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To: ansel12
I've been thinking on what you said re. smoking, and I've figured out why the libertarians are less insistent upon rolling back the smoking bans. Here's my take on why:
  1. The second-hand-smoking issue complicates things. Now, I know that the experiments are often set up to reach the politically correct conclusion. But, unlike with global warming, there isn't an active community of skeptics that recurrently debunk the findings. Junk science second-hand-smoke studies may be, but you not only have to prove it, you also have to have an active community (including scientists) rallying to the cause. (And even then it's tough, as the global-warming issue has shown.) There's been no Climategate in second-hand smoke studies. And, if it proves that second-hand-smoke does cause deleterious effects, then second-hand smoke would have to be pegged as a kind of pollution (aggression) by libertarians.
  2. Smokers may complain but are nevertheless obedient. There's no open cadre of smokers that flout the smoking ban. That's very much unlike Prohibition, where the Volstead Act was frequently and openly broken. Laws that are openly flouted over a wide swath of society (not just in the projects!) are perceived to have something wrong with them.
  3. Despite recent attempts to obliterate the distinction, there's still a hard difference between the civil law and the criminal law. In everyday life, that means a hard distinction between a fine and jail time. That's why laws like speeding laws are regularly flouted but aren't the centre of a mass movement to repeal. If you get a traffic ticket, it's almost like getting a tax bill. The only people who go to court over those tickets are people who want to fight them. No jail time is directly involved. The lawmakers have really picked their spots on traffic laws: the only jailable offenses are ones that either involve outright aggression, have been credibly depicted as tantamount to outright aggression, or represent driving that's typically reckless. For the rest, it's little more than forking over the money. Same goes for the anti-smoking laws.
What I'm trying to get across is that the marijuana laws are low-hanging fruit for libertarian activists. There's no cluster of studies that say second-hand marijuana smoke causes damage to someone else, so there's no widely-claimed third-party effects to complicate the issue. The marijuana laws are widely flouted, including in middle-class circuits: a law that's widely disregarded by people who are law-abiding at heart is easy to cast as too strict. Combine that with jail time, not just a ticket, and you conjure up the image of (otherwise) law-abiding people being hauled off to the hoosegow and Bubba. What's made marijuana repeal do-able is the fact that the typical marijuana user does not show the behaviour patterns of the typical criminal - just as the typical illegal drinker in the Prohibition era did not show those patterns either. This last point is important. You may have noticed that libertarians are for open borders at the theoretical level, but they're for a lot of things at the theoretical level. In terms of activism, they haven't been pushing amnesty. Had their mission in life solely been to festoon libertarianism with liberal glamour, they would have. But, for now anyway, little Pedro is doing without them.

One of the main reasons why the Brits' mercantilist laws were seen as tyrannical in the American colonies was the fact that many people made their living through smuggling - and were men of integrity. In other words, they were the opposite of the stereotypical "black marketeer." Their inner integrity was enough to impress their fellow Americans into seeing the laws as unjust. If there's any point that's decisive in re unjust laws, it would be this one. People who are law-abiding through and through, but who nevertheless break a specific law, put the question mark on the law itself. Smokers, on the other hand, are obedient, so the question mark remains unput. Sort-of like the TSA.

And, I should add, libertarian support for repealing prostitution laws was stuck in the theoretical bubble until the trade itself became gentrified. As long as "what about the pimps?" is a decisive question, even a libertarian recognizes that there's no point in pressing the issue with activism.

To sum up, the behaviour of all-too-many marijuana smokers themselves, combined with the severity of the marijuana laws, make repeal a winning issue. If FedGov were stupid enough to make possession of a handgun a jailable offense, you can bet that there'd be a bevy of libertarian activists agitating for repeal. That issue would be even more of a winner than repeal of the marijuana laws.

That said, winning on repeal would be a major notch in the belt for libertarian activists. Winning encourages them, perhaps enough to throw some muscle behind the repeal of those smoking prohibitions and other "health n' safety" neoPuritanism.

88 posted on 12/12/2012 2:42:11 PM PST by danielmryan
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To: danielmryan

Pot smoke can actually drug you, and stinks to high heaven.

Also, the tobacco bans are on beaches and in parks.


90 posted on 12/12/2012 3:17:28 PM PST by ansel12 (A.Coulter2005(truncated)Romney will never recover from his Court's create of a right to gay marriage)
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To: danielmryan

Silly nonsense, prostitution has been “gentrified”? Libertarians have avoided it because of the “pimp” issue?

What a long rambling post that said nothing worthwhile and little to nothing accurate.


91 posted on 12/12/2012 3:20:53 PM PST by ansel12 (A.Coulter2005(truncated)Romney will never recover from his Court's create of a right to gay marriage)
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