Posted on 05/10/2011 9:54:08 AM PDT by aic4ever
A conservative will join a libertarian in thinking that the federal government largely oversteps its bounds by doing something like limiting the gallons-per-flush on a toilet, or making 100 watt light bulbs illegal. These are not, after all, life-altering choices of a moral bent for conservatives. But drugs are. And because the Superior Republican Morality comes into play, ultimately you just don't know what's best for you.
But the federal government sure does. And it ain't Freedom.
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We who believe in freedom ought to claim the moral high ground more often. We deserve it, we should claim it.
You can’t have a free society without good morals. The Founders knew this. Just read what they wrote about religion in the public square.
True freedom is not the same thing as license.
There is no high moral ground to sanctioning drug abuse.
We don’t live in a vacuum.
Your drug abuse severely impacts me, and in particular, vulnerable people around you - in particular children and other dependents.
I know, we can wait until you injure them, then arrest you.
Doesn’t help the victims much.
If I see someone racing towards me with a knife, I can kill him. I don’t have to wait until the knife is in me. Mankind has lived long enough to know what the usual consequences of drug abuse are.
If I see someone using meth every day, I think he should be put away. He will damage someone; it is almost inevitable. To pretend otherwise is stupid.
“You can’t have a free society without good morals”.
This is tricky, isn’t it? I mean one person may view a bikini as immoral, another may not. One person may view drinking alcohol as immoral, another may not. However, if you are talking about essentially following the ten commandments... then I would agree.
Yep, everytime I flush my inadequate little toilet, I thank ManBearPig.
Does that apply to tobacco and alcohol also?
Doing drugs is a personal choice over which the Federal Government does not and should not have any Constitutional power to control. At the same time your neighbors should have and do have the right to kick your a$$ and beat you out of town for being a degenerate sleaziod. As it stands today if a group of decent men tried to run drug addicts, perverts, and other miscreants out of their neighborhoods the armed might of FEDGOV would come down on their heads like an anvil. They would be declared racist, right-wing terrorists, and charged with violating the “civil rights” of these downtrodden victims of society.
False conclusion. For the consequences of a REAL experiment in drug legalization look at China.
It went from nothing, to 3/4s of the Male population of Manchuria becoming drug addicts. It destroyed China so badly that they are only now starting to come out of it.
Assuming we can agree on a definition of "bad," this question is not one of opinion, but rather of objective fact.
One can still make an arguably persuasive libertarian argument for legalization of drugs on the basis that you should have the legal right to mess yourself up if you choose to. But you cannot make a persuasive argument that (most if not all) illegal drugs do not have serious deleterious effects on many if not all of their users.
Same as with tobacco smoking, heavy drinking or homosexual sex. The negative health effects are a question of fact, not of opinion.
It does not apply to tobacco (tobacco does not impair your reasoning).
It applies to drunkenness, not light alcohol use. Drunkenness impairs your reasoning; light alcohol use (wine with dinner, beer with your hot dog) does not.
But you already know that.
Tobacco use impacts others too, doesn’t it? Light alcohol use to some, may be a lot to others, same as with drugs. Who gets to make that call? The individual or you?
Light alcohol DOES impair some people. Not all people react to it the same way.
The political debate comes down to this: We have a certain level of government control at this point in time. In the next 2 - 4 years do we move towards more freedom or less freedom? Will decentralized governments be allowed to move in one direction or the other? Or will centralized government impose a one-size-fits-all level of control (or de-control) on everyone?
Don’t confuse the political debate with the philosophical or religous debate. They are separate debates.
“Tobacco use impacts others too, doesn’t it? Light alcohol use to some, may be a lot to others, same as with drugs. Who gets to make that call? The individual or you?”
Tobacco use does not make you irrational, paranoid, comatose, or schizo.
Neither does light alcohol use.
You can pretend you don’t know that if you want.
“Light alcohol DOES impair some people. “
Well, they can not use it, then.
I have not met anyone who become irrational on a glass or two of wine or a cocktail.
But I guess that’s just me.
Neither does light drug use. I suppose you can pretend you don’t know that if you want also.
There are 100,000 million more men than women in China.
I'd do drugs too if there were zero chance of having a normal life.
A better approach to the argument is this: should the federal government be in charge of issuing traffic tickets in every town in America? And if you say, “Of course not!”, then to assume that you don’t want any traffic laws at all.
It’s not an either/or argument. And neither is drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, toilets or light bulbs. Our sole choices are *not* “federal government or nothing.”
Right now, if left up to the individual States, abortion would only be legal in from 3 to 5 of them, and for an indefinite time. But it would be extremely hard to legalize abortion in States where it was not legal.
And while there would be *some* people willing to leave their State, to travel to another State, to have an abortion, before Roe v. Wade, there were some willing to travel to other countries to get abortions. Some things just cannot be entirely stopped.
As far as drugs go, between the horrific abuses heaped on the Bill of Rights since alcohol prohibition, continuing and intensifying with the War on Drugs, a LOT of States would probably say, “To heck with it!”
“We no longer care if people wish to harm themselves with drugs. Preventing them from choosing to do so is so vastly *more* harmful to us all, that we can no longer afford to interfere with their self-harm.”
“Thus we will treat drug abuse as a medical, not a legal problem.”
Yet this is also not a federal decision to make. And if people are willing to travel from a State which has decided that drugs should remain illegal, to one where drugs are legal, this again is something we must learn to live with. We cannot all wear chains, to prevent someone from leaping off a cliff.
And likewise prostitution. Thank heavens that for the most part, the federal government has not tried to make prostitution illegal nationally.
But while most States would continue to not permit it, eventually some might get around to allowing it on a limited basis. And that is their prerogative.
“Neither does light drug use.”
Actually you are correct.
If you take two hits from a bong filled with marijuana, you could probably still babysit my kid or drive a car.
The problem is, who just takes two hits from a bong? They smoke until they are high.
Whereas most of the people who drink have a drink or two.
Therein lies the difference.
Should someone get drunk, I am all for the enforcement of public drunkenness, child neglect, etc. laws.
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