Posted on 04/16/2013 12:10:24 PM PDT by Oldpuppymax
You have to live amongst drunks, too. How are they any different?
Prohibitionists ate rather uniquely upfront about their “la-la-la, I can’t hear you” finger in the ear routine. Internet debates hardly ever change anyone’s mind, but most of the time people at least pretend to be listening to eachother. I enjoy honesty about beliefs being beyond rational discussion.
Is it not a common sense truth that prohibiting what people won’t stop using creates crime, too? Or does that crime not matter? Not to mention the accomoanying growth of and loss of respect for gubmint. Who cares about innercity thugs having shootouts in residential neighborhoods? I’d much rather bust someone for getting high on something that isn’t alchohol./s
I’d much rather deal with real crimes caused by drug abuse than the fake “crime” of drug abuse and crime caused by the black market created by prohibition. Especially because even with prohibition anyone who wants to can abus, drugs. There is a downside, as I’ve mentioned, considering we’ve turned away from personal responsibility and cushion people from the consequences of their actions. But advocating prohibition as a fix is wrong. Foremost because it’s unjust; also because it doesn’t work.
Your argument reminds me of the Bloombergian argument for sugary drink and salt prohibition. Now that we have partially socialized healthcare, it becomes the community’s responsibility to regulate people’s health. Hence sugar and salt intake fall under the “police powers” of gubmint. The real solution, as you and I know, is for fatties to pay for themselves. Otherwise socialism will keep causing problems that will inevitably require gubmint oversight of every damn aspect of our lives.
I must conclude by stressing how much worse a problem is alchohol, and how absolutely silly is your ignoring it.
Including the drug alcohol? Do you favor banning that drug?
No. But certainly endorse the restraints on its use by minors, people at work or driving.
Why are such restraints not sufficient for marijuana - why must it be banned?
Actually the upside to Prohibition is that the number of deaths from cirrhosis, liver failure, alcohol poisoning,accidents as well as domestic abuse and violence all declined during its implementation.
And yet you don't favor a return to Prohibition - which is good, as restricting liberties to prevent self-harm is not a proper function of government. (Actually, murders dropped when Prohibition ended.)
Also comparing alcohol to marijuana is not a valid physiological comparison. Let’s just say the receptors in our brains are a bit different
You have yet to show how that alleged difference is relevant to their proper legal statuses.
Such debates don't take place on FR as no FReeper loves drugs - perhaps you're thinking of the debate on respecting individual liberties or continuing to hyperinflate drug profits and channel those profits into criminal hands.
When it comes to the mind-altering drugs-approving libertarians and their sort
To favor legalization is not to "approve" - I favor the legality of tobacco but in no sense approve its use.
Actually Prohibition did what it was designed to do. Compare American drinking before and after Prohibition. It dropped drastically and stayed down even after Prohibition was repealed.
Where public drunkenness was common it became uncommon.
You no longer left work and handed your paycheck to the bartender. Yes, that happened literally.
It can be argued that Prohibition resulted in the great upward mobility that happened in the 1950's and onward.
Criminologist refutes cannabis-related crime increase claims - http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3005416/posts
Since drug use has been flat for decades, it must be time to end that prohibition too.
I have no problem with drugs being legal.
You want to indulge in a club or your home? Go ahead.
But you don't get any "diminished capacity" excuse if you if you do harm to someone while under the influence.
I was just pointing out that Prohibition did what it was meant to do. It cut drastically back on drunkenness especially in the lower class.
Compare the difference in British and American twenty somethings drinking. Generally Americans go out for a drink and go home with a buzz, the British get puke your guts out drunk.
It has become ingrained culturally in the US that getting falling down drunk is something that you should not do as a general rule.
You want to indulge in a club or your home? Go ahead.
But you don't get any "diminished capacity" excuse if you if you do harm to someone while under the influence.
Amen to all that!
“It can be argued that Prohibition resulted in the great upward mobility that happened in the 50s and onward.”
No it can’t, except maybe by maniacs. In the first place you’d have to ignore the fact that the Great Depression started during prohibition, then you’d have to ignore the fact that there was a bigger gap between the end of prohibition and the postwar boom than between the start of prohibition and the Great Depression. The argument can t be that the generation which grew up under prohibition learner a good lesson about sobriety which showed itself in the 50s, though not the 30s or most if the 40s. But that is nonsense, because that’s a whole generation away.
Is it that prohibition children passed their sober experience onto the next generation? No, because that’s too close to the baby boom generation, which was the most irresponsible to date.
All this ignores, also, the incredible booms of the latter part of the 19th century and early 20th, which was proportionally bigger and historically more important than the postwar boom, plus the Jazz Age boom, which happened during prohibition, yes, but hardly arguable to have been caused by it.
Not only is the phsiological comparison between alcohol and marijuana not valid but the legal, cultural and historical comparisons between the two intoxicants are also bogus. Great harm comes to countries and cultures when intoxicants are legalized and the legal and societal proscriptions against their use are loosened. It may be an inconvenient fact to your argument but the so called “legalization” of drugs has been a disaster wherever it has been implemented. The experiences in the Netherlands and Switzerland ,despite the nonsense and propaganda spouted by vested advocates, has not been good. America IMHO is already in decline, things will be worse with marijuana legalization and the ease of procurement.Young people will suffer the most. But cheer up. Your arguments are winning. The drive for legalization is prevailing. Soon marijuana will be readily available in Colorodo, California and Washington despite Federal laws which are being ignored. “Decriminalization” is becoming widespread. People like me who think its a huge mistake are becoming a minority. Enjoy your dope, but like I said, I prefer to have as little to do with you and your ilk as possible.
Prohibition may have shrunk consumption generally, but it went up for certain portions of the population. Is that all it was supposed to do, by the way? Was the expenditure worth the result? Were all the negative side effects: loss of liberty, perversion of justice, rise in crimes concomitant to black market trafficking, funding of empires of organized crime, political corruption, diminution of respect for government, increase of dangerous thrill drinking, increase in potency and lack of safety concerns for what booze was consumed, etc., unimportant? Seems to me a rather low bar for prohibition’s success to hang on that one measure.
If it worked so well, why was it repealed, anyway?
The only physiological comparison I've made even implicitly is that both are mind-altering substances that can lead to dependency (more so in the case of alcohol). The relevance of your alleged physiological differences has yet to be shown.
but the legal, cultural and historical comparisons between the two intoxicants are also bogus.
Any such comparisons are in your mind - as is the relevance of the alleged differences.
the so called “legalization” of drugs has been a disaster wherever it has been implemented. The experiences in the Netherlands
That is not legalization but decriminalization.
and Switzerland ,despite the nonsense and propaganda spouted by vested advocates, has not been good.
Needle Park was a stupid idea, and as could have easily been predicted created a small magnet to hyperconcentrate users and sellers. Statewide legalization will be a very different animal.
Enjoy your dope,
I use no drugs, legal or illegal.
but like I said, I prefer to have as little to do with you and your ilk as possible.
And I prefer to have as little as possible to do with those who substitute personal smears for reasoned debate - except to expose to others the moral, factual, and logical emptiness of their position.
Well, no, it didn't. The people who were determined to get drunk would have been drunkards with out prohibition as well.
Is that all it was supposed to do, by the way?
No, but that is what it did do.
The people who were pushing for it were the people who had to deal with the results of uncontrolled drunkenness. It wasn't pretty.
Were all the negative side effects: loss of liberty, perversion of justice, rise in crimes concomitant to black market trafficking, funding of empires of organized crime, political corruption, diminution of respect for government, increase of dangerous thrill drinking, increase in potency and lack of safety concerns for what booze was consumed, etc., unimportant?
Wow all of that? You really think that wasn't there before Prohibition?
Let's look at "lack of safety concerns for what booze was consumed" prior to Prohibition you had such delightful items in the booze such as tobacco, rattlesnake heads, wood alcohol and other yummy stuff.
It was aged all of two to three minutes.
Oddly enough the alcohol during Prohibition was probably safer. You didn't want an unhappy customer who could turn you in.
I know it is fashionable to blame everything that went wrong during that time on Prohibition but you have to look at what was happening in the country prior. When you do you find, "loss of liberty, perversion of justice, rise in crimes, black market trafficking, empires of organized crime, political corruption, diminution of respect for government, lots of dangerous thrill drinking" was already there.
If it worked so well, why was it repealed, anyway?
Cynically, it was because the government wanted the money from the booze tax.
But the other part of it was that it did work.
It was no longer needed.
And so it lost support and went away.
That used to happen to laws when they were no longer needed.
Doesn't anymore.
Despite spamming me with a person’s opinion found on the internet in opposing hard data to the contrary, there is the fact that the British government downgraded marijuana, saw for themselves what a skyrocketing bad result that was and upgraded it again.
BTW, it is kind of ironic how much of a nanny you are in pushing the drugs agenda, considering your name. I didn’t even post to you but you are so driven for drugs that you must spam me regardless.
Could you possibly be a little less of a nanny? I had seen your link the first time.
“Great harm comes to countries and cultures when intoxicants are legalized and the legal and societal proscriptions against their use are loosened.”
As a conservative you ought to rely more upon prescription than proscription, especially for so-called crimes which run entirely counter to the natural law understanding of crime. I see no reason why “societal” standards of conduct have to follow legal proscriptions. Unless you live in a corrupt civilization such as our own, where gubmint intrudes itself into every nook and cranny of our lives.
Might I suggest that if it is so that legalization of drugs leads to their abuse that this is the fault of the previous prohibition, rather than its removal? I see no good reason to assume otherwise. It would be as if we suddenly turned away from socialism—the impossible dream—and left everyone on their own two economic feet. Proletariat wouldn’t know what to do, and society’d grind to a halt as we’d storm the capital and demand they save us from ourselves. For no one’s been raised to be anything beyond minimally self-reliant for more than a century, and we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves. Would this be freedom’s fault? I’d rather blame gubmint for replacing the ethic that built this country with gross subservience.
That being said, there remains the giant flaw in your case for the War on Some Drugs. Let’s say sudden legalization of marijuana would bring chaos. Are you saying alchohol consumption is relatively orderly? Is it even possible to think that? I guess so, since most everyone drinks and not everyone wrecks their lives and the lives of others. But that’s a crooked way to look at it. Because by any measure alchohol causes much, much more damage than any other mind altering substance. This is so despite the much vaunted and sacred cultural/historical habits grown over the generations you imagine render it harmless. Or harmless enough to be legal.
Other drugs were legal or mostly so in the past, though certainly they’re more potent, and various other changes, foremost the replacement of personal responsibility with what can be termed the Freudian Ethic, have made them potentially more dangerous. You can always argue legal marijuana would cause more trouble than booze. But is the scourge of alchohol, however relatively benign you account it, truly a-okay? You’re fine with all the addiction, all the accidents, all the disease, all the lives ruined, and so on? Why? Where is the line? What does it take to require proscription, and what is it about weed which booze lacks?
The answer is always something along the lines of it’s been there for thousands of years, and we’ve evolved customs to deal with it. But those customs don’t work all that well, so far as I can tell. There seem to be a panopoly of evils, and precisely the same sort of evils associated with illegal drugs, resulting from alchohol abuse. The real answer is that we’re used to alchohol. It’s been around not long enough for us to use it wisely, but long enough for us to treat its adverse effects as a natural part of life. Marijuana et. al. haven’t been grandfathered in thusly, and as such still seem like something only dirty hippies and other burnouts use.
That’s the beauty of democracy. Non-politically-favored minorities can go suck an egg. Highs for me and not for thee.
“The people who were determined to get drunk would have been drunkards with out prohibition as well”
Maybe, but also it could turn regular drinkers into drunks, for the obvious reason that if you’re gonna break the law you wanna make it worth your while. Aside from inexperience and the general idiocy of youth, this is a big reason why high school drinking parties tend to come with puke and alchohol poisoning, whereas people who can drink whenever they want don’t attach soecial importance to any random might of drinking.
Also, the very fact of illegality is a draw for some. The greater the taboo the greater the desire, as they say. Which isn’t universally true, but applies here. Outlawing certain things almost guarantees you’re going to make a fad of them.
Anyway, alchohol consumption did go up for certain classes. That is a fact. Prohibition was not effective across the board.
You’re warping the meaning of “nanny,” there. The other poster may be insisting on his way, but it would be as if a nanny were forcing a parent to let their kid eat ice cream all day. A recognizable sort if nanny would be forestalling the kid from spoiling his appetite. The way you put it is a little like lefties who rail against the “tyranny of the marketplace,” preferring the freedom of state regulation.
Bottom line is that both of you under the guise of freedom and liberty are advocating polices that will result in more drug use especially by unsophisticated young people who are very vulnerable to grave harm. Usually despite protestations to the opposite, such positions are taken to justify personal behavior and habits. Your positions as they are being implemented by a “tolerant” culture tired of confrontation will lead to more suffering and decline in America. You can rationalize with self serving faulty reasoning all you want, but in the final analysis, you are very bad guys propagating harm.
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