When I was younger I held to the more libertarian view that drugs are someone else’s problem, a matter of individual choice. But my life experience has taught me that the war on drugs, in some way, must be continued, just as much as we criminalize murder or theft.
The war on drugs goes hand in hand with the larger idea of being committed to one’s family. I’m not talking about the wishy washy liberal notion of “love”. I’m talking about actually making a commitment to the people you are spending your life with - your wife, your children, your parents, brothers and sisters.
When someone is on drugs, they can’t honor their commitments. They simply can’t. Always with someone who has a drug problem, there are other family members who suffer from emotional and financial neglect. People on drugs say they can “keep it together”, but then destructively rationalize their own selfish interests at the expense of everyone around them. There are countless children who do not have holiday gifts or parents around because their parents are stoned. There are coworkers left holding the bag on a project and putting their own jobs at stake because someone is stoned or drunk. There are mothers who weep, fathers who break, children who resent, companies that founder, all for the supposedly harmless and individual benefit of the physical sensation of being high.
The thing that ultimately causes the conservative to be different and better than his or her liberal counterpart is commitment. Liberals avoid commitment in anything. They assault marriage, religion, all largely because you have to make a commitment. For them, I suppose, this shallower life
without genuine trust is something, but for me, as a conservative, real social bonds and familial bonds formed by commitment honored and trust forged is more than any lets all go our own way talking points uttered in a movie, and yes, I prefer to do deal with people who can make a commitment as much as I can. The commitmentless life of individual drug and sexual moires and self-entertainment is simply not for me, and I think it is right to call these people as faithless and ruinous as they are.
No thanks, we see where all that has taken us.
It's time for liberty and personal responsibility. Once you decide that use of naughty vegetables is a reason to deprive someone of their liberties you are playing for the other team.
And because of that the government should criminalize it just like theft or murder?
Can't you say the same about alcohol abuse? But do you really want to get into the comparisons of alcohol and pot?
What good to society does cigarette smoking bring? But why should government criminalize it?
And if it is so terrible why should government profit off of something it considers immoral?
Drug Warriors tend to have a very difficult time keeping a consistent argument considering that at one point alcohol will illegal and pot was legal!
You also seem oblivious to the great many high level users, and no, I am not condoning their use or their abuse but why should the government interfere with Betty Ford, Brett Favre, Rush Limbaugh, or Whitney Houston who have all had some sort of substance abuse problems.
Were you talking about drugs or alcohol? This sounds exactly like the problems found with alcoholics.
Yet we aren’t banning that...