as smoking cigarettes, crack would be a hell of a lot worse.A ludicrous scenario, but I'll excuse it because of your lack of practical experience. The degree to which people smoke drugs other than tobacco has no correlation with the degree to which people smoke tobacco. Even if it's the same person. NOBODY chain-smokes marijuana, a la "Reefer Madness," because halfway through the second spliff they fall asleep. Ditto for crack, although they can keep it going longer than a marijuana high. The psychoactive effects of different drugs work in different ways.As a disclaimer, I am not an expert in this subject, this is just my observation, which is shared by the majority of people in the United States.The same Americans who have a higher rate of belief in angels than in evolution? The same Americans who think it's sensible to drive a 5,000 pound truck to the grocery store? The same Americans who think that a man who can't even speak his own native language fluently is qualified to be the fucking PRESIDENT?(as if that means anything, I know)Thank you for the disclaimer. An educated populace is the cornerstone of a democracy, and we've got front row seats to an example of the contrapositive.The only psychoactive drug that is legal is alcohol.You need to go to a library and read the Consumer's Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs. Tobacco is very psychoactive. Its effects are terrible, as you said, and it is widely popular. If another drug is legalized, why don't you think it has the chance to become popular, especially if it is addictive?Because every drug is different. You already conceded that marijuana doesn't follow the same vector as other drugs. Why can't you imagine that the same thing can be said for LSD, opiates, and whatever else is out there? The "especially if it's addictive" part is key to this issue and you just glide right over it. Many people in both the drug user and drug treatment camps agree that NO other drug is as addictive as tobacco. For the average drug whose addictivity level is not so high, many other factors besides its chemistry come into play to determine whether any one user is in danger of becoming addicted. The most important one is sheer depression, especially if it's caused by real life conditions and not a neurosis. I have seen people get "accidentally" addicted to morphine after surgery, yet they retained enough presence of mind to say "I've gotta back off on this shit, it's interfering with the real life that I enjoy so much." And I've seen people with dead-end jobs and a five-year losing streak in romance become addicted to propoxyphene (Darvon) or benzodiazepines (Valium, Dalmane, etc.).I don't exactly see how you go from letting these users use freely to intregrating them into productive society.What I was referring to was the much larger proportion of the drug user community who are NOT hopelessly addicted, who just burn a reefer or pop a pill after work the same way we might have a glass of wine every single night. Putting them in jail removes a family's breadwinner and blows some corporation's project schedule. But even jailing the ones who commit crimes to support their habits isn't doing society a favor, if you remember that the only reason they turned to crime in the first place was that the government manipulated the price of drugs up to a level where their buddies in the banking business can turn a tidy profit by laundering the cash flow. I'd rather see a heroin addict sitting on the sidewalk collecting enough quarters to buy a fix, just as the winos do, than get carjacked because he needs five hundred bucks to buy a dose of narcotic that costs about a nickel to produce. True, it would take away the underground black market, but I don't exactly see heroin users as productive society.All I can say is listen to your elders. Not all of us are full of shit. In my grandparents' day there were SURGEONS who were addicted to heroin, and they did absolutely reliable, sometimes brilliant work, as long as they got their maintenance dose. The scuttlebutt says that there are still a few of them around today, since doctors can get heroin more easily and safely than the rest of us, but I won't ask you to believe scuttlebutt.I'm saying that it would be better if mankind did not have access to [nuclear] weapons at all. We do not have the responsibility to deal with them, and it is entirely possible that we will destroy ourselves with them.And it would be better if that first guy hadn't eaten the monkey meat sandwich that started the HIV epidemic. Sometimes there's no point in arguing over whether a thing is right or wrong. It just IS, and we have to deal with it. The 20th Century was the Century of Physics, and somebody was going to discover the secret of nuclear fission and fusion. If you believe in God or Destiny then perhaps this is just one of those periodic tests we have to pass to see if we get to stay in charge of the planet. For the rest of us it's a matter of re-engineering our political system so our only choice doesn't come down to Tweedle-dumb (Gore) vs. Tweedle-really-really-dumb (Bush) and one of those guys gets to sit there with his finger poised over the red button. I've never said that I don't want to make any changes in the government. The only issue that I disagreed with was legalizing all drugs.That doesn't make you much different from the average libertarian. I personally have a big problem with Freedom of Religion. If this planet really does go up in a big mushroom cloud, that will be the catalyst that makes it happen.Addictive video games: Just a little personal joke, because I have trouble pulling myself away from these games. Wonder what will happen to the world when a perfect virtual reality system is developed.The same thing that happens whenever anything new is developed that finds uncontrollable urges in a portion of the population. UN-natural selection. The people who can survive in the world their predecessors created pass their genes along, the ones who can't don't. Yeah, I think that is a problem worth worrying about even though my hunch is that VR itself will simply displace TV and it couldn't be much worse.Free will is too unreliable in a world where all humans(yes, all) are sheep and can hardly be trusted to take care of themselves.I thought cynicism, the last stronghold of the idealist, was an affliction of people my age. You haven't lived long enough and met enough people to be disillusioned with absolutely all of them!I like this libertarian idea of fostering responsibility in everyone, but drug addicts can hardly help themselves.Your model of drug use and drug addiction is full of flaws and in aggregate they destroy the model's ability to help you make an informed decision about the topic. If you want to talk about people who are genuinely incapable of helping themselves, check out the entire neighborhoods full of people who have been on welfare for so many generations that nobody even understands how to use an alarm clock. (I didn't make that up. My wife was a social worker for many years.) Or the religious wackos who believe that it is better to let a two year old child die of influenza than to let him be touched by an M.D. Or the government employees who have been unaccountable for the results of what little work they produce for so many years that they can't understand why the rest of us choose to do what we do."Heroin is a true addiction, with a recovery rate of 40-50%,” explains Giel van Brussel, who has been head of Amsterdam's addiction care department for many years. “With cocaine, the recovery rate is around 90%, so we don't see it as such an enormous problem.” I'd have to agree with this guy.Just because Holland as a nation is soft on drugs doesn't mean this guy is telling the truth. Double-check everything you read. If it's on the Internet, check it ten times. Even if he's not lying, he's deliberately misusing statistics and hoping you don't notice. Notice how he doesn't say HOW addictive heroin is - what percentage of people who use it recreationally become addicted? Or what OTHER factors play a role in determining which user becomes addicted and which doesn't, such as depression, neurosis, or body chemistry?Heroin is the main thing I'm concerned about.That puts you completely out of step with the Drug Warriors in our country. They all think methamphetamine is their biggest problem. And I would tend to agree with them. Meth is one drug which is NOT primarily used for recreation. Girls your age use it to lose weight. They're all fixated on that twelve-year-old-boy look that has taken over the fashion model demographic since the industry is dominated by gay male designers. I try to avoid bashing but I'll allow myself the liberty in this case because I think what gay men have done to straight women is an abomination: bulimia, anorexia, and meth.Legalization would just encourage it.Not an unreasonable hypothesis, but I'll bet you can't prove it. There is a fair amount of evidence to the contrary. My mother cursed Prohibition, because the "naughty" image of the speakeasy got respectable women in large numbers coming into bars for the first time in American history. Americans are not by nature a people who respect authority, such as, for example, the Japanese and Germans. A good many of our people do stuff just BECAUSE they are told not to. One thing that legalization would definitely help with is to keep the drugs out of the hands of children. Notice that there are no "beer pushers" or "cigarette pushers" hanging around school grounds? It's because the free market price of those commodities is so low that there just isn't enough profit in the sale to take the risk of being busted for selling to a minor. You have to get your older brother or somebody like that to buy it for you and that at least introduces the dynamic of the supplier caring about the welfare of the consumer instead of simply his own profit. Decriminalization would be probably be fine, however.That compromise is probably what will happen. People are getting sick of watching their friends, family and co-workers getting hassled for recreational drugs and their voices are being amplified by a lot of current and former law enforcement types who are sick of doing the hassling. But it will leave the black market intact, so the cops can still be on the take and the banks can still launder the money. What a perfectly American solution to the problem!And yet you would consider legalizing [meth and crack]?Hey, it's to a large degree Big Nanny's fault that those drugs exist. They would never have been invented in a free market. Don't blame me if the best solution I can come up with for fixing Big Nanny's big boo-boo is not perfect. Besides, crack is primarily an inner city problem and has a strong correlation with feelings of hopelessness. Meth is a phenomenon of the fashion/diet industry. If we put our civic-minded energies into solving the root problems that make drugs appealing, the second-order effect of the drugs themselves will almost surely become more manageable.Abusing drugs has become a part of our culture, and I doubt that we could really go back to those days.Not only a cynic, but a fatalist. How do you kids become jaded so early?They were a lot more tolerant of people dying and developing diseases back then.The hard core libertarians say that people need to be able to occasionally see a real life example of what happens to people who do things that they have been told were wrong. That tends to be more convincing than a thousand DARE lectures. This is a tough position for me to endorse, but for a cynical fatalist like yourself it fits right into your personal philosophy.When they put cocaine into Coke, everyone smoked, and the children worked at factories. I wouldn't want to go back to then, anyway. The days of the Industrial Revolution were pretty harsh. People didn't really care if the bums down the street were dying.A lot of that was the philosophy of the Industrial Revolution. The Information Age comes with a totally different national character. People care a lot more about each other, even strangers. That's certainly the motivation for many of you who want to curtail drug use; you think you are saving people from hurting themselves. Just because I'm pretty sure you're wrong doesn't mean I don't admire your caring nature.I smoke marijuana every so often, have tried shrooms, and even popped a few prescription pain pills. I don't consider any of them addictive.How nice that you have determined which drugs are safe for your own use. Why don't the rest of us have the right to do that? I can't handle caffeine. It took 25 years and a lot of horribly sad experiences before I figured that out, because Coke and Pepsi are as American as apple pie. To this day people casually forget to give me decaf coffee or cola, even though I've told them a million times, but they try to protect me from drugs that have virtually no effect on me at all, much less negative effects.I have some experience with drugs, and the black market that sells to kids. These days, the new thing is getting "fuzzy" on Oxycotin. We already have a huge problem with kids using drugs, and its just getting worse. I'm in high school, I see a lot of it.Because there's so much profit to be made in selling expensive black-market drugs to high school kids, some gangster who doesn't mind taking risks is willing to do it.Here's a test for feasibility: do you honestly think this will happen? If so, when? I highly doubt that the conservative US is going to do what no other country has done: legalize all drugs.Spain has come pretty close. Canada is getting there. If some judge had the balls to declare the DEA unconstitutional, which is a slam-dunk, California would join them. The biggest impediment to decriminalization is not popular opinion. It is the Drug War industry: huge government bureaucracies staffed by people who are too incompetent to get honest work; cops on the take; governments getting rich off of asset forfeiture; and bankers who skim off their share of the profits.Legalization gives me an image of advertising campaigns.Don't get me started on my rant about the advertising industry. There's more to this libertarian's philosophy than smaller government. I might actually permit capital punishment for people who make their parasitic living by fraudulently influencing Americans into buying products based on how sexy the commercials look.Instead, make it a big crime to traffic the drugs.As I already said, you'll get a lot of support for that from the Drug War industry. Putting individual users in jail doesn't really work in their favor.And a fine and rehab for just using them.So we end up disagreeing on that one. Reasonable people can disagree. At least you don't want to take them away from their families and jobs and throw them in prison to be gang-raped and come back out to spread HIV among the population.Wow... that was long. I prefer sticking to little snappy posts. ;)But that's what happens when you adhere to the proper style of a debate. Thanks for taking the trouble to write all those words. They made a lot of sense, demonstrated that you are a caring and reasonable person, and upheld the standards of the medium.

Please forgive my previous harangues against a person who I figured was of my own generation.

--Peace