Replies

Well you've just about swayed me, my FRiend.

But we’re not at the point where government cameras are installed in your home to see what you’re doing at all times....do you want to see us go there?

No, absolutely not. And your C.S. Lewis quote and following comments make a nearly-unassailable argument. I'm a libertophile to the bone. But as I said before, liberty is not a trump card for every debate.

Liberty and society are in a perpetual tug-of-war - you don't have to read much of the founders' debates to see they realized this and struggled greatly over it. If a particular liberty might bring this country to ruin - IF, just IF it might - surely you'd find it difficult to oppose restrictions on that liberty, right? I know you don't think drug-liberty could bring us to ruin, but I trust you can see the tug-o-war we face regarding some liberties.

This overreaching federal government makes my job in this debate harder, because they've tugged way too far, and I can't defend their tyrannical actions. But I believe legitimizing drug use will make it widespread, and with it widespread ruin of lives, families, and eventually the nation itself, until we become such a weakened body that we have no defense against whatever ailment (i.e. invading force, communism, islam, etc.) gets to us first.

That's my fear for the future of our great nation. Mexico is acting out of desperation, trying to stave off the "failed state" status everyone's predicting. I hope we never get there, but unless we've got what it takes to control our appetites - drugs or otherwise - it looks to me like that's where we're headed.

Well that’s what we all have to hope for isn’t it!!?

That people, given Liberty, will invariatably choose the best path? Isn’t that what we all believe?

At least most will, and we’ll be the better people for what the best give, not for what the worst don’t. That doesn’t mean that the majority will go in the ‘worst’ direction, does it? Drugs are illegal now, and many millions are apt to abuse them anyway. Studies in human nature have proven that many people will gravitate toward something strictly because it IS illicit.

The problem with that ol’ slippery slope is that the Government has already created a cottage industry with the WoSD. Paramilitary gear for cops, no knock raids, and civil asset forfeiture laws have been used to give law enforcement a horrible incentive to absolutely rape the Liberty of thousands, unjustly and without any due process.

Just as we argue now against Government creating it’s own cottage healtcare industry, in the same breath many can happily support another...the War on Some Drugs.

This overreaching federal government makes my job in this debate harder... ...I believe legitimizing drug use will make it widespread...

It's a real bugaboo, no? Try letting go of the assumption that "legal" equates to "blessed as good and proper". Far as I know, most places it's not against the law to jump off a cliff.

Some time around ten years ago a couple of Eugene's finest responded to a disturbance call in the downtown shopping district. They arrived to find a group of 8 or 10 local youth in front of one of the businesses wearing mud (and nothing else), apparently making some kind of a protest statement. The cops cuffed them, wrapped them up and hauled them in. Looking for the applicable chapter and verse for charging purposes they searched city, county, and state laws and found absolutely nothing. They had no choice but to sheepishly apologize and let them go.

If you watched O'Reilly on one of a couple times over the last few weeks, or Huckabee filling in for him just tonight, you'd know that no law against public nudity, much to his chagrin, remains the status quo in Oregon. Now, the state and the police are not going around saying folks should run around naked in the streets and dig this, almost nobody ever does it (but dang, there's more than a few I see in this college town I sorta wish would).

The state could outlaw it tomorrow and there'd be no constitutional argument against it far as I know (I imagine this state legislature would rather find a way to tax it), but in 140 years of statehood it seems there has not been a compelling need to do that.

Besides the constitutional argument against federal prohibition, I believe most of the legislative arguments for it (things like rampant non-marital, or worse, interracial sex) are utter fallacy and I think the laws deserves a serious revisiting of all the aspects of need and propriety or lack of same. Certainly, if individual states had a justifiable need for some kind of regulation or prohibition it would be within the power of most of their legislatures to enact them.

But I believe legitimizing drug use will make it widespread, and with it widespread ruin of lives, families, and eventually the nation itself, until we become such a weakened body that we have no defense against whatever ailment (i.e. invading force, communism, islam, etc.) gets to us first.

And on what basis do you found that belief that tens of millions of people who have no interest in doing drugs right now will suddenly decide that they do, and ruin their lives as a result? People hardly want to smoke tobacco anymore, and yet you still believe that tens of millions of them want to do cocaine, heroin, pot, and LSD if only it were legal?

It's easier for high school students to get pot and other illegal drugs than it is for them to get alcohol or tobacco right now, today. Illegality is not stifling supply - anyone who wants to do these drugs right now can obtain them easily with a couple of inquiries in the right places.

But yet you still believe that legalization will lead to an explosion in drug abuse.

I just don't get it.

Have you considered that if the hard-core addicts wasted away and died under a bridge at the age of 25 in a drug-induced stupor, instead of limping along to the age of 50 or taking half a dozen people with them on the freeway in a legal alcohol-induced stupor, that our nation would be the stronger for it?

Here in New Hampshire, package liquor is imported by a state agency and sold only in state-run stores. Advertising of distilled spirits is legally constrained. Suppose the same arrangement was made for other kinds of drugs besides alcohol, instead of the free-for-all which you fear?