Bill Bennett's Confused And Confusing Defense Of Pot Prohibition

Forbes ^ | 2/05/2015 | Jacob Sullum

[ConservingFreedom]

“With marijuana,” declare William J. Bennett and Robert A. White in Going to Pot, their new prohibitionist screed, “we have inexplicably suspended all the normal rules of reasoning and knowledge.” You can’t say they didn’t warn us.

The challenge for Bennett, a former drug czar and secretary of education who makes his living nowadays as a conservative pundit and talk radio host, and White, a New Jersey lawyer, is that most Americans support marijuana legalization, having discovered through direct and indirect experience that cannabis is not the menace portrayed in decades of anti-pot propaganda. To make the familiar seem threatening again, Bennett and White argue that marijuana is both more dangerous than it used to be, because it is more potent, and more dangerous than we used to think, because recent research has revealed “long-lasting and permanent serious health effects.” The result is a rambling, repetitive, self-contradicting hodgepodge of scare stories, misleading comparisons, unsupportable generalizations, and decontextualized research results. [...]

When it comes to assessing the evidence concerning marijuana’s hazards, Bennett and White’s approach is not exactly rigorous. They criticize evidence of marijuana’s benefits as merely “anecdotal” yet intersperse their text with personal testimonials about its harms. They do Google searches on “marijuana” paired with various possible dangers, then present the alarming (and generally misleading) headlines that pop up as if they conclusively verify those dangers. They cite any study that reflects negatively on marijuana (often repeatedly) as if it were the final word on the subject. Occasionally they acknowledge that the studies they favor have been criticized on methodological grounds or that other studies have generated different results. But they argue that even the possibility of bad outcomes such as IQ loss, psychosis, or addiction to other drugs is enough to oppose legalization. [...]

[DJ Taylor]

Sorry, I don’t talk to liberals.

Peddle your dope elsewhere.

[DiogenesLamp]

And... you’re back to pushing drugs.

[Finny]

Yet here we are on a conservative website, whose adherents supposedly revere the Freedom America offers to all, with many of those using their personal myth-driven prejudices about pot to defame and insult their conservative brethren who merely disagree with their uneducated, ignorant anti-pot rants.

Amen and BUMP.

These people who so quickly, willfully, and constantly libel fellow FReepers with falsehoods spun out of pure emotional rhetoric, are WORSE and CREEPIER than most drug addicts!

[ConservingFreedom]

You're back to lying about me. Have any rebuttal to the article?

[DiogenesLamp]

It doesn’t matter to them that someone smoking a dried out plant in their home has no effect on them at all,

And there it is, right there in a nutshell, the stupidity of Libertarian philosophy.

Welfare cash paying for marijuana a reality in Colorado

DENVER — Public tax money very likely paid for welfare recipients to smoke the equivalent of about 17 pounds of weed (or approximately 9,000 joints) in 2014. Compared with what the rest of Colorado ingested, that’s a small percentage, but controversial none the less. Only FOX31 Denver’s investigative team took the time to analyze every ATM cash transaction between Colorado marijuana dispensaries and welfare recipients in the first year of legal pot sales.

http://kdvr.com/2015/02/04/welfare-cash-paying-for-marijuana-a-reality-in-colorado/

[ConservingFreedom]

Sorry, I don’t talk to

That's what those with no argument to offer always say:

[DiogenesLamp]

“The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.” – Broadcast talk 6-11-35

Yes, eating and drinking and gambling is exactly like using a brain altering psychotropic drug.

How do you feel about vaccination? Who's business is it anyways if you get sick with the measles? Right? It's not like you can spread it to anyone else or anything, is it?

[DiogenesLamp]

Insufficient reason to have pot illegal, since voting Democrat is not illegal.

Aye, but voting Christian soon will be. That's a side effect of voting Democrat.

[sparklite2]

“The free man owns himself.”

I’m surprised to hear than from a theologian. It’s a very radical notion. “I own myself.” Or I’m not free. It has led to some very hot threads on this forum in times past.

[ConservingFreedom]

Welfare cash paying for marijuana a reality in Colorado

As well as all the states where it's illegal. Bet it pays for tobacco and chewing gum too, with the same sort of effect on the taxpayer, but I don't hear you clamoring for a ban on those.

[cuban leaf]

Yes, eating and drinking and gambling is exactly like using a brain altering psychotropic drug.

---

Those things are not alike either. However, using a mind altering drug is very much like drinking. And alcohol is worse than Marijuana. To be clear, I’ve not touched the stuff since 1977 and think it’s stupid to do so except for real medicinal purposes, but I defend peoples right to do it in the vein of the quote.

[cuban leaf]

How do you feel about vaccination?

---

Depends on the vaccination. I’ve never had a flu vaccination.

[Finny]

Alcohol IS a brain-altering drug, you DOLT!!!!

[cuban leaf]

red herring. It pays for a LOT of alcohol too.

[DiogenesLamp]

Whack that straw man.

I whack you every chance I get, but you're not made of "straw".

Conflating Freedom depicted below as he might appear in real life.

[cuban leaf]

I’m thinking he may be Bill Bennet.;-)

I say that because the arguments are not, um, effective.

[DiogenesLamp]

Selling adults what they want to buy - what a concept.

Yeah, i'm sure ISIS is in the market for more gasoline, and Iran is always looking to acquire more Uranium.

No doubt you would screech about "Freedom" while you sold others the means to kill us... Which is not very far off from what you are actually doing.

[Responsibility2nd]

Tough troll trash talk like this is typical. You’re well known around here for your hostile abusive posts to both men and women.

I pity you.

[Blood of Tyrants]

Maybe so, but the damage done to our freedoms by the WOD far outweighs the benefits.